How the wealthiest city in Europe spent down its empire: a golden century of art, then two hundred years of plague, opera and masked balls - until Napoleon ended the Republic in 1797.
Last updated August 6, 2026
In a nutshell: Venice entered the Renaissance as the wealthiest city in Europe - and then the new Atlantic routes broke its monopoly. Plague, opera and an elegant party followed, until Napoleon ended the Republic in 1797. Start from the history overview; before this came the seafaring empire.
Around 1500 Venice ranked among the six largest cities in Europe, with some 180,000 inhabitants, nearly a thousand of them enormously wealthy. The wealthiest city-state on the continent channelled its surplus into art: Titian, Tintoretto, Sansovino, the Bellinis and Palladio all worked here, and the piazza of San Marco turned into a meeting point where traders and aristocrats from across the empire mingled.
But the foundations were shifting: in 1492 Columbus opened trade with the Americas, and two years later Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa to open a sea route to the eastern markets - the Republic's monopoly was broken. Meanwhile wars with Milan bled the treasury, the Ottomans pressed on Venice's eastern holdings, and after Constantinople fell to them in 1453 the city lost its best customer.
The allied victory at Lepanto in 1571 was a one-off triumph that left the Venetian navy badly damaged, while Spain, England and Holland, sailing ocean-going ships, came to dominate world trade.
As the empire shrank - Crete, the last great colony, was taken by the Ottomans in 1669 - the Republic at home grew more pleasure-loving. This is the Venice of Baroque monuments, masked Carnevale balls, velvet-dressed audiences at the opera and the escapades of Casanova.
Pleasure had a soundtrack: in 1637 Venice opened the Teatro San Cassiano, the world's first public opera house, and opera became a commercial art form. Death shadowed the fun: the plague of 1630–31 carried off 46,000 of the city's 140,000 people, and the great white church of Santa Maria della Salute, built by Baldassare Longhena, rose as a votive offering for the city's deliverance.
Plagues ravaged the population, the government grew corrupt, and dissidents were locked away in the dank cells of the Doge's Palace. In 1797 Napoleon marched in and toppled the last doge, ending over a millennium of independent rule.