The City of Dreams | Venetians & Ottomans | The Canals | Anthem of the Republic
The Republic of Venice (Venetian: Repùblica Vèneta; Italian: Repubblica di Venezia) was a sovereign state and maritime republic in Northeast Italy, which existed for a millennium between the 8th century and 1797.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Republic_of_Venice
Republic of Venice
Venice, the capital of a province in Northern Italy, is formed of a group of 117 small islands joined together by 378 bridges mostly built of stone. These islands are partly natural, partly artificial, constructed by means of piles driven into the bottom of the shallow sea, as all the houses of the city are built upon a network of rows of piles. The islands are separated by a number of canals...
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15333a.htm
The Lagoon People
Wealth and power dramatically transformed that paradigm into the rule of a hereditary oligarchy deployed in interlocking committees and councils, part of a precisely calibrated system of checks and balances designed to maintain itself. That was its brilliance and its undoing.
After the 12th c. the power of the doge was increasingly limited, his prerogatives taken away, and his freedom of action curtailed until he became a figurehead with no independent power at all. Membership on the councils was interchangeable, a revolving door of members drawn from the same pool cycling through interlocking committees and councils.
https://www.theballotboy.com/the-state-apparatus
Was Venice a Democracy?
During the so-called Dark Ages – between the fall of Roman empire and the Renaissance – the politics of Europe was monarchical, feudal, brutal and unfair. During this time, Venice flourished economically and intellectually, chiefly because it kept the best of Greek and Roman democratic traditions alive. The Republic of Venice had many democratic virtues: it was founded on equality, cherished free speech and it was able to collectively defend itself and prosper. Was it, however, a democracy?
The Most Serene Republic or La Serenissima, as Venice liked to style itself, was never a republic in the sense that all of its citizens could vote or take an active part in its governance. However, for centuries when most states were run by one person with almost unlimited power, Venice had a system of governance with checks and balances in which certain citizens exercised much more authority than in most other states at the time. By this definition, Venice had the longest history of any republican government.
Venice had a mixed government, combining monarchy in the Doge, elected aristocracy in the Senate and wider nobility in the Great Council. Though not a democracy, the Republic of Venice inspired ideas of accountable governance. There was balance of powers between the Great Council which elected the Doge in a very complicated manner and for life and with the elected Senate acting as parliament. Importantly, the Doge’s power was limited by an oath of office, much like a constitution.
In practice, Venetian politics were dominated by a powerful merchant class at whose apex were the old noble families. This made it an oligarchy – or government by the few – rather than an actual republic in which the common people would hold political power. Regardless, Venice’s place in the history of political institutions is notable for the rather revolutionary idea in medieval Europe that no one had given the Venetians their political rights – instead, they had created those rights for themselves.
In the final analysis, the Venetian oligarcho-democracy survived many feuds, attempted coups, plague epidemics, wars and schemes by foreign powers. In particular, Venice during its millennium of independence outlived every other Italian state despite its vulnerable geographic location and its lack of arable soil and a steady supply of potable water. Despite all that, Venice’s political system helped the Venetians to turn their circumstances to their advantage, become rich and successful, and outlast their many enemies.
https://futurevenetian.co.za/was-venice-a-democracy/
Democratic Culture in the Early Venetian Republic
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230299467_8
Venetian Doges & Government – executive summary
Renaissance Venice was one of the longest-lasting governments with a substantial democratic component ever. It ran for over 500 years under range voting using a 3-point scale; plus several additional centuries under previous forms of semi-democratic rule.
This longetivity was despite what would seem to be large inherent disadvantages and dangers.
Venice began as a Greek-style democracy and gradually changed character to end as an aristocracy (i.e. only a democracy for the few thousand richest families). Even at the end, though, theoretically the "assembly of the people" always had the right to reject the aristocracy's range-voting-based choice of the Doge. In one view this veto right, since apparently never exercised, was a mere "formality" and not genuine power; in another view it was genuine and the exercise of democratic power was via the threat of the veto. (In the famous words of chess grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch, "the threat is stronger than its execution" and I think this chess maxim often applies to governments even better than to chess.)
Venice also gradually evolved with time to diminish the power of the One Doge versus the Many in the Grand Council. The principle of "checks and balances" was well appreciated in the design of Venice's government.
At its peak Venice was the highest-trading city in the world and one of the greatest (if not the greatest) naval powers in Europe. Although certainly not perfect, historians have admired it as the greatest success (in terms of justice, happiness, technology, prosperity, art, etc) in Europe during that era.
https://rangevoting.org/VeniceExec.html
Matt Riggsby - How Did Elections Work in the Republic of Venice?
https://www.quora.com/...-how-democratic-was-the-republic-of-Venice
Chris O'Leary - Is America a Democracy or a Republic?
People who say “The US is a republic, not a democracy” are right that it’s a republic. They are incorrect when they follow with that means it’s not a democracy.
Where people get confused with is that they’re talking about two entirely different things. A republic is strictly a form of government. Democracy is an ideology that governments are organized with.
The US is a republic.
The most relevant definition of a republic is this case is: A government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law
So yes, The US is a Republic.
Democracy refers to a means of rule where the power to govern rests with a country’s people rather than a ruling class or individual. The word is derived from the Greek "demos," meaning "the people," and "kratia," which means "power or authority."
Of the people, by the people, for the people. Sound familiar?
Now when Conservatives (usually oddly militantly, IDK why) say this, what they usually mean is that the US is not a direct democracy, in other words, we don’t hold a vote to decide what to do in all situations, and follow the flow wherever the mob takes us.
The fact of the matter is that direct Democracy is absolutely used in the US.
State and local laws and policies are often decided by ballot referendum, in other words, the people in the local, municipal, county or state elections are often asked to vote on a ballot initiative, and the majority vote decides the result. This is direct democracy in action.
There are three main types of Democracy, three things you’re generally referring to when you use the term “Democracy” the first being “Direct Democracy.
The Second is a Representative Democracy, which is often called “indirect democracy.”
Representative Democracy is in effect a way to streamline the democratic process. Here, elected officials are chosen by the people to represent the will of the people. In the US, the Senate, the House of Representatives and state legislatures are the clearest examples of representative democracy in action.
The third type of democracy is what the United States can most accurately be described as, being, a “Constitutional Democracy.” Constitutional democracy is one that has specific written structures in place that limit the power of the majority, in other words, documents that hold those entrusted with the elected office to agreed-upon norms.
The US is a Constitutional Democracy organized as a representative democracy which in some instances uses direct democracy.
None of these things keep it from being a Republic. But the oddly militant “It’s not a democracy!” line is…
Sorry. Yes. We are.
https://www.quora.com/...-how-democratic-was-the-republic-of-Venice
- ( secularism and nutrality )
...The most general element in the political ideal to which Venetian writers exposed their audience was a ubiquitous secularism. They were not hostile to religion; indeed, like most of their compatriots, they were demonstrably men of faith, albeit of a kind uncongenial to the developing orthodoxy of the Counter-Reformation; and this fact doubtless contributed to the esteem for Venice among pious Gallicans and Protestants. Their secularism was expressed rather in an antipathy to speculative systems that impose an artificial coherence on all values and experience and thereby claim a right to supervise, among other matters, the political order. They were the enemies not of religion but of metaphysics, and of the notion that the conduct of human affairs should be determined by some comprehensive vision of the nature of things. Their secularism was thus the necessary condition of an autonomous politics, an autonomous culture, and the full appreciation of human freedom.
This characteristic of the Venetian mind found especially vigorous expression in the hostility to Scholasticism and to the dogmatic temperament in general that permeated Sarpi's treatment of the Council of Trent and makes him seem so clearly a predecessor of Gibbon. Sarpi displayed much the same zest as some leading figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in showing up the presumption in all intellectual system building, its tendency to close men off from the actualities of human experience, and its exploitation to disguise and advance a crude libido dominandi . The Venetian approach to human affairs—though Contarini was a partial exception—was earthbound and empirical. Its refusal to force the data of human experience into large systems was notably exhibited in the preference of Venetian writers for exposition through dialogues in which various points of view may find expression without explicit resolution. This familiar Renaissance form was employed by Paruta. It was also, slightly disguised, a favorite device in Sarpi's great work.
Their rejection of system was fundamental for the Venetians to the appreciation of a wide range of human concerns. If there was no universal pattern which bound all things into a single scheme, the subordination of one set of values to another, of one area of experience to another, and indeed of one class of men to another was no longer defensible, except perhaps on the most practical grounds. The implications for political life were here especially clear. Reason of state could no longer find its justification in eternal reason, and there was thus no alternative to a secular politics. The consequence was full recognition of the dignity of the lay estate and of political activity; and this tendency in Venetian discourse was, I suspect, a substantial element in its attractions for European readers. It provided another of Sarpi's major themes, but it emerged with particular clarity in Paruta's defence of civic life.[3] We may also take Paruta as an example of Venetian appreciation of the autonomy of other dimensions of human culture...
- ( secularism - particularism - constitutionalism, combined )
As the reflections of Paruta have already suggested, the rejection of universal intellectual systems had a counterpart in the rejection of political universalism, and this bias in the political culture of Venice doubtless also contributed to its wider acceptability. The values attributed to Venice and the patriotism they called forth were equally applicable to other particular states, but not to a universal empire. Paruta himself devoted many pages to a criticism of ancient Roman universalism, which he judged both politically ineffectual and, in comparison with the small states of ancient Greece, artistically and intellectually sterile.[5] The same arguments were equally effective, as the Venetians were aware, against the universalism promoted by the Counter-Reformation papacy.
Venetian politics were based, therefore, on the need to defend the integrity of particular states. The Venetian interdict of 1606–1607, so widely publicized throughout Europe, was, among other things, the first of the great seventeenth-century conflicts over sovereignty; and Sarpi had argued the cause of Venice in terms well calculated to have a broad appeal. "I cannot refrain from saying," he advised his government, "that no injury penetrates more deeply into a principate than when its majesty, that is to say sovereignty, is limited and subjected to the laws of another. A prince who possesses a small part of the world is equal in this respect to one who possesses much, nor was Romulus less a prince than Trajan, nor is your Serenity now greater than your forebears when their empire had not extended beyond the lagoons. He who takes away a part of his state from a prince makes him a lesser prince but leaves him a prince; he who imposes laws and obligations on him deprives him of the essence of a prince, even if he possesses the whole of Asia."[6] And the case for the local settlement of local issues was still another important theme in his history of the council. As he made a Gallican prelate at the council remark, "It would be a great absurdity to watch Paris burn when the Seine and Marne are full of water, in the belief that it was necessary to wait to put out the fire for water from the Tiber." Venetian political culture corresponded, then, to what was more and more clearly destined to be the shape of the European community of nations.
The rejection of systems and of the notion of hierarchy posed a serious danger to political existence, however, because it deprived society, both domestic and international, of its traditional principle of order. The Florentines had discovered the solution to this problem in the idea of balance, which was destined to supplant the hierarchical principle of order at almost the same time in both science and politics. Venice largely owed her survival, in a world dominated by great powers, to a calculated exploitation of the balance of power, and her writers tended to take this for granted. The case was quite different, however, for the internal structure of states; and Venetian publicists were long concerned to account for the order and effectiveness of the Republic by describing its balanced constitution. Contarini's classic work on this subject at times justified Venetian arrangements by appealing rather mechanically to the eternal order of nature, an argument which doubtless did not weaken his case with some of his later readers.
But Contarini was too much of a Venetian to remain long with metaphysics; the order with which he was really concerned was that provided by effective government. "In our city," he boasted, "no popular tumult or sedition has ever occurred"; and his explanation of this remarkable fact was understandably of peculiar interest for Europeans whose own societies had been demonstrably less fortunate. The secret of Venetian success, Contarini revealed, was her constitution, which held the potentially antagonistic forces of the political arena in a complementary equilibrium. "Such moderation and proportion characterize this Republic," he declared, "and such a mixture of all suitable estates, that this city by itself incorporates at once a princely sovereignty, a governance of the nobility, and a rule of citizens, so that the whole appears as balanced as equal weights."[10] And since this happy arrangement of checks and balances was severely impersonal, it pointed also to a government of laws rather than of men. But its ultimate test was utilitarian. "The whole purpose of civil life consists in this," Contarini insisted: "that, by the easiest way possible, the citizens may share in a happy life." Venice supplied, therefore, both a secular ideal and the means for its fulfillment.
Venetian constitutionalism received even wider, if less explicit, dissemination through the great work of Sarpi, which submits the papacy, as a species of governance, to searching scrutiny and finds it wanting largely because of its failure to realize the admirable principles exhibited by the Venetian government. Sarpi argued that the church had originated as a free, spiritual, and democratic body; and he showed how it had degenerated, step by step, through the classic sequence of forms described by Machiavelli, until it had at last emerged as the naked tyranny of the contemporary papacy, a particularly odious example of government by men rather than by laws. Here too the popularity of Sarpi's masterpiece had far more than a religious meaning.
Sarpi's vision of the development of ecclesiastical government over the
centuries brings us to a final major contribution of Venetian political
culture to the rest of Europe: its increasingly sophisticated historicism,
which brought into a single focus the secularism, the particularism, and the
constitutionalism of the Venetian tradition. These impulses were combined
with a grasp of history as a process largely transcending individual acts
which, it seems to me, went substantially beyond the hints at this
conception in Florentine historiography...
- ( rejection of external powers )
Even more stimulating to the European imagination was the Venetian triumph over the pope in the great interdict of 1606–1607. This episode, which was followed with keen attention abroad, was the occasion for a flood of writings, for and against Venice, that circulated everywhere and in various ways called attention to the political values she claimed to incorporate; indirectly the interdict also produced Sarpi's great work on the Council of Trent...
- ( rule of law )
It was usual to attribute the internal stability of Venice to the excellence of her laws, their strict enforcement, and their impartial application to all classes. In Venice alone among republics, Boccalini suggested, the ruling group had abstained from oppressive legislation in its own interest; and her reputation in this respect was celebrated by Spenser in a sonnet which praised Venice above Rome because she "farre exceedes in policie of right." Boccalini praised the vigorous administration of her laws, attributing to this her perpetual youth and beauty;[80] and Bodin admitted that "an injury done by a Venetian gentleman unto the least inhabitant of the city is right severely corrected and punished." Behind each of these observations, we may assume, lurks some experience with situations in which so happy a condition did not prevail...
- ( religious toleration )
We may note first the general European approval of the secular character of the Venetian state. The point is largely left implicit, or it emerges superficially as applause for the exclusion from political responsibility in Venice of the clergy or members of clerically oriented families. But Howell, who had been imprisoned as a royalist and wrote of Venice during the Puritan domination of England, expressed fuller appreciation for the Venetian effort to separate politics from religion: "She hath a speciall care of the Pulpit (and Presse) that no Churchman from the meanest Priest to the Patriarch dare tamper in their Sermons with temporall and State-affairs, or the transactions and designes of the Senat; It being too well known that Churchmen are the most perilous and pernicious Instruments in a State , if they misapply their talent, and employ it to poyson the hearts of the peeple, to intoxicate their brains, and suscitat them to sedition, and a mislike of the Government.... Yet they bear a very high respect unto the Church." And Amelot de la Houssaye charged that much of the criticism of Sarpi came from a failure to distinguish politics and religion. Venice was a lesson, therefore, for a Europe in which political order was still regularly disrupted by the imperious demands of religion: Venice revealed that the first condition of effective statecraft was that it must be secular and therefore autonomous.
Hand in hand with the separation of realms went the separateness of states; Venice was also admirable because she had insisted so strenuously on her particularity and her sovereignty. This, indeed, was the primary meaning of that Venetian freedom which was the most widely celebrated element in the myth of Venice; its attractiveness signified resistance to the idea of a universal empire and devotion to one's own fatherland. Bodin noted this aspect of Venice; Fougasse thought nothing more certain than that, in this sense, Venice had been always free; Voltaire was still to celebrate the perpetual independence of Venice as though it represented for him some great human value...
- ( mixed regime - the one the few and the many )
As Howell will have suggested, the Venetian talent for balancing among changing political forces abroad pointed more profoundly to a general adaptability to shifting circumstance that was seen as the necessary condition both of her survival and of her apparent invulnerability to change. She could remain "forever young" because she had learned how to master the successive challenges of political life and in this sense to triumph over time. Nothing was more attractive to anxious European observers than this aspect of the Venetian achievement. This was the major impulse behind their admiration of her constitution and of those qualities of flexibility and finesse in her policy that less friendly and less secular minds perceived as unscrupulous, opportunistic, in short Machiavellian.
There was a good deal of discussion about the nature of the Venetian constitution, and the earlier view that it was a mixture of monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements maintained (somewhat like the equilibrium in Venetian relations abroad) in a perfect balance tended to give way by the later sixteenth century to the recognition that Venice was a pure aristocracy. Although some observers were critical of the limitations on the doge as a reflection on the competence of kings and therefore a threat to good political order, the elimination of a democratic taint from the image of the Republic doubtless increased the attractiveness of the Venetian model for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As an aristocratic republic of the most responsible and effective type, Venice acquired a new kind of interest. Much was therefore made of the general competence of her nobility, of the systematic way in which younger nobles were advanced through positions of steadily increasing responsibility, and of the contentment of the lower classes under this regime.
But however it was regarded otherwise, the main point about the Venetian constitution as it was perceived abroad was that it was a regular structure ("a great and ingenious machine" in the suggestive words of Saint-Didier), and that it worked. As early as Thomas Starkey, Englishmen had recognized its effectiveness in preventing tyranny; Howell identified this as a factor in the survival of Venice and a safeguard against "trenching upon the Common Liberty, and doing injustice"; and Venice figured prominently in the constitutional discussions carried on in the England of Cromwell and the Holland of De Witt. Even in the France of Louis XIV Saint-Didier was bold enough to describe at length the limits on the power of the doge, in a work that generally represented the Venetian government as perfect. Other writers emphasized the virtues in the Venetian system of broad participation by citizens in the affairs of the government. Even Bodin may have hinted at this in recognizing that although Venice was "pure and simply Aristocratic," she was "yet somewhat governed by Proportion Harmonicall," language that suggests multiple participation. The point was evidently important to Voltaire in his contrast between Rome and Venice: "Rome lost, by Caesar, at the end of five hundred years, its liberty acquired by Brutus. Venice has preserved hers for eleven centuries, and I hope she will always do so." In the same interest some writers persisted in the old view that the Venetian constitution retained a democratic element, among them Howell, Harrington, Saint-Didier, and perhaps even Rousseau, who declared: "It is a mistake to regard the government of Venice as a genuine aristocracy. For while the Venetian people has no part in the government, the Venetian nobility is itself a people."
By permitting the representation of diverse and changing interests, the Venetian constitution kept the Republic in touch with changing conditions and needs; and in the flexibility and shrewdness of Venetian policy European writers found additional grounds for admiration and emulation. This was the general lesson to which numerous particular examples pointed; Venice could be seen to incorporate not only eternal reason but also (however inconsistently in particular cases) practical reason, reason of state. Venice, Howell declared, had "allwayes bin one of the most politic and pragmaticall'st Republics on Earth"; Louis Dumay expressed somewhat the same thought in saying that she had been preserved "rather by prudence than by valour." The duc de Rohan put it more baldly in celebrating the degree to which the Venetians followed "all the maxims of their true interest," and Naudé most sharply of all in describing them as "steeped in a continual Machiavelism": in Naudé's eyes a point in their favor...
- ( economic freedom and social freedom )
Much of what in Venice interested European observers might also have been discerned in Florence, though perhaps less readily and, because the Florentine Republic had perished, less persuasively. But one final attribute of Venice that vividly impressed the European imagination was regarded as clearly unique: the remarkable personal liberty enjoyed by all Venetians. Because it was general and took many forms, and because of the peculiar capacity of personal freedom to induce anxiety, it produced a variety of reactions, often ambivalent. Thus Saint-Didier: "The liberty of Venice permits everything, for whatever life one leads, whatever religion one professes; if one does not talk, and undertakes nothing against the state or the nobility, one can live in full security, and no one will undertake to censure one's conduct nor oppose one's personal disorder." In its religious dimension the freedom of Venice won the approval of Salmasius, and Milton was grateful to Sarpi for his contribution as a historian to liberty of conscience. But although Saint-Didier was impressed by the religious latitude allowed in Venice, he was dubious about it: "The tolerance there is so great that they close their eyes" to all sorts of deviations. Leti doubted whether liberty in Venice was good for civil life.
These ambiguous reactions to the personal freedoms of Venice were all based on a failure, perhaps even a refusal, to distinguish between liberty and license. It is apparent from them that no real separation between the two yet seemed possible; personal liberty was generally supposed to merge inevitably into license; and, however fascinating either of these conditions might be, liberty was therefore always dangerous. The almost obsessive preoccupation of foreigners with the licentiousness of Venice, which was given increasing substance as she became a purveyor of pleasures to the upper classes of Europe, the gaudiest stop on the Grand Tour, should thus be seen as a kind of negative tribute to the more general freedom of Venetian society. The sexual temptation that Venice represented and its very confusion with more obviously political aspects of personal liberty pointed, indeed, to the possibility that orderly and effective government might after all be consistent with permissiveness in the more private dimensions of life, though the lesson was slow to emerge. Venice, in any case, could be seen increasingly to possess all kinds of freedom, and by the second half of the eighteenth century the appropriate distinction could at last be made. Thus the Encyclopédie , delicately distinguishing among the satisfactions of life, observed that in Venice one tasted both la liberté et les plaisirs ...
Why did Venice Eventually Fail?
Rowson is of the apparent opinion that Venice gradually became corrupt. The problem was that their democracy was intended to be for the benefit of the rich male "nobles," which was not the same as for "everyone." That may have been good at first because those were the smartest most successful people in Venice and their interests coincided well with "everyone's." But toward the end, they weren't the smartest who got rich due to their shrewdness and merchant success; they were just the ones who happened to be born into the right family lines, and they stayed rich by corrupting government power (e.g. customs duties) for their own purposes. According to Rowson, "Venice was being bled dry so that the aristocrats could keep gambling at the tables." And, we might add, cavorting with prostitutes. By the time Napoleon the juggernaut came, the once-huge Venetian navy was down to only a few ships and there was nothing they could do to defend themselves.
https://rangevoting.org/VenHist.html
https://rangevoting.org/
As Calm as the Lagoon - An analysis of the Venetian oligarchy from 1297 to 1509
The Venetian oligarchy endured from its cementing in 1297 to 1797. This stability set it aside from other Italian city-states who shifted from one governmental method to the next. The Venetian oligarchy endured through two centuries of existential threats and yet, despite these crises, remained largely the same. It never allowed the people a voice in their government like Genoa or resort to the rule of one man, such as in Milan. This raises the question of how it managed to do so.
https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/33078
The Most Serene Republic of Venice, was an Italian state originating from the city of Venice (today in Northeastern Italy. It existed for over a millennium, from the late seventh century until the late eighteenth century (1797). At times, its jurisdiction extended into Dalmatia further into Italy and across many Mediterranean and Aegean islands including Cyprus and Crete. In addition, it had far-flung trading outposts. It fought many battles against the Ottoman Empire and earlier Muslim polities although it also engaged in extensive trade within the Muslim world. Many Muslim cities, including Istanbul had Venetian quarters. The Venetian navy even helped Muslim rules in Egypt to police their shore-line, preventing piracy. One of the republics most famous sons was the merchant and explorer, Marco Polo who traveled the Silk Road to China. It is often referred to as La Serenissima, in reference to its title in Venetian, The Most Serene Republic. It is also referred to as the Republic of Venice or the Venetian Republic. It was never a republic in the sense that all citizens voted, or could take part in governance. However, for centuries when most states were run more or less by one person with almost unlimited power, Venice had a system of governance with checks and balances in which certain citizens exercised much more authority than in most other polities at the time. It has the longest history of any republican system yet devised.
The republic thrived on trade and, rather like the Carthaginian Empire only became involved in war to protect its commercial routes and interests. Because of its independence, Venice was an important cultural and intellectual center during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Venice was a major conduit for cultural exchange between Europe, Africa and as far East as China. The city was not subjected as strictly to the control of the Catholic Church as other centers of Europe, allowing more freedom for scholars and artists. From the fifteenth century, many works of Islamic learning were also printed in Venice. Like other Italian city states, the city of Venice maintained schools and universities, for which it sought the most prestigious professors. Wealthy families competed with each other in building magnificent palaces. Ultimately, the larger imperial entity to the North, the Holy Roman Empire of Austria which had long coveted access to the sea, took control of the City-state and ended its existence as an independent entity. After a brief period under Napoleon Bonaparte, Austrian Venice fell to the forces of the Italian unification movement in 1866. Trade enabled the republic to respect the cultural and religious other, with whom it would rather trade than fight. The republic engaged in war to protect its interests but its not insignificant power derived from trade, not from military might.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Republic_of_Venice
Machiavelli & Republicanism in Elizabethan England
Abstract - The purpose of this succinct work is to present N. Machiavelli's classic republican view from his proposition of an inevitable paradox, the founding of an expansionist republic, difficult to govern, or the founding of a stable, but small and weak republic. Such a paradox, according to Machiavelli, should direct and condition all the constitutive devices of the republic when choosing what will be its destiny as a political body. The model of republic preferred by the Florentine will be the expansionist model of Rome, leading him to assume all the devices that gave this republic its power. From this presentation of the Machiavellian proposition, we will analyse the assimilation of republican thought in England from the Elizabethan period, as well as the political-social scenario that exists there. This itinerary will allow us to understand, in general, why classical republicanism was received on English soil from the perspective of establishing a mixed, stable government, thus favouring the spread of the Venice myth as a serene republic and delaying the use, even that mitigated, of the republican presuppositions expressed in the Machiavellian work that directed towards a Roman model.
https://www.redalyc.org/journal/5766/576666994015/html/
The State as a Work of Art
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/11/state-work-art-marcia-christoff-reina.html
