The commander recognised him as a Venetian either by his appearance or by his language, laid his topsail to the mast and took him aboard, to learn that the Genoese vessels before him were but the vanguard of a huge fleet which was itself at hand, and would soon be in sight. To engage was now out of the question, and could only end in the total loss of the six Venetian vessels; Giustiniani put about and re-entered the lagoons, to take the bad news to Venice. The first fault committed by the Genoese was that, having surprised the city, they did not profit by their advantage and storm it at once, at a moment when at least half the population must have been paralysed with fear. Instead, they seem to have followed a consistent but mistaken plan; for they pillaged and laid waste the outlying islands one by one with the evident intention of destroying the city’s supplies, and of ultimately cutting off all communication between it and the mainland. In the course of this more or less systematic operation they came before Malamocco on the sixth of August 1379; but here they met with a first check, for they perceived that the place was too strongly fortified to be rashly attacked, and they therefore sailed past it towards Chioggia, which was, and is, the most important strategic point of the lagoons. Chioggia is close to the mainland, at the western extremity of the Venetian archipelago. The name belongs vaguely, in old maps, to the long island properly called Brondolo, on the western end of which is built the town of Brondolo; more particularly to the Port, or entrance between this island and the one called Palestrina, between which two the ‘Lupa,’ the Tower of the She-Wolf, rises out of the water; and especially to the small city of Chioggia. The latter is divided into two parts--the greater Chioggia, built on a [Illustration: CALLE DELLA DONAZELLA] number of very small islets, and the lesser, which stands on the inside shore of the main island. There was a bridge between the two parts. The entrance to the port of Chioggia being deep and safe, the Venetians had deepened also a natural channel, twenty-five miles long, which led thence through the shallow lagoons to Venice, and this was one of the best and safest approaches to the city from the outer sea, a fact which was well known to the Genoese, who looked upon Chioggia as the real key to the capital, and the name of the place has been given by all historians to the war that followed. It is almost needless to say that the extreme shallowness of the lagoons was a real defence against an enemy not well acquainted with the channels, which, as every one knows, are marked by tall timbers that project from six to fifteen feet above the water. To remove these was a first measure of defence. [Sidenote: _Rom. iii. 274._]