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
Levantine Sea Levantine Sea stretches over an area of . The northern part of the Levantine Sea between Cyprus and Turkey is called the Cilician Sea. Also in the north are two large bays, the Gulf of İskenderun (northeast) and the Gulf of Antalya (northwest). The Leviathan gas field is located in this area under the Levantine basin in the southeastern part of the Mediterranean. To the west of the Levantine Deep Marine Basin is the Nile Delta Basin, followed by the Herodotus Basin, large and up to deep, which – at a possible age of 340 million years – is believed