Inventing the Renaissance: Ada Palmer

Yes, that's one of the things we might get to, which is really pretty interesting. It turns out that the Renaissance economy—although part of the point is there really wasn't a Renaissance, but anyway—was a lot more interesting and complicated than we think.

Right. What I mean is this ongoing and cumulative process of inventing and reinventing and re-reinventing having a name for this point in time. And you know, we talk about different historical eras and for some of them there's a crisp, clear date and event that lets us define something, right? Everyone can agree that the French Revolution was an event and that it happened in a certain set of years and we know what we mean when we say French Revolution. But the Renaissance is the inverse of that.

You can tell that this is not in any traditional way an historical era, is that if I had a campus and I walk around and I ask my different colleagues, when is the Renaissance, right? If I go out of my office and turn right and get to the English department and say when is the Renaissance, they'll say, oh, the Renaissance is getting going by 1550 and you know Shakespeare is the core of the Renaissance, so when Hamlet debuts in 1600, that's the Renaissance. But if I turn left out the same hallway and end up where my colleagues in Romance Languages are and ask the Italianists when is the Renaissance, they'll say, oh, you know, the Renaissance is 1250 and Dante and it's really getting going and its peak by 1400 and it's really starting to end by 1450. So that 1500 is the tail end of it. You know, when Shakespeare's grandparents haven't been born yet.

So that's your cue that the Renaissance isn't a specific set of events or an era in time. Instead, it's the idea that there is this transitional phase between a fully pre-modern world and our world in which some change or a set of changes started that somehow propel modernity and defined the difference between our non-modern predecessors and us. But everybody's idea about what those things are and when they happen and why they happen and which things define modernity are different. Because what this really is is about modernity and very little to do with the reality of the time period we project this onto.

I would say the Germans, the English in collaboration with them. Yes. But a lot of the first major theorists of the Renaissance and Renaissance culture and cultural history in the 19th century are German. And core to that is legitimacy, right? Every regime, every cultural movement, every business, every person who wants to be important needs sources of legitimacy. And your sources of legitimacy can be past success. They can be scientific studies saying that you're right. They can be your own fame. They can be different sorts of things, but one major source of legitimacy is history. If you can claim to be the continuation of some past thing that we think is good, you can make yourself seem legitimate.

This is why so many capital buildings are shaped like ancient Roman temples because they claim and project the legitimacy and stability that we imagine of ancient Rome, right? This is also, I mean, legitimacy in lots of directions like what is a zoo? It is showing that you have the international trade connections necessary to acquire all of these animals. A city having a zoo proves that it has cultural capital. It is also a form of legitimacy. But one major form of legitimacy is claiming past bits of history that we like and saying that you are the continuation of them.

So in the 19th century when nationalism especially is on the rise, there's a lot of discussion of which bits of history get to be claimed by different successors. And you know, rationally we would say, well, early Italy gets to be claimed by later Italy because they're the same place, they're the descendants of the same people. But lots of projects get made to claim, you know, no, London is the true new Athens because London is continuing the values of Socrates by having parliament or blah blah blah, right? One can make these interesting rhetorical arguments that even if there's no direct cultural continuity between you and something, you're somehow claiming its continuity.

And there's an effort on the part especially of Protestant Europe, so the Germans and the Anglosphere, to claim the good parts of the Renaissance for them, which is where this myth of a secular or secularizing or anti-Catholic or anti-church Renaissance comes from. It's part of the goal of distancing the Renaissance from Catholicism in order to claim that Catholicism somehow poisons Mediterranean Europe and is why the true successors of the Renaissance aren't Mediterranean Europe, which was poisoned by Catholicism, but it's Northern Europe, which is free of Catholic poison and therefore the true values of free-thinking, free-spirited celebration of the dignity of man, etc., are thriving there.

This is a rhetorical project of the 19th century, but it's also a midpoint, right? Because there had already been a bunch of different efforts to claim the Renaissance before that point and yet others after, although our modern one very much begins then.

Right. It means a grammar teacher who's teaching Latin and Greek in a new kind of middle school/high school curriculum. And indeed a lot of trouble with understanding this period, or rather a lot of opportunities to turn this period into what you want it to be, come from false friends. Right? This moment where a word resembles something and it means something else. One of the most telling ones is in Machiavelli.

And all through the 19th century into the 20th there were lots of celebrations of Machiavelli as, you know, a theorist of democracy and a defender of the people. And Machiavelli talks a huge amount about the popolo and the importance of the enfranchisement and power of the popolo and how a republic thrives when the popolo is fully enfranchised and fully involved in the administration of government. People celebrate this as one of the first theorizations of democracy and therefore that it allows modern democracy to claim the Renaissance and say the reason the Renaissance golden age happened was the arrival of democracy and democratic thinking. This is one of many ways to claim the Renaissance.

However, having translated a bit more carefully, popolo means the 5% of the population that are the top economic elite hereditary leaders of the merchant guild system. It doesn't mean the people, it means the 5%. Right? So even SPQR, where the original sort of which the Romans themselves were busy appropriating their version of a distant past. But the P in SPQR for Rome was not popolo. It was not the populace in the way of the mass populace, right? It's the Roman citizen elite populace.

And for the Renaissance cities, this is for Florence, this is an even smaller group, even a smaller slice, right? And it's still important, it's still a very interesting set of political theories for him to be advancing, but it's an oligarchic political theory, not a democratic political theory. But in the 19th century it gets read as a democratic political theory, and if you simply translate the same sentences differently, you can get something that feels like a democratic political theory. And this is one of many different ways people try to claim, you know, the Renaissance was a golden age. The thing we are doing is the continuity of it.

And to briefly explain one other so that people have two examples to put side by side. You know, one of the theories about what causes this great burst of art and culture and discovery and all of the stuff that we see in museums and love to go visit on the Grand Tour was the advance of modern finance and the beginning of new methods of lending money, new methods of insurance, and that finance as we know it. Money lending on a sophisticated level begins in the very late 1100s and is really getting going by the 1300s, and thus that it is banking that causes and enables all of the fruitfulness of the Renaissance.

Thus claim books written in the mid-20th century. Capitalism is what caused the Renaissance. And this theory is incredibly popular during the Cold War when you can say therefore the capitalist West is the continuation of the golden Renaissance and the communist enemies are the continuation of the bad backward medieval Dark Ages. Right? You can see how rhetorically useful and legitimating that argument is. And so that suggestion of what caused the Renaissance was really popular for a while. At other points, other theories of what caused the Renaissance, such as democratization, are popular with people who want to claim that democracy is definitely the path forward of the future. Whatever X is, when X caused the Renaissance, if you run across an X that you can claim to be the continuation of, this is really useful to you.

But I mean, there are two reasons that it seems to have left us so many more. One is that the rhetoric of the Renaissance as a golden age kicks in even during the Renaissance itself. It's the Renaissance that invents itself as a golden age and immediately afterward. So as early as the 17th and the 18th centuries, having Renaissance stuff made you part of this idea of a new golden age. It made you legitimate. Therefore, if you had Renaissance stuff, you kept your Renaissance stuff. If you had older stuff, you were like, ah, we'll knock that medieval church down and build a new church. We don't care. But the Renaissance one we're keeping.

So a much higher percentage of Renaissance cultural stuff survived than the percentage of medieval stuff that survives. Not just because it's more recent. You know, more Renaissance stuff survives than from the century right after. A disproportionate amount of Renaissance art survived because we decided that having Renaissance art was proof of legitimacy. So everyone kept it. And therefore we have an outsized footprint of it. And when you go to museums, there's the Renaissance stuff always in the center on display as one of the treasures of the museum. There would be more medieval stuff if people had preserved it better.

Yeah. So this is an arena in which we understand, you know, what causes this vast flourishing of art and culture. The answer is desperation in the effort to survive. So when you're an Italian city state, that means you're a large, sackable, wealthy city that needs to defend itself, but that doesn't have the way Paris does a vast kingdom around it from which it can levy troops. So you have all the vulnerabilities of it's desirable for people to conquer you, but very few defenses. It's nearly impossible to raise an army domestically. You have to hire mercenary armies to defend you. Mercenary armies will never care as much as home citizens about defending the city. They're bribable. They're inherently a man who can be bought can be bought by the other side.

Additionally, as banking gets going, these cities become staggeringly wealthy. And the major northern Italian city states of Florence, Milan, Venice, these are three of the six largest and wealthiest cities in Europe, the others being Naples in the south of Italy and then Paris. London will eventually catch up but hasn't yet. And that means you have these vast centers of wealth, huge banks, wealthy banking families who literally have piles of bags of gold in their basement, right?

And also all Italian city states hate their neighbors. Every city state hates the ones next door because they've been having a 400-year feud. This is the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. And they're living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet in which all of the noble families hate each other and are much more interested in knifing each other in the street than they are in any form of justice. And it's very easy to go to Lord Montague and say, hey, will you help us take over the city? In return, we'll murder all the Capulets for you. And you're like, this is a very tempting offer. So Italy is full of treachery, disloyalty, and danger, as well as enormous bags of gold in the basement.

Florence, as the capital of the textile industry, you know, the center of big wool, the biggest industry in Europe at the time, is especially wealthy and also especially friendless. First, because of their goofy political system in which in order to prevent any of their local nobles like the Montecchi Capuleti from taking over the city, their solution was to murder all the local nobles, cut their heads off, put them on pikes, put them on spikes around the city center, burn their houses down, rake salt into the earth, and build a new city hall on top, which is the beautiful piazza that everyone takes photos of when we're in the city, right?

And to make a new government in which only the merchant elites, right, the popolo, the 5%, extreme wealthy families. These are hereditary families, but they're not noble-blooded.

Yeah. Which means nobody in the city of Florence is actually of diplomatic rank, right? Diplomats have to be noble-blooded. And also Florence has this international reputation as the center of permissive sexuality, perversion, and sodomy. And to Florentine is the verb for anal sex in six different European languages. Right? So this is the most sackable city in the world. Right? It has no friends. Everyone considers it to be a pit of scum and villainy. It is enormous amounts of wealth just sitting right there, right? And nobody will think that you've really done very much harm to anyone who matters if you march on this merchant republic.

So, how do you defend yourself if you're this merchant republic? Well, imagine for a moment now that you are the French envoy on your way to Rome. There's been a new pope elected. You have to go deliver the usual greetings from the king and give a speech in Latin for an hour that says, congratulations, you're the pope. Our king is very powerful and he's so glad you're the pope. This is what your job is on the way. And you're stopping off at different cities en route and you're stopping by Florence and there's nobody in this city who's even of sufficient rank to actually talk to you, right? They're all of the same rank as your valet whose job it is to lead your horse. There's nobody of worthy rank to host you for the night.

So, you're going to be staying with your dad's banker because you at least have his address. But this is going to be sort of the most humiliating night of your life because you're spending your time slumming it with your servants' kinsmen. But instead, as you approach this large, fierce walled city, you see this enormous dome arching up above of an architectural challenge and complexity like you've never seen. And you know, you've seen domes and cathedrals at home, and you know that building a dome a fifth this size is the great architectural achievement of your whole city. So, what even is this?

And as you enter, you're coming past buildings where you see bronze statues that look so lifelike, it's as if they're about to spring to life. You've never seen something like that before, except, you know, just the severed hand of an ancient Roman bronze that your father happened to have in his collection at home. But these are huge and intact and new. That technology doesn't exist. Nobody can do that, right? And you keep going and you get as far as your banker's house and your servants knock on the door as you arrive and he comes out and humbly greets you at the door and apologizes that his humble home is unworthy to host your excellency. And you're like, yes, indeed you are, but whatever.

And he brings you inside, but once you're inside, the space is like no space you've ever been in with white lights streaming in through these luminously constructed rounded arches. And wait a minute, wait a minute. You have seen this once. It looks like the Roman ruins in the backyard of your father's castle when you were growing up, but there are no buildings like that anymore. We don't know how to do that. And all around the courtyard are busts of the Roman emperors in order. And above them are portraits of this banker guy and the members of his family. And in the middle there are yet more astonishingly beautiful Roman bronzes. And except wait, they're not Roman bronzes. They're new bronzes. And they're extremely naked and extremely distracting.

And in the corner, a bunch of men in weird robes speaking a language you've never heard before. You say, who are those guys? And your host says, oh, they're Platonists. They're speaking ancient Greek. And you say, but ancient Greek is lost. Most of Plato is lost. We don't have any of these things. And he says, of course we have lots of Plato here. Look, here's my grandson, Lorenzo. He's just written a poem in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul. Would you like to hear him recite it? And now there's a little boy reciting a poem at you in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul. And you're like, where am I? None of this is possible.

That's the moment when Cosimo de' Medici turns to you and says, would you like to make an alliance with Florence? Right? And you can either say no and you can march in here with the armies of the king and you can sack this and you can take the gold home and burn it and France will be rich and all this will be gone. Or you can say yes, let's make an alliance. Send me a bronzemith and an architect and a Platonist and a Greek scholar and we're going to do the court in France like this. And then the next time an envoy comes from Portugal or Castile or England, they're going to feel as uncultured and worthless as I feel right now. They've turned on their head the hierarchy of who is cultured and who isn't. And they've managed to win by the self-defense mechanism of the culture victory instead of the military victory.

Well, first of all, there's just the combination of extreme inequality and a hierarchical society with republican manners.

Yeah. The necessity of performing an egalitarian status, right? If you are from the wealthiest family in this city, you dress identically to your peers who are barely at the bottom of the top of the economic totem pole. And when you see all of these paintings of Florence and everyone is wearing exactly the same red robe, everyone is wearing exactly the same red robe. There is a performance of egalitarianism even as there is the enjoyment of other details. And I think it is a very American modern thing which I can hammer home with a contemporary example.

There was an exhibit called First Kings of Europe about the archaeology of the early Balkans that was at the Field Museum last year. I think it was a great exhibit. And it was about the origins of inequality fundamentally and the origins of kingship out of the beginnings of wealth inequality. And in the gift shop, because the whole exhibit was about inequality, they made two T-shirts and two microbrew special-made-for-the-exhibit beers. And the beers were supposed to reconstruct the beer drunk by the kings and the beer drunk by the peasants at the same time. So you could get the king's beer or the commoner's beer. And then you could get a T-shirt with the king's beer label on it or the commoner's beer label on it. And I talked with the gift shop people and they said, yeah, and everybody buys the king's beer and the commoner's shirt.

And it's important here for us to remember that all the other city republics that we compare them to, right, Venice and Siena and Bologna and Genoa, all had nobility. They were republics, but they had nobility. And they had a noble Senate. The way ancient Rome had a Senate consisting of noble families. The sons of the noble families would automatically enter the Senate. The different republics had different structures for sometimes enabling non-noble participation or sometimes enabling new nobles to join the elites.

I was actually just doing a close study of this, that there is a very direct correlation between how dysfunctional a Renaissance republic was and whether it lacked a mechanism to allow new money to get power. When there wasn't a mechanism to let new money move into the elite status within the republic, then the new money would break the republic. But when there was a mechanism, when the one or two families a generation that rise to super wealth through investment have a way to then join the old elite, then things would be stable for hundreds of years.