Abstract
In 1797, after long negotiations, Bonaparte, then general of the French army, and Cobenzl, the Austrian representative, agreed on the following deal: Austria recognized France's rights on the Belgium territory and was granted in exchange the Venetian Republic. By selling Venice, Bonaparte did not only humiliate it, he put an end to a centuries-old tradition of the city-state being the spatial and organizational leading unit in Italy. He eradicated the city that was once the embodiment of economic prosperity; and he also exampled the formidable hold of the territorial state over any other form of spatial and political organization. How did this happen? Only five centuries before, in 1302, the variable forms of city and empire were the only units that anyone could think of, having prevailed for more than a millennium, and the pope Boniface VIII could rightly quote Jeremiah in his Unam Sanctam Ecclesiam bull, 'I have set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms', thus reasserting the clout of the spiritual power over the temporal one. How is it that the sovereign territorial state, inexistent at that time, could possibly arise and become in five centuries the spatial and political reference for the exercise of power?
