Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
In a Nutshell
Renaissance humanists like Petrarch sought to revive Roman virtues through elite classical education, building libraries and fostering arts, but this unexpectedly fueled literacy, printing innovations, and Machiavelli's empirical political science, laying groundwork for the scientific method (Bacon, Galileo) via widespread text access and hypothesis-testing. Florence's bizarre anti-tyrant republic—run by lotteried merchant guilds excluding nobles, with rotating consensus councils locked in towers—resisted Medici takeover, preserving republican forms, property rights, and partial liberties even under ducal rule, showing resistance's enduring wins. Unintended progress defined the era: Petrarch's oligarchic vision birthed science curing the Black Death, print revolutionized info like digital tech (Gutenberg bankrupt sans distribution, evolving to pamphlets/Reformation), while inventors like Leonardo hoarded secrets, delaying systematic advancement until post-1600 sharing.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Ada Palmer, Renaissance historian, novelist, and composer at the University of Chicago, discusses Inventing the Renaissance. In late 15th-early 16th century Italy, republics like Venice, Florence, and Genoa existed due to the Roman Empire's dissolution in the West. Cities had to self-govern without centralized Roman oversight for supply routes, roads free of bandits, or large-scale import/export. Larger, wealthier towns surrounded by good agricultural land sustained themselves from local resources and farms, forming republics with senates modeled on the old Roman Senate and councils of top families. Weaker towns were prone to takeover by one wealthy family with goons declaring monarchy, or people migrating to noble villas for protection by bodyguards, leading to depopulated towns and monarchal village structures around lords. Italy's great agriculture allowed more cities to sustain as republics.
Renaissance humanists aimed to resuscitate Roman virtues like stability for safety and good government. Petrarch, surviving the Black Death amid civil war, bandits, and foreign mercenaries, saw an age of ash and shadow. After losing friends but learning two younger scholar friends survived—one killed by bandits, the other wounded and lost—he urged imitating ancient Romans, especially leaders who prioritized the state over family. Example: Romeo and Juliet's Lords Montague and Capulet feud harms Verona but they prioritize family honor over city good, unlike ancient Roman consul Brutus (ancestor of Caesar's killer) who executed his own sons for treason. Humanists asked how to raise leaders like Cicero and Brutus by recreating their education with Plato and Homer, building libraries by traveling across Alps and to Constantinople for manuscripts, and hiring tutors like Marsilio Ficino fluent in Greek and Latin to immerse young princes and princesses.
Assumption: education works by osmosis—exposure leads to imitation. Upstart rulers with no legitimacy used antiquity trappings—Roman emperor dress, virtue parades, palaces with pediments—to propagandize legitimacy, making people think, "This guy is like the Caesars, not a tyrant, maybe he'll bring a golden age." Medici in Florence, low-status merchants, used Latin, Greek, Cicero quotes for respect.
French ambassador to new pope passes through Florence, seen as scum, villainy, filth, sodomy capital ("to Florentine" means anal sex in European languages; French laws indict visitors for sodomy). Enters to lifelike ancient-style statues, massive cathedral dome rivaling Roman ruins, banker's humble palace with airy courtyard like Roman ruins, shining new bronze statue, busts of Roman emperors, robed Platonists speaking ancient Greek, Plato works, grandson Lorenzo de' Medici (10 years old) reciting poem in ancient Greek on three parts of soul. Cosimo de' Medici offers alliance; ambassador flips from condescension to awe, wanting bronzesmith, architect, Greek teacher for French court to outshine others.
Raised princes with Latin/Greek fought worse wars with more deaths, betrayals, cannons; wealth centralized more mercenaries. Instead of philosopher princes, got Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia (educated in classics) causing destruction. Machiavelli, raised on Petrarchan project, observed virtuous princes like Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (with Plato, libraries, art) betrayed and ruined, while terrible people like Cesare Borgia and Julius II succeeded. In exile letter: day wasted hunting larks, pub with uncultured men, then dons court robes to commune with ancients in library. Concludes osmosis fails; proposes political science—use history as casebook: compare examples (e.g., five river battles) to imitate what worked, avoid what didn't. Contemporaries called him historian. Wrote early 1500s, over century after Petrarch (span like Napoleon to Yuri Gagarin). Plan maxed out, failed; halfway through Renaissance (Shakespeare's grandparents unborn).
By 1600 (200 years in), printing press spreads libraries; more literacy, science. Micro-technologies: footnotes, marginal glossaries explain vocabulary. Early: masterful Latin needed, no dictionaries; only expert classicists read ancients like Ficino. 100 years later: vernacular translations, footnotes; med students read Lucretius on materialist atomism (Poggio found it readable by two dozen; pre-1600: 30 print editions, 30,000 readers). Diverse readers (med/law students, countries) test hypotheses: discover heart as pump, atoms for diseases, germ theory (1560s-1580s, 160 years post-Lucretius). Francis Bacon, Galileo: use nature as casebook like Machiavelli's history—examine, doubt, rethink.
Resuscitate Roman virtues → read what Romans read → build libraries → resuscitate arts → literacy + new info analysis → applies to history/leaders and nature/world.
Multiple stories for Scientific/Industrial Revolutions (e.g., Joseph Henrich on Catholic Church breaking kinship networks for guilds/idea discussion). This story: fertile environment like topsoil for forests—build books, info networks for discourse, journals. Medieval Florence: 90% male literacy (12th century) for merchants (letters, accounts, tabs), but few book-literate (scarce books). By 1600, books in medium towns transform literacy to access scientific/intellectual/legal ideas. Guilds own trade libraries by 1600 (not 1100). All changes (literacy, guilds, networks) intermix. More steps than "rediscover texts → science" (like skipping Napoleon to moon landing). Salient now for AI: hard to predict/control huge changes.
Petrarch sought values triumph, Christianity upheld (ancients like Plato ~90% agree, add Trinity). Guessed contents; found Hedonists, Epicureans, Stoics—plural, chaotic. Led to wars, Machiavelli's critique, new science (Galileo), unlike envisioned. Yet Bacon's method propagators (Voltaire, Montesquieu) pushed smallpox inoculation, disease eradications, germ theory, hygiene, vaccines, penicillin/treatments for Black Death. Petrarch thought he would make a world which shared his values.
Instead, he made a world that doesn't share his values but is capable of curing a disease he never imagined would be curable. If you showed him this future, it would be scary and weird to him because it does not embrace his values. Our values are different. He would be horrified by democracy. He believed that only a tiny elite has the capacity to rule.
If we had a time-traveling Petrarch, he would really wrestle for a long time to wrap his head around democracy as a functional system. He really thought in oligarchic terms. But he would see the wonders we've created, especially the fact that we can treat the Black Death, and he would weep for joy seeing that. He did not create a world that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well.
We have many examples of that. Trains and bicycles come in, and we get feminism because it's easier for people, especially women, to move freely and independently. They can organize. They can mobilize. We get suffragettes. Did the inventor of the train intend for there to be women's liberation? No. Did it go the way he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes.
It's important here to zoom in a little bit on Florence's own government system and how and why it's weird, in order to understand what rank Machiavelli actually holds in it.
All of these republics, except Florence, are modeled on ancient Rome. The ancient Roman model was an oligarchic republic in which within the city there are certain noble families, usually founding families who made the city in the first place, who are the senatorial families. Hereditarily, when they come of age, the men of the family are automatically in the senate. From among them are elected the consuls, high senators, or the head of state if there is one. You have a small slice of the population that are fully enfranchised members of the republic who rule over the commoner majority. That is how Venice works. That is how Genoa works. That is how Bologna and Siena for the most part work. That's how the Swiss Republic works. That's how all of these republics work.
Florence was like that for quite a while, but when republics fell, they usually fell to noble families who are the foremost, the strongest, the military class. If you're a military leader in this period, you have to have noble blood. No soldier is going to follow a commander who doesn't have noble blood. That would be weird. Those threats to the independence of the republic almost always came from the nobility.
After one particular near miss in which the city was nearly taken over, they decided to get rid of the nobility of Florence. They massacred most of them, cut their heads off, put them on pikes, burned their houses down, raked salt into the earth, and had a party on their graves, the way you do in the period when you're getting rid of a class of people. There were a few noble families that they really liked who had not been part of negative stuff. They allowed them to officially renounce their nobility. They renounced their nobility, changed their names, and declared themselves commoners. They set up a commoner republic.
What that meant was the senate consisted of members of merchant guilds. A member of a merchant guild here means the owners of workshops. It’s not the guy who sits at the loom weaving, but the guy who owns the warehouse full of looms where the workers are working. The head of the sculpture works, the head of the architectural firm, not the bricklayers who are actually laying the bricks. Bourgeoisie is an anachronistic word, but we're talking about the owners of the means of production who are themselves commoners. They are very wealthy, but from the point of view of the diplomatic corps of any other society, all of the ruling people and all of their ambassadors are noble-blooded. If you're an ambassador, you're automatically noble-blooded. Nobody's going to take an ambassador seriously who isn't.
From the perspective of every other polity in the world, the rulers of Florence are the rank of their valet. There is no nobility left in the city. In fact, Florence can't run its own armies or head its own police, because you're not going to surrender if you're told to surrender in the name of some guy who doesn't have a coat of arms. That would be weird. So they actually have to hire a nobleman to come to the city and be their chief of police to arrest people in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor.
One at a time, they'll invite a skilled military commander nobleman who will come to the city. He'll be podestà. He'll live in the palace, which is also the prison. He'll arrest people. He'll enforce the law. They will pay him handsomely at the end of the year, escort him to the gates, and then banish him from the city for life on pain of death so that he cannot return and make use of the power that he had in the city to try to take over. They're very wary of any nobleman.
They've set up a really weird republic—weird from the perspective of everyone around them—in which a bunch of merchants are trying to share power by being lotteried into the senate. You put names in a bag. You examine all of the merchant members of guilds. You choose which ones are fit to serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane, not so deeply in debt that they could be manipulated by the people whom they owe money to. Their names go in a bag. You choose nine guys at random. They rule the city. They are put in a palace where they rule the city from that tower. They're actually locked in the tower for the duration of their time in office because if they left the tower, they could be bribed or kidnapped. They rule the city for two or three months. At the end, they are thanked for their service and escorted out, and then a different nine guys share power for the next three months. It's a power sharing that is designed to be tyrant-proof because you need consensus of nine randomly selected guys to decide to do anything. Oh, it's not even a majority vote, it's consensus? It's consensus.
Previously you were describing "kill the nobles, salt the earth". But then you say it's the heads of the merchant guilds who are in charge. Merchants and entrepreneurs have notable status in Florence because when you have a merchant capital, everybody works for somebody who works for somebody who works for the boss.
If you are a major merchant in Florence, you're importing and exporting wool to and from all across Europe. You have employees all across Europe. You're buying mass bulk wool from England, importing it to Florence to use olive oil that you've bought from Naples to process into high-quality wool, which you're then exporting to Germany and France. You are a very interconnected businessman. You have a lot of contacts, you have a lot of clout, and the employees who work for you look to you for their safety net as well as their political representation.
We're very accustomed in the modern period to thinking of the government as being our big safety net. If we wonder who is going to fund the hospitals, whose job is it to take care of orphans, we think of the government, or maybe the church. But in this period, if you're killed and you leave orphans behind, it is your employer whose duty it is to take care of them. If you are injured and can no longer work, it is your employer who will support you for the rest of your life while you are disabled and find you work that you can do with that disability. A huge portion of the safety net is your employer.
Are you in trouble with the law? Your employer will supply your defense attorney. Your employer will supply the persuasive note to the judge that they would very much appreciate if their person got off. This is the system known as the patronage system, and it existed in ancient Rome. It exists and saturates the medieval and the Renaissance worlds in which everyone is in a very interconnected hierarchy.
So if you're a brewer and your son gets in a barroom brawl and punches somebody out and the person's nose breaks and they die in the brawl and your son is suddenly in trouble and you say, "Oh no, I don't want my son to be executed," you turn to your landlord. Your landlord turns to his landlord. They turn to one of these major families. These major families are massive landowners that own dozens of apartments within the city. Hundreds or thousands of people work for them. So it makes sense to everyone to be represented that way, like having a council of the CEOs of all of the organizations that employees work for, when your corporation also supplies your social safety net and you see your representation there.
It's also a world that's used to thinking in terms of hierarchy and very unused to thinking about real democracy. It really doesn't have any confidence in what we would recognize as democracy. We talk about these republics, and we're very excited by the fact that they give more power to the people than a monarchy does, but they're still incredibly narrow oligarchic republics.
When we read Machiavelli, he talks a lot about the popolo, which we translate as "the people." He talks about how important it is that the popolo are respected and have a voice, that the popolo are armed, and the government shows respect for the people by allowing them to be armed. We read this and we're like, "This feels really familiar. This feels like documents of the founding of the US where we're respecting and arming and trusting the people." Popolo meant the top 4% economically of the population, the members of the merchant guilds. That's the popolo. He's talking about a narrow-slice oligarchy being heard, a narrow-slice oligarchy being respected.
We didn't realize that in the nineteenth century when we were excitedly translating The Prince and reading it as quasi-democratic. We now have read more documents of the period and realize how people use these words.
Florence in this period goes through five different forms of government. It's this republic of nine dudes in a tower, as you were saying, before 1434, and then— There's a gradual takeover. There's a gradual, what we could call regulatory capture.
But an interesting detail about Florence, even as the Medici take over, is that the Medici know the people of Florence are very deeply invested in this republic and very deeply invested in its institutions. Therefore, they have to respect those institutions and proclaim respect for those institutions. So they're going to sustain people in the named offices that there used to be. They're going to continue to let the guilds be important and have important offices.
There was a mandatory outfit that people wore who worked in the republic. The garment over there in the corner is a lucco fiorentino. This was the garment you were mandated by law to wear if you held office in the Florentine Republic. To us, we look at it and say, "It's a long red robe. It looks very Renaissance." To them, it looked like a toga because of the way it was draped. They thought of this as a toga. They're cosplaying the Roman Republic. Wearing a Florentine toga while in office was something that you did to represent your fealty to Cicero and republican values.
The dukes made their men continue to wear these. In fact, the first Duke, Cosimo I, would wear one to costume balls as if in his heart he longed not to dress like a duke, but to dress in a toga like a republican.
It's doubly ironic because when the Roman Republic turns to the Roman Empire, they still have the senate. They still have all these old institutions, even though it's no longer a republic. The Roman Senate keeps meeting until 1200 AD. It's sort of doubly ironic that they are doing the same thing, but in the 1500s. And it means that more rights are granted to the people of Florence than to other cities that fell to monarchies at similar points. The monarchs of Florence know they have to be careful, they have to respect rights to a certain amount, and they can't run roughshod over them.
There's a really cool building that I love in Florence. If you've been there, there's the famous bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, which has little jeweler shops all along it. When you get to the end of it, there's this funny overhead corridor, the Vasari Corridor, which was built by the dukes of Florence to connect the old city palace where the senate used to meet—where they had to have their seat of power—to their new palace across the river, which was much bigger, where they could have grand balls and things that dukes need to have.
Because they're so terrified of being assassinated by their own people, they built this overhead walkway that goes from one end of the city to the other so that they could walk in safety without being assassinated. This is a sign of a weak duke. But also, when he was building it, it's going across the roofs and sometimes blasting off the second stories of different people's houses. Most people, when His Grace the Duke says, "I'm gonna blast the top story off your house," would say, "Yes, Your Grace, please continue."
There are literally severed heads of people who resisted still rotting on spikes in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. But they get to this one point where there's a very old tower, a 500-year-old tower. This belongs to the Mannelli family, who are descended from peers of Julius Caesar and can trace their genealogy all the way back to an old Roman gens.
When the duke says, "We want to knock the top off your tower," they say, "No, this is our tower. This tower has been ours since before the Medici existed as a named family. You may not knock the top off." And the duke does not knock the top off. The corridor goes around in this awkward square around that tower, because he knows that if he violates something as traditional and core to the civilization as the property rights of somebody who has owned something for a long time, there will be rebellion, civil war, dissent, and resistance.
These are monarchs who know that they are weak and are therefore careful, and therefore more rights, like property rights, exist.
Meanwhile, across the river in Ferrara, Duke Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara used to wander around Ferrara buck naked with a sword in one hand and his dick in the other, to show off that nobody would ever possibly try to harm a Duke d'Este. He and his siblings used to do things like, if they liked a musician, kidnap them and lock them in a tower so that nobody else could hear them, or if they wanted each other's musician, send goons to kidnap each other's musicians. They also used to recreationally murder each other's servants when the siblings were tiffing with each other. That is what you do when you don't fear your people and when you feel confident in power.
They are much closer to tyrants than the Medici are ever able to be, even after the republic falls. That's what's so neat. Because the resistance failed, if we're looking at it in black and white. The republic fell. There wasn't a republic anymore. There was a duke. He took over, and the old system was gone. But because the republic fought so hard and because the people really believed in it, the people had a lot more rights, and the tyrant was a lot less tyrannical because there had been that fight. It's a great example of how even when resistance loses, resistance wins.
I think there's an interesting parallel to today, not to be too on the nose, but sometimes people debate the odds that America becomes a Putinist kind of country within a couple of decades. I think the odds are actually quite low. Just because even though constitutionally, or at least in precedent, the president is very powerful, the republican expectation is so strong. The amount of resistance faced, even when you successfully do something, demotivates the next escalation.
The only thing that makes resistance weak in the US is when people feel as if partial victory is failure. Remembering moments like how Florence's resistance all the way to the end meant that there was more liberty for the next several centuries, even under the tyrant, is what we need to remind ourselves, that partial victory is an important thing. Even if the worst were to happen and there were to be tyranny, that tyranny would be so much weaker because there was a lot of resistance, and traditions of resistance and structures would develop that would continue to exist.
The Medici are the bankers for the papacy. What does that mean? Why is that necessary? How are they able to make money off of that from the interest on the float?
When Cosimo de' Medici swings the contract as banker for the pope, it's important to remember that when you can't wire transfer money in the pre-modern world, collecting taxes is a very difficult and complicated system. It is generally done by the centralizing power that has the right to tax delegating somebody local. If you're in a town, there'll be a local tax collector. It's his job to go around to everybody and collect taxes, send a portion of those taxes home to the central power, and keep a remainder to pay himself.
The central power will say, "We expect X amount of taxes from this area." When you hear about wicked tax collectors, it's because if you are told, "We want 10,000 florins worth of tax from this town," but you extract 15,000, you can keep the other 5,000. The 10,000 is what you need to send to the central power, so the more you extract, the more you get paid.
This delegate system, in which there's a local tax collector and even a more local tax collector below him who might collect tax from a particular village, means that you depend a lot upon the person whose job it is to collect your taxes.
When Cosimo is papal banker, he is the person collecting and channeling the money from every church in Christendom when everybody puts a coin into a collection box or pilgrims come and put money. All of the wealth that's supposed to flow back to the papacy is actually flowing to Cosimo. Cosimo is passing it on to the papacy after taking a cut. That is a lot of money moving quickly. There is also a lot of ability to make contracts and contacts. We all know how important networking is.
He rises in prominence from a banker to somebody who has enough money to effectively take over his state via manipulating the guys-out-of-a-bag system.
To discuss that again briefly, if you have a system where you lottery people, sortition is the technical term for it. This is a very old form of government. Ancient Athens used it. It actually works really well. But like any institution, it is corruptible. In the same way that you can corrupt voting by bribing people or manipulating the machines or manipulating voters, you can also corrupt sortition by bribing the people who pull names out of the bag.
Or you can use the simpler mechanism which Cosimo uses first. If you're a giant bigwig in the city and you employ a third of the people in the city and they’re on your payroll, and nine guys at random are chosen out of a bag, three of them are going to be your guys, just statistically. If you tell all your guys, "I want this policy, this policy, and this policy, and if you have questions, send for me and I'll tell you what to do," when the plurality on a random council all have a plan and it's your plan, you effectively control the city.
In that way, the Medici effectively controlled this lotteried system, because they guaranteed that the plurality, in a situation that doesn't have a majority, will always be them.
But of course, there's a chance to that. In 1430 and 1432, Cosimo has bad luck, and the lottery draws a lot of people who dislike him and doesn't draw any of his guys. They immediately declare him a traitor to the state, arrest him, and lock him in a tower. And he bribes his way out. He offers the equivalent of about $300,000 to the guard outside the cell and $700,000 to the captain of the guard to smuggle him out of the tower.
He wrote in a letter later that they were the two most foolish men he'd ever met because he was Cosimo de' Medici. He would happily have paid them tens of millions of dollars to let him out of there, but they weren't ambitious enough to think to ask for more than a few hundred thousand.
So he escapes, and then the next election they happened to elect entirely people who just loved Cosimo. They invited him back to the city in triumph, declared him father of the fatherland, and arrested and persecuted all of his enemies, who turned out to be guilty of tax evasion and all sorts of other things. That was the moment that his grip tightened. And he's like, "I'm going to stop simply controlling a plurality, and I'm going to start bribing the people who actually run the elections."
His famous quote about this is, > "It is dangerous to be rich and not powerful."
You need the power to defend yourself in a situation like King of the Mountain, where when you're on top, everyone will try to knock you down.
This is the system into which Machiavelli is born. His family has worked for the Medici family for generations. He grows up expecting to work for the Medici family. But the problem with heredity is that sometimes you get a weak link.
And in the moment that Machiavelli is in his early twenties, he is coming of age, about to work in government for the first time, a government in which he is not, in fact, even fully enfranchised. That's one of the fascinating things about the degree of his patriotism. You weren't allowed to serve in government office fully—the lotteried offices—if your family was deep in debt. His grandfather had a lot of unpaid tax debt. So he worked his whole life for a government of which he was not even quite a full citizen.
That shows a deep love of country, but it also shows that even people who could not be in office deeply loved and cared about this republic and the important liberty they felt they had being ruled by the 5% instead of being ruled by one dictator.
To us, that isn't a very big difference. They’re still both not democracy. We would say they’re both not liberty in the sense that we want liberty. But it's an inch more liberty than monarchy. Even that small amount of liberty, people loved it. People were willing to fight for it. People were willing to go to the streets, wave their banners, and say "libertas" for the republic. Because they were invested in it, Machiavelli observes, they sustained it.
But eventually, one particular Medici—I'm not saying names because they all have the same names over and over, and it's really confusing—comes to power quite young and weak. He's basically 20 when he's suddenly in charge of a very precarious republic. Right then, the French are invading Italy, and he's scared. He botches the diplomacy with France and falls into disrepute, and the city takes the opportunity to kick him out.
The subsequent regimes, which are an independent republic again, are the ones for which Machiavelli works. He was part of the regime that ruled while they were in exile. When they returned, they viewed him as an enemy. He didn't actively organize to resist them, but his name was found on a list of potential people that an anti-Medicean resistance movement had intended to recruit.
He is arrested, tortured, exiled, and in exile writes The Prince. He dedicates it to the very family that exiled him because they now control Florence, and he will only work for Florence. He doesn't want his manual of the great secrets of statecraft to be in the hands of anybody but his homeland, so that it will defend his homeland.
When Florence exiles you, they tell you, "Go to this place and wait, and if you're good, we'll invite you back." Florence has been doing this for ages because Florence actually used this as the core of its diplomatic corps.
When you have no nobility, you can't have ambassadors in the full-on noble ambassador sense. There's nobody in the city of sufficient rank to go talk to the kings, to play chess with the sultan, and do all the things you have to do to be a proper ambassador.
What Florence did instead is exile people and say, "Okay, we're exiling you. You go to Bruges. Be our contact in Bruges. You go to London. Be our contact in London. Be good. Send us letters informing us what's going on. When we have diplomatic needs to talk to the king, we're going to send letters to you, and you're going to forward them. If you're good, you get to come back."
So being in exile is sort of being on probation, but also being entrusted with state matters. That's not quite what they did with Machiavelli.
Machiavelli was banished to a hamlet in the middle of the Tuscan countryside near nothing important, told to "Go sit in the country and rot, and if you're good, we'll invite you back." Everyone expected him to break the promise and leave, as he was a well-known statesman, scholar, playwright, and historian. Dozens of cardinals in Rome and other cities would employ him. Kings of England and Kings of Naples loved employing Florentines as secretaries. He might tutor the daughters of the Duke of Milan, like Francesco Filelfo did after being kicked out of Florence for opposing the Medici. Exiled Florentine intellectuals typically went to courts in Milan, Naples, or England to exert influence.
Instead, Machiavelli passed the test by staying in the country faithfully. He did not run to Rome like Dante to write important things with the ear of power. He stayed, rotted, and wrote letters home: "I will serve you or nothing. Bring me home to serve my country." This was weird and not normal for other Florentine intellectuals in similar banishments.
His personal letters show love of country. Letters about writing The Prince and exchanges with friends confirm this. He published and circulated his comic play (a big hit) and history of Florence (well known at the time). The Prince stayed in close private circles with trusted friends, then sent a copy to Florence as a job application: "Please bring me back. I will work for you. I will be loyal. I support my city more than any particular iteration of my city, my country more than any particular regime. Whatever is in power, I will be faithful."
In The Prince, ruthless actions to keep power are justified because the end (survival of country) justifies the means, not ends in general. Machiavelli saw regime changes bring civil violence and blood in Florence's streets. Life under a tyrant is better than civil war, massacre, and conquest. "Don't push for regime change. Even if tyrannical, more people survive by sticking with the tyrant."
Gutenberg went bankrupt after inventing printing, and his apprentices also went bankrupt. This was when Cosimo paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per book. Printed books were mass-produced commodities without distribution networks. Mass production was rare; only coins were mass-produced. Everything else was artisanal. Mass-produced products need distribution.
E-books existed when books were typed on computers in the 1970s, but no market until Kindle created a commodity way to buy/sell them. Gutenberg produced 300 Bibles for the cost of one, sold seven to the seven people in his landlocked German town legally allowed to read the Bible (only priests). Left with 293 unsellable Bibles, he went bankrupt. There were 300 people in Europe wanting them, but not in one location.
Bank seized his press, tried the business, went bankrupt due to overhead. Apprentices built presses, went bankrupt, fled debts to Venice. Venice was the Mediterranean airport hub for changing boats. Printers gave ten Bibles to each of thirty ships' captains going to thirty cities. First sustainable print circulation via hub system.
Book fairs emerged: printers spend year printing, bring thousand copies to fair with thousand other printers, trade for five copies each of 200 books instead of thousand of one, sell in bookshops. Frankfurt Book Fair still exists today.
Printing press (1450) took 40 years to be economically sustainable; printers made money in 1490s. 1510s brought pamphlets/news distribution, Reformation enabled by pamphlets like Arab Spring by cell phones. Newspapers followed like social media.
One information revolution with successive applications as it disseminates/saturates, like digital revolution: computer → personal computer → internet → cell phone → social media → LLMs. Print hit Europe with revolutions for 150 years, new bang every decade or couple decades. Pamphlet from Wittenberg to London in 17 days enabled Reformation coordination; impossible a decade earlier (took months).
Print and digital revolutions parallel: one big technological change in information with successive applications over decades, not multiple revolutions.
History seemed to speed up: Martin Luther/Reformation, 20 years later England splits from Catholic Church (unprecedented in two millennia), tumults every decade. In 1506 nostalgic for 1490; now in 2026 nostalgic for 2000.
History always moved fast; high school teaching covers large chunks quickly, pretending stagnation. 19th-century books group things to make modernity special. Zoom in anywhere: every decade feels different; 1320s nostalgic for 1300s.
Civ video game (70 million copies shipped, #1 history teacher since 1991; 65% of Earth with tech play games) teaches antiquity turn=50 years, Middle Ages=25, Industrial Rev=10/5, modern=1 year (as much happens now as 50 years antiquity). Textbooks lie similarly. Historians zooming on any decade show fast pace like present.
Technologically, past moved fast too (chairs with backs, scissors, improved metallurgy). Raphael/Michelangelo paintings glow like gemstones vs. flatter colors 100 years earlier due to 11 major technical revolutions over 120 years in oil processing, colors, fake gemstones, fake gold (yellow over tinfoil for frames).
14th century viewed Romans as best time, since then Dark Ages. Progress always happened artisanally.
Population exploded last 200 years (majority of humans who ever lived). Due to agriculture/hygiene improvements via artisanal inventions (better plows, seeds, cabbages, pots).
Post-1600 systematic scientific method: observe world, inductive reasoning for secret motions of nature, publish to community for progress.
Leonardo da Vinci not a scientist: wrote in coded mirror writing, refused to share with students/assistants. Wanted unique masterpieces for future marveling ("How did he do it? No one replicated"). Like marveling at Colosseum/Pantheon. Brunelleschi burned notes/schematics after Florence dome so no one replicates. Inventors/engineers sought peers unable to match them, sabotaging progress.
Francis Bacon's simile of three insects:
- Ant (encyclopedist): gathers/piles knowledge (anthill/library), possesses but no output.
- Spider (system weaver): spins beautiful logical theories from own mind, hypnotic but unreal.
- Honeybee: gathers from nature, processes through own being to produce sweet/useful for humankind (scientist).
English Academy of Sciences founded with Bacon's portrait. Standard shifts: great achiever shares knowledge (not just builds dome). Academies ensure each generation better (better agriculture, no famines, refrigeration, chicken in winter). Science as ultimate charity: gift to every future human.
1620s/1630s: Galileo/Descartes publish; heart as pump disproves four humors; blood circulation; magnification shows flea wing patterns. World coming into view, progress beginning.
Zoom out: progress always (France agriculture 1300 > 1000). Bacon saw artisans patenting tools (carpenter better chisel). Made it systematic. They thought history stagnant until now; really accelerating, now articulated.
Hockey stick graphs flat then zhoop post-scientific method. Depends on graph/zoom. Post-Bacon inventions enable population boom 150 years later. Would have happened later/slower/more painful without (mice on island hockey stick then starve/eat each other).
Acceleration after 1620: yes in one sense, continuation of curving curve in another.
Venice scaled printing (fine typesetting metalworking), advanced milling (water/windmills), gears for watches. Why no Industrial Revolution?
Italy richer per square meter: breadbasket, Big Olive Oil (fuel, industrial, cooking), Big Wool, Big Finance. No need for new industry; already top via agriculture.
England produced crappy wool, exported crude wool to Florence (used olive oil for fine quality; wool suits non-itchy vs. itchy blankets). Industrially ambitious places not already top pursue it.
Italy agricultural/finance world. Mining: land more valuable as farm than ripped up. Rich cities so subdivided because
Rich Italian cities remained mostly independent, unlike centralized England where the crown could pass legislation for massive transformation. No city wanted giant industrialization, which was awful for the city. Industrial Revolution happened mostly outside wealthier English centers, in second-tier towns like Lancaster that grew massively.
Competitiveness between Italian city-states should have spurred textile machines, but documents confirm they figured out industrial looms in the 1400s and chose not to use them. They preferred luxuriant artisanal fabrics.
First printed books mimicked artisanal luxury: fonts looked like handwritten scripts, often with blank spaces for illumination to match manuscripts. No commodity market for cheap books yet.
Printing got cheaper, and around this time paper itself got cheaper, making writing cheaper too. Historians see marked change in records kept, improving our understanding. Huge amounts rest on cheap writing surfaces.
Fall of Rome and Papyrus Loss: Western and Northern Europe lost access to papyrus, the cheap writing surface of antiquity. Papyrus from tall, thin water reed (fibrous like asparagus): slice into ribbons, lay parallel on stone like noodles, perpendicular layer on top, dry in sun—naturally sticky, minimal labor.
Enabled Roman bureaucracy, libraries in mid-sized cities, letters, tax records. Egypt sometimes withheld papyrus in wars, collapsing Roman infrastructure overnight without writing.
Papyrus is warm-weather plant, killed by frost—cannot grow north of frost line (France, Spain, most Italy; only Sicily tip). Replacement: parchment from dead sheep. Price difference like head of lettuce vs. leather jacket.
Every medieval book page = leather jacket portion. Handwritten medieval book on parchment costs as much as a house; small pocket copy = studio condo; big illuminated Bible = countryside villa. Libraries only for mega-rich; University of Paris library (Europe's great one) had 600 books—less than an airport kiosk. Middle East sultans, Sub-Saharan Africa, China had thousands due to cheap paper/rice paper/papyrus.
Rome had many papyrus books that fell apart (brittle) between 400-600 A.D.—most antiquity knowledge lost then, not Alexandria fire. With 1000-book library, could only copy 100 due to leather shortage—not enough industry. Monks prioritized (e.g., Saint Augustine), so more surviving Augustine than all pagan classical Latin. Subjective tastes created unintentional censorship, biasing survival.
Paper hit Europe 800 A.D. (400-year famine). Not as cheap as papyrus: gather rags, immerse in water, beat violently in mill to pulp, scoop on screen (fibers lock like grits slurry). Needs paper mill—more labor.
Parchment = leather jacket; papyrus = lettuce; paper = dozen frozen prepackaged meals (10x lettuce cost, 1/10th jacket). People wary: paper weaker than tough parchment. Used for rough drafts, letters, sketchbooks first. 400 years before earliest state document on paper.
Disseminated slowly: entered 800, trusted by 1200. Printing on paper, but also vellum (calfskin parchment). Rich like Dukes d'Este, Isabella d'Este ordered books printed on vellum (even when print run on paper)—produced in Venice by Gutenberg apprentices who fled there (1490s). Paper around 600 years by then, yet distrust persisted. Parchment use declined gradually; British Parliament records on parchment until 10 years ago; Vatican still does official records on parchment.
Book costs: not just scribe time (5 months), but materials. Gutenberg needed paper, borrowed ~$1.5 million equivalent, didn't recoup—went bankrupt. Risk: buy paper upfront in big lots for color match; slow print run.
Printers used multiple presses: one slow for valuable book (6 months), another for quick pamphlets (2 days: fashion at royal wedding, sell immediately). Pamphlets: cheap news, scandal rags—5 pages, sell 2-3x/week.
Pamphlet example: naked pages, short text, hand-stitched; print front/back over 2-4 days; print 1000, sell locally or to news writers traveling (Milan news to Florence travelers; sieges, royal wedding fashions).
Favorite title: "The Scandalous Tale of a Doctor from Padua and How He Seduced His Maid, Murdered His Wife, Murdered the Maid, Cut Out Her Heart and Ate It, and How He Was Justly Punished by God." Mix of nonsense/real; cheap blue cover (laundry lint color—rag paper unbleached, average clothing color).
18th-Century Leap: Gentleman's Magazine—invented "magazine"—weekly news roundup fact-checking contradictory newspapers (e.g., fold-out procession at state funeral). Response to fake news from newspapers.
Print evolution: printing press → pamphlets (fund books) → newspapers (fact-check pamphlets via serial reputation/accountability) → magazines (fact-check newspapers).
Physical Examples: Papyrus shows plaid (two strip layers); brittle, better scrolls than codex (cracks folding). 17th-c. parchment letter (indecipherable handwriting, aligned; cheap parchment shows flesh/hair side). 1480 book of hours (hand-calligraphed, French?, prayer book/Bible quotes/meditations; fat/small for pocket; margins for notes/addresses/day planner/smartphone; celebrities sign; wrote around natural hole).
Parchment: paper-thin animal skin (huge industrial effort); good parchment hard to ID as skin (tiny pores one side).
Oil: 1860s Drake strikes Pennsylvania; 1910s cars mass-sold; before, mostly kerosene lighting (gas flared); light bulb threatened Standard Oil.
Coal: Julius Caesar described Britons burning rocks (coal) due to poverty—no wood. Romans had coal/silver mines but no Industrial Revolution.
Industrial Revolution happens when needed. Gutenberg: amid 1410s library boom/demand spike; inventors made smaller books, more paper use pre-press. Paper surged before Gutenberg. Not random genius—response to need.
Martin Luther perfect timing vs. Savonarola (1490s prophet, like Khomeini; theocratic Florence, too early—pamphlets slow, local to Florence/Siena/Pisa). Machiavelli too late (contemporary Luther, but private circulation only for Florence; censorship in place).
Luther's Ninety-Five Theses: printed in London 17 days after Wittenberg release—pamphlet runners fast.
New censorship regime post-Luther: effective on books, not pamphlets (too fast/anonymous, like social media vs. CNN). Inquisition couldn't arrest printers—they got news first via news writers, skipped town.
Censorship Factors: 1) Law; 2) Technology (can't censor fastest info—printer flees, info continues).
Punish shops (China-style)? Printers moved towns; easy denial. Costly/human cost, but evaded. Too many, too fast—like social media porn/hate speech.
Raids happened (e.g., Anton Matytsin's The Specter of Skepticism describes clandestine bookshop raid notes).
Censorship restricted/scared, couldn't prevent circulation.
Pre-cheap books: reread same few books repeatedly (Cosimo de' Medici's father owned 12). Deep intimacy: know author personally, conversation across time. Petrarch loved Cicero—reread 20x, meditated every point/joke.
Petrarch heartbroken finding Cicero letters: petty (real estate yelling), irrational post-daughter's death (manic quarreling). Even wisest man couldn't conquer grief-induced pettiness.
If even Cicero became irrational and petty in the face of grief, does that mean humanity is doomed to forever be irrational and petty in the face of grief? Cicero broke his heart and his foot because a book fell on his foot, causing a bad infection that left him bedridden for months.
In 1492, Columbus reaches the New World. The reception of this news was muted. A Vatican document from 1100 or 1200 recognizes Vinland (Canada) from Viking information, treated as a little thing. Students, especially American ones, struggle to understand why it wasn't seen as a big deal, equivalent to discovering aliens today.
They find Caribbean islands and coastlines, thinking it's small, like the Canary Islands, not realizing the scale of Europe and Africa combined. No matter how big something far away is, petty local squabbles feel life-or-death. In 1492, France is about to invade Italy, potentially the largest war in 50 years; papacy taken over by Spain throwing unprecedented weight; Ottomans invading Italy and Hungary.
Okay, great. We'll worry about that [New World] when we're not having three wars at the same time. But guys, we're having three wars at the same time. Oh my God.
Martin Luther hits like a ton of bricks before they realize it's a continent, not an island. Local tumults dominate over distant ones. They're also discovering sub-Saharan Africa (more than just Ethiopia), the heart as a pump, amid paradigm shifts like maps being wrong, ancients wrong on geography, world bigger, heliocentrism, math revolutions.
Does it matter whether the sun goes around the Earth or the Earth around the sun when the French are invading right now and we need to get the defenses going, and there's a giant civil war happening, and we're about to be betrayed? It does matter, but it also doesn't matter.
Any decade is consumed by its tumults and fails to recognize surrounding importance.
In studying censorship history (topic of next non-fiction book), every era is wrong about what to worry about censoring. Time machine advice would highlight ignored threats.
French Enlightenment: Voltaire, Rousseau, Marquis de Sade, La Mettrie’s materialist atheism circulate, but Inquisition obsesses over Jansenism (Calvinist Catholicism: grim, authoritarian God hating souls as worthless spiders, obeying arbitrary pope).
Raiding clandestine bookshops: Voltaire fine, banned Encyclopédie (Diderot/d’Holbach’s universal education project to reconstruct progress if dark age comes) fine, Diderot/Rousseau letters fine—but Jansenist Trinity treatises get the full crackdown.
Rome bans Encyclopédie (radical on biology, statecraft, rational law reform); France loves it (king, queen—queen looked up silk pantyhose tech). Ceremonial burning: they march Encyclopédie to fire, then burn Jansenist treatises instead.
This is always true.
1540s Inquisition: Ignore Machiavelli (revolutionary), Lucretius’s De rerum natura (materialist science; see Greenblatt’s The Swerve, detailed in Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance). Inquisitors: Lucretius safe for learned readers who know falsehoods; focus on Protestant minutiae.
1545 Index of Banned Books: Arch-heretics in all caps—minor Protestants like Calvin, Zwingli, Luther, Melanchthon. Machiavelli not in all caps, not important enough.
An era is always wrong about what ideas and what circulation and what changes are the really big ones and are always much, much more worried about, "Oh my God, the Prince of Spain, which princess is he gonna marry? This is going to determine whether Spain is or isn't annexed by Germany. This is the most important thing that has ever happened in the entire stream of time." People are like, "We've discovered another continent," and they're like, "We don't care. We just wanna know who's gonna marry Charles."
Inquisition executions: Of thousands killed, ~100 for atheism (one with reincarnation ideas); 12 trials of scientists (Galileo, Giordano Bruno—only Bruno executed, 3 convicted total); hundreds of thousands for Judaizing (contaminating Christianity with Jewish thought), paganism (indigenous religions in colonies).
Kepler discovers planetary motion laws whimsically (Platonic objects, Tycho Brahe’s data) as Habsburg imperial mathematician doing astrology. Excommunicated as Lutheran; mother tried for witchcraft (also Lutheran), unrelated to science.
Milton’s Areopagitica (early 1600s) defends free press amid push for England’s first systematic censorship (ad hoc before, unlike Catholic world’s anti-Protestant system). Anxiety over Papists, moral panic about books (like 1954 comics, 1990s D&D).
We must trust truth to rise purely to the top. We must let free voices move, otherwise you're gonna create a situation where people are writing for the censor first and for the public second. It will constrain people's thoughts in the way that we know chilling effects and fear do.
Milton fails; regime passes. Paradise Lost censored: Satan as charismatic protagonist, God as jackass, anti-monarchical rhetoric from revolutionary pamphlets fine—but change one line on comet/astrology.
Guys, speaking as a time traveler, you're so wrong about what you're censoring.
Late 17th century, Vatican (Inquisition-run) has Europe’s most extensive experimental laboratory (Daniele Macuglia’s work, Italian dissertation on post-Galileo Inquisition).
Post-Galileo, they verify book truths via experiments, inventing peer review (second lab recreates first). Inquisitors experiment by day, write scientific treatises by night.
History is never what we expect.
Keep Dwarkesh Patel in your library
Save the videos and channels worth coming back to, and find them again in one place.
