Historically, Italian conspiracies have been treated as isolated incidents with their own particular, local causes and little attention has been paid to searching for links and comparisons among them. However, traditions undoubtedly existed and conspiracies of whatever sort did not take place in a vacuum; often they were a continuation in another form of previous ones. Similarly, in studies of Renaissance Italy conspiracy tends to be classified as an event and not as a category of crime, and this has focussed interest on its internal dynamics rather than on its external justification. For a historian, as for contemporaries, to view something as a crime raises the possibility that the accused might not be guilty (or by logical extension, that in certain circumstances the particular crime under investigation might never even have taken place), whereas an event undoubtedly happened. The implications of this labelling are important. Advantage was seen to lie with those who actively discovered conspiracies for they could then construct and announce what type of activity had taken place. Events can be ‘discovered’ only if they have previously been kept secret, and secrecy by itself implies guilt. A denial of guilt was expected and therefore worthless. If the deed were declared to have been perpetrated against a person of divine or human authority, such as a pope or a prince, there was even less need for tangible evidence, as any attempt to suggest innocence necessarily implied guilt of a different kind, for disbelieving the version of events publicized by the ruler.