Negotiations were twice begun with a view to peace, but the Sultan’s demands were intolerable and the unequal contest continued. In 1476 Friuli was again devastated and the flames of burning cities could be seen from St Mark’s tower. Sailors were clamouring for their arrears of pay on the very steps of the ducal palace. Scutari (in Albania), after heroically resisting two sieges, was nearing the end. A loan from the mainland provinces and 100,000 ducats from the sum left to the Republic by their condottiero Colleoni were swallowed up. In January 1479 Venice yielded. She ceded Scutari, Stalimene and other territory in the Morea occupied by the Turks during the war, in exchange for which the Sultan restored all that had been taken from her beyond her old boundaries. She maintained consular jurisdiction in Constantinople, but agreed to pay an indemnity of 200,000 ducats and a tribute of 10,000 ducats a year for her trading privileges. It was in Moro’s reign that the last vestige of popular government was effaced. The title of “Communitas Venetiarum,” long disused in actual practice, was formally changed to the “Signoria.” During the wearing anxieties of the Turkish wars from the death of Moro in 1471 to the signature of the peace under Doge Giov. Mocenigo in 1479 four Doges, Nicolo Tron, Nicolo Marcello, Pietro Mocenigo, and Andrea Vendramin followed in rapid succession, the last a descendant of a family ennobled after the Chioggian war. The delimitation of the new frontiers had been barely concluded in the East when a dispute concerning salterns and custom dues on the Po and the arrest of a priest for debt by the Venetian Consul at Ferrara led to another war in the peninsula. In 1482 the whole of Italy was aflame, and states that had watched unmoved the agony of the sixteen years’ Turkish wars now turned on Venice and accused her of sinister motives in concluding the peace. The Republic was now allied with Genoa and the Papacy against the Duke of Ferrara, supported by the King of Naples, by Florence and some minor Italian states. The early operations were in her favour, but in a few months the Pope, alarmed by an attack on Rome by the Neapolitans, joined the league against Venice, and as feudal lord of Ferrara, summoned her, under pain of excommunication, to abandon operations against that city. When the interdict reached the Venetian Embassy at Rome, their ambassador was absent and his agent refused to transmit the document to Venice. It was then fixed on the doors of St Peter’s and afterwards forwarded to the Patriarch at Venice, who was ordered under pain of excommunication to serve it on the Signory.[51] The Patriarch fell diplomatically sick and secretly informed the Doge. The Ten were convoked. The Patriarch was warned to keep silence, and that the services of the Church must proceed as usual. The Pope was a long way off; the Ten were near; he obeyed them. A formal appeal was then made to