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The earliest submission of the Dalmatian cities to Venetian sovereignty, around the medieval millennial year 1000, remained fundamental for the mythology of Venice’s political culture right up to the end of the history of the republic in 1797. Giacomo Diedo, whose history of Venice was published in 1751, focused his attention upon “the first acquisitions of the Venetians in Dalmatia, which then might serve as a base for further advances.” In fact, the coastal cities of Dalmatia would serve Venice in the most literal (and littoral) sense as bases for an imperial commercial domain that advanced beyond the Adriatic to the eastern Mediterranean, but for Diedo, and his eighteenth-century contemporaries, Dalmatia was also an ideological base on which to construct a culturally convenient vision of Venetian empire. The Dalmatians, in order “to secure themselves from the molestations of the barbarians” (the Narentani along the river Neretva), appealed for the protection of Venice, so that the Adriatic armada of the Doge Pietro II Orseolo was welcomed “with acclamations by the inhabitants who saluted him as their liberator.”