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Updated: July 3, 2025
As the situation changed from time to time, these city-states united more or less closely with China or fell away from her altogether. In this period, however, Turkestan was of no military or economic importance to China. In the time of the Ming there also began in the east and south the plague of Japanese piracy.
The stirring story of the colonial struggles which occupied the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will be taken up in another chapter; at this point, therefore, we turn from the expanding nations on the Atlantic seaboard to note the mournful plight of the older commercial powers the German and Italian city-states.
By the seventh century after Christ, when Ancient Greek civilization may be said finally to have dissolved, our own civilization was ready to 'shoot up and thrive' and repeat the tragedy of mankind. The writer can best express his personal feeling about the Empire in a parable. It was like the sea round whose shores its network of city-states was strung.
The city-states of Greece, where democracy originated, set such store in consequence by the personal liberty of the individual citizen, that they preferred to remain small, and suffered the inevitable penalty of their weakness. Rome, growing till she overshadowed the world, sacrificed liberty in the process.
Envy and covetousness begat injustice, and injustice disloyalty. The city-states, in their rivalry for dominion or their resentment against the domineering of one state over another, forgot their loyalty to the common weal of Greece and fought each other for empire or liberty.
We ourselves are apt to forget that the facts on which Aristotle relied were both real and important. The history of the Greek and mediaeval City-States shows how effective a stimulus may be given to some of the highest activities and emotions of mankind when the whole environment of each citizen comes within the first-hand range of his senses and memory.
For the city-states of the Netherlands see Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I , ch. xiii; the monumental History of the People of the Netherlands, by the distinguished Dutch historian P. J. Blok, trans. by O. A. Bierstadt, 5 vols.
I and II; and Belgian Democracy: its Early History, trans. by J. V. Saunders from the authoritative work of the famous Belgian historian Henri Pirenne . For the German city-states see references under HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE above. General: Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I , ch. x, iii; Histoire generale, Vol.
By the year 1500, however, the popes were becoming prone to regard themselves as Italian princes who might normally employ their states as so many pawns in the game of peninsular politics. North and west of the Papal States were the various city-states which were so thoroughly distinctive of Italian politics at the opening of the sixteenth century.
That disembodied he might spend eternity with the divine, or, absorbed into the divine essence, become himself divine such ideas, though not unknown or without attraction to rarer spirits, were wholly impotent to combat the vivid interest in life and the lust of strenuous endeavour which were bred in the small worlds of the city-states.
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