than the whole of Christendom besides.’[29] Dealing with a period two centuries later, he declares it ’difficult to comprehend how two simple cities could put to sea such prodigious fleets as those of Pisa and Genoa.’  The difficulty disappears when we have Mahan’s explanation.  The maritime republics of Italy—­like Athens and Rhodes in ancient, Catalonia in mediaeval, and England and the Netherlands in more modern times—­were ’peculiarly well fitted, by situation and resources, for the control of the sea by both war and commerce.’  As far as the western Mediterranean was concerned, Genoa and Pisa had given early proofs of their maritime energy, and fixed themselves, in succession to the Saracens, in the Balearic Isles, Sardinia, and Corsica.  Sea-power was the Themistoclean instrument with which they made a small state into a great one.

[Footnote 29:  Ital.Republics_, English ed., p. 29.]

A fertile source of dispute between states is the acquisition of territory beyond sea.  As others have done before and since, the maritime republics of Italy quarrelled over this.  Sea-power seemed, like Saturn, to devour its own children.  In 1284, in a great sea-fight off Meloria, the Pisans were defeated by the Genoese with heavy loss, which, as Sismondi states, ’ruined the maritime power’ of the former.  From that time Genoa, transferring her activity to the Levant, became the rival of Venice, The fleets of the two cities in 1298 met near Cyprus in an encounter, said to be accidental, that began ’a terrible war which for seven years stained the Mediterranean with blood and consumed immense wealth.’  In the next century the two republics, ’irritated by commercial quarrels’—­like the English and Dutch afterwards—­were again at war in the Levant.  Sometimes one side, sometimes the other was victorious; but the contest was exhausting to both, and especially to Venice.  Within a quarter of a century they were at war again.  Hostilities lasted till the Genoese met with the crushing defeat of Chioggia.  ‘From this time,’ says Hallam, ’Genoa never commanded the ocean with such navies as before; her commerce gradually went into decay; and the fifteenth century, the most splendid in the annals of Venice, is till recent times the most ignominious in those of Genoa.’  Venice seemed now to have no naval rival, and had no fear that anyone could forbid the ceremony in which the Doge, standing in the bows of the Bucentaur, cast a ring into the Adriatic with the words, Desponsamus
te,_Mare,_in_signum_veri_perpetuique_dominii_.  The result of the combats at Chioggia, though fatal to it in the long-run, did not at once destroy the naval importance of Genoa.  A remarkable characteristic of sea-power is the delusive manner in which it appears to revive after a great defeat.  The Persian navy occasionally made a brave show afterwards; but in reality it had received at Salamis a mortal wound.  Athens seemed strong enough on the sea after the catastrophe