"City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas"

More fighting, this time with the Genoese. The counter-siege was the second most nail-biting battle in the book:

• Gold currency, marine charts, insurance contracts, the use of the stern rudder, the introduction of public mechanical clocks—the Genoese were using these decades earlier than the Venetians.
• Genoa generally enjoyed a slightly worse reputation: “Cruel men, who love nothing but money” was the curt judgment of one Byzantine chronicler. They were enthusiastic slavers
• Underlying this first Genoese war was a profound truth: Neither side had the resources to win the sea by conventional means—they could only exhaust themselves in the endeavor.
• pawns. The enmity between the maritime republics would remain a malign force within Constantinople to the very last day of its Christian life, and it muffled the stealthy advance of another emergent power in the region—the Turkic tribes now moving west across the landmass of Asia Minor.
• Spices were the first manifestation of a world trade and its ideal commodity. They were lightweight, high in value, low in bulk, and almost imperishable;
• but the Black Sea has a dark heart. Below two hundred meters, the sea drops away into silence. These lower reaches lock up the world’s largest reservoir of toxic hydrogen sulfide.
• The fish stocks of the Danube, the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Don—tucked into the tributary Sea of Azov in its northeast corner—fed Constantinople for a thousand years;
• the doge’s palace into the masterpiece of Venetian Gothic, a delicate traceried structure of astonishing lightness and beauty that seemed to express the effortless serenity, grace, good judgment, and stability of the Venetian state.
• It is unlikely that the Black Death was transmitted from just this single event, but it was soon carried west on merchant ships. Only four out of eight Genoese galleys sailing the Black Sea in 1347 made it back to the city; on the others, all the crew died and the ships vanished.
• By the time the plague had burned itself out, possibly two-thirds of the Venetian population had perished; fifty noble families ceased to exist.
• By the end of 1350, as a by-product of the Black Sea trade, probably half of Europe’s population had died. The figure in the Mediterranean basin was perhaps as high as 75 percent in places.
• Already a small but significant change was starting to take place in attitudes among the ordinary citizens toward the seagoing life. The plague had left its survivors better off. They had inherited considerable wealth and the scarcity of labor forced up its asking price. A rift was also opening up between the classes,
• (During Cretan rebellion:) He replied, “It must be so; friendship gives way to religion, liberty, and the eradication of you schismatics from this island, which is our birthright.” … Having said this, they killed him.  
• The city tried to buy the best, the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood—Giovanni Acuto (the Sharp) the Italians called him
• The apparently inexhaustible Pisani positioned his ships in the Sicilian channel to catch Doria’s fleet off the toe of Italy. He was outwitted; the Genoese slipped around the south of Sicily. Pisani doubled back, trying to second-guess what Doria would do next, trawling for news across the mouth of the Adriatic.
• He was Hieronimo Sabadia, a Venetian sailor captured at Pola, who had jumped overboard from one of the approaching ships to warn his compatriots not to advance; the six Genoese galleys were a decoy for the main fleet of forty-seven vessels lying over the horizon.
• Set in the fringes of the lagoon, within marshes, salt pans, reed beds, sandbanks, narrow excavated channels, and secret waterways, Chioggia was the place where a century of maritime warfare was destined to reach its resolution. Venice’s imaginative world, habitually vast, had now shrunk to the defense of a few square miles of floundering marsh.
• Watching the movement of these ships closely, ambitious plans were made to trap isolated vessels, like hunters trying to down an elephant.
• Pisani’s idea was to block these exits, hemming the enemy in. The besiegers would become, in their turn, besieged.
• The sunken cogs had effectively blocked the channel anyway. The doge proceeded to return with two more cogs laden with rocks, marble, and large millstones, which were tipped into the submerged hulks, then wrapped with chains. They were now immovable barriers.
• The indestructible Zeno would have none of it. He plucked the arrow from his throat and barked out an order to a sailor to dive overboard with a tow rope and swim back to the mooring.
• At this critical moment, the Venetians were affected by the same indecision as had overtaken Doria early in the siege.
• The marshland and waterways behind Chioggia became the terrain for amphibious warfare: boatloads of men fighting in the rivers; infantry floundering through canals; ambushes among the sedge.
• they used a shibboleth to separate the Paduans, Hungarians, and mercenaries from the Genoese. Asked to pronounce the word capra (goat), the Genoese could only accurately reproduce their dialect version, crapa.
• Venice had outlasted Genoa less through military supremacy than through the durability of her institutions, the social cohesion of her people, and their patriotic adherence to the flag of Saint Mark. After the humiliation of Chioggia, Genoa imploded. Ten successive doges were deposed in five years; in 1394 the city handed itself to the French kings.