SPAIN AND SPANISH ITALY

The last words of Lipsius' De magnitudine Romana (1598) represent one important way in which the Tacitist vision would now go – into a destruction not merely of the constitutional order within states, but (as he had foreshadowed in his De constantia fourteen years previously) of patriotism itself, in the interests of security. The insights of the new humanism had been applied by its first generation – men like Corbinelli or Pasquale, or Lipsius himself in his Politicorum – to the problems of their own states, riven by civil war or governed by the memory of it. But by the 1590s, Europe as a whole could now be seen as a society broken by civil war between nations, whose reconstruction called for a new imperialism. This was a message which – of course – a Spanish or Habsburg audience above all was ready to hear, and there is no sign that even in the troubled world of the 1590s it felt that the Habsburgs could not take on this role. In Italy, in particular, writers in this new genre in the 1590s began to make this theme explicit, and to expand their horizons from the small absolutisms of the peninsula which their predecessors in the 1580s had analysed. The first and in many ways the classic expression of this came in a series of works by a Piedmontese, Giovanni Botero.