Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Some dust marking to page block but pages are great. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> National consciousness by having become since the Enlightenment part of almost every European’s collective inheritance has powerfully contributed to looking upon a political entity like that of the Serenissima as a hybrid a sport of nature. Only one other polity which bore some resemblance to it remained in existence the Papal State. But it hardly modified this opinion. It had never stretched over something like a thousand miles; it had remained huddled as it were like a patchwork cope about the shoulders of the pope. To those who are familiar with the unique character of the city of the lagoon today it might seem banal to underline the singularity of the Venetian case. Still it is perhaps worth recalling that the extent and duration of the Venetian empire were based neither on a coherent geographic configuration nor on ethnic religious or linguistic homogeneity. It is thus not totally out of place to bring to mind at least briefly the co-ordinates of a state so different from others. The assertion that Venice was a channel between Orient and Occident can no longer be seen in such simple terms. At the start and for a long time thereafter such a function was the making of its economic fortune; but the fact remains that this channel soon expanded into becoming a flexible but nevertheless potentially resistant zone which did not survive (SP)