Venetian Fortifications - A Gazetteer: Mainland Greece, Crete, Cyprus and the Islands 1204-1797

This book describes the fortifications erected in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean by the Republic of Venice and those of its citizens who established their own petty lordships throughout the Aegean. The earliest of these fortifications date to the first decades of the thirteenth century. The last were erected at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This survey therefore also describes the transition in military technology from the mediaeval castle with its high walls and square towers to the advanced engineering embodied in the bastioned circuits that developed from the early sixteenth century onwards, developments in which Venetian military engineers excelled. It also traces the process by which Venice progressed from a purely maritime Republic dependent on commercial trading concessions in the Byzantine Empire, to a Mediterranean power holding substantial overseas territories both as colonies and as fortified naval bases.