Abstract
This essay outlines the rise and decline of the most powerful Italian republican state between the middle ages and the early modern period. It moreover seeks to analyze the political, financial, and military means that enabled a state based on a peripheral site and disposing of relatively limited population resources to achieve such a prominent position in Europe. It then examines the causes of its decline, in both relative and absolute terms. The history of Venice in fact offers an excellent case study with which to verify Schumpeter's thesis for a specific geographical area, that of the Italian peninsula, which has been surprisingly neglected by scholars interested in the origins of the fiscal state.
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