Venice

In the early seventeenth century, Venice was no longer what it had been in the past, an expanding power and a dynamic player in the Italian and European political scene. Now almost every sphere of its activities was marked by that retrenchment which would characterize the decades to come in an attempt to limit the damage of changing international circumstances. The progressive relocation of the trade routes to the orient and the opening up of new sea routes, the increasingly aggressive competition from other European merchant navies (particularly the English and Dutch) and also qualitative changes in commerce began to weigh heavily on the Venetian economy, which in the first years of the seventeenth century entered a phase of recession — after the great boom of the last decades of the preceding century — rendered all the worse by the more general stagnation which affected Europe and also the Ottoman Empire around 1620. Moreover, in terms of politics, the strengthening of the absolute monarchies and the activities of the papacy — with the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs in support — posed ever more pressing threats to the very existence of the Most Serene Republic, above and beyond the traditional menace of the Turks.

Venice proudly resisted even the Pope (Paul V) from 1605 to 1609 in the course of a jurisdictional dispute during which Rome went so far as to resort to the weapon of interdiction.