ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century saw the emergence for the first time of a network of organized diplomatic contacts which linked together more or less continuously the states of western Europe. By the early seventeenth century areas hitherto on the margins of this system, Russia, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, were beginning to be, at least in some sense, parts of it. A true European state system was emerging; and foreshadowings, though faint ones, of the basic idea underlying such a system, that of the balance of power, were beginning to be visible.
