17th century Italy was a stagnant and increasingly irrelevant place. Economic growth had capped off two hundred years before, and its two most powerful states, the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples, were Spanish clients along with the Republic of Genoa.

I can say a lot more about the early history of Venice, but that's in part because in Venetian History "There is either too much going on or too little" as J.J. Norwich puts it in his History of Venice; "The simple fact is that in the seventeenth century, by comparison with its predecessors, relatively little happened in the political life of the Republic." Given that, it is difficult to compete with mythos around the "Sun King" and his Musketeers!

The Republic of Venice, insofar that it had never been enveloped in someone else's sphere of influence, maintained an active and competent diplomatic corps: a dispute with the Papacy early in the 17th century was dealt with through entirely diplomatic means, and all through the thirty years war the Republic of Venice maintained continuous communication with all belligerents. The peace of Westphalia itself was mediated by the Venetian diplomat Alvise Contarini and his staff.

Neutrality during the thirty years war meant that the army stayed small, numbering around nine-thousand regulars. Venice did not have the same need to develop large standing armies as the Northern European states did during the thirty years war. Although the Republic had been the first Italian State to establish a standing army, this was limited to garrisons in colonies (mostly composed of foreign veterans, primarily from Germany, but some were from England and France as well). To quote Norwich again, "The rest of Europe left her alone [...] Indeed, if one reads a general European history of the time, one cannot fail to be struck by the way the spotlight has shifted northward, leaving the peninsula in a dark and quiet shadow. Only the Turk threatened her now, and as the next twenty years were to show, even he was past his prime."

To see the Venetian army in action, we'll have to wait until the Ottoman Empire declared war in 1645. Everyone knows that Republic of Venice, like the rest of Italy, was cut off from the Atlantic trade which had benefitted England and the Netherlands (and to a lesser extent, France), consequentially the Thirty Year's War had a disproportionately recessionary effect on the Venetian economy: the conflict reduced consumption of goods from the Mediterranean in Germany, many of which were produced in the Venetian Republic and almost all of which were imported by Venetian merchants. The consequential fall in tax revenue had made it more difficult for the Republic to properly maintain garrisons overseas. It would be natural that the Ottoman Empire, Venice's historic rival in the Mediterranean, began to eye the large Island of Crete.

The Turks were particularly bent on war, as protracted conflicts with Persia ended with the Ottoman conquest of Mesopotamia: the Empire's military was on a high, but the Sultan's coffers were less than healthy. The conquest of a rich and economically developed island could prove to be useful. The Venetian relations with the Ottoman Empire began tensing up as early as the 1630's, the pretext being that Venetian naval patrols had a habit of apprehending pirates even when they sought refuge in Ottoman ports, which the Ottoman empire saw as a breach of sovereignty.

With the declaration of war in 1645, an army of 60.000 disembarked in Crete. The garrisons on the Island were no match for the Ottoman Army; although the Venetians had invested heavily in fortifications in Cretian cities, these fortifications had not been maintained or repaired since the recession. In addition, the Republic had a well-developed system to call volunteer reservists to arms, however the training of these volunteers had also declined over the course of the recession caused by the Thirty Years War. On paper, there were some thirty-eight thousand men who could be called to arms across the republic, but in reality less than a third could be realistically mobilized. Adding to these, the Republic could in theory call the local Greek nobility to service, but because most were unable to locally source horses and arms a negligible number were eventually deployed.

Venetian Military doctrine had always emphasized naval power while land-based doctrine was mostly centered around fortress defense. Initially, this strategy seemed to work: in 1646 the Turkish fleet was decisively defeated in the vicinity of Negropont, in the Aegean Sea. The Venetian navy would from then on focus on the dual objectives of cutting off the supply lines to the Turkish Army in Crete as well as blockading the straight of the Dardanelles. The Venetian army, on the other hand, would focus on defending Candia, the capital of Crete. To this end, the four-thousand strong Canadian garrison was reinforced with some six thousand additional thirty years war veterans hired five years previously to keep an eye on the the border with the Papal States.

The fortifications in Candia (which are still visible today) allowed the city's well-supplied defenders to comfortably wait out the siege. However, it just wasn't possible for the Venetian navy to patrol the entire Cretian coastline and Ottoman convoys continued to resupply their army in spite of crushing Venetian victories at sea between 1649 and 1656. In the Dardanelles, Venetian raids would even come to threaten Istanbul, however here too they had little effect: the Ottoman capital could be just as easily supplied by land.

The disparity in resources between Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice was immense, and by 1657, in spite of small victories in the spring, the Venetian fleet was defeated at sea in July. This focused the fleet to regroup and abandon the blockade of Istanbul.

The Venetian diplomatic machine went into overdrive behind the scenes, securing commitments in the form of ships and material from France and Spain. Recruitment, emphasizing the fact that the Candian War was a christian struggle against infidels, stepped up all over Europe.

In the Venetian army, recruitment was the responsibility of individual Captains. These could be Venetians who, having applied, were granted commissions and a purse from which to pay signing bonuses and the first three months of salary (i.e. the time it would take to reach the font) or these could be foreigners. Foreign captains were appointed by foreign colonels, who were given mandates by the Venetian Senate's Committee on War to raise entire regiments. A high level-officer could expect his commission contract to specify his rank, who his superiors would be, who his subordinates would be, and from which geographic area he would recruit his companies from (apart from making sure captains wouldn't recruit from overlapping areas, meticulous care was taken to ensure officers were from the same region as the soldiers they were commanding throughout the conflict).

The size of a company was set by senatorial decree at one hundred men, but in reality most companies were approved as complete with slightly fewer. The Captains had the power to appoint their officers, usually two sergeants, a standard bearer, and a drummer.

Companies were usually armed with a 30%-70% breakdown between pike and shot. Interestingly, this is the more or less opposite ratio to what most 17th century pike and shot formations were armed as. This was a deliberate choice, as Venetian doctrine centered was around fortress defense. Indeed, companies destined for garrison duty and companies of marines would be armed exclusively with firearms.

Surprisingly, the inventory lists in Candia also list some thousand bows and fifty thousand arrows, the idea being that levies from the Cretian uplands could exploit their millennial traditions in archery in defense of the island (however, the rapid advance of the Ottoman force made this stratagem impossible to implement).

Unlike almost every other component of the armed forces except the Navy, artillery officers were almost exclusively Venetian. Commissions were granted after having passed an exam testing knowledge of geometry, chemistry, and physics, and they were appointed to posts as well as salaried directly from the state, rather than through Captains. Individual gunners had the responsibility to deploy and operate artillery during battle, make gunpowder, and maintain the working order of their cannons. Although each gunner was assisted by one or more trainees, shortage of trained gunners and their overwork of the same was a recurring problem in the defense of Candia.

Needless to say, the Republic of Venice put up a valiant fight on Crete, but was ultimately outmatched in every conceivable way. The garrison in Candia surrendered in 1669 and was allowed to march out unharmed. The Venetian government signed a peace treaty in 1671 ceding all of Crete, apart from three port cities.