"Inventing the Renaissance", I

Ada Palmer's lively rewrite of our story about the Renaissance is the best find of this year.

• The friend urged Machiavelli to write more. Why? Because, he said, without a good history of these days, future generations would never believe how bad it was, and would never forgive their generation for losing so much so quickly.1 This was the same decade in which Michelangelo carved the David and Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, yet living through the years that laid these golden eggs felt like an apocalypse... how the golden and grim extremes of the Renaissance, and the later mythmaking of those extremes, in turn birthed larger myths which shape how we imagine history in general.


• novelists inventing fantasy or science fiction worlds fill their imagined histories with cycles of golden ages and dark ages, rises and falls. And yet historians all agree, such imagined cycles have little connection with what evidence shows us about real history.


• * Arguments over which era or individual deserves credit for an innovation are history’s version of another question: What is the beginning of a river? Is it the very first few drops of water entering the soil? The first spot where the water forms a tiny finger-wide channel?... Just so, the major features of the way we think usually have several dates that could be celebrated as beginnings: the first few mentions brief as water drops, the first ongoing dialog enough to flow, the first point that whole groups or movements start to talk about them, or the first point they became powerful enough to sweep the world on into major social change... the Renaissance was not the beginning but the broadening of a stream, whose first drops fell in antiquity, collecting into trickles in the Middle Ages, which swelled enough in the Renaissance to catch our eye with their glimmer and motion, yet still needed centuries more to become major currents guiding the barque of history.


• * We’ll journey through the Renaissance fifteen separate times, looping like time travelers, following the lives of fifteen different Renaissance people—some famous, some obscure—from youth to death, living through the same years from different perspectives, and learning why some Renaissance figures became household names while others faded away, not because they weren’t important, but because they didn’t fit what later eras wanted the Renaissance to be.


• Young Nick tasted the gorgeous, alien Latin of a long-lost world... He read of Gaius Mucius Scaevola (fl. 508 BCE), who sacrificed his own right hand, burning it in a fire to prove Rome’s courage to his Etruscan enemies—even as Florence and her neighbors distrusted their own citizens so much that they hired foreigners to head their police.


• Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74). Petrarch invented the Dark Ages, by which I mean he was the first person to talk about the era after the Roman Empire as a period of shadow, misery, darkness, and decay... he was part of a circle of Italian scholars who deeply loved Cicero, and read his political and philosophical works intensively.


• Petrarch always described himself as a man born in exile—an exile in space, but also in time. (After a plague) Petrarch projected that ash and shadow backward on everything since Rome, lumping together for the first time what we now call the Middle Ages, and ascribing to it everything terrible about his own lived experience.


• in the Renaissance as much as 60 percent of all charitable giving went, not to orphans, nuns, or hospitals, but to ransoming fellow citizens from galley slavery.


• There are also the two peculiar, impregnable powers: Venice with its modest land empire but huge sea empire of port cities and coastal fortresses peppering the Mediterranean, and the Swiss who live untouchable within their Alps, and base their economy almost entirely on hiring out their mercenary armies.


• there is no territory juicier than Italy. <> Why Italy? From 1300 to 1500, the Italian peninsula—an agricultural paradise, rich in wool, olive oil, wine, and other precious exports, positioned at the center of the Mediterranean and easily reached from every corner of its world—had five of Europe’s ten most populous cities:... If our age has Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Finance, in this era think Big Wool, Big Olive Oil, and (eternally) Big Finance, all of them enriching the same few cities... these city-states commanded only small slices of countryside from which to levy armies. .. To make this more unstable yet, Italy’s cities all hated their neighbors... Isolated, friendless Italian city-states with weak defenses, neighbors happy to see them burn, and literal piles of gold in the basements of their merchant princes—if you’re a king and want to conquer something, do you choose anywhere else, or do you choose Italy?


• 1494. The French invade Italy... • Goal: Prevent Florence from being conquered by any of 10+ different enormous foreign powers. • Resources: 100 bags of gold, 10 sheep, 1 wood, lots of books, and a bust of Caesar.


• * 1508. Every crown in Europe hates their neighbors, and would rather fight it out through proxy wars in weak, lootable Italy than back at home... Who will be fighting whom? France and Spain both want Naples. France and the Empire both want Milan. Will England’s hatred of France mean they help Spain? Will England press its claim to the French throne? Will Portugal press its claim to the Castilian throne? Will Burgundy rebel against the Empire? Will the Ottomans ally with somebody to slice up Italy? Will the Swiss finally wake up and notice that they have the best armies in Europe and could conquer whatever the heck they wanted if they tried?... The alliance has formed! It is: everyone joins forces to attack Venice.


• Machiavelli: WTF?!?!
  Conclusion: must invent Political Science.
  It’s only a slight exaggeration. The War of the League of Cambrai is so incomprehensible its Wikipedia page had to develop a new table format to index the betrayals. Everyone switches sides, and what begins with the pope calling on everyone to attack Venice ends with Venice defending the pope from everyone else.


• everyone who’s anyone is banished from Florence at some point: Dante, Petrarch, Cosimo de Medici, Benvenuto Cellini several times, the Strozzi family pretty constantly, so many more. When Florence banished important people, it often banished them to a specific place, often some distant city, to serve as trade contacts and unofficial ambassadors. A good and loyal Florentine in exile—staying where he was sent—might serve the city from a distance and thus earn his return.


• The Prince: This was far from the first time anyone said bad examples can be educational... But that’s very different from using the deeds of good and bad people coequally as models of success alone, based on what worked or didn’t, without any consideration of whether a figure’s virtue or vice may rub off on the reader. All events are equal objects for study, with virtue and vice irrelevant to their utility. <> This is modern political science.


• several more facets of Machiavelli: Machiavelli the ethicist, Machiavelli the historian, Machiavelli the atheist, and Shakespeare’s murderous Machiavel.


• Let’s pick something that feels really medieval: the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V on his foaming war horse, his army bright with knightly banners as the haughty French learn that their sparkling armor is no match for the English longbow.
  Now something that feels really Renaissance: Poggio Bracciolini, the great book-hunter celebrated as the launching point of modernity in Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer-winning The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.1 Poggio risks life and fortune crossing the Alps to search monastic libraries for lost works of ancient Roman and Greek science.. Poggio then attended Henry V’s wedding in 1420: same people, same year, same party favors.


• No matter how mythical golden ages are, they’re incredibly useful to later regimes and peoples who want to make glorifying claims about themselves. If you present yourself, your movement, your business model, your political proposal, etc., as the return of a golden age, or the successor to a golden age, that claim can make you seem important, powerful. Legitimate... Far more than Tinkerbell, regimes and governments need us to believe in them, or they die.


• There are many ways to project legitimacy: getting trusted local elites to work for you, getting religious leaders to endorse you, publishing your pedigree (fake or real) of mighty ancestors, mounting a big parade, paying an astrologer to circulate your horoscope which predicts you’ll be a great ruler, building an equestrian statue of yourself in the square, fixing bridges and feeding orphans so people talk about your generosity, cracking down on crime so people talk about your strength; even a modern city having a zoo and art museum aims to project legitimacy, an important city with the trappings of cultured power.


• implicitly by borrowing the trappings of an era...  the Washington Monument a giant obelisk, was claiming legitimacy by invoking the golden ages of ancient Egypt and triumphant Rome, with the monument’s aluminum tip (high-tech and more expensive than gold at the time) adding additional claims about wealth and science.


• * Ancient Rome is very easy to use this way because Rome had several phases (republic, empire, Christian Rome) so if some rival has done a great job declaring itself the New Roman Empire, you can simply say the empire was corrupt, and that you’re the successor to the republic, the truly great period of Rome... you can get creative, like how the nineteenth-century romantic movement claimed the archaic pastoral Rome of Vergil’s Georgics, replacing pediments and columns with garlands and shepherds to claim a version of Rome’s golden age no one had been using lately. <> The Renaissance has even greater flexibility than Rome, because its definition—in geography, time, and cause—is so deliciously vague.


• if we’re in the middle of the Cold War, and an influential historian publishes a book magnifying old discussions from Max Weber and Sombart arguing that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the rise of banking and the merchant class,... The fact that it was a golden age proves capitalism will make a golden age as well! And communism is the bad Dark Ages!


• * Historiography is studying the historians who made those judgments, and why the consensus changed over time. Historiography is viewed as the tedious part of a PhD, but issues like the golden Renaissance and bad Middle Ages are why historiography really matters, since every new wave of theories about the Renaissance X-Factor ripples out into politics and beyond.


• One thing to understand about scholarship is how invaluable work can be while being completely wrong... Sometimes we discover we were totally wrong about the first thing, but we wouldn’t have arrived at the later, better conclusion if the earlier wrong one hadn’t drawn attention to the field.


• for decades, those reading Norse texts rarely worked with those digging up Norse stuff. (Reminder, Norse = the people, Viking = a profession/activity, i.e. raiding places;...  The feud-born barrier between the studies of literature and archaeology was finally weakened in the 1960s when women entered the field in substantial numbers... were already being marginalized by their male colleagues, so had less to lose by breaking scholarly taboos... Thus it was Anne Stine Ingstad with her husband Helge who took the Saga of Erik the Red and Vinland Saga seriously as historical sources for the first time, and, following their claims that Vikings from Greenland had reached Canada, found the Norse settlement in Newfoundland


• as shown by the fact that the excavations didn’t find any fishing equipment, or even fish bones, in the Greenland Norsemen’s refuse piles (middens). The theory argued that this failure to adapt to the land proved unsustainable and failed... Environmentalism was growing in the 1970s, as were anti-colonial ideas, and both were supported by this narrative of bad, closed-minded Europeans vs. good, land-respecting indigenous peoples... The reason there were no fish bones in the refuse (McGovern was right about that) is that they’d been using every part of the animal, grinding fish bones into paste for human consumption, and feeding heads and other waste to goats and pigs and even cows...  (C) the stone sinkers used for nets and fishing poles look exactly like loom weights


• their livestock ate rancid fish for a quarter of the year, and while cow milk still tastes okay, pigs’ flesh tastes like what they’ve been eating, so it’s very likely that Greenlandic pig meat tasted so rancid that, to quote insect sting expert Justin Schmidt’s description of getting a bee sting on the tongue, “for 10 minutes, life is not worth living.”


• Doyle changes his mind about his ideal reasoner and has Holmes carry a “pocket Petrarch,” because any smart, impressive person, even one with little interest in philosophy or literature, was, of course, familiar with Petrarch.


• To this day, it’s hard for the enchantment of blood and scandal not to color our understanding of the Renaissance; .. an infamous murderer, the unforgettably named Guidarello Guidarelli (d. 1455–1501) was mysteriously stabbed to death at Cesare Borgia’s masked ball. Such opera-worthy drama is still glitter, the sinister black glitter which throws the gold glitter around it into gorgeous contrast.


• Jacob Burckhardt's 1860 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. This book aimed to be a history, not of a country, person, war, or event, but of an era and its culture,.. The book helped pioneer cultural history: studying politics, art, culture, and daily life together, and addressing issues like “the effect of these political circumstances on the spirit of the nation at large.”11 That this style of history originated in German scholarship is in part due to the influence of Herder and Hegel’s concept of volksgeist (the spirit/mind of a people),


• Burckhardt: said the Renaissance was the birth of the Modern Man, defined by a powerful confidence in human excellence and human potential. The X-Factor which made Renaissance different from medieval was the rise of individualism:


• the Oration on the Dignity of Man (written 1486) by genius polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), which contains the often-quoted passage, “Being unwilling to accept second place in the universe, let man vie with the angels in dignity and glory!” (Spoiler: we’ve since realized that Pico’s Oration isn’t an oration and isn’t about the dignity of man, it’s actually a coded manual on how to turn yourself into an angel,


• according to Burckhardt, the spirit of modernity and individualism born in Renaissance Italy were spoiled by the Italian Wars, and Italy being sliced up by empire, so the true fulfillment of the Renaissance’s modern ideas was to be hoped for in the present, as nations were being reunified, rationalism was triumphing... Another major concept from Burckhardt is: the state as a work of art.


• 19th c:  in contrast with what they saw as inferior, contaminated works which mixed influences of multiple nations ... scholars of the period focused on literature written in the native language of a place, considering it authentic in a way that an English author writing in French or a medieval Spaniard in Latin could never be.


• Rome Empire: Aramaic, Hebrew, etc., with Greek serving as a lingua Franca used by an even a larger portion of the population than those who spoke Latin.


• * If seeing the concept of purity used like this is making your skin crawl,... Each lab brews different things to make our world better: Chem Lab, new meds; Physics Lab, new particles; History and Philosophy Labs, new proofs that Nazis are wrong.


• The Renaissance as a nationalist awakening felt right to nineteenth-century readers in Germany and its neighbors, just as, a century later, the idea of Norse Greenland being wiped out by the Little Ice Age would feel right to climate scientists.


• these nineteenth-century secularizing movements rejected theological justifications for law or moral codes, but felt that society could not function without charity, altruism, justice, and empathy, so sought to put humanity itself at the center of a new ethics. This gave the thrilling Burckhardtian portrait of Renaissance individualism a sexy nineteenth-century name, and the field of Renaissance studies was officially doomed:


• the term humanism certainly vies with Renaissance in misleadingness and vagueness. <> This term was not an –ism in the Renaissance. Humanism, as a term, is from 1808, born from Enlightenment educational debates and projected back onto the Renaissance. The word umanista existed in the Renaissance, but while the -ista ending sounds ideological to us, in period Italian it was a practitioner suffix,


• “the Baron thesis” in 50s: The Renaissance X-Factor, he proposed, was not the pursuit of the supreme excellence of the individual, but rather political participation, partnered with free-spirited, deeply engaged political discourse...  Aristotle said humans actualize our potential by participating in a city-state (polis), hence Aristotle’s “man is a political animal,” whose full potential to do lots of things (art, poetry, library-building, hosting the Olympics) can only be realized in a city, with what we now call division of labor. <> For Baron, the Renaissance X-Factor was republican civic participation: an environment which fostered discussions of liberty, the first flourishing of what would later be perfected in modern democracies, the American Experiment, and constitutional monarchy... Baron’s civic humanism presented the Renaissance golden age as the first test drive of modern democracy


• Florence: The participating elite was a small minority of well-established men who owned substantial investment capital and some farms and villas (but not enough land to be too much like landed nobility), and who were sufficiently connected to local power networks to join the city’s exclusive merchant guilds, since only guild members could hold office.


• Machiavelli: to him popolo means 10 percent or fewer of the richest old family elites of Florence, while he and his peers considered it actively harmful to the state if the 90 percent majority thought about or tried to be a part of politics.


• (Sorry, Shakespeare, but Venice actually had ship insurance, which let investors avoid Merchant of Venice-type bankruptcy risks when boats went down at sea; new plot device required.)


• The Black Death gets invoked here, since the loss of 30 percent of Europe’s population in 1348 had huge economic consequences. The Renaissance can be characterized as the period of regeneration after the Black Death, and the Renaissance is generally agreed to have stopped by 1700, which is also when we think Europe’s population finally matched pre-1348 levels. ... the exciting theory that the Renaissance was a consequence of the empowerment of labor, creating the day laborer who could, for the first time, pick and choose where to sell his hours...  We now realize that the aftermath of the Black Death actually birthed a fleet of new efforts to control labor and prevent its empowerment


• * Florence was a center of this tour, because Florence had won the seventeenth-century self-advertising propaganda game, and had tons of amazing art and architecture which stayed in Florence and was not for sale! Upon the death of the last Medici duke Gian Gastone de Medici (1671–1737), his extremely smart sister Anna Maria Luisa de Medici (1667–1743) bequeathed the family’s art treasures to the city of Florence with strict conditions that the art never, ever leave Florence... as Florence realized the value of tourism, it used museum proceeds to buy extra art from neighboring cities too. <> Thus, as 1700 flowed on to 1800 and 1900, Florence stayed beautiful and full of art, and above all it stayed Renaissance. Tourism was already the heart of its economy in 1700, and tourists wanted Renaissance Florence, not anything new.


• Gerhard Wolf (1896–1971) and giving him honorary Florentine citizenship.35 Wolf was the German commander in charge of Florence during the war. After a philosophy PhD, he had become a career diplomat working for the German foreign service in Italy, and joined the Nazi party late on, when it was clear this was the only way to maintain influence. In Florence, he dedicated himself to protecting the city’s Jews and other persecuted groups


• the fact that we study Florence so much makes us take care of Florence, which in turn makes it easy to study Florence, making Florence seem more important in a self-reinforcing cycle... As with Florence, so with the Renaissance in general: it was already embraced as a pinnacle of artistic taste by the 1700s, so we preserved more of its art, display and reproduce more of its works, believe it left us more glorious art than other eras, but how much of that is real and how much is because the Renaissance pieces were kept more carefully,.. A self-fulfilling source base—when we judge history by what survives and remains on display, the taste and judgment of the intervening centuries distort our understanding.


• Tales of progress, of a correct path forward, of the Middle Ages as a stagnant setback in humanity’s true path—these teleological narratives are deeply moving, but are less about the Renaissance than about modernity and what people see as the defining features of right now.


• In these republics, the richest families—both nobles and those not-quite-nobles Machiavelli or Varchi would call ottimati or grandi—competed to gain power within the systems, secure seats on city councils and all the rest.


• * Florence, determined to preserve its republic, developed a system of government so bizarre... Step 1: Execute or exile everybody in the city with a drop of noble blood. Also the political faction that just lost. And their friends. Bar everyone connected with them from holding public office. Burn their houses down, rake salt into the earth, celebrate. (This was a process, but events culminated in 1293 when Florence formally barred magnates (i.e. landed nobility) from political participation, and ended up with its system of laboring plebs, bourgeois popolo, and big wig ottimati.) ... We’ll create a ruling council selected from the popolo and put them in the palace, but instead of being elected they’ll be drawn at random out of a bag! After all, voters can be bribed! And influenced by people playing the Siena board game bankrupting themselves on public works projects! But drawing from a bag leaves it all up to God! Also, to make sure no one person has too much power, nine guys will share office and have to agree on everything. To make sure no single person has power long enough to sink their fangs into the state, the term of office will be two months.


• Cosimo de Medici (1389–1464) manages the super special rare play: banker to the pope. Now every time a coin clinks in a box in any church in Christendom, he gets a cut.


• * Florence’s rule by lot thrived for a full 150 years before Cosimo began to seriously game the system—a lot longer than most modern electoral democracies have lasted before their first big run-ins with corrupt capture. Any set of rules can be gamed with time and cunning, and in time inventions like jerrymandering and voter suppression are as inevitable as computer viruses and software hacks. When our friend Machiavelli observed that all institutions become gradually corrupted, requiring reform, he could as easily have been writing of 1990 as of 1490... when you hear that this fantastically bizarre Florentine system functioned 150 years basically as intended, and an additional century in various stages of mostly functional corruption and reform, remember that the US hasn’t beaten that record yet, and neither have most states extant today, while Venice’s comparably complex republic lasted 1,100 years (from 697 CE until Napoleon), a record practically no polity can beat.


• Venice, which is where you flee when you have to flee in the Renaissance. Why Venice? It was where most Mediterranean voyages had their layovers, like a sail-era airport hub, full of mixing peoples, cargoes, and opportunities... it could strategically pick and choose which Church to look to at its convenience, like a kid who asks Mom when Dad says no. Since no higher power could order Venice to extradite heretics or exiles, it was the destination of choice for those with foes to fear.


• Cosimo entrenched his power in many ways, including strategic deployment of a Medici militia in the city’s seats of government, and the old tactic of granting himself and his allies temporary emergency powers to deal with the supposed crisis—powers the family would see continually renewed for generations.


• * it’s super inconvenient beyond Florence, because in this world you have to be a nobleman (by birth or elevated via a knighthood or title) to be taken seriously on the world political stage,.. Florence ... hired noblemen from other cities one at a time to come be its chief of police (podestà) and arrest people and enforce the law, partly because a foreigner was more trusted to enforce law neutrally... For this reason, for a long time, Florence didn’t even have proper ambassadors—they have to be noble too


• for the podestà the city hired each year to arrest people and enforce justice, he could be and act a nobleman during his stay, but at year’s end he was escorted to the gates, paid and thanked lavishly for his service, then banished forever from Florence on pain of death, such was the city’s fear of noblemen’s ambition.


• Cosimo spends 32 million dollars on the education of his grandsons... Land ownership and military action were the main ways to be taken seriously beyond the city... Lorenzo spent lavishly on political influence, on legitimacy, and on turning banking capital into land, a kind of wealth which didn’t yield as much annual profit (bad investment from a purely capitalist point of view) but which granted status and legitimacy, since land was what nobles/magnates*4 had, and was expected of political classes beyond Florence’s peculiar republic.


• Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), celebrated poet, scholar, and friend of Pico and Lorenzo, a beautiful man about whom romantic tales (heterosexual and homosexual) abound:


• This was long described as proof of Lorenzo’s greed (stealing from orphans he adopted!), but historians later realized it was standard practice for there to be a lawsuit for settling inheritance in the period, that’s how inheritance for Florence’s rich popolani families was normally resolved.


• * Lorenzo hired Federico da Montefeltro, a mercenary captain similar to Francesco Sforza who rose to the throne of Urbino as Sforza rose in Milan, and who was sufficiently badass that it’s said, when he lost an eye in battle, he (in an era without anesthetic) had his surgeons remove the bridge of his nose so he could see across it better with his other eye


• If we reframe Lorenzo’s condition as acromegaly conjoined with a hereditary tendency toward debilitating arthritis,*5 or more generally as chronic illness and chronic pain, he stops feeling like a dissolute libertine and starts feeling like a disability case study.


• Cecilia Mary Ady (1881–1958): the Bentivoglio of Bologna (for which book in 1938 she received one of the very first PhDs granted to women), and The English Church and How It Works (1940) which was considered important enough to see print in the middle of the Second World War despite paper rationing.


• The gender balance at that conference was close to 50/50, but we had sex-segregated by topic, by the questions we were asking... the questions weren’t about technical readings of Greek, they were about Pico’s relationships, his friends, his nearly deadly duel—the questions of romance. <> What we now call cultural history is, in many ways, the descendant of those romantic histories, and has increasingly become the dominant activity in the academic portions of the History Lab: the project of producing evidence-based portraits of what it was like to live in another time and place.


• Why so many female biographers? Partly, because women still get fewer academic jobs, and biography is one of few kinds of history writing which sells enough to live on.. Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolò Rising, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Phillipa Gregory’s The White Queen, Rozsa Gaston’s Anne and Charles, so many enchanting tales from my friend Jo Walton’s 2019 Lent (about Savonarola) back to George Eliot’s 1863 Romola (also about Savonarola).


• Rome was a teaching tool, so the empire fell when that lesson was complete, the tool no longer necessary, like last year’s textbook. Many medieval and indeed Renaissance interpreters viewed history this way, and to fully reject it we need our friend Machiavelli. <> The two people most directly responsible for inventing the Middle Ages—and who really owe medievalists an apology—are both from Tuscany: Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74), and Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444)... It was post-Black Death Petrarch who fired imaginations across Italy with the idea of an intentional remaking of the age.


• History of the Florentine People, which was the first work to divide history into three parts: ancient, middle, and modern, i.e. what we call Renaissance... the idea of this new history like the ancients wrote was so exciting that the whole city of Florence declared a special holiday when Bruni finished it,


• All these new histories, and their soon-to-follow cousin genre the heroic family epic in Aeneid-style, adjusted details to make the current ruler(s) look great and legitimate (self-fashioning individualism, you say?), generally at the expense of making the newly invented Middle Ages look bad.


• the big takeaway from my dissertation: that the impact of a book or idea often doesn’t happen at the moment it arrives, it can happen decades or even centuries later, when circumstances have changed and made readers come to the same book with new questions.

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• If instead we read the private letters which flew back and forth between Machiavelli and his correspondents in those years, we see terror, invasion, plague deaths, a desperate man scrambling to even keep track of the ever-moving threats encircling his fragile homeland... The friend who wrote the letter, Ercole Bentivoglio, typifies the alluring sinister glitter of the political web which shaped these years.


• Renaissance politics isn’t turtles all the way down, it’s murders and betrayals all the way down. <> The apocalyptic tone of Petrarch’s Italia Mia is as remote in time from Machiavelli’s Decennale primo as Robespierre is from NASA, ... Yet Petrarch’s and Bentivoglio’s tones match eerily, Petrarch’s “cruel wars for light causes,” and a wounded Italy overrun with foreign mercenaries and sliced up by invading empires, recurring patterns in this golden-yet-bleeding age.


• the Renaissance, not only endemic plague but malaria, typhoid, dysentery, deadly influenza, measles, and the classic pox were old constants of life, which not only persisted but grew fiercer decade by decade. <> Progress, strangely, was the cause... Wars too grew bloodier through progress... By the year 1500 (definitely Renaissance) the average life expectancy in Italian city-states had dropped to eighteen.


• * the Renaissance also saw the great leap when doctors realized that, rather than examining the color of a patient’s urine to diagnose them, it was much more sophisticated to take the patient’s horoscope at the time that they peed.


• Republics couldn’t offer titles as monarchs could, setting them at a disadvantage, so they often had to pay more, or offer extra incentives


• The most useful answer may be: nothing. Guelph-Ghibelline violence was usually just about sides, green team vs. purple, fighting because ancestors fought:... feud by feud, Italy becomes a literal checkerboard, where every town joins the opposite faction from its neighbors,


• Italy’s political units did not have local overlords, but lay between two distant potential leader-supporters, so needed to make strategic decisions about which political identity to embrace. This politics-by-planning felt familiar and modern to Burckhardt, in the middle of nineteenth-century Europe’s strategic alliance building (which had not yet erupted into the First World War)...  the vendettas merged into the bitterness of the next conflicts, and the next, without clear victory, so Ghibelline cities like Pisa and Siena still hate Guelph cities like Florence and vice versa


• the Italian Wars (1494–1559) : The true disaster sparked as some Italian powers, hoping to oust rivals with borrowed strength, invited France to invade Italy... on France marched, slicing an inexorable path of carnage down to Rome, where everybody betrayed everybody, and on to Naples, where everyone died of plague again. It took one opera-worthy decade of this grinding on for Machiavelli to decide that we needed better tools to understand this mess, but even then the wars kept going, that stage now called the War of the League of Cambrai dragging so many forces into Italy that soon Englishmen were fighting Scotsmen on the shore by Venice, because Italy was where you went for wars.


• Shakespeare’s England c.1600 was full of veterans returned from Italy with tales of blood and glory. Petrarch’s cruel wars for light causes were 300 years before Shakespeare’s joke, but no generation in between knew Italy in peace.


• * Plans changed with every pope, and since the pendulum of politics meant popes were usually replaced by their enemies, each pope hated his predecessor,... Between popes was the worst, that patch of months (or years) as cardinals gathered to vote, which meant Rome had no prince, so no law, courts, or police, and, by tradition, new popes were supposed to pardon criminals, so every pope’s death was an open invitation to do your murders now to get away with it! each new election marked by celebratory looting.


• The pope had a lot more power to start wars than to end them, as Shakespeare shows us later in King John,.. The Church’s wealth—which had increased steadily throughout the Middle Ages—meant the papacy could not be apolitical.


• * European history exams often have questions about the Investiture Controversy (1076–1122), Avignon Papacy (1309–76), Western Schism (1378–1417), and Henry VIII’s break with Rome (1534), but these are just the named peaks of a struggle conducted at a thousand levels in a thousand places—even in the modern world Franco during his dictatorship (1936–75) struggled with the pope to secure the right to appoint and veto Spain’s bishops and priests. The Church’s wealth and power created a pan-European prisoner’s dilemma: if either side in a conflict manipulated the Church, that side would win, so neither side could afford to leave Church offices uncorrupted. This prisoner’s dilemma was fractal,


• In fact, the only extended peace recorded in thousands of years of Italian history was under the good gay emperors: Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, 98–180 CE.


• You know Florence’s reputation too, infamous as a center of sodomy, so much so that the verb to Florentine is the word for anal sex in French (and several other languages),


• So you ask, “Who are they?” and the banker answers, “Oh, they’re Platonists, they’re practicing ancient Greek.” Your breath catches again. “But ancient Greek is lost! Plato is lost!” “Oh, no, we have lots of Plato here,” he answers, “look, here’s my nephew Francesco, he’s just written a poem about the nature of the soul in mixed Latin and Greek, would you like to hear it?”... These things do not exist! And all the haughtiness and scorn are gone, as suddenly it’s you who feels weak, small, uncultured, staggered by the presence of this power older, vaster, grander, far more real than jousts and battlements and all the trappings of French cities built on Roman ruins.


• * It’s a defense mechanism. <> If war is politics by other means, then the art, the Greek, the courtyards, all of it, it’s war by other means, war waged by tiny city-states that will never win in wars of troops on troops or ships on ships, but Italy will always win the war to have the most antiquity... The classical revival has turned antiquity into a language of power... assembling a library is an investment like the moon landing, but if, like the moon landing, it has the power to tip the scales of politics, then it’s worth every florin.


• he’ll hire a Greek émigré to teach the boy and other bright young Florentines, and give such tutors a stipend and a house, and secure the complete works of Plato still in Greek ($$$$$), so that Ficino can grow up a Platonist, and someday teach Plato to Cosimo’s grandsons who haven’t yet been born. Because that’s the scale of patience and planning it takes to raise philosopher princes and make a golden age—or try to.


• For Florence’s ottimati, as they performed the complex role of non-noble nobility while hosting visiting magnates or mercenaries whom the city hoped to hire, there was eternal reason to invest in the art displays which made one feel noble to nobles but not too noble to Florentine citizens


• * to the new pontiff:  in the 1400s Florentine umanisti started giving massively elaborate hour-plus Latin obedience orations, which generated such excitement that Florence started to be invited to give its speech in the elite chamber reserved for receiving kings and emperors, our dorky merchant republic receiving royal honors with the world’s eye upon it, all because its Latin was just that good!


• The kings and clerics who funded the great medieval libraries had put their theological collections foremost (most prominent shelves, most costly decorations) with classics sitting humbly on back shelves, present and used, but not in the spotlight. Big Renaissance collectors simply reversed that, still owning and using all the theological stuff (the Church was still big bucks) but now the theology sat in the back, the classics in the front


• * the new Latin style, which strove to feel different from other Latin, using rare vocabulary and irregular grammar as much as possible precisely because medieval Latin didn’t... Renaissance neoclassical Latin—the Latin of the umanisti—remains the hardest Latin ever penned, because the goal was not to convey information but to convey mastery; if ordinary speech is the equivalent of walking, then the opening paragraphs of a Renaissance work is an elaborate gymnastic routine


• They were right, but the dome executed by Brunelleschi was enabled by his study of Roman sites, and reading of Vitruvius, freshly recovered by book-hunting Poggio. Thus, the dome was a triumph of the classicizing project even though it had been started long before.


• This project aspired to social engineering, or at least era engineering, palaces being erected and orations written, not to glorify a single king, but to create an age of peace out of an age of strife.


• Petrarch’s deep Christian piety shows all over, and he agonized all his life about whether he was sinning by loving Cicero (a pagan) so much, fretting as Saint Jerome had fretted centuries before. (You can find Renaissance paintings of the dream Saint Jerome had in which angels beat him as punishment for reading pagans, and of him beating himself with a rock to try to purge his love for Cicero.)


• The Umanista’s Rival: Scholasticism: The proto-version of the scholastic method (the scholastic before there were scholastics, as Petrarch was a Renaissance classicizer before there was Renaissance classicism) we locate in passionate theologian-statesman Saint Anselm of Canterbury... After Anselm, scholasticism was popularized by intellectual mega-rockstar Peter Abelard (c.1079–1142), and polished to a high art by subtle Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308), tricksy William of Ockham (1287–1347), and all-time world theology boxing champion Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–74)... Later, when Thomas Aquinas was up for sainthood, his advocates argued that every single chapter in his Summa Theologica should be considered an individual miracle, and the judges agreed.


• The seven liberal arts (artes liberales) were already well established by the days of Boethius (500 CE), and divided studies into the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric, i.e. stuff that uses words—and the quadrivium—music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy/astrology, i.e. stuff that uses math. Scholasticism taught the trivium, but made logic queen, especially very technical chains of dialectical reasoning... Scholasticism based its methods on one of the most influential books in world history: Aristotle’s Organon (The Instrument),


• if you come to a false conclusion in theology, then you’re damned to eternal torment and Hellfire forever and ever and ever, and so is everyone who reads your book. Medieval theology was higher stakes than Aristotle defining systems of government, it was even higher stakes than architecture, it was super-mega-high-risk tightrope-over-a-lava-pit-with-alligators high-stakes, and it was contagious! It wasn’t just your soul at risk, but thousands around you.


• * Hence the title of Abelard’s logic textbook, Sic et non, that is, Yes and No. Abelard was also as extraordinarily belligerent as he was glamorous and charismatic, and his talent at making an argument with an intellectual rival as dramatic as a cockfight or a bear baiting was a major reason this period saw philosophical and theological debates become a new form of thrilling public tournament. People in 1100 genuinely would line up to see monks from two orders, or a Christian and a Jewish theologian, debate in front of the king


• do souls need bodies or not?.. Aquinas argues that the physical body (brain) is essential for cognition, but that God’s essence substitutes for the missing physical parts while people are in Heaven, and the super special perfected bodies made at resurrection will be even niftier, allowing the resurrected blessed to function fully without God’s help.


• Scotists (connected with the Franciscans) and Thomists (connected with the Dominicans) differed mainly on whether knowing/understanding God or loving/desiring God is the best route to Heaven, the Dominicans backing knowledge and the Franciscans love. While the Thomists were dominant enough that Dunce as in “Dunce cap” was coined from Duns Scotus


• William of Ockham (c.1287–1347), known today for Ockham’s razor, argued that the whole system was much too complicated,.. Ockham’s via moderna was actually a major step toward John Locke’s tabula rasa, it just took another 350 years to catch on


• The idea that the elegant words and lofty exemplars in Greek and Roman classics provided a potent moral education remained and still remains core to modern ideas of the humanities...  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), could almost have come from Petrarch’s pen, expecting that the monster, happening upon a book by a classical author in the raw with no teacher, guidance, or educational structure, nonetheless feels his intellect stirred to high things:


• Moral education was the promise of the studia humanitatis, improvement of the soul through the acquisition of virtue. Beautiful Ciceronian Latin not only let you display how different you were—use of rare participles proof of being umanista not scholasticus—it would also make you more persuasive, able to craft words that sting and bite, and make souls want to be good.


• Many beyond Florence wanted this alternate nobility, since Italy’s rulers had a major paucity of blood legitimacy, so much so that the Knights Hospitaller, who required members to have four quarterings of nobility (proof of 100 percent noble ancestors back four generations) required only two generations for Italians,


• they believed that, if wise ancients without the aid of revelation independently arrived at the same ethics as Christianity, this was proof of God’s hand moving in the pagans too.44 Seneca they saw as so quasi-Christian that, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was popularly believed that Seneca was friends with Saint Paul, and a set of fake letters between Paul and Seneca more popular than real Senecan texts.


• for the majority, spectatorship rather than participation was the expected relationship with the new educational system. Umanisti were a presence to be proud of like a nation’s Nobel laureates, but while many heard and cared about their public comments, only fellow experts truly understood their more technical work. The main avenue from the studia humanitatis to the masses was literally perceiving the ruler, in processions and state events when the virtuous prince, framed by images of the feats of Caesar and Alexander and allegorical statues representing Charity and Fortitude all carefully designed by umanisti and their artist friends, would present a mirror of virtue observed and absorbed by the people, who would then become more virtuous, just as they learned Bible stories from seeing the statues on the doors of the cathedral.


• It was a hairline crack, the suggestion that a few rare souls born to humble parents are capable of rising to the heights of the elite, a small but vital crack in the millennia-old belief that the hierarchy of nature—in which trees were greater than shrubs and lions greater than cats—applied as immovably to elites being greater than their subjects.


• Petrarch writes of feeling his reason failing in the face of such unending grief. What did our generation do, he asks, that was so much worse than every other generation that we deserve this? Where are our friends, their dear faces, sweet words, and delightful conversation? We used to be a crowd, now we are almost none. He writes of his shame, that all the consolations and strong armor of philosophy have shattered into nothing.


• The only hope the studia humanitatis can offer here is that phil-anthrôpía, love of humanity, will make people love and pity one another more, reducing—between famines, plagues, and deaths—the only Horseman of the Apocalypse humankind could aspire to control: war.


• In the 1490s, for example, Ferdinand of Aragon had a claim to Castile, Isabella of Castile had a claim to Portugal, João of Portugal had a claim to England, Henry of England had a claim to France, Charles of France had a claim to Naples, and Ferrante of Naples was close enough kin to Ferdinand of Aragon that you could basically rotate everyone clockwise one throne and have a stronger claim. <> War-ravaged Iberia and tumultuous Hungary were early adopters of the classical revival,


• * When his local Bohemian queen died, Matthias married Beatrice of Naples (1457–1508), daughter of King Ferrante of Naples and granddaughter of Alfonso the Magnanimous, an Italian princess educated in Greek and Latin, who filled his new palace with culture and won the hearts of Hungary so deeply that, when King Matthias died without an heir, the lords agreed to crown whomever Beatrice chose as her second husband, leaving the crown with her and birthing her unique title: Beatrice Twice Queen of Hungary.


• Europe had paper as early as 800 CE but was slow to trust it as a serious writing surface, using it mostly for unimportant letters, sketches, cheaper books, and disposable things, while a serious library was still expected to be composed mainly of costly dead sheep.


• All civilizations have architectures of power: East Asian tiered pagodas, central Asian onion domes, Viking knotted carvings, Mesoamerican platformed pyramids, the stunning floral and calligraphic decoration on Sultan Bayezid’s own mosque; but Greco-Roman antiquity became the language of power most consistently exported by the European empires which dominated the globe in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This made European classical style the most broadly legible architectural language of power in the world,


• The framework of superiority which 1600s–1900s Europe used to justify its global conquests was a new development, an apparatus to understand and excuse its bloody deeds... one tool was the classical revival, which defined European classical education as the main source of nobility and legitimacy, thus justifying the toppling of regimes and rulers which lacked it, and the erasure of indigenous cultures. Eddie Izzard has a famous comic bit about colonialism, where Britain claims India, saying: Do you have a flag? No flag, no country. Classics as power spawned a similar attitude: no columns, no culture.


• Nineteenth-century analyses of the Poetic Edda, working with a manuscript known to contain both authentic medieval poems and seventeenth-century imitations, merrily judged that, since they knew their own ancestors must be morally superior to the Romans, Odin must be morally superior to Zeus, so the poems where Thor and Odin do terrible things must be the fakes.


• Every dedication letter from the period extolls the classical virtues of [insert prince here], but when the dedicatee is Francesco Sforza, the new viper who swallowed up the old vipers of Milan, this feels less like cultivation of the soul and more like an attempt to cover up the blood stains with a classical throw rug... when they finally got Homer back—after centuries of merely seeing references to how he was the greatest of all poets—they were troubled by the antiwar messages of the Iliad.


• In sum, hiring a single Latin scholar was not a large investment for a wealthy patron, costing as much as a fancy garment or a new inlaid bedstead, or at most as much as a Roman statue or dainty summer home. .. we can compare the investment in umanisti to the US State Department’s investment in the Fulbright program


• We do know that on his last day, when Cosimo lay dying, he called thirty-year-old Marsilio Ficino to him to translate Plato at his bedside, so he could hear as much as possible of the wisdom of antiquity before he died. The text was the Timaeus, about the origins of the universe and its divine Maker, and the Phaedo, where Socrates outlines the reasons he does not fear death. That feels sincere. .. Ficino’s Cosimo, their intimacy, years watching lost Plato emerge from Greek like fossils under the excavator’s brush—it feels sincere.


• Ficino letter: For it is ordered by nature that things themselves should be more potent than their names, and that real events should move the soul with greater force than what is either false or may have happened. Therefore, by imitating the deeds of Socrates we are taught better how to attain courage than by the art displayed by Aristotle in his writings on morality.

"Inventing the Renaissance", II

The third section of the book is the biography of fifteen men and women around that time.

------iii

• We’ve encountered several intersecting threads: scholarship, cash, politics, feuds, war, plague, dynastic crisis, high blood and low; but to get a better feel of this era I want to introduce fifteen new friends, drawn from a wide array of walks of life.


• * a powerful patron family, like the Montagues or the Medici, was the backbone of the social safety net. Patrons.. Patrons were also one’s legal guarantors for contracts or debts, even for one’s tabs at shops and restaurants... The client family, in return, not only worked for the patron—building furniture, tilling the farm, doing the paperwork, frescoing the palace—but did things the high-status patron couldn’t, such as haggling over market goods, hosting low-status guests, teaching their trades to fellow clients, or taking on missions of trust in lower social spaces.


• Florence’s tax system, for example, was more a wealth tax than an income tax, and for many years was based on officials interviewing your neighbors each year to ask them how rich they thought you were.. loyal clients could claim your resources were low this year,


• * Patronage networks had many layers, not just top and bottom. Master craftsmen like Brunelleschi or Michelangelo were clients of the great families or mighty guilds who commissioned work from them, but were also patrons to their own apprentices, workmen, and servants. When Michelangelo began painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the scaffolding that had been prepared for him was so inefficient that, when he redesigned it, it produced enough surplus rope that selling it provided dowry money for several of his workers,


• * Patronage was also integral to the legal system. We’ve all heard of the extreme severity of medieval and Renaissance laws... it isn’t until the eighteenth century that Europe developed the idea that justice systems should aim for equal enforcement, Renaissance courts focused instead on mercy, expecting the judge to almost always give a lighter punishment than what was on the books—a fine, for example, instead of death—so that the extreme sentences proclaimed by law were actually the exception, not the rule. This was tied to Christian ideas about sin and salvation


• It was the patron who secured the lesser sentence, the powerful family who vouched for you, who stood character witness,


• being a client was not fully freedom either, one of many fine grades of unfreedom reinforced by the coercive social structures of the age.


• In 1600, the Roman market square of Campo dei Fiori was the site of another burning at the stake, one of the most infamous in history, that of scientist-scholar Giordano Bruno... but Bruno’s case was not typical; in fact it was the only science-related execution the Inquisition ever carried out—tens of thousands for Lutheranism and witchcraft, one for science. Bruno’s execution happened because he had angered his patron, promising to teach memory skills that the patron found he couldn’t teach, so the patron denounced Bruno as a swindler


• Grace is our keyword here. The Latin gratias, often rendered as grace, also meant political influence, so, in fact, a perfectly valid translation of the Archangel Gabriel’s words at the Annunciation, Ave Maria gratia plena, is “Hail Mary full of political influence.”


• Catholic salvation wasn’t about being not guilty; it was about everyone being constantly guilty of sins but begging to be forgiven anyway. <> Patronage also went all the way up, beyond the king or city council, to the afterlife and patron saints... Divine patronage was deadly serious in this period, and heresy and sinful conduct were feared largely because of the anxiety that offending the saints would forfeit protection for the whole area.


• * a big goal of executions, as of all punishments at the time, was to give the guilty person’s soul the best shot at getting into Heaven. Christians in this period believed (from Plato, though few knew it was Plato) that the soul was like an eye and looked in a direction, and whether you were damned or saved depended on what direction your soul looked at the moment of death.


• * We see this in early Shakespeare plays where he kills off lots of characters (he had to give up large casts after plague outbreaks in the 1590s killed most of London’s actors): Shakespeare knows his audience is wondering where souls are going, so always indicates it in their last words, so virtuous types like Salisbury can get hit in the face with a cannon and still piously blurt out, “O Lord, have mercy on us, wretched sinners!” while complex characters like York mix up and down in their last words, “My soul to heaven, my blood upon your heads!” and villainous Richard III dies shouting of his kingdom and his horse.


• when the Reformation begins, this entangled understanding of Earthly hierarchy with Heavenly hierarchy will be much of how religious reform triggers social upheaval. When Luther and his peers say priests and saints are not needed as intermediaries, that even a peasant can pray directly to God Himself without needing the grace of a favored saint or living priest to endorse the suit, this translates quickly into mass rebellion against the aristocratic masters whose function as tools of political influence between peasant and king was the same as that of priests and saints between peasant and God. Eroding the belief that all things naturally work through chains of intermediary grace is one way that the Reformation will contribute, along with many other shifts, to the egalitarian movements of the Enlightenment, which required the breakdown of Europe’s belief—as old as Aristotle—that hierarchy was an inextricable part of Nature:


• *  In the implausibly interesting autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71), the Florentine goldsmith-sculptor-assassin-jailbreaker-necromancer (actually!), Cellini boasts in several passages about how he waits to get a big commission from a king or the pope and then brutally murders a rival, knowing his patron will pull strings to let him get away with it, rather than lose a precious artist and the unfinished art.


• Up in England we’ve met Henry VI (1421–71) who was an infant when his father Henry V (1386–1422) died, creating a power vacuum in which the young king’s uncles Cardinal Beaufort (c.1375–1447) and Humphrey of Gloucester (1390–1447) raced to hire Italian secretaries like Bruni and Poggio. A long lifetime and many wars later we’ve also met Charles VIII of France (1470–98) who invaded Italy in 1494


• And we’ve briefly met Queen Beatrice’s niece and nephew from Ferrara, Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) with her big shopping spree who threatened to give her slow artist a tour of the dungeons, and her brother Cardinal Ippolito d’Este (1479–1520) who had his half-brother’s eyes gouged out over a love quarrel, and didn’t thank Ariosto for his epic Orlando Furioso.


• Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (c.1408–71) was a Florentine matron, who ran Florence’s end of the vast Strozzi banking empire while her sons were in exile


• Richard Goldthwaite’s numbers show that, in 1427, the top 1 percent of Florence’s families (famous for extreme wealth!) owned 27 percent of the wealth; in comparison in the US in 1995 the top 1 percent owned 38 percent of the wealth.


• Florence:  the super-rich instead gave forced loans to the state—loans which were gradually paid back, and generated state debt that could be traded as if today’s wealthiest were required to buy a certain quota of government bonds as their form of paying taxes. Since this generated a commodity (debt) which elites could buy, sell, and speculate with, they were more willing to pay than if the taxes were direct.


• Machiavelli himself observed in the Discourses when comparing ancient Roman religion with Christianity: that the different ways a culture incentivizes elite spending has a huge impact on whether or not the wealth that accumulates in elite hands still benefits society more broadly.


• most umanisti had friends who had spent time as galley captives before ransom, or had done so themselves, and encountered corresponding enslaved Muslim people in Rome and elsewhere.


• Alessandra’s letters show her forcefulness in business, her touching spirituality as she lost friends to plague, her careful navigation of the web of patronage, and her cold practicality as she discussed chilling questions, such as whether to take out life insurance on her daughters when they became pregnant... such methods could not touch a woman’s dowry, and Alessandra invested her untouchable 1,600 so successfully that it helped carry and stabilize the family fortunes.


• Fun fact: in the 1300s into the 1400s, Florence bought 100 percent of England’s wool exports.29 Processing wool to make fine, not-itchy cloth required, in the period, a lot of oil, and England’s only oil crop was walnuts, not an efficient choice. Olive oil was ideal, but England’s frequent wars with Spain made getting industrial levels of olive oil up to England so costly that it proved more profitable to sell all of England’s wool to oil-rich Florence, to turn into high-profit high-quality fabric.. the mineral alum, to make your dyes colorfast, which could only be acquired from three known mines, one in the Byzantine (later Ottoman) Empire, one (after the 1460s) belonging to the pope, and the third (after 1472) in Florentine-controlled Volterra.


• once the bride reached her new home, the pearls and other reusable materials would be resold to buy equipment for the newlyweds’ silk business... For the pearls, think stock market shares or savings bonds, high-value investments infinitely resalable. Indeed, the choice of pearls as a form of display was itself strategic: costly embroideries and cut gemstones were both unique and recognizable


• Manetto di Jacopo Amanatini (c.1388–c.1450/2), known as Grasso, or “the fat woodcarver” was a Florentine woodworker, best known for being the butt of a strange prank


• The prank which made Amanatini famous was masterminded by Brunelleschi (who was not yet working on the dome), along with Brunelleschi’s equally famous lover Donatello and several of their friends... Together, Brunelleschi and his friends conspired to convince Amanatini that he had gone mad and was actually someone else. Through their influence, one morning suddenly everyone in the entire city started addressing Amanatini as Matteo Mannini


• Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) was the longest-lived professional umanista of the early days of the classicizing movement... Filelfo frequently boasted about the fact that he had three testicles—for which he invented a Greek word τριόρχης (tresticular)


• Italy’s premier mercenary at the time was Cosimo’s friend Francesco I’m-Better-At-Using-Artillery-Than-Anyone Sforza. Sforza fought for both sides alternately, since a hired sword is content to switch when the other side bids higher, or (as often happened to him) when his current employer didn’t pay as much as was promised... he often took the same town four or five times for different sides,


• His annoyed father-in-law then made a will which he never intended to actually go into effect leaving the Duchy of Milan to… (any guesses?)… King Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon the humanist-loving conqueror of Naples. Why? As a stick to go with the carrot, that Sforza had better be loyal if he wanted his father-in-law to rescind that will and leave him the duchy... then dropped dead unexpectedly the very next day.


• Nineteenth-Century Historians: Thus the Visconti dynasty died out completely due to lack of heirs, and was replaced by the cunning conqueror Francesco Sforza.
  Bianca Maria Visconti: Excuse me, I’m right here!
  Nineteenth-Century Historians: Yes, but you’re a woman, and a bastard, so you don’t exist.
  Bianca Maria Visconti: I’m his battle partner! I led armies! I’m doing tons of diplomacy!


• Filelfo gets erased just like Bianca Maria, by another equally distorting bias of historians. Which bias? Well, Filelfo turned his back on Venice, Florence, and Siena (republics), seeking higher pay which he found at Milan’s ducal court


• Giovanni Battista da Montesecco (c.1450–78) was a mercenary used by Pope Sixtus IV in the infamous Pazzi Conspiracy.


• Demonic possession is as plausible an explanation as any, since, upon becoming Pope Sixtus IV, della Rovere immediately abandoned his humble Franciscan ways, and became determined to reunite the Roman Empire by war (surprise, it’s Battle Pope!).


• Thus on April 25, 1478, under Brunelleschi’s dome, the assassins struck, killing the younger brother Giuliano de Medici, but the wounded Lorenzo escaped, ... Patronage webs overlap, so a moment of major strife puts many lives and livelihoods at risk as two webs rip apart, making palpable how even warm and intimate relationships, like a student and the tutor who raised him, retain the inescapable coercive power of master and dependant, and the ever-present threat of a fall from grace.


• Saint Julian, patron saint of repentant murderers, a very popular saint at the time


• Ippolita Maria Visconti Sforza (1445–88) was the eldest daughter of Milan’s conquering Power Couple: Francesco Sforza, and of his bride Bianca Maria Visconti.


• The power vacuum of a child duke triggered a power struggle between Ippolita Maria’s ambitious younger brothers and the boy’s mother Bona of Savoy (1449–1503), sister-in-law of the French King Louis XI (the same Bona who almost married Edward IV of England, but was spurned in favor of Elizabeth Woodville; thus, improbably, both Bona’s possible marriages would have led to her brother-in-law locking her princely son in a tower).


• The campaign in Otranto was in some ways successful, the small Ottoman fleet countered by a hastily mustered papal navy commanded by the implausible Archbishop of Genoa, twice ex-doge, ex-pirate Paolo Campofregoso (1430–98), a churchman with serious sea battle experience from his years leading a pirate fleet raiding his homeland’s shipping out of spite at being deposed as doge... The tattered Peace of Lodi endured, with Princess Ippolita Maria—the living link between Milan and Naples—as one of its lynchpins.


• (Pope) Innocent was seen so much as della Rovere tool that his election triggered my nominee for The Most Passive Aggressive Letter in Earth History, when Lorenzo de Medici... instructing Piero to tell the pope on his behalf, “I am aware it was my duty to prostrate myself in person at the feet of His Holiness, as I did at those of his Predecessor of saintly memory; but that I trust in his goodness to forgive me because at that time I had my brother who was well able to fill my duties,” [i.e. running Florence while Lorenzo went to Rome] the Predecessor of saintly memory being Sixtus, and the brother his victim, the murdered Giuliano.


• * It could be easy to feel that our brilliant, peacemaking princess’s life and efforts came to naught, since she herself suffered so much, and both the families she was supposed to link were overthrown not long after her death. But we get another sense when we zoom in. Years of peace—even one year of peace—is a precious thing within a lifetime. Ippolita Maria spent twenty-three years in Naples, a substantial diplomatic career, and during that time she was vital to the negotiations which shaped the Pazzi War, to the alliance that defended against the Ottoman invasion, and to keeping the friendship of Florence and Milan which saved her royal father-in-law from being overthrown by the Conspiracy of the Barons in 1486, extending her family’s reign by eight precious years. Through this and her Pazzi Conspiracy interventions, she helped extend the treaties of the Peace of Lodi by a full decade... The world does not stay saved, but to save it three times is no small achievement, and Ippolita Maria’s ten-year prolongation of semi-peace was no less precious to her generation than the peace between the First and Second World Wars.


• Josquin des Prez (c.1450/55–1521) was the most renowned composer of the decades around 1500... Music is an exception, one rare field in which a boy of genuine peasant roots blessed with the right combo of voice and ear could catch the notice of a choir director and be recruited, trained


• * extreme exceptions whose rare abilities—music, prophecy; one could also rise through genius skills at language, art, or memory, religious visions, or much-sought-after dwarfism—met the fancies of the super-rich, triggering rare moments when Fortune’s Wheel truly turned all the way, bottom to top.


• Ferrara was uniquely stable for an Italian city-state, ruled by just about the only genuinely blue-blooded old noble family in Italy (relatives of the House of Welf and the Hanoverians), and positioned as a kind of buffer zone between Venice’s land empire and the Papal States... Between its noble blood, strong allies, and serious investments in the best artillery works in Europe, members of the House d’Este were not just the most eligible bachelors and bachelorettes in Italy, but able to spend lavishly on luxuries like art and music.


• (Rodrigo Borgia) Pope Alexander IV unrolled his own war plans, aiming to turn the section of central Italy that Sixtus had destabilized into a permanent Borgia kingdom—not an extension of the Papal States that would continue to be passed from hand to hand by the ever-changing wheel of popes, but a permanent kingdom, split off from the Papal States and given to Alexander’s descendants to rule as kings.


• Duke Ludovico: his most trusted friend and long-time lover Galeazzo Sanseverino (c.1460–1525), whom period sources paint as the sexiest thing in pants in Italy. Sanseverino was so charming that even Duchess Beatrice had adored her husband’s male lover (while hating his female mistresses),


• King Charles of France died suddenly after banging his head on a doorframe (history, unlike fiction, doesn’t have to be plausible)


• Objects like the Portinari Altarpiece, brought from Bruges to Florence and influencing Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan, show how, the more we zoom in on real lives, the more the lines between our separate Renaissances vanish.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portinari_Altarpiece


• * Why then do we tend to talk about these Renaissances separately?... minimizing co-authorship or migration. There’s also a practicality factor: you need languages to study history, and most people who train to study Florence don’t have Hungarian, Breton, Catalan, Arabic, etc. We have a lot more scholars capable of studying the Renaissance of one place than we do scholars who can follow Manetto Amanatini the woodcarver from Italy to Hungary.


• We had these great studies showing that pre-modern Europeans moved very little, that travel was dangerous, and that most people married someone born less than a mile from their birthplace. But those early studies were mainly of the British Isles, and later, when we looked at other places, we realized people in the British Isles were super way more stationary than most Europeans.


• Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) is celebrated now, as in his lifetime, as one of the most elegant voices of the Renaissance, a master of Greek, Latin, Italian, poetry, and prose, who gained renown for translating Homer into beautiful Latin verse that finally captured both the sense and poetry... he was the first to realize Virgil was originally spelled Vergil, and why it changed. This made Poliziano exceptionally important as a scholar, not just as an author and courtier, one of the great progenitors of the modern discipline of classics.


• It’s worth setting Poliziano himself aside for a couple paragraphs to make clear how difficult it was getting Greek back to the level that allowed him to produce his gorgeous Latin Homer.


• Lorenzo’s Roman wife... wanted the boy to read the Psalms in Latin (in bad medieval Latin in Poliziano’s opinion) rather than reading Ovid as Poliziano planned. This is historically important because Leo will be pope when Luther releases the Ninety-Five Theses, so many Reformation histories will cast him as the villain. The most recent English-language biography of Pope Leo X, written in 1908, states as fact that if Clarice had won the argument and three-year-old Leo had read the Psalms instead of Ovid, the Reformation wouldn’t have happened.


• light of the whole world: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Count of Concordia (1463–94), author of the famous (not) Oration (not) on the Dignity of Man.69 For a long time, Pico was the first example in Wikipedia’s page on genius... there is a playful passion in the letters where Poliziano calls Pico “Prince of Muses,” saying “no mortal is more beautiful or preeminent in all kinds of learning!” while Pico says of Poliziano, “Who wouldn’t want to die on the receiving end of your sword?” meaning, in context, the sword of Poliziano’s brilliant literary criticism.


• Ficino believed that integrating Platonism into Christianity would complete God’s message, rehabilitate and renew the Church, reveal the true path to a golden age, and perhaps bring world peace by creating a religion in which God’s Truth would be so clear that everyone would instantly convert. This was a form of syncretism, an attempt to amalgamate different religions and philosophies into one. Pico loved Ficino, and became an even more expansive syncretist,


• Jacopo Antiquari (writing for the anxious Visconti Sforza in Milan) said God must be incensed against Italy, since Lorenzo’s death would—like snow melting on a mountaintop—pour down destruction on the land.


• Poliziano’s murder: There are four Renaissances in this paragraph. Villari’s nationalist revolutionary Renaissance with degenerate Lorenzo and his syphilitic cronies; the romantic Renaissance of poets crooning under balconies; Burckhardt’s Renaissance with true philosopher Lorenzo so beloved that kindred spirits follow him in death; and last the forensic Renaissance of plunging life expectancies and murder without consequences


• * Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98)... burned at the stake aged forty-five, not for heresy—the world is more complex than that—but for his political activities during the four years he helmed Florence as a theocratic republic, from the French invasion of 1494 to 1498.


• Preaching for Lent was a big deal, an oratory marathon composing and delivering a new multi-hour sermon every day for six weeks. Towns competed to hire star performers, crowd-drawing celebrities like Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444), whose arrivals were anticipated like a major touring rock band.. In 1490, Lorenzo de Medici invited Savonarola to give Florence’s Lenten sermons


• Many things Savonarola criticized are things the Medici did, making it easy to read his sermons as anti-Medici, but they can equally be read as anti-elite in general


• Dominican headquarters church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva sports one of my favorite frescoes: Filippino Lippi’s Saint Thomas Aquinas Interrupts the Annunciation to Introduce the Virgin Mary to Cardinal Carafa who paid for the painting, while patient Archangel Gabriel just has to wait.  https://www.wga.hu/html_m/l/lippi/flippino/carafa/index.html


• The Florentine ambassadors went out to see King Charles, taking Savonarola with them. The firebrand preacher persuaded the king to spare the city, and Florence was saved. A miracle? Many hailed it as one. Other Florentines helped too: diplomats like former ambassador to France Piero Capponi (1447–96), and artists who raced to paint gold-and-blue French fleur-de-lis all over the Palazzo Vecchio reception room


• * So enthusiastic was the city about this expansion of participation that the Hall of the Five Hundred that was added to the Palazzo Vecchio to hold this huge council is the only public works project in the city’s history that was finished early and under-budget.79 At the time, Florentine day laborers earned enough to live on working three days in a week, so usually took off the other four to look at art or listen to people recite Dante (really!),


• the Bonfire of the Vanities: The scholar I know who’s worked most on Savonarola thinks that it was more like Burning Man... If we add the fact that many of those youths had been child prostitutes, whom Savonarola gave another means of life, how different does their devotion to him feel? We do know that it wasn’t a mass book burning, or a mass art burning, or an effort to plunge Europe back into the (mythical) Dark Ages. The bonfire aimed at virtue and renewal,


• * Warrior-matron Caterina Sforza: she knew that, if the next pope wasn’t a kinsman, he would appoint one of his own relatives to replace her husband as commander of the papal armies. So Caterina, seven months pregnant at the time, took over the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo (she just walked in and the men obeyed!) and aimed its cannons at the Sistine Chapel, threatening to blow up the cardinals inside unless they promised to secure her husband’s position... the famous moment when enemy troops threatened her children and she bared her genitals up on her fortress walls, declaring: Go ahead and kill them, I have the mold to make more!


• San Pier Maggiore’s signature ritual, that every new bishop of Florence had to ceremonially marry its abbess, and that negotiating this ceremony involved the abbess setting conditions, establishing the line between her (local) authority and the (usually foreign, papal-appointed) bishop’s, and even a wedding feast held by the abbess-bride’s relatives which helped establish the relations between Florence’s old families and the churchman suddenly entrusted with 1/5 of the power in the city.


• Alessandra Scala is what we’ve been looking for, the Renaissance Woman of our dreams, of every era’s dreams from Poliziano’s to today’s. She’s brilliant, articulate, powerful, embodying ideals of scholarship and self-fashioning, and she’s nearly a blank slate... In 1491 she can be Sappho; in 1925 she can be Juliet; in 1985 she can be a proto-feminist proving the brilliance of womankind... The nunnery has to be glossed over because (like Savonarola) our modernizing Renaissance can’t take Alessandra Scala’s years of Greek and Latin being overshadowed by years of so medieval-feeling a setting as a nunnery. The possibility of Alessandra Scala enjoying the convent grates against our X-Factors: self-fashioning, nationalism, secularization... Alessandra Scala is the ideal Renaissance Woman for another, sadder reason too: her death at thirty-one doesn’t make us face how much she couldn’t do.


• Raffaello Maffei (1451–1522), called Volterrano, was a prolific scholar, translator, biographer, and author of a staggeringly ambitious and popular Latin encyclopedia of everything,99 who worked at the Vatican through the wild papacies of Paul II (reclusive Venetian), Sixtus IV (Battle Pope!), Innocent VIII (King Log), Alexander VI (the very, very, very…), and Julius II (Battle Pope 2: the Wars Get Weirder!).


• Pius II (awesome umanista, scholar, and pornographer who left an epic tell-all papal memoir)


• Pope Alexander’s children were different from selfish and irresponsible Cybo. Juan/Giovanni (made a duke and a commander of the papal armies), Cèsar/Cesare (made a cardinal), and Lucrezia (married to powerful husbands) were all ambitious, active political minds in themselves, partners of Alexander’s plans as Sixtus’s nephews had been to his.


• Post Juan Borgia's death: Cesare renounced his cardinalship (the first ever to do so), married a French princess, received the title Duke of Valentinois


• Post Pope Alexander's death: The Roman mob traditionally celebrated the turnover of popes with rioting and looting, especially emptying the former residence of the newly elected pope who would no longer need his earthly goods, but this time was different. The whole Vatican Palace was ransacked, the papal treasures carried off by Borgia forces, palace staff, and general riot. So thorough was the sack that Pope Alexander’s corpse was later found wrapped in a carpet, without a stick of furniture remaining


• Julius II feels one way if we study Rome first, seeing all his splendid art (the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Raphael’s School of Athens), but feels very different if we read Raffaello’s later account.104 Julius spent lavishly on construction, antiquities, and hired many umanisti, but when Michelangelo asked what book His Holiness wanted to be holding in his portrait statue, Julius answered, “Give me a sword, I’m no scholar.”


• The Medici had remained in exile since Savonarola’s rise, leaving Florence a republic, but now they aided Pope Julius (old enemies united by the chance of wartime gain) in return for papal troops, which in 1512 seized Florence, restoring Medici rule over the city and her dominions, including Volterra.


• * Erasmus’s influence is an order of magnitude above other Renaissance figures: a staggeringly prolific author, editor, and stylist, loved for his wit, his piety, his humaneness, his handbooks of eloquence, his encyclopedic knowledge of the classics, whose publications in the later 1500s comprised as much as 30 percent of all books being printed! Even when Erasmus’s efforts to reconcile Luther with the papacy made both sides feel obliged to formally condemn him, both sides still loved this frenemy, and the Inquisition still let Catholics teach and read his works, all you had to do was ritually cross out his name on the title page... suddenly one of the prefaces was clear, smooth, easy to read, neither simple nor ornate, just lovely, elegant, and inviting, like stepping out into a breezy courtyard after a stuffy room. I cried aloud, “This is gorgeous! Who… oh, it’s Erasmus.”


• * A huge portion of the innovative work of umanisti happened in formats we today find difficult or alien: in funeral orations, exchanges of letters, Socratic dialogs, aphorism collections, classroom works composed for princes and princesses, encyclopedias, and especially in commentaries on classics, which claim on the front page that they’re just elaborating Vergil yet hide radical new ideas within... Machiavelli’s utilitarian ethics disseminated via footnotes in Spanish editions of Seneca, debates over Aristotle vs. Galileo raged in the marginal notes of Lucretius editions, and (I’m not kidding) the roots of deism and atheism spread in those tedious editors’ prefaces to Epictetus that I was slogging through.107 This age cared more about ancients than moderns, so a scholar got more attention pointing out something in Vergil than saying something new—this is why Machiavelli’s book of republican government is Discourses on Livy,


• Renaissance authors bent over backwards to pretend their innovations weren’t new, ... repopulate a Renaissance we didn’t realize had been thinned down to atypical works—thinned both by how X-Factor hunting shaped inclusions and exclusions, and by the fact that umanisti actively lie about what their books are about!


• You are Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519). You had the best of educations: the studia humanitatis, Latin, Greek, music; you’re fluent in Italian, Spanish, Catalan/Valencian, and French. You can compose poetry in multiple languages, and by age twelve you knew the histories, leaders, and dynastic tangles of all European and Mediterranean powers inside out.


• strong and experienced Ludovico had seized Milan from his nephew Gian Galeazzo, angering Gian Galeazzo’s Neapolitan wife, so Naples was threatening to attack Milan. The threat of the pope endorsing a French claim to Naples was the perfect stick to get obstreperous King Ferrante to leave Ludovico and Milan in peace, and to make him stop resisting Borgia power... But King Charles actually came.


• Certainly Cèsar had a taste for politics and conquest which, as Machiavelli would soon observe, made him an outstanding warlord, even in this age of warlords.


• Ferrara’s heir, Prince Alfonso d’Este was Italy’s most eligible bachelor, having just lost his first wife in childbirth (the fascinating Anna Visconti Sforza (1476–97), who had dressed in men’s clothes and openly preferred female lovers).


• Rome is the Eternal Problem City, and Sixtus and Innocent had proved no power stood secure in central Italy while the volatile papacy constantly changed hands. Regulatory capture was likely the real goal, not to overthrow the papacy but to permanently control it. Cèsar and his heirs, ruling the lands surrounding Rome, would control the selection of cardinals and popes, as France had done back in Petrarch’s day by dragging the papacy to Avignon. History has other examples of regulatory capture: the closest comparison (though you have never heard of it) being the Tokugawa Shogunate’s control over the Emperors of Japan,


• when wonderful Ariosto started sharing the first chapters of Orlando Furioso (you love that poem so much! How could ungrateful Ippolito not be overjoyed to be its dedicatee?!). Isabella and her sister Beatrice had quarreled so fiercely about which of their favorite characters was best (Isabella championing Rinaldo and Beatrice the titular Orlando) that Isabella tried to bully poor Pietro Bembo—such a dear man and brilliant scholar—into fighting a duel against Beatrice’s champion (her husband Ludovico’s lover Galeazzo Sanseverino) for the honor of her favorite character in a book!


• Here’s the Isabella d’Este moment—the very day Isabella heard that Cèsar had looted the ducal palace of Urbino, she had her brother Cardinal Ippolito write to Cèsar to say she always liked a particular pair of antique statues in that palace, a Venus and a Cupid, asking if he would send them to her.120 Cèsar did so (the Borgia-d’Este alliance was important), but for Isabella to profit so callously from the sacking of her husband’s sister’s home!


• When Isabella d’Este learned of Cèsar’s clever maneuvers, she sent him a gift of a hundred masks in many colors representing his many deceptions121—not quite as biting a gift as King Louis’s Mary Magdalene shield, but hardly sisterly.


• the Venetian scholar Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) became… more than a friend... Bembo had the innovative idea that the different marks we use to break up written words should have specific meanings, that . should be used exclusively for the end of a sentence while; should combine two complete clauses and, should mark a minor pause. So great was the influence of these Aldine editions that this practice spread across Europe, making Bembo the father of modern punctuation.


• Julius II imposed damnatio memoriae upon your family, commanding that your crest be effaced everywhere in the city, the Borgia name crossed out of documents, paintings you commissioned blacked out, your father’s tomb opened and desecrated, and his reign never spoken of on pain of excommunication.


• * For a strange period in 1510–11, the war which had begun with Julius calling France, Ferrara, and other powers to attack Venice turned into Venice, now reconciled with Rome, defending the pope from France and Ferrara. Frightened Julius called for what became the Holy League, assembled to drive the French from Italy, asking for help from Spain, the Empire, England (always eager to fight France), Venice (eager to retake its lands), and Swiss mercenaries. France called in its allies Scotland and Florence (the republic was still grateful for Charles’s mercy in 1494, and angry at Julius’s part in the Pazzi Conspiracy), and Ferrara joined them, since the pope had betrayed you. This mess is how we got Englishmen fighting Scotsmen in the hills of Italy, a war in which every single participant changed sides, some several times.


• You used your dowry and personal treasures cunningly (as the brilliant historian Diane Yvonne Ghirardo will show), working out an innovative way to amass agricultural wealth without selling your jewels or even buying land outright.125 Ferrara was surrounded by swamps, and whenever you heard of a village or local lord disrupted by the wars and struggling to pay taxes, you would offer to pay the tax debt in return for a permanent lease on the useless swamp land next door. You would then drain the swamp to create new farmland, paying for the ambitious engineering by pawning jewels from your dowry, which you could then buy back with the profits of the farms.


• And with his wealth—partly the fruits of your investments—your son Ippolito will erect a palace far grander than any Rome could fit, with sprawling gardens and 3,000 fountains, built in Tivoli near the ruins of the Emperor Hadrian’s villa


• These female mystics had a complex relationship with Savonarola and his piagnoni.129 Female mystics were extremely influential at the time, drawing enormous crowds and wealth to cities, often called “living saints” (sante vive).


• In monastic life, the first order means monks (or friars), and the second order nuns, both living in closed monastic institutions separate from the secular world. Mendicant friars of the first order might leave their monastery daily to work or preach out in the city, but still lived in a monk-only space. The third order (i.e. tertiaries) means lay brothers and sisters, who take less strict vows and lead more public lives, dwelling either in group communities open to secular visitors, or in secular homes


• monk means a member of a more traditional monastic order like the Benedictines, whose members’ vows include a vow of stability tying them for life to a specific monastery in a specific place, while the Dominicans (as well as the Franciscans, Augustinians, and Carmelites) are mendicant i.e. itinerant orders, whose friars take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience (to the hierarchy of their order) but circulate from monastery to monastery within the order


• The nuns of Santa Caterina lived by illuminating manuscripts, painting (nearly a third of known female painters of the 1500s were Dominican nuns), and by printing books with their own printing press.


• 1528 the new Great Council held a formal vote electing Jesus Christ to be King of Florence in perpetuity, with only twenty votes against. <> One must wonder about those twenty votes (anti-theocratic republicans? Medici partisans? curmudgeons? not-so-closet atheists?), but while there were dissenters in the city, the fact remains that liberated Florence—cradle of the Renaissance, of republican democracy, individualism, capitalism, secularization, of all the thrilling X-Factors—chose to welcome elements of mystical theocracy. Again. Savonarola’s years weren’t a lone blip; Florence chose it again.


• Camilla’s power was not wealth and savvy investment (proto-capitalism), or the classicism of the umanisti (the learned Renaissance woman), nor was she breaking into male-dominated spheres like our virago Caterina Sforza, or even excelling in the female-dominated spheres of motherhood and charity that both eras (past and present) respect. Camilla turned her back on all those paths, and wielded spirituality at its most mystical. That makes us—in our new millennium as we look to the Renaissance to find the roots of our modernity—uncomfortable.


• since ancient sites contained chunks of buildings built centuries apart all jumbled together, Renaissance people using these as models when designing a tomb, palace, etc. mixed elements of many eras of ancient architecture together, in a way that looked ancient to Renaissance people, but to an ancient Roman would look as improbable as a glassy skyscraper with art nouveau trim sitting on a Victorian red brick base—improbable but beautiful.156 Renaissance monuments are the fruits of this antiquarianism shared among learned and artisan cultures,


• It was in January 1504, early in Julius’s reign, as the city waited to learn just how warlike this second Battle Pope would prove, that Michelangelo’s innovative David was unveiled, depicting the young king, not in the tranquility of victory with Goliath’s severed head at his feet, but before the battle, his tense expression inviting the viewer to imagine his thoughts as he planned for the crisis to come... One of the most epic committees in Earth history—including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Filipino Lippi, Ghirlandaio’s surviving brother Davide, and Giovanni Cellini (father of the implausibly interesting Benvenuto Cellini)—was tasked with choosing a fitting spot for the statue.


• Another odd thing about the Sistine Chapel ceiling is that the creation story skips straight from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden to Noah and the flood, skipping Cain and Abel and other well-known stories, and culminating with the episode (rather obscure today but considered important in the Renaissance) of the Drunkenness of Noah. In this story, old Noah got drunk and fell asleep, and his sons pulled the blanket off him and laughed at his naked aging body... Noah’s sons’ laughter shattered that respect, requiring Noah to create law and government to bind human behavior.


• * for an average ratio of twenty naked men to each bible scene (most of which also contain naked men)... Part of the reason for this is that Michelangelo would rather be sculpting, so, condemned to paint, he filled the surface with imagined sculptures: some marble, some bronze, some in the round, some in relief, all in poses ideal for the limitations of each medium (stone, metal); Michelangelo’s wistfully imagined forty sculptures that will never be... The other reason is Michelangelo’s deep, passionate love of naked men.


• To call Michelangelo gay is like calling a Renaissance market a “shopping mall”—the facts are right, but the valences (suburbia, teenagers, consumerism) all wrong. Renaissance ideas about homosexuality were articulated differently, and taboos enforced differently and disobeyed differently, from today.


• sexuality were articulated differently, and taboos enforced differently and disobeyed differently, from today... In this dual-attraction culture, men were expected to be attracted to men in the same spirit as to women, that is to younger, more feminine men. So entrenched was this expectation that Michael Rocke found Florentine courts even levied heavier sodomy fines on homosexual couples who violated the norm by having the elder partner be the penetrated partner in the sex act.


• The grace of powerful patrons kept clients safe. Michelangelo’s contemporary Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (who was around the corner frescoing another room while Michelangelo was in the Sistine), was such an infamous sodomite he happily adopted Il Sodoma (the Sodomite) as his name (as our Angelo adopted Poliziano).


• Pope Andrian: He also considered destroying that most beloved center of Roman street life, Pasquino, a broken old statue set up in a square in 1501 by Cardinal Carafa; on holidays umanisti would dress Pasquino up as various gods in whimsical procession, while year-round poets posted verses on its base satirizing the pope and other notables,172 and still do to this day.


• Michelangelo was tasked with building fortifications to prepare the city for siege. One of the defensive structures he built is now Piazzale Michelangelo, the famous square above the city where visitors enjoy panoramic views of Florence’s skyline—even that is a desperate remnant of our desperate Renaissance.


• the sculptor spent the next years traveling between Florence and Rome, alternately not finishing the tomb of Julius and not finishing the San Lorenzo façade, library, and tombs (unfinished projects #4, #5, and #6, not counting other smaller tasks along the way).


• The artist wrote thirty sonnets and other poems to Tommaso (fully a third of all his poetry), tutored him in drawing and architecture, and gifted him a set of mythological drawings including an extremely erotic version of Renaissance Europe’s most prominent homosexual narrative: Zeus abducting Ganymede... when Michelangelo’s grand-nephew published the artist’s poetry in 1623, he changed the male pronouns in the Tommaso poems to female, to erase the homoerotic content


• Cellini includes many sketchy episodes in his autobiography... the time he got sodomy charges dismissed by demanding that the accuser clearly describe what they were accusing him of, and they were too prudish to name the body parts—but Cellini is absolutely dead silent about the change-overs of power in Florence in 1512–37...  (I love that any choose-your-own-adventure book set in Florence can have “killed by young Cellini on the roof throwing rocks at people” as an ending option).


• Cellini's The Perseus is so cunningly positioned, just under the eaves, that when it rains (and the wind is right) the naked hero remains dry, while the water drips like blood from the gore that streams from Medusa’s head, from the neck of the headless body at the hero’s feet, and from his sword.


• Pope Paul III lived long enough to see the Last Judgment completed in 1541, and to call the Council of Trent, which tried to organize a response to the Reformation, including grudging steps to address some of the corruption on Luther’s grievance list.


• Tombs are records of the next generation, not one’s own. Visitors to Florence are often confused why the two grand Michelangelo tombs in Florence are of two of the least important Medici...


• Pius IV was Michelangelo’s last pope. The artist had seen thirteen popes, from Sixtus who began the string of wars clear to the Counter-Reformation. He kept sculpting until just days before his death in 1564, less than a week before what would have been his eighty-ninth birthday.


• But in this story where almost no one gets the tomb they wanted, Michelangelo may be the only one who got the thing he wanted most: given the position of the windows, if he rises as he planned on Judgment Day, he will have to take about four paces to the left to see the Duomo one last time.

--------

• So let’s imagine ourselves as Michelangelo in the 1520s or 1530s, straining under the stress of della Rovere lawsuits and unfinished Medici projects, thinking back, and make him equivalent to us in the 2020s or 2030s looking back an equal distance at our past. For Michelangelo, Dante’s Commedia is as old as Pride and Prejudice or Frankenstein, and he looks back on the Black Death and Petrarch as remotely as we do on 1848,


• If you learn some dates, remember 1348 Black Death, 1450 printing press, and 1517 Reformation, plus optionally 1492, for Europe’s contact with the Americas, Lorenzo’s death, and Borgia’s election. The point is not the dates, it’s to get a sense of lived time, how many years it took for Petrarch’s friends to assemble their libraries, and get Michelangelo’s Delphic sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.


• In the 1430s = 1930s (Great Depression, Hitler on the rise), Cosimo de Medici lost then recovered power, banishing the Strozzi men and Filelfo from Florence, and the main structure of Brunelleschi’s dome was complete by 1436 = 1936 (parallel to when Jesse Owens triumphed at the Nazi Germany-hosted Olympic Games).


• If there was a Baby Boom equivalent, births in the 1440s and 1450s (1940s and 1950s) included Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici, our assassin Montesecco, pious Raffaello Maffei Volterrano, Savonarola, Poliziano, Cardinal Ascanio Visconti Sforza with his bunny and his parrot, Queen Isabella of Castile, and Beatrice of Naples Twice Queen of Hungary.


• Julia (born ~1665?). She served as a lady-in-waiting, clairvoyant, and sibyl to King Kristina of Sweden, the most celebrated learned lady of her century.


• Kristina (1626–89) ascended the Swedish throne aged five... usually wore partial or complete male dress.. Traveling through Denmark and the Netherlands in men’s clothing with the pseudonym “Count Dohna,” she converted secretly to Catholicism


• * “Age of Reason” with a list of famous figures who discovered scientific truths, our cherry-picking of successes disguises the hundreds of other figures who thought that the character of one’s soul was mystically present in one’s facial features (Thomas Browne), that magnetism was made of tiny flying screws (Descartes! Descartes thought that!), or that gold could be condensed out of sunlight (looking at you Newton)... I like to call the seventeenth century the Try Everything Age


• My PhD adviser said you should choose your dissertation topic based on the cuisine of the region you must visit for research.


• *  the old “Help, this is the right street number but my hostel doesn’t exist?!!” (Answer: Florence has two sets of street numbers, the red numbers (rossi) sometimes written in black, and the black numbers (neri) often written in blue—this is not reasonable but it is hilarious, and based on which doors were commercial and which residential 300 years ago.)

"Inventing the Renaissance", III

Machiavelli redux:

• The Three Branches of Ethics:
  • Virtue Ethics—is any ethical system which judges action based on the interior motives, character, feelings, or intentions of the actor.
  • Deontology—is any ethical system which judges action based on a set of laws or rules external to the doer. They can be any rules, with any source.
  • Consequentialism/Utilitarianism--Machiavelli is the founder of consequentialism/utilitarianism as we know it (with some precursors, notably Mohism in fifth-century BCE China),..  any form of ethics which judges an action based on the consequences of the action, rather than the action itself or the motive of the doer.


• Back to deontology vs. virtue ethics: Dante is a fabulous window on how most ethical systems are hybrids of the two. In Dante, judgment is dictated by Divine Law, but Divine Law cares both about the soul’s character and the soul’s deeds... Hell is organized by which act was done and which rule broken (deontology), while Purgatory is organized around interiority (virtue ethics). It’s also (an oversimplification) generally true from the Reformation on that Catholicism is more concerned with repenting for deeds, and many Protestantisms (especially Calvinism and Puritanism) with the purity of one’s thoughts.


• Voluntarism is an ethical system which says an act is only good if (drumroll please…) it is good by both virtue ethics and deontology!


• One is that consequentialism’s rise in the eighteenth century led to the first arguments for deterrence-based justice, advanced by figures like Voltaire (1694–1778), and Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), a Milanese Enlightenment figure much admired and publicized by Voltaire, and hailed today as the father of our modern systems of deterrence-based justice.192 In contrast with retributive justice, rehabilitative justice, or restorative justice, deterrence-based justice aims to minimize human suffering by inflicting the lightest possible sentence that still effectively deters the crime, so the sum total of the pain experienced by victims and criminals together is the lowest possible.


• the Pandora’s Box which releases Voltaire and Beccaria to campaign against torture has other contents too, including that deadliest inhabitant of thought-experiment land, the trolley problem.


• if deontology and virtue ethics are as old as philosophy, why did it take 1,800 years for the third (to us equally obvious) branch of ethics to enter the formal conversation? <> Because, my friends, before we can have consequentialism, we must have Borgias.


• * Once upon a time (c.1475) the whimsical Will that scripts the Great Scroll of the Cosmos woke up in the morning and decided: Someday centuries from now, when humankind has outgrown the dastardly moustaches of melodrama and moved on to a phase of complex antiheroes, sympathetic villains, and moral ambiguity, I want history teachers to be able to stand at the front of the classroom and say, “Yes, he really did go around dressed all in black wearing a mask and killing people for fun.” Thus Cesare Borgia was conceived.


• * The Prince (completed by 1513) was far from the first mirror for princes. It came from a long tradition of such advice manuals and collections of heroic maxims; the first use of the title Speculum regum (mirror of the princes) was 1183,


• The Nine Worthies: We see this in the long tradition of wildly ahistorical Troy narratives, featuring anachronisms such as Hector and the Greeks fighting chivalric duels around the walls of Troy196 in works like Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c.1390). This gorgeous nonsense remained so popular that even the return of the Iliad had no power to stop the surreal experience of Shakespeare’s Chaucer-based Troilus and Cressida (1602), or the mind-bending Troy/Arthuriana crossovers in Orlando Furioso, which feature the haunted tomb of Saint Merlin (really!),


• Della Rovere: “Borgia bad! You said you’d oust Borgia!”
  France: “I can see how Borgia out-bribed you at the election. He’s way better at this evil pope stuff than you. Also, did you hear I’m the Sword of the Lord?” SMASH!!!!
  Naples: “Someone please rescue us from the horrors of war!”
  The Plague: “HELLO! You called?”
  France: “Plague? Yikes! Bye!”
  Horsemen of the Apocalypse: *high-five*


• Good morning, Mr Machiavelli. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep Duke Cesare “Valentino” Borgia from conquering Florence. You will serve as our ambassador to him.


• The Borgia conquest sweeping away illegitimate rulers meant a lot of past popes’ cronies finally got some comeuppance.. Duke Valentino’s newly planted governors didn’t have any ties to local people, so they were short-term more equitable in their enforcement of justice than those who had been in town long enough to have local favorites. It is sometimes said of modern democracies that every politician enters office at their most popular and least competent, and leaves it at their most competent and least popular—this was somewhat similar.


• * The vassal betraying the benefactor is the worst thing in Dante’s Inferno, right at the center of Hell where Satan and Judas are; Dante didn’t even have a section for benefactors who betray their vassals, it wasn’t in his mind that anyone would do that. But it did occur to Valentino, who, by this time, had been disfigured by syphilis and started wearing a mask most of the time.


• Like our Norse scholars realizing those loom weights might be fishing weights, old questions are sometimes answered by investigating unrelated questions—this is intellectual diversity.


• _Because he had a great spirit and lofty aims, could not have governed his affairs differently, and only Alexander’s short life and his illness thwarted his designs.207 <> Valentino did not fall because of his cruel and fearsome deeds, says Machiavelli, they were the best possible plan. The Borgia fall is not a moral lesson that good princes rise and evil princes fall, it is the opposite:


• The ethicists of Machiavelli’s past condemn Pope Julius as a traitor, but is it really a bad act—our Nick asks—betraying one man and his followers to end so terrible a war? Is that a meaningful use of good and evil? <> Thus utilitarian ethics is born... we should also study Valentino and Julius, who—with their treatment of Remirro de Orco and of each other—showed that fear and cunning are even more potent in crisis than virtue and love.


• the old oversimplification, the end justifies the means, is in this sense a smaller shift than what Machiavelli is suggesting: he wants us to judge the means by its end... Machiavelli never explicitly discusses the religious implications of consequentialism, but he very conspicuously does not talk about the theological side; there is no section of The Prince to parallel the final part of Hobbes’s Leviathan, “On the Kingdome of Darknesse” about how theology trumps politics.


• When scholars argue about “Who was the first modern philosopher?” those who argue for Machiavelli point out that he was the first person to combine all three forms of ethics, and the first to use history, not as a set of moral maxims, but as case studies to be analyzed, making history an empirical, not a philosophical or literary exercise: a social science, looking for the hidden causes of things,


• Plato advanced the radical idea that it would be better if kids took jobs they were well suited for instead of automatically doing what their parents did, but we mainly remember the weird stuff, the Cave, the “noble lie.” Aristotle said maybe nature has patterns we can understand (science!), but we remember all those tedious syllogisms. Just so, with Machiavelli, we take away the ends justify the means and better to be feared than loved, not realizing that his more important, now-ubiquitous innovations were ever new: that ethics should consider consequences, and that studying history can help us understand the causes of past tragedies and triumphs


• It was the magical year my papal election class was in the same time slot as my wonderful colleague John McCormick’s course on Machiavelli’s political thought, so we had a crossover. We brought both classes together, so each could hear how the other’s approach (history vs. political science) felt different. <> As an example, I asked both classes, “What would Machiavelli say if you asked him what would happen if Milan suddenly changed from a monarchal duchy to a republic?” The poli sci students went first: He’d say that it would be very unstable, because the people don’t have a republican tradition... Then my students replied: He’d say it would all depend on whether Cardinal Ascanio Visconti Sforza is or isn’t in the inner circle of the current pope, how badly the Orsini-Colonna feud is raging, whether politics in Florence is stable enough for the Medici to aid Milan’s defenses.. the instant they heard the phrase, “if Milan became a republic,” all my students had turned as a body to stare at our King Charles with trepidation


• We need that antidote to the illusion that the world is shaped only by geniuses, by special people, history’s protagonists, who never fretted about rent or laundry as we powerlessly ordinary people do.


• in 1861, when the unification of Italy kicked out the Habsburg rulers, and Florence suddenly had to decide whether to be part of the new Italian Republic, they gathered the descendants of the families that had been the last set of Dudes in the Tower, gathered them anew in the Palazzo Vecchio, and had them vote on it

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• Whether we call it a work ethic, or values, or a worldview, or a national genius, or a spirit of the age, we moderns have inherited a long tradition of believing eras are defined by the characteristics of their people, like the strengths and flaws of epic heroes.


• In the nineteenth century (the true recurring villain of our story) England, Scotland, France, the Dutch empire, and uniting Germany did a lot of work to paint themselves as the true shapers and inheritors of Western thought, claiming straight lines of descent from the golden age of ancient philosophy to their own intellectual golden ages: the French Enlightenment, English scientific revolution, Scottish Enlightenment, modern German science and geisteswissenschaft (moral sciences, humanities, literally spirit-of-a-people-studies), etc. Such efforts to claim the ancient golden age worked better if one could exclude Italy’s Renaissance one, resulting in claims that, while the Renaissance was an artistic and cultural golden age, the more serious intellectual golden age waited for [insert nation here]. This was part of a larger project of casting Mediterranean nations—especially Spain and Italy—in a negative light, magnifying the evils of Catholicism... claiming the Inquisition’s censorship strangled freethought and made true intellectual innovation impossible (even though Protestant powers had their own censorship), and even claiming that only Iberian empires did the bad colonialism with atrocities, while the English and French empires did beneficent good colonialism (look up the Black Legend if you aren’t familiar).


• This project reflects how funding structures shape research. The way Germany funds scholarship these days encourages big, collaborative, grant-funded research groups, required to write very detailed explanations of their methodologies when asking for funding, which has caused Germany to produce lush detailed studies of the methodologies and collaboration of Renaissance scholars too. The way Italy funds scholarship these days gives lots of support to philology and art history, encouraging translations, critical editions, and lushly-researched group-authored exhibit catalogs. A similar set of funding structures encourage Dutch scholarship to do meticulous teamwork and philological analysis, resulting in deep readings of Renaissance texts from scholars like Karl Enenkel, Susanna de Beer, and Lodi Nauta.15 In America, meanwhile, neither collaboration, nor exhibit catalogs, nor translations, critical editions, or deep philological analysis will get a historian tenure, so we mostly produce single-authored topical monographs like my Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance,


• Petrarch used to complain that people were so eager for his letters that they were copied numerous times en route, and read by many before they reached the addressee.20 Such letters could also have complexly plural authors, as one classics lover served as amanuensis to another, hence Raffaello Maffei plausibly mistaking a Lorenzo letter for Poliziano, since Lorenzo’s correspondence was usually dictated to one of his umanisti


• “A humanist is someone who receives a letter from Erasmus.” It also works... Centering our definition of umanisti on letters communicates the interconnected, diasporic, multi-city, multi-national nature of Renaissance scholarship, built of friendships, friend circles, schools, and also rivalries, whose battles in letters made combatants famous... And it communicates how exclusive the humanist world could be, how failing to be acknowledged, failing to get a letter back, could lock you out, no matter your efforts.


• We have so much material from Florence because it was an outlier, in everything: art, wealth, politics, law, literacy rate, sodomy rate, soul projection rate, you name an attribute a Renaissance city could have and Florence is at an extreme end. Yes, all these things happened elsewhere too, but we must be careful basing any impression of the defining spirit of the age on such an outlier.


• The single introductory text read and reproduced most in medieval Europe was Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical dialog written in the last days before the great scholar-statesman’s execution in 524 CE... The Consolation of Philosophy is different from Boethius’s other works, a deeply personal dialog in which Lady Philosophy descends into the prison to help the philosopher prepare to face his coming death.


• Boethius’s description of Lady Philosophy herself. She is queenly, commanding, supernatural, and wears a long gown with its skirt tattered and missing many pieces. Over the years, she explains, many have tried to grasp her, and many philosophers or sects have torn a piece from her gown and carried it off, clutching it dearly and believing that they possess the whole of her, not realizing it’s just a tiny scrap...They are a little right. The Stoics, Skeptics, Platonists, Aristotelians, Zoroastrians, Chaldean cults, they all had scraps of truth. Doesn’t it sound like it would be a good idea to stitch that tattered fabric back together?


• Much of the compatibility of Boethius’s ideas with both pagan and Christian thought comes from the fact that Saint Augustine was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very troublesome child, and his mother Monica was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very patient mom. (Monica is, in fact, the patron saint of patience,.. Young Augustine decided that Christianity was a stupid religion for stupid people like his stupid mom


• Good old Manichaeism, the belief that the cosmos is ruled, not by one Maker, but by two great forces in constant conflict, a Good/Light force and an Evil/Bad force (so, Star Wars), and you too can be part of this epic battle if you give the leaders of this movement lots of money! Manichaeism was a mystery cult, like Mithraism or the Orphic Mysteries, with exclusive membership, tantalizing recruitment, dazzling rituals, months or years of initiation before you learned their real beliefs, and constant demands for cash...  Adherents could help the light force defeat the dark by finding seeds of light trapped in base matter and liberating them, and many seeds were trapped in expensive foods like delicious fruits and desserts, and could be liberated by buying those foods for the cult leaders whose spiritually trained digestive systems were capable of liberating seeds of yummy yummy light. And throughout his Manichaean period, Augustine was also having lots of fun, wine, and sex, and constantly dissing and ditching his still supportive mother,


• Augustine then reread the Bible and went, Holy shit! This religion isn’t stupid, it makes perfect sense, it just needs coherent metaphysics! He then sat down and wrote so many books explicating Christianity that they outnumber the entire surviving corpus of classical Latin. Using Neoplatonic-Stoic Aristotelian-hybrid metaphysics (and a dash of Kabbalistic practice), he created the first Christian answers to many questions the Bible doesn’t answer, and everyone embraced him as the prince of theologians,


• Remember that time Peter Abelard ticked off his abbot by proving their abbey’s founding saint didn’t exist? That was Saint Denys, i.e. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagyte, a book more than a person, since the author was imagined backward from the book. The book is a work of late antique mystical theology written in Greek around the fifth or sixth century CE (later than Augustine, contemporary with Boethius) and full of the period’s typical Neoplatonic/Christian hybrid stuff about the soul and abstract Maker. But the work was mistakenly attributed to Dionysius the Athenian lawyer described in the Acts of the Apostles, who was converted to Christianity by Saint Paul and became the first Bishop of Athens, so the book seemed 500 years older than it really was... We think Christianity got a big dose of Platonism in 400 CE with Augustine, and another with Boethius a century later, but Renaissance people thought that earlier Christianity, exemplified by Pseudo-Dionysius, was more Platonic than Augustine, concluding that Christian and ancient Greek theology had become less similar over time, splitting from one archaic whole instead of merging two things into one.


• The philosopher kings who take turns ruling Plato’s hypothetical republic are expected to agree 100 percent, because their souls are trying to craft laws that are sketches of the same perfect justice, and slight disagreements will be corrected as easily as two people discussing a movie correct each other’s imperfect memories of it.


• In the 1600s, Thomas Hobbes sparked one such firestorm when his Leviathan suggested that pre-civilized humanity, living in a war of all against all, might through Reason and self-interest come together and develop society. Until Hobbes, Europe had no explanation for how government came to be other than that God instituted it, and no explanation for what glue should hold men together other than fear of divine punishment... Hobbes’s was a political theory an atheist might use, giving atheism an answer, and thereby so terrifying England that the government strengthened its censorship specifically to target “Leviathan the Great,”


• * If one wanted to be an atheist in the Middle Ages one had to throw away 90 percent of all science and social theory, and when asked “Why do rocks sink?” or “How do planets move?” or “Where did the world come from?” or “How does the mind connect to the body?” one had to answer, “I have no idea.” <> Turning one’s back on answers is very difficult, and is part of why the study of atheism is so closely tied to the study of philosophical skepticism, i.e. philosophies which say we cannot understand the fundamentals of existence. Only very recently have atheists had the leisure of both denying God and still having a clear, technical model of the universe... it required saying you believed one thing so much that you were willing to turn your back on the understandings of the world shared by almost everyone, even though you didn’t have a coherent alternative. There is a fragile courage to pre-modern atheism


• Lucretius also relates that Epicurus thought many atoms have little hooks on them which is what made them clump together into worlds, that there are many worlds like ours, and that the animals we see are all suited to their environments because only animals suited to their environments survived, but he also says that no new species come into existence anymore because Earth has undergone menopause and no longer grows giant placentas out of the ground, which is where new species used to come from (so close and yet so far…).


• there is one early copy of Lucretius (1490s) whose annotations stand out from the rest, whose reader didn’t mark the grammar or Vergilian lines, but concentrated on the sections in Book III with the technical fundamentals of atomism, and, in the margin by the explanation of the famous random swerve of matter, which others marked “absurd to consider,” this scholar wrote instead, much as a modern would, “that motion is variable, and from this we have free will.” And that copy is Machiavelli’s.


• We also have to understand that the Renaissance Inquisition was not an all-powerful, all-seeing Orwellian thought police; it aspired to be that, claimed to be that, but its inner workings show it constantly felt understaffed and underfunded, stretching its resources thin to hold back what it saw as an avalanche of threats...  it chose its battles, prioritizing the threats it considered most important. It did not choose atheism. <> Why wasn’t the Inquisition worried about atheism? Largely because it was so radical they thought no sensible person would take it seriously... The lack of answers of early atheism meant it wasn’t seen as a real competitor. The only people who would be tempted by it, in the period’s view, would be a fool, or someone fundamentally wicked who hopes there is no God because they’re afraid of being punished—both those categories are people the Church didn’t care about.


• But many Lucretius readers were other kinds of freethinking radicals, dissatisfied with the standard answers of the Church and interested in new approaches. While a few turned to atheism, Ficino, Pico, Franchi, and even Giordano Bruno turned in other directions: to Luther, to Aristotle, to Zoroaster, to astrology, to new mystic visionaries and old rediscovered texts, to all sorts of things. Atheism was an option, but it was not the default direction for a freethinking Renaissance radical.


• The meta-lesson here is that one of the victims of censorship is our ability to interpret the historical record. When we know people are self-censoring, we inevitably try to deduce their secret thoughts, but such efforts are very vulnerable to the subjective bias of we who do it.


• * A secular turn simply in the sense of caring more about secular things than earlier thinkers started as a trickle around 1400, entered libraries and courts, then universities started offering more courses on rhetoric (how to convince Earthly people of Earthly matters) and hired their first chairs in ethics (how to behave on Earth). One world-changing effect of our umanisti—one which clearly does merit association with secular humanism—was simply increasing how much people thought this world was a meaty topic. Major contributions to the history of thought don’t have to be systemic theories or advancing a specific answer, they can instead be broadening the range of questions. Many of the most important eras in the history of thought can be better characterized by their questions than their answers. Antiquity: How do we know things with certainty? Medieval: How do we know things about the eternal and permanent? Scientific revolution: How do we know things about Nature? Analytic philosophy: How do we know what we mean when we express things? Renaissance: What can we know about the human world, social dynamics, and how to make them better?


• Machiavelli’s Discourses devote several chapters to demonstrating that ancient Roman religion made ancient Rome stronger than Christian nations are. the Roman cult of honor and ancestor worship meant Romans believed their posthumous wellbeing depended on being remembered on Earth, a state best achieved through doing deeds of valor, glory, and renown, so that to fight and die for one’s country was encouraged by religion, unlike Christianity which glorifies a humble and contemplative life and otherworldliness, which are useless to the welfare of the state.


• I don’t think you’d arrive at modern atheism because you wouldn’t have Hobbes, Newton, Locke, Marx, Darwin, genetics, or telescopes to guide your answers, instead you’d have Aristotle, Abelard, Averroes, Lucretius, Plato, Petrarch, and the astrolabe. The modern scientific answers core to modern atheism aren’t transparent when you don’t have telescopes or DNA. It’s natural for different data to yield different answers. You would be a radical freethinker, you’d ask the same brilliant, all-touching questions, but, like Lucretius’s many Renaissance readers, you might be drawn to any of a wide variety of new, exciting radicalisms which prospered in 1450’s wide Renaissance world.


• This way of understanding the Renaissance has a name now: virtue politics, the Renaissance project to use the study of the classics to cultivate virtue in Europe’s ruling elites, using a particular method and aiming to advance a particular stability-seeking political agenda.71 That the method and political agenda are particular is key, because medieval elites were also raised on the classics, and medieval education also centered virtue, but Renaissance umanisti and their patrons and students did so in different ways (for example, exaggerating their classicism), and for different reasons (for example, the hope for European peace). The project was to heal Italian and European politics through cultivating personal virtue, a union of soulcraft and statecraft.


• * Legitimate power equaled power virtuously exercised. This was appealing in an Italy full of new powers, where traditional legitimacy was virtually absent... Italy suddenly redefined nobility, putting Roman antiquity at the center. Europe’s other powers largely consented, racing to fill their courts with antiques and Italian arts, excited to have this new, non-military axis on which to compete; like the Space Race, the classical culture race could let powers compete while keeping wars cold.


• The propaganda coup of Virtue Politics failed to defend Italy from plagues, feuds, and invasions, but it did establish the importance of Italy’s culture in a way which prevented the cultural assimilation Petrarch had feared... hanks to the same defense mechanism we saw Cosimo deploy against our imaginary envoy so many years before: you don’t want to burn this, you want to have it. Italy defined itself as the win condition of the culture game, and soon, not only did we have Hungarian warlords using laurel wreaths to impress the heirs of Vlad the Impaler, but Lucretius also reached Voltaire’s bookshelf, and Epicurean materialism entered Hobbes’s thought


• there was the idea that education makes nobility, and that a child of gold like Poliziano may be born to parents even of the lowest rank—that now-familiar hairline crack which gradually widened toward the radical idea that all humans might be created equal.


• Machiavelli was a passionate lover of the studia humanitatis, a product of virtue politics, but he saw the project to save Europe by instilling virtue in its rulers as a failure. If the studia humanitatis did produce some philosopher princes like Ippolita Maria Visconti Sforza and Alfonso the Magnanimous, it just as often produced their next generation kinsman, entitled Ippolito d’Este... Machiavelli looked around still-wounded Italy and said: It isn’t working; saving Europe requires something new.


• another innovative perceiver of that problem lay on the horizon, shaped by the fourth generation of the studia humanitatis and observing the continued tumults of this desperate a century: Martin Luther. Luther—like Machiavelli and Savonarola—grew up with Vergil and Ovid, the old educational starter set which had been used in medieval classrooms for centuries, but which were now transformed, layered with new ideas. .. The meticulous philology of the umanisti, and their multi-generational teamwork assembling Greek and Latin lexicons, helped Luther to expose centuries-old confusions caused by the distorting word-for-word translation methods the ancients had applied to Christian and pagan texts alike.

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• Printers: went bankrupt too; there were 300 people in Europe who wanted Cicero at that moment, but they were scattered over 80 towns. In a world of artisanal production, with few mass-produced commodities beyond coins and still newfangled woodblock-printed playing cards, this costly mass-produced commodity did not have a way to reach the rich but far-flung buyers who were building libraries.... printers living on book sales required distribution methods.


• each printing press had to be built by someone who’d learned to make one from another printer, so the innovation spread exponentially, reaching large cities first, then medium, taking generations to reach smaller towns and saturation point. <> In parallel to the books-on-boats and books-for-cheese economies of Venice and Germany, the period also saw the growth of a news economy.


• This is how Luther’s words were in print in London seventeen days after they went public in Germany.


• In 1123, Peter Abelard attracted Woodstock-sized crowds using The Philosopher (Aristotle) to make two seemingly contradictory authorities agree. In the 1260s The Theologian Thomas Aquinas demonstrated this wedding of authorities even more potently, and all supporting Christianity.


• And there was a correspondence between nobility of people and the noble qualities of plants, not just that Europe’s (better-fed) nobility tended to be taller and (from spending days indoors) paler, but they ate nobler foods. Nobles ate noble fruits that grew on noble trees, and noble cuts of meat from the front (head end, Heavenly end) of the animal, while their servants ate base Hellbound onions, garlic, carrots, and hams from the butt end of the animal.


• * Enter cantaloupe. <> Spherical, golden, sun-like, lying basely on the ground. Are noble fruits not fed by tall strong trees reaching high toward Heaven? Are plants not differentiable into a hierarchy? What rank is supposed to eat cantaloupe? If we were wrong about Nature having a hierarchy of plants, are we wrong about other hierarchies? ... maybe human souls aren’t fundamentally different, with souls of iron destined to be ruled by souls of gold?


• In sum, medieval and especially Renaissance Europe valued authority... While the average castle guard would not use the words epistemology and psychology to describe this, he understood perfectly well the ubiquitous belief that most people are liable to be wrong a lot of the time, and that the best guide away from error is authority, whether accepting what the castle doctor says wise Galen said, or going to fetch Horatio to talk to the ghost because he’s a scholar,


• The Renaissance hierarchy of evidence put authority foremost, logic second, and observation at the bottom, the weakest form of evidence for a claim.


• it took 150 years to clean up the text, and develop tools like printed margin notes and glossaries. By 1590 there were 30,000 copies, many of them cheap, just in time for med students—shocked by the discovery of the circulation of the blood!—to look to them for new ideas of how the body’s health might work. We celebrate Lucretius as a contributor to science, but it took 150 years of umanisti to make texts like his legible, and to convince ambitious families of Europe that a library of classics was the best route to (A) peace (B) legitimacy, and (C) a decent salary. It was that process which—by 1590—finally got Lucretius’s science into the hands of what we can at last call scientists.


• The presumptive authority of the past wasn’t just broken by Ptolemy and Galen turning out to be wrong, but by the sheer number of authorities accumulating via Ever-So-Much-More-So for a thousand years, coming to a head in 1600 for everyone to see. It took all of them together, all those years, to get us to one of the most powerful sentences in the history of humankind: “If Aristotle were alive today, he would change his mind.” —Galileo


• 1600s Italy was so saturated with experiment that even members of the Roman Inquisition set up experimental science laboratories in Rome to test the findings of books they were tasked to censor, considering it their job to fact-check publications, not only against doctrine, but by all means: philology, checking footnotes, and testing in the lab.


• To prove these things, Descartes used many familiar scholastic arguments, like Saint Anselm’s famous ontological proof of God’s existence, but Descartes framed it all in simpler, more approachable vocabulary, his signature clear and distinct ideas, since he wanted logic to be a tool for everyone—with Europe’s intellectual world already swarmed by contradictory Christian truth-claims, there was no point in continuing scholasticism’s practice of using super technical language to keep non-experts from approaching theology’s deadly nuclear enriched uranium, the whole world had already been exposed.


• All this resulted in such fantastic contrasts as Cartesians ferociously denouncing Newtonian cosmology (Vacuum in space? Never!) while crashing witch trials to insist that curses can’t be real because there’s no force at a distance (this genuinely got the French witch trial craze to fade out sooner than in many other regions).


• Medieval Christian Europe realized (and if you grant their starting premises they’re right) that, given that the entire world is a temporary construct designed by God for the purpose of teaching humans about salvation and damnation, it’s madness to look to Earth for cause-and-effect chains: there is one omnipotent Cause of all effects. As Dante tells us, God wanted Christ to be lawfully executed by all humanity together, so the guilt and salvation would be universal, so He created the Roman Empire in order to have a government large enough to represent the whole world and then order the Crucifixion.


• surpassing the ancients lay in execution, not fundamentals, and better ships were supposed to bring back gold and glory, not cantaloupe to overthrow Theophrastus. Umanisti envisioned positive change, and (major major moment!) they proposed that people could collaborate to intentionally (!!) cause large-scale social change, but they did not envision ongoing, constant anthropogenic change. Their focus was a one-time restoration of a better age, within a world presumed to be governed by a Divine Plan with its cycles, rises and falls, good kings and bad, all scripted from beyond.


• Then, around 1600, Francis Bacon invented progress. <> You know what the trigger was: the multiplication of rival truth-claims—some from antiquity, some from fracturing Christianity, some from exploration or discoveries—until we couldn’t just keep Abelarding anymore. Bacon invented progress in the same sense one might say Petrarch invented the Renaissance: he was the rhetorical firebrand whose flashy, persuasive rhetoric, those words that sting and bite, gave fame and momentum to a collective project already in progress, and made wealthy patrons take it seriously.


• * There are, Bacon said, three kinds of scholar: the ant, the spider, and the honeybee (a simile he took from Petrarch, who took it from Seneca, who took it from Plutarch, but each used it to describe different things). For Bacon, the three represent different ways of seeking knowledge. The ant is the encyclopedist, who roams the Earth gathering crumbs of knowledge into a huge pile, raising the ant mound higher and higher, competing to have the greatest pile to sit and gloat upon, but making nothing. The spider is the theorist or system-weaver, who spins elaborate, entrancing webs out of the stuff of his own mind, in which it is so easy to be entangled, but there’s nothing there but the produce of that one mind. And then there is the honeybee, who gathers from the fruits of nature and, processing them through the organ of his own being, produces something good and useful for the world—this was the newborn third knowledge-seeking mode, the scientist.


• Bacon proposed something different: the glory of this new science would not be having the marvel but gifting the means to make marvels to all humanity.20 Rather than secretive Leonardos and Brunelleschis, who jealously guard their methods so their works will still be wonders in a thousand years, the scientist’s glory will lie in publishing, sharing techniques, the measure of achievement not one looming monument, but the useful invention which enters every home and improves every life.


• * It’s not an easy task to prove that science works when you have no examples of science working yet. Bacon does not have steam engines, or pasteurization, or vaccines to point at...  We know science will work, Bacon replied, because of God... So, from God’s Goodness, we know Reason must be able to achieve all things that God designed us hope for. God gave us science, and it is an act of Christian charity, an infinite charity toward all posterity, to use it.


• Two hundred years is a long time for a vast, society-wide project to keep getting support—funding laboratories and observing spiders—fed by nothing but pure hope that these discoveries streaming out of Royal Society papers would someday do something. It may remind us of another project to create a golden age, which got support from royal courts and merchant princes for 200 years before Valentino Borgia looked Machiavelli in the eye and made him think they needed something different.


• The concept as the 1600s crystallized it was positive, and to use it in a negative sense would have been nonsensical to Bacon and King Kristina, like using healing in a negative sense. But now along with Great progress this year! We say swallowed up by progress, or the ironic shrugging Welp, that’s progress!


• Teleological histories (histories that presume society is developing toward some specific end) are also particularly prone to presentism, i.e. magnifying things that look like us,

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• once pointed out to me that France during the Catholic-Protestant religious wars was about 10 percent Protestant, somewhat comparable to the African American population of the US today, which is around 13 percent. It’s a striking comparison, and with telling differences. For example, France’s Protestant population was disproportionately rich and powerful, comprising 10 percent of the population but 30 percent of the ruling class,


• Human Agency history can also be harmful. The old, bad version was Great Man history, epitomized by Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) which presents humanity as a kind of inert but rich medium, like potting soil ready for a seed... That makes us feel just as powerless as Great Forces history


• Ruxandra of Wallachia the Vampire Raven Princess (granddaughter of Vlad the Impaler and niece of Matthias Corvinus the Raven King, about whom, through some unfathomable injustice, there is not yet a single YA fantasy romance!)


• The Great Forces were real. The dam was about to break; no one could stop it. The Italian Wars were going to happen, the likely popes were too warlike, the incentives for the great thrones of Europe too strong. But the human agents—even the junior clerk, grateful that someone gave him one florin to fix his parents’ roof, who passes on a whisper—they shaped what happened, each having consequences, intertwined but real. The dam was about to break, but every person there got to dig a channel to try to direct the waters. Those channels determined the flood’s shape, its path, its damage, whether it burned Burgundy, or Genoa, or fragile Florence.


• But my Renaissance class, the class who’d just burned down imaginary Europe, was all energy: It’s the system! The incentives! Structures of power! We need to analyze the structures that make people support a candidate they know won’t actually be good for the position, but which gets them what they want, or think they need. Let’s study the system! Systemic analysis will teach us how to make better results in future! Instead of bitterness, they had questions.


• Florence’s public health response to the Black Death was to double the fine for selling meat from male and female animals in the same butcher’s booth, thinking that the mix of generative juices birthed disease.


• the second time he worked his courage up and went back home, to guard the great dome whose foundations were laid out by builders who did not know how to finish what they started, but began their project trusting future generations would keep working on it, and find a way. Their efforts didn’t make a golden age in the 1400s. Or the 1500s. Or the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, or 1900s. But Renaissance people didn’t shy away from starting things that take 500 years.