At the end of the fourteenth century, Venice's primacy was unquestioned. In 1383, she occupied Corfu, the gateway to the Adriatic. Without difficulty, though at great expense,¹³⁰ between 1405 and 1427, she occupied the towns of the Terraferma: Padua, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo. Now she was protected from the rest of Italy by a ring of towns and territories. The occupation of this mainland zone, already penetrated by the Venetian economy, was in fact part of a significant larger movement: Milan was taking over Lombardy; Florence was asserting herself over Tuscany and in 1405 overcame her rival Pisa; Genoa succeeded in spreading her rule to the two 'rivieras', the east and the west, and filled in the harbour of her rival Savona.  Everywhere the leading Italian cities were gaining strength at the expense of lesser ones - a classic process.

Much earlier than this, Venice had successfully carved herself out an empire - modest in extent but of remarkable strategic and commercial importance since it was strung out along the routes to the Levant. This was a scattered empire, reminiscent, though on a very different scale, of the Portuguese and later the Dutch Empires in the Indian Ocean, a trading-post empire forming a long capitalist antenna; an empire 'on the Phoenician model', to use a more ancient parallel.

Power and wealth went hand in hand. And Venice's wealth (and consequently her power) can be put to the test by looking at the city's budgets, the Bilanci, as well as at the famous speech delivered by the elderly doge Tommaso Mocenigo, just before his death in 1423.

In that year, the receipts of the city of Venice alone amounted to some 750,000 ducats. If  the budget was between 5 and 10% of national income - then the gross national income of the city lay somewhere between 7.5 million and 15 million ducats. Since the estimated population of Venice and the Dogado (the suburbs as far as Chioggia) was 150,000 at most, per capita income in the city would be between 50 and 100 ducats - very high indeed; even the lower figure is hardly credible.