She was mistress, almost without dispute, until the Turkish navy was sufficiently strong to oppose her. The first war between them which went on for fifteen years from 1464, was indecisive, but it ended with Venice paying tribute to Turkey for her trading rights. Venice had no friends. She had been nearly starved out by Padua, lying just inland of her own territory; and lest this should happen to her again she had fought, and fought with success, to add to her mainland territory. Therefore she had not a neighbour with whom she was not on terms of enmity. All were jealous of her and all feared her. Thus it happened that in the very last year of the fifteenth century, when war with Turkey broke out {224} again, we see the curious spectacle of the Pope himself, of the Emperor, and of the rulers of three other great states of Italy, Naples, Florence, and Milan, all, in some degree, favouring the Turkish and Moslem Sultan in his fight against the Italian and Christian ruler of Venice. Less than fifty years earlier, after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the Pope had imposed and endeavoured to collect a tax of one-tenth of the value of all benefices--or of all paid offices in the Church--in order to raise a force to evict the Turks. But now he had come to regard the Moslem Turk as a less dangerous enemy than the Venetian Christian. In that final year, moreover, the Turks gained their first really crippling naval victory over the Venetians at Sapienza; and for Venice it was the beginning of the end of her great power. Thus at the opening of the sixteenth century we find the Turk established nearly as far in Europe as it was his destiny to plant himself. He had all that country of the Balkans which various races of the Slavs had held before him and which they again now hold, after him; and he had parts of what before, and also later again, were Austria. Therefore of those Balkans and of those Austrian provinces, he was in no more than temporary possession. {225} CHAPTER XXIV THE NEW DAWN In every part of the Western world we see the leading nations settling down at the beginning of the sixteenth century within boundaries nearly the same as those which define them at the beginning of the twentieth. And for the most part those boundaries remain, in spite of the upheaval caused by the Great War. There is, however, one notable exception, namely Italy. The very idea of a united Italy does not seem to have been in men's minds until later. The country which we now know by that name was then, as we have seen, divided between five principal States, Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal State, and Naples with Sicily.