Reason of state seems to have become established as a term of art in the councils of princes at about the time of the Society's foundation. It had originally been an Italian coinage, but circulated readily wherever there was a vernacular equivalent for stato, that is to say in the Romance languages, in English and in Dutch, and more tardily where there was not. It was eventually rendered in colloquial Latin as ratio status. What exactly the term referred to, however, remained highly ambiguous. This was in part because both its components were themselves ambiguous. ‘Reason’ (in all the European variants for ragion and ratio) could mean ‘reflecting about’, a ground or reason for something, or a method or way of doing something, and ‘state’ meant a government or regime, or status, condition, or ‘estate’, notably the status, condition, or ‘estate’ of the prince. Reason of state could therefore mean thinking about or discussing the business of ruling, or the methods or ways of acting, or reasons for acting, that were typical of rulers or regimes. Giovanni Botero was the first to use the term as a book-title, in 1589. By that time it had come to be equated with ‘Machiavellian’ and ‘Machiavellism’, etc., already well-established terms in the vocabulary of political abuse.