These two boys whose lives were nearly identical when they were young and then split at this vital moment where they had both served their country till this moment. But Machiavelli gets labeled traitor.
It is amazing that these people tortured him. They destroyed the republic that he believed in. And he's writing this book. Please, let me show you how to keep power.
And these wars are going to be so complicated and so filled with betrayal and inversion that Wikipedia had to innovate a new way of having its tech boxes line up for saying who's on which side.
Welcome to the Before Cast, the podcast where we use the past to make sense of the present and future. I am Adam Davidson. Excited to be here with Ada Palmer. Hi Ada.
So if you have not listened to our first episode, this is just our second episode. We're just getting going. We do recommend it. We spell out a big picture on Machiavelli's life. But today, we're going to go deep, deep, deep into the most consequential few months of his life when he was writing The Prince. But before we do that, we have some requests. Hit like and subscribe. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Click subscribe in YouTube. We are told this is what we must beg you to do every time, or support on Patreon, which makes an even bigger difference, but both do matter a lot. So, we're going to plunge in with this letter.
We're going to plunge in with the letter, and then we'll talk about the letters.
Here I'm going to pretend that we're holding it in our hands.
So the letter then is one that he writes in December of 1513 when he's been in exile for roughly a year and he's been feeling powerless watching from a distance as the great crowned heads of Europe and power structures of Europe change and as this new government is entrenching itself in Florence with a mixture of competence and incompetence and making wise and unwise decisions. And he's desperate to be there and he's also thinking so hard about how they're exercising power. So he says in the letter very casually, very briefly in the midst of his other analysis of things, I'm thinking of writing a little book on princes, something that he touched on many times in his earlier analytic work. But here he is, he wants to write this little book on princes. And that's how we date The Prince. That's how we know when he must have started writing it because often we don't know. We work hard to figure out when exactly these things were written. It's not as if he read it, wrote it, and then published it. You know, often when a book has a publication date of 2026, we guess they were writing it in 2025. But he doesn't publish it. It's not released until after his death because The Prince is not for public circulation. The Prince is for Machiavelli, the trusted circle of classmates and close friends that he wants to discuss politics with. And it's for the leaders of his government and only the leaders of his government may have it because Machiavelli only serves his country. And while crowned heads and cardinals all over Europe would happily have paid him a very lush salary to go work for them, he refuses and he will rot in the countryside faithful to his country. Faithful to his exiled him, faithful to his torturer.
And he treats his political prudence the way a scientist would treat a secret weapons breakthrough of I'm not going to share this with anybody except my own homeland to safeguard my people. That is his little book on princes.
And he's not being falsely modest, right? He's not saying like, oh, this is going to be a great book that everyone's going to read for centuries. He really thinks of it as a little book. He thinks of it as a little book for a very specific audience on a very specific topic that he really wants the only prince in the world he wants to see succeed is that one.
We have a letter in which Machiavelli describes his time in exile. It's probably one of the most quoted letters in the history of the world. And he describes how, you know, he had been at the height of the seat of government. He was then, there's a different letter where he describes his arrest. He's arrested. This is because the conquerors have uncovered a conspiracy against them and there was a list of names and these are names of the people the conspirators intended to try to recruit but hadn't yet contacted. His name is on that list. And so he is innocent but he is arrested as a possible traitor and he is interrogated. He is tortured as he describes in his letter and then afterward he is exiled to the middle of nowhere countryside. And that's weird and shows that they're really alarmed by him because Florence exiles people all the time. Exile is normal, but Florentine exile does not work like you imagine it works. When you're a Florentine and you're exiled, you're exiled to a specific place usually and with the expectation that you will go there and you will represent the city there and you will continue as an important Florentine to have your business connections and you will probably open a branch of whatever business your family runs, right? And the city will then send you instructions and they will say, you know, you're in exile in London. Here is the correspondence we want you to relay to the offices of the king. Here is the correspondence we want you to relay to the English wool guilds. And if you faithfully serve your country in exile as part of this diplomatic corps while you're on probation, then when you have served well for a few years, they will recall you and they will bring you back. And Florence actually depended on having a population of exiled Florentines spotting Europe who would exercise the city's bidding and the city's guilds bidding and do important trade at a distance. So their entire wool deal with the English crown where for about a half a century Florence has been monopolistically buying all of England's wool. Because you need olive oil to process wool to high quality and not be itchy, right? Think of the difference between itchy wool blanket and really nice suit fabric that's all smooth, right? What makes that difference is buckets of olive oil. More olive oil than you can possibly imagine.
England does not have a lot of olive oil.
No olive oil. England's only oil crop at the time is walnuts. Walnuts turn stuff brown. They're useful for some things but not other things anyway. So much better. Do you want to produce itchy wool that people will buy at a low price or do you want to sell all your wool to the Florentines who will make high quality wool and be able to outbid you and then sell it better? So they monopolistically bought up all of England's wool. All of that is negotiated by exiles, right? And so when Machiavelli, a statesman, an experienced ambassador,
And we're not going to go deep. I should just, just to set the stage. We're doing, we're not going chronologically. We're going
No, no, we're zooming in on this letter. We're zooming in on this letter, but just to give a little hint,
Native Florentine Machiavelli wants nothing in his life more than to serve Florence, which we think of as a city, but he would have thought of as his country. And as you said, we will get deep into it later. We'll learn all about why he was exiled and what it meant for this humiliation to happen. But we're going to jump in. And at this point, he has traveled, right, essentially the known world.
He's 43. He's traveled all around Europe and especially around Italy. He's been an ambassador to kings and popes. He's an incredibly veteran statesman. He's also been a military leader. Commander is more complicated. Leader. He's a very desirable person. And when you exile him and exile him to sit in the countryside in the middle of nowhere just outside of Florence where you're too far away to do things in the city but you're not in any center of power. You're not able to contact anyone of importance. You are stuck in the countryside. This is the desire to nullify him as a political actor.
Right, which for him was, I'm sure he's glad he wasn't dead, but it was probably pretty close to that level of, but with hope right at the end. And so what you do in exile as a Florentine is you work to earn the trust of your country and be invited back.
And he writes this beautiful letter in which he describes how he spends his days mucking around. He hunts larks a lot. They liked eating larks as well as having them as pets, those tiny little
Yeah, you eat them whole like fish, right? Like an anchovy.
And then after he mucks around in the countryside hunting larks for a chunk of the day, he goes to a pub and hangs out with people getting drunk at the pub. And these are uncultured peasants and he feels like he's slumming it with them. And then he goes home and he changes into the court dress that he would wear when he was in office and when he was a statesman and an ambassador to popes and kings and attired thus as for a king, step into his library and there hold commerce with the ancients, meaning reading Livy, reading these historians that he devoted his life to commenting on, not for abstract literary motives, right, but because as he states at the beginning of the Discourses, men have devoted enormous energies to faithfully studying and imitating the way the ancients made art, the way the ancients made sculpture, the way the ancients made engineering. But the greatest thing about Rome was its political success. And we have not devoted the same to reconstructing its political system. So I am going to reconstruct its political system so we can imitate it. Just as the artists writing treatises about perspective or anatomy are reconstructing the artistic achievements of the ancients so that we can imitate them. That is his love and his motive for studying the classics. But you see his passion when he speaks of attiring himself in court dress in order to hold commerce with the ancients.
And it is such an amazing visual. I mean, it's a weird choice for me. If I'm going to do heavy writing and reading, I'd rather do it early in the morning. I wouldn't spend the day hunting then drinking. But this idea that he takes off the mucky clothes of the world, puts on this fancy dress that nobody can see him in, that nobody cares that he wears. His days of being in the court are long gone, and I'm assuming lights a bunch of candles. And when he describes it, it's like he feels he's in a room with ancient Roman thinkers.
He's there with Cicero. He's there with Livy in their discussions and he's having debates with them exactly as he would have back in Florence been in the gardens, the Ricci gardens famously is where he did a lot of his discussions for his Discourses on Livy. And he and other scholars and statesmen, most of them are both scholars and statesmen, would discuss and he would present, you know, today's chapter is me thinking about this one thing that Sulla did and I think the conclusion is this and he would have those discussions and now he is having those discussions alone with his books, himself and his pen, but that pen of course proves mightier than any sword Machiavelli was ever able to wield in his war days.
Yes. And is he, how much of a weirdo in his time and place is he? I mean, you know, we certainly there are, I mean, it's the Renaissance. It's the golden era for many of us when we look back at that period. So, there are lots of very smart people doing all sorts of very smart things. But there's a way that he's wielding that pen as a scalpel that nobody else quite.
Yeah. And it's, you know, when we ask how much is he a weirdo? Which are the weirdo? Which are there are many spectra on which this can be a weird thing to do. Is he a weirdo to dress up to go into a library? Is he a weirdo to feel like this about the books? The answer to both of those is no.
That's normal. And my guess is you would do that potentially, dress up to go to a library like
I mean, I have a reconstruction of a lucco over there. I've been working on it with my students.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's actually, this is neat. Let's zoom in on this garment. This is going to take us around a time. We're going to spend forever talking about getting to the significance of this letter, but it's worth it for the detour. So, when Machiavelli says he's putting on court dress, he doesn't name the garment. And there's two different things that it can possibly be. And both of them are very, very interesting. Both of them are actually very, very different. So, sumptuary law. Pre-modern societies in Europe had sumptuary law. These were regulations governing who could wear what. A lot of sumptuary law focused on the idea of morality and banning really expensive opulent clothing because you don't want your populace spending ridiculous amounts of money on absurd, useless and vain luxuries. So they would do things like ban having over a certain amount of ounces of gold that you're wearing at any given time or they would ban sewing pearls onto your hat. And you have to wear X amount of modesty, right? And of course, as with any rule, as soon as they make this rule, people break it. So the instant they ban women in Florence from sewing pearls onto their hat, the women in Florence stopped wearing hats and braid the pearls directly into their hair, which is perfectly legal. Which is why you see all of those beautiful Botticellis where women have elaborate pearls braided into their hair because Florentine women did that because of sumptuary law and you don't get that very much in other cities in Italy that didn't have that exact law. So women still wore hats. This is one of the reasons we like Florentine art so much because a lot of Renaissance art, the woman is wearing a hat that looks like her head was just shoved into a Monopoly hotel and we're like, I'm sorry, this is not doing it for me aesthetically. I'm sure it was beautiful at the time, but it just looks like a cardboard box. Come on. But in Florence, they don't. This is because of sumptuary law. And sumptuary laws were specific to individual countries, which means within Italy to individual cities, but they would also mandate certain garments to tell the professions of different kinds of people. So for example, most cities had a law that prostitutes must dress in a particular way. Really, right? And you know, in Bologna, prostitutes must wear a blue veil, but in Venice, prostitutes must instead wear this one particular hat, right? And it's a different coding in different cities, but it lets you instantaneously spot the difference between a prostitute or a courtesan and a virtuous lady, right? So one thing that sumptuary law did though was it actually was less about opulence than it was about category because if you are of X social station you may have this many ounces of gold. If you are of a higher social station you may have more ounces of gold. If you are of a lower social station even if you became rich you can't dress as opulently as the old money people do have this higher status. So it makes people display their social status and it regulates how much people can and can't wear. If you have read the unabridged Hunchback of Notre Dame, there's a moment at which sumptuary law comes up in the middle in terms of what Esmeralda is wearing and it makes no sense to most modern readers, but that's what it is. So under the Florentine Republic, there was a specific men's garment which could be what Machiavelli was wearing in this moment and could be not that. So when you are not in Florence, when you are a foreigner, and this is true in general, when you are a foreigner in a city, you are immune to its sumptuary law. You don't dress by the customs of the place you are. You dress in your own way. And so if foreigners are in Florence, they dress however they want. Florentines follow Florentine law. This lets you spot foreigners easily. And it categorizes people into in-group and out-group. And it also means that if you are a Florentine you have to dress in the modest governed Florentine ways at home but when you are elsewhere you can dress much more opulently because sumptuary law limits opulence and sometimes societies would strategically let you be immune to sumptuary law for a particular period of time when opulence is useful. For example, in Siena, as in many places, well, Florence had this too, but they didn't use it the same way. If you're a woman and it's your debut year, right, the year you're an adult and your marriage is being negotiated and you're on the market, right? You are immune to sumptuary law for that year so that you can wear the fanciest, most expensive, most over-the-top, most amazing fashions to advertise yourself, to advertise your family, to make a big deal out of the major political and economic merger that is about to happen as these two powerful families link a young woman and a young man. So that there would always be a few women, all of them young and therefore often from the aesthetics of the period considered beautiful, who would be dressed in like five times as expensive stuff as everyone else and just, you know, stood out a mile when you see them down the street. Siena would specifically summon these girls to stand in a line when an important ambassador was arriving in the city so that the important ambassador would be greeted by dozens and dozens of the city's new young women in the most ridiculously expensive things that they would ever wear in their life because it makes the city look rich.
Right. And it makes the city look good. And so these debutantes, as we would call them, had a political state function of advertising. Here is how rich our families are that they can attire their brides.
Look at all the pearls in their hair or hats or yeah.
And what it means is that if you're a Florentine and you're in Florence, you are wearing the modest dress of a Florentine. If you're a Florentine and you're not in Florence because you're in Bruges, you're dressing much more opulently because you're showing off your wealth and the wealth of your city. And you sometimes see these fascinating things where you'll have a portrait of the same woman when she's in Florence and she's wearing a modest linen veil and an expensive fabric but with no elaborate ornamentation, right? Simple gown over another gown made out of expensive fabrics, but here they are. And then you see the same woman when she's in Bruges and she's wearing one of those cone princess hats with pearls spiraling all the way up and into, you know, the lacy silk coming all down her back. And then she's got a fur-lined over gown over the other over gown over her gown. You're like, why is she wearing five gowns? Oh my god, she's wearing $300,000 worth of fabric on her body right now. What is happening? And she would not dress like that at home. She's dressing like that because she's an advertisement for the city of Florence while she's in Bruges. And she had herself painted while she was in Bruges. And that painting brought home to Florence and that shows what she wears there. And then a separate much, much more modest painting shows what she wears at home. Right? So if you look at Lorenzo de' Medici's wife Clarice Orsini, there are two portraits of her that show her as she would be in Florence with a very modest veil, white plain linen coming her head. You could mistake her for the Virgin Mary, right? And then one where she's wearing one of the Maleficent two-cone princess hat with gold spiraling all over it. And that hat is so illegal in Florence itself, even for a Medici. Well, even for Medici because they're also commoners and they're Florentines, but not for her because she's a Roman princess and we should get into the scandal around the he married a Roman what? So she's, that might be a different episode though, right? She's allowed to wear that hat. Gloria Orsini's extremely illegal hat. She could wear it. If he wore it, there would be a riot and we can talk about riots over that wedding. But I'm giving that example. So when Machiavelli says he is wearing what he wore when he was an officer of state, was it in Florence or was it when he was at the, when he's away? It might have been a very costly, very fancy doublet or a very costly, very fancy robe of a very finesse that he would not wear at home. Long robe being very likely, he's a statesman, he's not going to wear something short. Or, and I hope this is true, it's what he wears in his portraits, which is his lucco Florentino. So this is the Florentine toga. If you've ever looked at Renaissance art and you've looked at a portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici or Machiavelli or anybody, they are wearing this. It's either black with red sleeves or red with black sleeves usually. And it does not look anything like a toga whatsoever to us. To us, it looks like a red Renaissance robe or a black Renaissance robe. More like togas are white. They sometimes have a stripe. They're asymmetric. They go over one shoulder. They do it. This doesn't resemble a toga at all. But to them, it resembles a toga because it's open on the sides. It's open on the front. It's a cloak that has lots of pleating. So, there is a staggering amount of fabric in one of these things. There is fully five yards of fabric. Totally unnecessary.
That's so funny. I'm looking at one of these now. We can link to it in the description. I thought he was just very fat.
No. He's wearing five yards of fabric all bunched around himself and that's what
There's kind of a Michelin Man vibe to the outfit.
And it's a toga. It's a symbol of the classical Roman Republic faithfulness to a republic vibe, right? And the Florentines wear the lucco Florentino to symbolize their commitment to the republic and their faithfulness to it in the spirit of Livy and ancient Rome and everything that Machiavelli talks about. And under Florentine law, if you are in office, if you are holding an office in the city, you are mandated to wear this thing for a minimum of a certain number of hours a day. And there's a great book about men's fashion, and I'll put the link in, but there are even lawsuits where people are petitioning, can we have this changed so we can wear it for fewer hours in summer because it's hot and it's five yards of wool and I don't want to wear it in summer for seven hours. Can I wear it for only five hours in summer, please? And they're like, no, you must wear it for the full seven hours. And I wore one to the Renaissance Festival in 98 degree heat to see what it was like. And it was actually not that bad because it's ventilated on the sides and silk lining. So is Machiavelli wearing his court dress in the fancy expensive male equivalent of having a Maleficent cone hat? Or, and this is what I'm pretty sure it is, is Machiavelli coming in from the mucky day and putting on his toga and going into the room for men in togas. As in the last episode I talked about Alfonso the Magnificent of Naples, you know, referring to his library as a place for men in toga, not a place for men in armor.
Right. That the toga equals the philosopher, the classics. That's very likely what Machiavelli is putting on his robe of state in a Florentine sense and in a classical sense as he goes into the library.
And okay, and well that was both a delightful digression. It also captures what he was thinking about, what like this he is, he's been denied, he's been sucked away. I mean this was a globe-trotting, one of the most sophisticated globe-trotting political powers, you know, staffers. He wasn't like a king, but and he's suddenly stuck with these peasants. And so we really can get the feel of what he's trying to capture and create as he sits down to write The Prince.
The other writing that letter to Francesco Vettori, this is one of Machiavelli's oldest friends. They were elementary school students together. They went through the trials and tribulations and worst parts of their lives together. Vettori, writing to and about Machiavelli, is our witness to testify that the two of them suffered child abuse together from an abusive teacher. They shared a lot. They were very intimate. And Vettori was not kicked out of office. And Vettori at this time was in Rome as the official Florentine ambassador to Rome. And they're writing to each other about what their lives are like of these two boys whose lives were nearly identical when they were young and then split at this vital moment where they had both served their country till this moment. But Machiavelli gets labeled traitor. Vettori gets labeled trusted. So here is Vettori in Rome as an ambassador for a very controlling new regime. And his role in Rome is to be a puppet and be a meaningless ambassador who has no power because it's the direct envoys between the pope and the Medici family that are actually doing anything. And Vettori writes about his own uselessness and that he has all the pomp and the fancy palace and the servants and here he is in Rome and he has access to everything and he's doing nothing and that his life is a waste. And he spends his days walking around the gardens and then he has, you know, secretaries read to him and mostly he's concerned with love affairs. And, you know, here are his friends and his boyfriend and his girlfriend and his friends are bugging him about his sex life and he asks Machiavelli for sex life advice. Machiavelli gives him sex life advice. They're really intimate and Vettori is really talking about here's my useless life in the halls of power in contrast with Machiavelli's useless life in exile from the halls of power and how both of them feel that this shift, this conquest has taken power away from both of these men in radically different ways.
So, you know, he's asked Machiavelli, how do you spend your time in exile? Here's how I'm spending my time in Rome. And they describe to each other the garden and the library.
Wow. So the thing he's writing is The Prince, right? There's this other letter, not the same letter, but it's fun to see these letters in his sequence, right? Because, you know, and I guess for a historian, you're thrilled he's in exile because it means he has to write his family and his friends documents. We know what he's thinking. We don't know what he's thinking when he's not in exile. Yeah.
So the exile always looms large because we have the documents and then eventually when he's recalled from exile in his day of triumph and returns home, we have no idea what happened or how he felt or anything because his friends were there. He just told them, hello. So we only know about what he's doing when he's not at home. And so we're glad that he spends so little time at home. But so in 1513, so the fall is 1512 and he's exiled in 1512 and he's spending his time in the countryside and he's still deeply worried about his country. And he should be because this is when the wars of Pope Julius are beginning and these wars are going to be so complicated and so filled with betrayal and inversion that Wikipedia had to innovate a new way of having its tech boxes line up for saying who's on which side, really, because the normal way of showing who's on which side cannot describe the War of the League of Cambrai. Switched sides. It is a ludicrous war and every World War I seems sensible. And you're like, wait a minute. Englishmen are fighting Scotsmen in Italy. Why are Englishmen fighting Scotsmen in Italy? They can do that at home. They were doing that at home at the same time. It's a very ornate complicated war. In 1512 when it's very bad and Italy is filled with foreign armies invited there by a bellicose pope and everything is falling apart and then we're transitioning toward a new pope and the new military targets on the horizon. Machiavelli is terrified that his country could be conquered at any moment. And he's been terrified his whole life that his country could be conquered at any moment. And he was right to be. And it nearly was several times, twice before he turned 10. But he's very, very worried that these armies and the complexity of this war and what the new pope might be doing could create a new chaos. And yes, the city has been conquered internally by the Medici family. But what if it's conquered by something even more and beyond that because major cities have burned? Once a city is conquered, it's often conquered again and again and again because you've broken the chain of stability. He saw that happen to his neighbors like Bologna, which after its first conquest then is conquered over and over. So he's really worried about his country and his letters from exile oscillate between I'm doing this detailed analysis and here are the personalities of all the kings of Europe and here's what I think they might decide at the end of this big meeting when they're deciding what the shape of the next war would be. Right? And those are some of his letters and he also has letters. There's one on June 20th of 1513 where it really sounds like Machiavelli woke up at 3 in the morning having had nightmares about the Swiss mercenaries taking over the world. He's like, oh my god, the Swiss guys, they're so good at military crap, and we've all been hiring them to fight all of our wars forever, and what if they realize they could use their armies for their own purposes and suddenly conquer all of us, and we would be completely helpless. What do we do? And his friends write back and is like, well, they haven't thought of it yet, Machiavelli. Maybe they probably won't. I know you're kind of freaking out suddenly about this, but just don't tell them. They won't think of it on their own if they haven't after this long. Yes, they have all the best irresistible pikemen that nobody can possibly defeat, but they never try to conquer anything, which the reason being if you're Swiss, your homeland is impregnable. If you conquer something, you have to keep it. You would rather just retreat to your like
Make a lot of money, get some booty.
It's one of these things where if you're playing a game like Civ and you're like, it's not fair. They have an impregnable fortress at the middle of their territory. I can throw everything at them and it doesn't matter. That's not a balanced game. Like, no, Europe is not a balanced game in 1512. Venice and the Swiss, the two impregnable powers just get to do whatever they want. So Machiavelli is oscillating between analysis and anxiety. And then it's in December of that year that he says he's thinking of writing a little book on princes. He calls it little book
A little book on princes.
Little book on princes. So his little book on princes, which he then writes quite quickly and circulates in only two ways. One, to two intimate friends, write to Vettori, to the others that he's corresponding with. And then the other, he sends the dedication copy to the conquerors who tortured and exiled him.
Saying, you know, this is what I can do. This is the best advice I can give you if you bring me back. This is who you will have in your service. Here is my explanation of why you have the potential to stabilize this region and right, and bring peace to all of this. If you will recall me, I will be faithful.
And so first of all, it is amazing that these people tortured him. They destroyed the republic that he believed in and imposed, I mean, can we call it a dictatorship? And he's writing this book, please let me show you how to keep power.
Yep. But as we discussed in the first episode, this fact leads people to read The Prince and Machiavelli becomes the synonym for avaricious, power-hungry.
Right, yeah, after his death, right?
After his death, after because after the death of a member of one of these families who is famous, right, and is an author and is well-known, when you've had this Machiavelli in your Machiavelli family or when you've had the famous Pico in your Pico family, there then develops the kinsman, you know, usually a nephew or a son who dedicates himself to preserving and circulating that ancestor's legacy and to publishing the unpublished works and collecting and transcribing things where there might be only one copy, but it's copied over again. Yeah, it was very recent, was it since COVID, a lost work of Machiavelli was discovered in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence simply because a scholar was reading it who recognized Machiavelli's grandson's handwriting.
And we're like, oh, wait. Machiavelli's grandson is transcribing something. What is this? Oh, we have a description that Machiavelli wrote a thing on this topic. Here it is. We found it at long last here in the 2020s.
But so, but also if you did just open The Prince, or at least in translation, it seems like, oh, this is all about holding on to power, but you've just explained, I think, the context where Machiavelli is not thinking either we're going to have a dictator in Florence or we're going to have some prosperous democracy. What he's thinking is either I teach these people how to hold on to power or it is the complete collapse of the civilization I believe in.
Right, because if they don't keep power, someone will come take this. This is Italy in which city-states are being conquered and handed back and forth very frequently and he has watched that happen in Milan, he has watched that happen in Naples, he has watched that happen especially in the papal states and a process which began when Machiavelli was a young kid is that if you pull up a map of the shape of the Papal States, you will notice that there's this bite-shaped gap in the top left. And that's Tuscany. And if you look at it in the same way that somebody might look at a map of North America and be like, hey, why isn't Greenland the same color as my country? You look at as a pope this bite out of the side of your territory and you're like, that should be in the Papal States. And so there had been efforts to annex Machiavelli's country by this very dangerous neighboring power over and over throughout his lifetime. Now, why do I say dangerous neighboring power when I mean the pope, right? The pope to us doesn't feel very dangerous.
Don't think of a sweet old man who goes around talking about why war is bad. Yeah. Because we are thinking of the papal armies here. But more significantly, the papacy is, and Machiavelli doesn't analyze this, the worst monarchy to be under because popes die on an average of once a decade. And then you can't predict the successor. You can't prepare for it. You can't, you know, reach out to the crown prince and start building good relations so that he'll be merciful to your city. There is an election and then there is an unpredictable new dictator. And as often happens in electoral systems, everyone who hated the current pope will team up to elect the opposite of that pope because they hate the group person and group that's in power and they want the inverse. Right? So if you had a pope from Venice and everyone's angry at the pope from Venice, they will get together and say, what's the opposite of a pope from Venice? Well, Venice's archenemy is Genoa, so he better elect a pope from Genoa because he'll kick out all the terrible Venetians out of Rome. Right. So, you're inevitably following each decade a complete inverse of who's in and out of power and the same problem that presidential systems have, but worse, where a bunch of people have gained power, entrenched themselves a medium amount, and then you have the trauma of the new guy ripping all of that out. Everyone who's out was now in, and everyone who's in was now out. There can be no consistent policy over time. Looking at Rome's architectural center is a good way to see a microcosmic version of this problem. If you've ever visited Rome, you'll notice there's no real city center. There's no like central square, right?
You go to certain historic sites.
Yeah. Like here's Piazza Navona, it's
Pretty. Here's the Spanish Steps. It's pretty. But you're like, why?
Yeah, that's actually true. Right. You're sort of weirdly craving like where is the the bit that should be here, right? And it's not here and like the Vatican is way over there and the Colosseum is way um and there's two halves to that. One of course whereas Florence does have one, right? Florence has a center. Most cities had a center.
Um and the Renaissance half of why Rome has no center. There's a classical half. Um I'll give the classical half real fast. The classical half is simple. Rome grew from the middle as cities do. By the time you get to Constantine, this is a city of a million. It's really, really full. Then it converts to Christianity. The middle is full. You can't put your stuff there. Christianity, you must put it at the edges, which are not full. So, Christianity puts all its stuff at the edges. That's why the Vatican is over on one side, St. Lateran on the other. They build some stuff at the middle, but uh, you know, on top of old temples and things, but burial sites are mandated by law to be outside the city walls so that reconstruction doesn't worry about moving graveyards around. Uh as a result of which the Christian sites are all at the edges and then when Rome falls and the Justinian plague depopulates it and the only reason anyone wants to go to Rome is for pilgrimage the middle empties out and you get a hollow donut-shaped city because no one goes to Rome for anything but Christianity now so the middle the forum the central section is literally they're grazing sheep in the grass that has regrown what's happening today all the marble right because it's that hollow donut shape city with a population of 20,000 spread around a city built for a million.
Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance until the building boom that comes in the Renaissance when everyone is like let's do Renaissance things. Let's have palaces. All the cardinals are going to build palaces. And every pope in that period says, 'All right, and Rome needs a city center, and I pick this street, and I'm going to name it after myself, and I'm going to put a fountain with my coat of arms on it, and I'm going to move an obelisk 10 feet to the left and put my name on it. And then I'm going to command everybody to build their palaces along this street, and I'm going to be in power for 10 years, and we're going to get started, and people will have like bought land and laid stuff out, and I've built two fountains, and then I'm going to drop dead.' And then my successor is like, 'Screw that guy. I hated that guy. I'm gonna declare his street to be the street we pile horseshit on. And I'm going to pick a different spot, you know, 500 feet to the right [laughter] and name that street after me and disassemble the other one and spend 10 years building that city center. And then the next pope is like, screw those guys. Both of them are sucky. I'm going to build another street.' And so you have streets like the Via Giulia um which was chosen by Pope Julius to be the city center street and everyone started building things on it. And then later Pope you know Alexander literally flipped his palace around backward just so that the stables where the horse manure piles up could be on Julius's street so that he could have the satisfaction of knowing that he was dumping horseshit on the name of that hated loathsome man.
Wow. Um, so Rome has no city center because every pope dismantles what every previous pope made and uses like the first half of his time and political capital on dismantling what the earlier pope made.
And what is true of architecture is also true of state structure. Every pope tries to reorder Rome and reorder the papal states and look at the cities governed by the papacy and saying, 'Okay, the Da Varano family of Camerino and the Baglioni families of um Perugia, they suck. They keep having feuds. Let's banish them. We're going to put in better people. We're going to get rid of the Manfredi of Faenza and Imola. We're going to put in my nephew because I trust him and and and my niece-in-law. I trust her. Uh, we're going to put in stable people that we trust.' And then the next pope comes in is like, I don't want my predecessor's nephew and niece-in-law in charge of stuff. I got to get rid of them and put in my nephew and niece-in-law. So, there keep being abortive efforts to restructure the middle of Italy and to say we want to get rid of the feuding Montecchi and Capuleti equivalent, uh, selfish, bloody-minded, feuding families and put in something new. But something new is inevitably somebody's nephew or crony. And then the next person strips it out and overthrows the next person strips it out and overthrows it. And by the time Machiavelli is observing his neighbors, every neighbor of Florence within the Papal States has had five or six uproarings and replacements of their government uh at the whim of popes in living memory. And roughly speaking, like every other pope is loyal to Florence or at least many of them are from Florence.
You know, friendly to Florence or unfriendly to Florence.
It'll flip-flop. So from Machiavelli's standpoint, at least half the popes want to destroy Florence, take over Florence, etc. The other half are locals, but maybe locals. He doesn't...
Well, I [clears throat] mean, there haven't been Florentine popes at this point yet.
Oh, that hasn't happened yet. That...
There haven't been Florentine...
Well, except for of course exciting antipope John the 23rd, the pirate pope, um who was friends with Sigismondo Malatesta and he was pope for a while but he got depoped in one of these schisms.
Okay. All right. The Florentine popes are later.
