ABSTRACT
Telescoping both the Mongol/Ming China maritime expansion and basing acquisitions between about 1270 and 1410 in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean and Portugal’s elaboration of a closer-to-global basing network in the sixteenth century, was the some four-century long (1200-1600) battle for colonies, bases, commercial access and maritime supremacy in the Mediterranean involving first Venice and Genoa, then the Ottoman Empire and Spain, amounting at times to a complex quadripolar struggle over access and influence which, to a lesser degree, involved France as well. Venice, indeed, largely dominated the Mediterranean for more than two centuries to the extent it is sometimes mentioned in “long cycle”1 treatises as an early prototype maritime hegemon, an early example of the interplay between commercial and maritime dominance, albeit its small size and incapacity to field large armies and to dominate more than a small corner of Europe.
