History of the Republic of Venice were little compensation. This was the last war of the Republic with Turkey. The decline of Venice in the 18th century was also due not only to Genoa, Venice's old rival, but also to Livorno, a new port on the Tyrrhenian Sea created by the grand dukes of Tuscany and chosen as staging-post for British trade in the Mediterranean. Still more injurious were the Papal town of Ancona and Habsburg Trieste, a free port since 1719, in the Adriatic Sea, which no longer constituted a "Venetian Gulf". An eminent Venetian politician of the time declared, "Apart from the residue which
Gulf of Suez Rift the area now occupied by the rift was a shallow sea depositing carbonates. This period was mainly quiet tectonically but the northern part of the gulf region was affected by periodic far-field effects of the Alpine orogeny. A series of WSW-ENE trending extensional basins were inverted, creating isolated uplifted and folded areas known as 'Syrian arc' structures. These structures were mainly active during the Late Santonian but there is evidence of further movements on the same structures at the end of the Cretaceous and during the Paleogene. Rifting began along the whole of the Red Sea -Gulf of Suez rift