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 Aden of Berbera", named after the ancient Somali port city of Berbera on the south side of the gulf. However, as the city of Aden grew during the colonial era, the name of "Gulf of Aden" was popularized. The waterway is part of the important Suez Canal shipping route between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Sea in the Indian Ocean, with 21,000 ships crossing the gulf annually. The name of the Gulf was inspired by the former British Crown Colony city of Aden, now part of Yemen. The Somali names are Gacanka Cadmeed or Gacanka Berbera. The International Hydrographic Organization