he welfare and safety of a thousand patrician houses.
Wherever there were troubled waters, the fisher was Venice. All down
the Eastern coast, and along the Alpine slopes to the passes which
were the trade route to Northern Europe, and still farther, at the
expense of Milan and Naples, the patriarch of Aquileia and the Duke of
Ferrara, the Emperor and the Pope, the Queen of the Adriatic extended
her intelligent sway. It was under the long administration of the
Doge Foscari, Byron's hero, that it dawned upon the Venetians that it
might be their mission to supersede the frail and helpless governments
of the Peninsula; and their famous politician and historian, Paruta,
believed that it was in their power to do what Rome had done. Their
ambition was evident to their neighbours, and those whom they had
despoiled, under every plausible pretext, awaited the opportunity of
retribution.

Julius, taking counsel with Machiavelli, found it easy to form a
league composed of their enemies. As it was not the interest of the
empire, France and Spain, to spite Venice by strengthening each other,
the Venetians imagined they could safely hold their ground, leaving
the dependent cities to make their own terms with the enemy. Padua
held out victoriously against Maximilian, but the battle of Agnadello
was lost against the French in the same year 1509, in which, fighting
under the Crescent in the Indian Ocean, the Venetians were defeated by
the Portuguese, and lost their Eastern trade. They soon obtained
their revenge. Having gained his ends by employing France against
Venice in the League of Cambray, Julius now allied himself with the
Venetians to expel the French from Milan. He had recovered the papal
possessions, he had broken the Venetian power, and in this his third
effort to reconstitute Italy, he still succeeded, because he had the
support of the Venetians and the Swiss. The French gave battle to the
Spaniards at Ravenna and to the Swiss at Novara, and then they
evacuated the Milanese.

Lewis XII swore that he would wreak vengeance on the papacy, and, in
conjunction with the Emperor, opened a Council at Pisa, which was
attended by a minority of cardinals. Julius met the attack by calling
a general Council to meet at the Lateran, which was the first since
the great reforming Council, and was still sitting when Julius died in
1513. Like the Council at Pisa, it was regarded at Rome as a move in
the great game of Politics, and