Pursuit of power : Venetian ambassadors' reports on Spain, Turkey, and France in the age of Philip II, 1560-1600
"This book aims to introduce the general reader to these celebrated documents and to draw from them a political and social portrait of Europe in the age of Philip II as it was seen and understood by some of the period's most skilled and experienced observers. It is, then, a kind of reconstruction by means of selection and abridgment, an epitome, a distillation of the ambassadors' understanding of their world. The Venetian ambassadors were interested chiefly in the way power was held and used by the great European monarchies and empires; the pursuit of power therefore looms large in this reconstruction of the way the ambassadors viewed Europe in their time." [Introduction]
Print Book, English, 1970
Harper & Row, New York, 1970