ABSTRACT
An attempt to mark the beginning of the modern state is as arbitrary as an attempt to date the beginning of the modern era. For political, as all other, life is in constant flux, and the moulds that contain it are being cast and recast imperceptibly in the course of time. The medieval Roman Catholic realm from which modern Western Europe issued had also been conceived as a multinational theocracy, and the Western Europeans had been haunted by the same double image of a unified and powerful realm that had controlled the evolution of the two rival Mediterranean societies. The first generations of post-Renaissance Europeans were intellectually ill-prepared to mitigate the impact of their ideas upon the ancient orders from which their own civilization had become alienated in the course of time. The Italian mode of conducting diplomacy, which set the pattern for all other Western European states, originated in Venice.
