Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century

Kennth M. Setton provides a brief survey of the Thirty Years' Was as part of the background to Venetian relations with the Ottoman Empire. Having lost the island of Crete to the Turks in the long war of 1645-1669, Venice renewed her warfare with the Porte in 1684, this time as the ally of Austria after the Turkish failure to take Vienna the preceding year. The Venetians now conquered the Peloponnesus (the "Morea"), and occupied Athens, with the disastrous result that the Parthenon was destroyed, a tragedy which receives much attention in this book. This volume is to some exrtent a continuation of the author's highly praised work on "The Papacy and the Levant" (also published by the American Philosophical Society), which covers in four volumes the period from the Fourth Crusade (1204) to the battle of Lepanto (1571), and goes somewhat beyond.