VENISE, MUTATIONS D'UNE PUISSANCE NAVALE AU XVII SIECLE.

The composition, the organization and the functioning of the Venetian Navy have been the subject of numerous studies for the medieval time and the XVIth century, but the historians have disregarded the XVIIth century. Yet, this period plays a crucial role in the maritime history of the Serenissima. Whereas to the verge of the XVIIth century, the Venetian Navy was composed exclusively of galleys, a hundred years later it consisted of a majority of ships-of-the-line, while the Venetian triremes, which were always used in period of peace to assure the police of the Adriatic and the sea Ionian, acted only by balancing force in the wars. The present work considers this evolution, under the aspect either operational then of administration and organization. To this purpose, it has been distributed in two sections. The first part looks at the events that interested the Venetian Navy in the period that go from 1572 to 1699. Here, until about 1635, the main adversaries were not anymore the Turks, but the Hapsburg forces, in their double Spanish-Italic and Austrian declination, and only after the 1645 the conflicts with the Ottoman empire were going to restart. The second part of the work analyses the structures on which were articulated the Venetian Navy and her tools and men. In particular it has distinguished the ordinary forces from those extraordinary, operating a clean separation between the two components of the fleet and the respective organizations.