A visitor to Venice in 1513 wanted to see the galleys of the Arsenal, the treasury of San Marco, and the library of Marino Sanuto (1466-1536), thus nicely paying respect to the maritime, religious, and literary aspects of the city. In April 1530, Ferrante Sanseverino, the prince of Salerno and reportedly "a studious man," expressed a desire to meet three Venetians: Pietro Bembo, famous for his poetry; Giovanni Soro, the state secretary in charge of ciphers; and Sanuto, because, claims the diarist, "of the fame I have as a historian."

The polemical use of secular and ecclesiastical history was introduced into Protestant English Reformation controversy by William Tyndale, popularized by Simon Fish, polished by Robert Barnes and George Joye, and perfected by John Bale. These Reformers developed a Protestant theory of English and European history which maintained that for centuries the affairs of the European states had been conducted for the benefit of the Pope and that secular rulers were merely the puppets of papal policy, retained in power only so long as they obeyed the dictates of Rome, to be removed, as was Kingjohn of England, the moment they proved recalcitrant.

Les Antiquitez de Rome has long been praised as the first sonnet sequence in the Renaissance to have abandoned the subject matter of love, which Petrarch established as the almost exclusive concern of sonneteers. To be sure, Italian and French poets had occasionally written sonnets on other subjects—in fact, Petrarch's own Rime includes a small number of poems not concerned with love—but no sequence before Du Bellay's so radically departs from tradition as his seems to do.