The democratic peace has received substantial empirical support in the modern international system. The consistency of the results does not imply that reasonable critiques do not exist, that is, the effects of development, liberal economic structures, and preferences. These challenges, however, tend to strongly correlate with democracy, making direct statistical tests inefficient and not necessarily convincing. This study attempts to evaluate these challenges and extend the temporal domain of the democratic peace through an empirical analysis of Renaissance Italy. The data set contains the seven major powers of Renaissance Italy between 1250 and 1494, with measures of war, power, regime type, preferences, and contiguity. The analyses show that joint republicanism, power preponderance, and preference similarity decrease the probability of war.
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