His reasoning was correct.

But peoples fighting for freedom on their native soil could not risk an adventure which only some central power of the first magnitude like France might have conducted with fair prospect of success.

In the meantime what Sarpi called the Diacatholicon, that absolutist alliance of Rome, Spain and Austria, supported by the Inquisition and the Jesuits, accepted by the states of Italy and firmly rooted in some parts of Germany, invaded even those provinces where the traditions of independence still survived.

After 1610 the Jesuits obtained possession of France; and though they did not effect their re-entrance into Venice, the ruling classes of the Republic allowed themselves to be drugged by the prevalent narcotic.

Venice, too, was fighting for her life in the Adriatic and the Levant, while her nobles became daily more supine in aristocratic leisure, more papalizing in their private sympathies.