There is little more to say, to complete the story of the Turks in this south-eastern corner of Europe. They did not rest content with their conquests, but were constantly pushing northward and westward. The Christian nations generally, but by no means always, united to oppose them. They fought their conquering way as far north as Poland, and for a while we find Poland in alliance with the Moslem power. Yet fighting broke out afresh, and a large portion of Poland was laid waste. Peace was again made between the two in the first year of the sixteenth century, and it was a peace that had some permanence, but it enlarged still further the bounds of the Turkish possessions. In the midst of all this fighting by land in Europe, the Turks had found leisure to attend to naval matters and to the building and outfit of a large fleet. And with a fleet thus in constant readiness for action in the eastern waters of the Mediterranean Sea, there was one power, at least, with which it was certain to come into collision--the great naval power of Venice. Ever since the fourth Crusade in which Constantinople had been taken, largely by the aid of the Venetian navy, Venice had held many of the islands in the Ægean Sea and had a hold on cities on the Levantine coast. She was not the only Italian State, as we have seen, to be powerful at sea. There was Genoa, on the western side of the peninsula. We have also seen why the situation of Venice was the more favourable--because she looked eastward, and so was the gate by which the wealth of the East came into Western Europe. {223} It was largely by the help of the Genoese navy that the Greeks had retaken Constantinople, in 1261, from the Latins. Naval encounters between the fleets of these two rival Italian States were many during the next century and a half. Now one had the victory and now the other. But always the greater resources and wealth were on the side of Venice. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- {222} [Illustration: GENOA] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Nevertheless she was very hardly beset about the year 1380. Her main fleet had been beaten, the navy of Genoa held her blockaded by sea, and the enemy State of Padua prevented provisions coming to her by land. She was in imminent danger of starvation. And then the Genoese fleet suffered just that disaster which the Athenian fleet had suffered in its blockade of Syracuse. The Venetians contrived to block the waterway which gave entrance and exit to the lagoon in which the blockading ships of the Genoese lay. They found themselves entrapped precisely as they had proposed to trap the Venetians, and finally had to surrender and hand over the greater part of their fleet. It was a disaster from which Genoa never recovered, and Venice was left mistress of the Mediterranean.