Introduction

Summary

After Italian historiography's long disaffection with themes concerning foreign policy and diplomacy, a number of important studies have recently directed historians' attention to the problem of the origins of lomacy and to the ties between diplomatic forms and the political and institutional development of the Italian states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Thus a manifest gap has been filled in studies on the Italian peninsula in the modern age, where the history of diplomacy displays a curious pattern. On the one hand stands a long tradition of inquiry into the ‘Italian origins’ of modern diplomacy, identified in the closely knit web of political and diplomatic relations that prepared, accompanied and guaranteed the Peace of Lodi of 1454. Also identified with that Peace is the creation of the first ‘balance of power’ system used by historians as their model to explain and interpret subsequent critical episodes in the history of international relations, from the Treaty of Westphalia to the Treaty of Utrecht. On the other hand, this focus on the theme of the ‘origins’ has given rise to a historiographical bias which has induced research to concentrate on the medieval antecedents of the diplomatic institutions and functions, and to neglect subsequent forms and events.