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In this article Luisa Bussi notes the long established orthodoxy among historians that modern International Law was created as an outcome of the Westphalia settlement of 1648, and that this had established a new system of international relations, based on the principle of the legal equality of the new style sovereign states, which were replacing an older political order based on an established hierarchy of powers and principalities. The article concentrates on the mediation role of the Republic of Venice on which the eventual settlement depended. It is shown how the process of mediation in international disputes was firmly grounded in medieval theory and practice, and that the international order that developed from the settlement still embodied a hierarchical ranking of states and principalities, and that the modern system of international law based on the theoretical assumption of equality between sovereign states had not been established at Westphalia.
