Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/528

466 The Establishment of Tyrannies.—Just what happened among the contending republics of Greece took place in the case of the quarrelling city-commonwealths of Italy. Their republican constitutions were overthrown, and the supreme power fell into the hands of an ambitious aristocracy, or was seized by some bold usurper, who often succeeded in making the government hereditary in his family. Before the close of the fourteenth century almost all the republics of the peninsula had become converted into exclusive oligarchies or hereditary principalities.

We shall now relate some circumstances, for the most part of a commercial character, which concern some of the most renowned of the Italian city-states.

Venice.—Venice, the most celebrated of the Italian republics, had its beginnings in the fifth century, in the rude huts of some refugees who fled out in to the marshes of the Adriatic to escape the fury of the Huns of Attila (see p. 346). Conquests and negotiations gradually extended the possessions of the island-city until she came to control the coasts and waters of the Eastern Mediterranean in much the same way that Carthage had mastery of the Western Mediterranean at the time of the First Punic War. Even before the Crusades her trade with the East was very extensive, and by those expeditions was expanded into enormous proportions.

Venice was at the height of her power during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Her supremacy on the sea