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
Geology of the Baltic Sea East European Craton millions of years after it consolidated. This occurred during the Late Ediacaran and the Early Cambrian when the weakest part of the craton was reactivated. Since then the basin has been deepened mainly through subsidence caused by extensional tectonics. In the northern part of the Baltic Sea basin, including the Gulf of Bothnia and the Bothnian Sea, the depression originated as a series of interconnected rifts that were not active enough to split the East European Craton. Subsidence in the southern parts was most pronounced during a period starting in the Late Ordovician and lasting to Middle