Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/639

 THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 583 the first European states to do for its inhabitants what the modern State does, but what the Church had largely at- tended to in the Middle Ages. In other words, Venice had its own city hospitals, public institutions, and pension sys- tem. The government kept careful records and went at its problems in a systematic way, so that the city on the Adriatic has been called the birthplace of statistics. Its ambassadors stood first among the diplomats of Europe and in early modern times sent home reports of conditions in other countries which are among history's most valued sources. Of Venice's early public debt in 1171 we have al- ready spoken. Its currency circulated throughout Europe, and the gold ducat, first coined in 1284, in the later Middle Ages replaced the byzant of Constantinople as the standard coin. Of Venetian ports, islands, and other possessions and trading interests in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and of her relations there with the *, _. Venetian Turks as well as with Genoa and Constantinople, foreign we have already treated in other connections. poicy Genoa also was Venice's greatest rival in the western Medi- terranean and in trade with northern Europe. For a cen- tury after 1261, when the Genoese overthrew the Latin Em- pire at Constantinople, and 1284, when they decisively defeated the Pisans, their chief competitors on the west coast of Italy, Genoa was at the height of its power. Two great naval wars from 1350 to 1355 and from 1378 to 1381 ended the struggle of Genoa and Venice for maritime supremacy in favor of the latter. Another enmity of Venice was with Hungary over Dalmatia, the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, which was desired by Venice not only for commercial rea- sons, but more in order to secure a food-supply near at hand for its city population. Until the fifteenth century Venice's interest in the Italian mainland was limited to keeping the routes through the Alpine passes open to her trade. But in the first half of that century the acquisition of considerable territory in the northeast of the peninsula brought Venice into close and frequently hostile relations with Milan,