How did the upstart Venetian Republic manage to sustain a single government for 900 years, longer than all others in the world, past and present? The reasons are a distant mirror worth looking back at to understand the weakness of governments today. That’s centuries more than the Han Dynasty or any government in the Roman empire, and even longer that its closest rival, the Byzantine empire.

So what was it about the Republic run from its watery lagoon city that, despite wars, natural disasters, repeated visitations of the plague, its political system had such longevity? The first reason, one suspects, is that it was a sort of democracy in an age of feudalism.