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Justice, Authority and the Creation of the Ancien Rgime in Italy*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
Extract
IN the fifteenth and particularly in the sixteenth century one obvious casualty of historical development was the corporate state, embodied in the city states and communes of medieval Italy. Whether conquered by powerful foreign powers, or succumbing to the attractions of a locally-based signore, with the notable, and frequently-lauded, exception of Venice, whose proudest boast remained that her affairs were governed with laws, all the Italian communes had collapsed by the beginning of the seventeenth century and the norm of political organisation had become the highly centralised, absolutist monarchy, typified by the Church State, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the Duchy of Savoy.
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References
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