World (1652), Georgius Hornius's Orbis politicus (1668), Samuel von Pufendorf's Einleitung zu der Historie der vornehmsten Reiche (1684) or Peter Heylyn's Cosmography (1689). It was even longer than the last important Italian essay, Giovanni Tarcagnota's five-volume Delle istorie del mondo (1580). Now it was to be completed and republished by the Venetian firm of Girolamo Albrizzi. Adopting the approach of Tarcagnota's early seventeenth-century editors, later repeated by William Temple in 1695 for a History of England, Albrizzi assigned the new sections to a team of expert writers. He gave Egypt to Domenico Suarez of Mantua, China to Vittore Silvio Grandi of Venice; and he gave England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, the Duchy of Holstein and the counties of Guelders to Apostolo Zeno. The finished work promised to fill an important gap in popular historiography and to achieve considerable sales among educated readers. In scholarship, Zeno far outdid Foresti, who was not above repeating the popular myth about the fall of Belisarius (already rejected by the sixteenth-century historian Crinitus). He aso outdid the rest of the collaborators. Unlike them, he followed the Renaissance humanists in discarding the awkward Christianized version of the Book of Daniel's four-monarchy scheme, which divided universal history into the periods of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, distantly succeeded by the kingdom of heaven. He didn't treat the Holy Roman Empire as the logical extension of Rome into the modern world, so he could quletly divide the section on the third monarchy into separate volumes on each of the Northern kingdoms. And in order to avoid the dizzying complexities of a straight narrative presentation of hundreds of years of documented history, he followed Renaissance historian Paolo Emilio – who wrote on France – in adopting the Suetonian model of a series of biographies. In 1710 together with Scipione Maffei, Antonio Vallisneri and his brother, Pier Caterino Zeno, he founded the Giornale de' letterati d'Italia, maintaining that it was necessary that "Italians themselves make their own newspaper... revealing that good sense, erudition and ingenuity never were lacking among us, and now more than ever are they flourishing." The tri-monthly publication had prestigious contributors such as Scipione Maffei, Antonio Vallisneri, Eustachio Manfredi, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Giovan Battista Vico, Bernardino Ramazzini. Motivated above all by the desire to improve Italian learning, it enjoyed considerable success. When Apostolo Zeno was called to duty as poet laureate to the imperial court