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 Thailand Gulf of Thailand The Gulf of Thailand, also known as the Gulf of Siam, is a shallow inlet in the western part of the South China Sea, a marginal body of water in the western Pacific Ocean. The gulf is around 800 km (497 mi) long and up to 560 km (348 mi) wide, has a surface area of 320,000 km (123,553 sq mi) and is surrounded on the north, west and southwest by Thailand, on the northeast by Cambodia and Vietnam. The South China Sea is to the southeast. The modern Thai name of the gulf is "Ao Thai"