Venice's secret service: organising intelligence in the renaissance

摘要

From its peculiar republicanism to its floating city, Renaissance Venice had a reputation for doing things differently. In Venice's Secret Service: Organising Intelligence in the Renaissance, Ioanna Iordanou shows that this sense of exceptionalism also manifested in matters of state security. Though Venice's 'secret service' is not unknown to scholarship, Paolo Preto's work being a notable case in point, Iordanou offers a truly innovative perspective on the subject through her investigation of intelligence systems, institutional organisation, and social practice.1 A central thesis of the book is that, while other European powers were of course keenly concerned with issues of security, Venice was different in that it possessed and made robust use of centrally managed and systematically organised state intelligence apparatus. In putting forward this argument, Iordanou complicates the academic assumption that systema-tised intelligence and surveillance systems are products of the modern state.