"Inventing the Renaissance", I

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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.