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Updated: July 3, 2025
The force which had broken out desperately in the crazy wonder-working of Eunous of Enna and had then inspired the 'other-worldly' exaltation of Paul of Tarsos, was soon conducted into the walls of chapels, and the local associations of Christian chapel-goers were steadily linked up into a federation so powerfully organized that the Imperial federation of city-states had eventually to choose between going into partnership with it or being supplanted.
Of these city-states a word must be said before considering the new enthusiasm for the works of the Romans and Greeks and the increasing skill which the Italian artists displayed in painting, sculpture, and architecture. The map of Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century was still divided into three zones, as it had been in the time of the Hohenstaufens.
In the case of Italy and of the Netherlands, however, it is impossible to understand the politics of those countries in the sixteenth century without paying some attention to city-states, which played leading roles in both. In the Italy of the year 1500 there was not even the semblance of national political unity.
Not only was foreign trade changed from the south and east of Europe to the west, from the city-states to nations, from land-routes to ocean- routes; but the vessels which sailed the Atlantic were larger, stronger, and more numerous, and they sailed with amazing confidence and safety, as compared with the fragile caravels and galleys of a few centuries before.
Their association in the text suggests that the claims of local gods had already begun to compete with one another as a result of political combination between the cities of their cults. To the same general period we must also assign the compilation of the Sumerian Dynastic record, for that presupposes the existence of a supreme ruler among the Sumerian city-states.
For the first time since the early Greek city-states of two thousand years before, the professional playwright had a chance to ply his trade. The Middle Ages had known the theatre merely as part of certain church celebrations. The tragedies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had told the story of the suffering of our Lord.
Their scope was, of course, confined to the field of their own experience, the small self-contained City-States of Greece, and it did not fall within their province to foreshadow, like the Jewish Prophets, the end of warfare, or to speculate on the ultimate unity of mankind. Their task was to interpret the work of their own fellow-countrymen on the narrow stage of Greek life.
They had never come in contact with the higher Aegean civilization, nor had they mixed their blood with that of cultivated predecessors; their land was continental, poor in harbours, remote from the luxurious centres of life, and of comparatively rigorous climate; its configuration had offered them no inducement to form city-states and enter on intense political life.
To the south lay the kingdom of Naples. Then came the states of the Church, extending diagonally across the peninsula. To the north and west lay the group of city-states to which we now turn our attention. Of these none was more celebrated than Venice, which in the history of Europe ranks in importance with Paris and London.
Greece had been a country of City-States. The history of Phoenicia was the history of two cities called Sidon and Tyre. The Roman Empire was the "hinterland" of a single town. Writing, art, science, astronomy, architecture, literature, the theatre the list is endless have all been products of the city.
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