Ada Palmer on "Crises" and the Renaissance

Well, they usually braid together.

I think it's about 650 pages actually.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and also boring as well is misleading, right? Because you say early modern, people think so people are taking off their top hats and starting to have early cars. You know, early modern sounds like 19th century at the earliest, right? And if we use it for 1400, everyone is just, what are you even talking about? And you remember there's that whole chapter in the book about the word modern and how terrible a word it is and how we use it for different things in every arena. So, modern art isn't the same period as modern architecture, which isn't the same period as modern history, which isn't the same period as modern baseball or modern computing or modern fashion. And modern can mean anything from, you know, 2020s, if you're talking about modern computing to 27,000 BC if you're talking about modern genetics, right? Yeah.

So, people don't usually believe this, but Inventing the Renaissance, even though it ended up as a 600-page book, began as a very long blog post. And when it hit 40,000 words, I realized it wasn't a blog post. And I kept going until I finished my thought. And I couldn't believe when I found a publisher for it. They were like, "Yeah, keep going. Make it longer. It's great." And I was like, "Really? Every publisher in existence wants short things." And they're like, "No, we want a big fat tome." And I'm like, "Okay." So I gave them a big fat tome. Because it was born from the fact that during COVID I and many many colleagues who work on the Black Death and its aftermath got many iterations of the same terrible question. The question was if the Black Death caused the Renaissance, does that mean COVID is going to cause an economic boom?

And it's such a complicated bad question that rests on so many interesting and complicated false assumptions about what the Black Death was, what the Middle Ages were, what the Renaissance was, how quickly it moved from one to the other, what economic booms are versus what a golden age is, even how history works. That after a couple of attempts of giving a journalist a short answer to it, I realized I couldn't do a short answer and I started writing what I intended as a long blog post to be sort of a long answer that I could refer journalists to. But then that got way too long. So instead, it's a book.

We have this idea somehow that dark ages or crashes or disasters burn everything down and then stimulate growth and then things grow back afterward like a forest after a wildfire. And you get this a lot in contemporary ideas about what the fall of Rome was or what the Black Death was, what the dark ages were, that somehow the dark age was necessary for there to then be a golden age afterward. And you get this odd accelerationist idea that somehow if we want a better future, the best way is to burn down everything we have now. Because if we burn it down, we'll have a dark age and then we'll have a golden age. I remember actually when the book was coming out, there was an interview with Trump where he actually explicitly said that his economic plan was, well, there's going to be some pain and a bit of a dark age, but then there's going to be a golden age, which shows the way this idea of creation via destruction is in the way some people think about economics and think about politics.

And to explain why it's not just that it doesn't work that way, but that the concepts it's based on are themselves false. There's no such thing as a dark age and there never has been. And there's really no such thing as a golden age and there never has been. Requires a longer unpacking of but then why do we think that these things did exist? Why did my high school textbook tell me that the Renaissance was a golden age? Why was it lying to me? And it's like this is a really useful lie. And going into why it's such a useful lie is a long story that's not just about the Renaissance period. It's about the 19th century and the 20th century and why the idea of this golden age keeps being useful for different political purposes at different moments in time. And therefore, every reputation historians come up with is overridden by but it's so useful if it's true. So we still want to pretend that it's true.

I often joke with fellow historians that the 19th century is the real villain of every story and they always laugh and agree. And it's half because of the colonialism and the industrialization and the other disasters that happened in the 19th century. But the other half of it is that it's the 19th century that messes up our project as historians in basically every field. And the practice of history as we know it now is a 19th century origin. You know, things like Renaissance studies originate in the 19th century and they're all born out of a deeply shaped nationalism. And this is why we have these funny terms like the Italian Renaissance versus the Northern Renaissance versus the French Renaissance versus the English Renaissance because each of those countries constructed its own idea of this excellent golden age that was somehow the beginning of modernity in which they were able to celebrate their special thing that their country did.

Which is why the dates of when Renaissance is completely different in every country. And if you're talking to somebody who studies England and you say, "When is Renaissance?" You know, I can go out of my office and turn right down the hallway to the English department and ask them, "When is the Renaissance?" And they'll say, "Well, the Renaissance is Shakespeare and you know, the heights of English theater and then Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth." So, you know, the height of the Renaissance is 1600 when Hamlet debuts and it's getting going by 1550. And it's having its little antecedence and, you know, preview of the Renaissance in the early 1500s, but really it doesn't start until 1550. But if I turn left down the same hallway and I go to the romance languages department and I knock on the door and I'm like when is Renaissance? The Italianists are like oh the Renaissance is Dante and is you know the 1300s and it's really getting going by 1350 and the you know early first half of 1400s is the best part and it's really winding down after 1500 and it's over by 1550. So in one part of the hallway, the Renaissance is over by the time it's begun in the other end of the same hallway because each country is celebrating the moment when they had their hero. They had their great thing that they could claim was a break from everything that was before it, which was somehow bad, and the beginning of everything after it, which is modernity, and was somehow good.

Which is one of these hints, the fact that nobody can agree about the dates of when the Renaissance is, that tells us that this is a really made-up thing, right? Everyone can agree the dates of the French Revolution. The French Revolution definitely occurred at a time. We can argue about its causes. We can argue about its consequences. We can argue about the most important phases of it. But like it has concrete dates. Everyone believes it's real. It's when you get these amorphous concepts like renaissance that begins vaguely within 200 years and ends vaguely within another set of 200 years that you have your warning sign that this is constructed by in this case as is usually the case with history the nationalist projects of the 19th century all wanting to be able to claim this excellent achievement as being a national achievement.

Well, we can talk about Italy the way we talk about Europe, right? We can talk about it as a region. We can't talk about it as a nation or something that has shared national identity. And I think that's a useful way to think about it. And I'm always intentionally giving my students letters where, you know, somebody from Florence is complaining about weird foreigners like people from Venice and Milan to get them to hammer in that this is a region and that it's very much not a national identity, but it's still a region and that has meaning in the same way that Europe as a region has meaning and people can feel that being European has some component of identity beyond being from beyond the European world.

Yeah, but that's just actually untrue because enrollment at them went up and their funding went up and their libraries got bigger. And every century moving forward from the 1100s there are more scholastics and more universities. I always have fun talking with people who come out of the philosophy department. They're like, "Yeah, scholasticism, which is a medieval movement." And I'm like, "Yeah, the vast majority of scholastic books were written in the 17th century. Doesn't sound very medieval to me." But it's funny. We have this idea that when movements come after each other, they must replace each other. And people talk about scholasticism being replaced by humanism.

In the same way that people will ask me, you know, oh, when printing comes in, when do people stop making manuscripts? And the answer to when do people stop making manuscripts is walk into a Barnes & Noble, how many blank books are there for sale in that Barnes & Noble? We're making more manuscripts now than we ever did in the Middle Ages. We never stopped making manuscripts. They are a technology that coexist alongside printed books and then fulfill different services and the functions of them get passed back and forth. So similarly, new intellectual movements like that of the umisti, the humanists in the Renaissance come in and they debate with and compete with and are employed alongside and talk to and respond to the books of the Scholastics. But more and more and more scholastic stuff is being put out over the whole course of the Renaissance.

Well let's talk a tiny bit more about the 19th century first because I think that helps answer the second question. Because as you'll recall when I talk about the reason we keep inventing and reinventing renaissance is that we get to pick something to say is the cause of a change and as you know I use the term X factor for this. Renaissance is a period in which a historian will make the claim that some thing changes, some X factor comes in that sparks acceleration and transformation and that is the end of a period of sort of a flat wiggly line in a graph being transformed into one where the graph is going up caused by some change and then people will make a different claim about what that change is but it's always an X factor and whatever that is causes the beginning of modernity and the move toward where we are now and these claims teams will pick different things.

So sometimes you'll have a claim that banking is what caused the renaissance. And there were major innovations in insurance and money lending and the ability to deposit money in one city and take it out in another which enabled finance which enabled large-scale investment and movement of goods which is what enables all of these you know high quality production of metal and fabric and the economy is finally booming again and the roads are finally grinding again and we have a large interconnected economy the way the Roman Empire did and that that stimulates all of the growth which in turn enables the idea and the art and etc. and that banking is what causes the Renaissance and therefore that capitalism is really what causes the Renaissance and the excellence of the Renaissance proves that capitalism is best and will inevitably triumph over its communist rivals. And boy was this thesis popular during the cold war, right? Because it can be used to justify one political stance as the correct one whose trajectory is the modern trajectory toward excellence. And then you compare your enemies to the bad, no good, communal, in this case middle ages.

And then a different historian will have different data that suggests that one of the things that causes the Renaissance is republican debates that are going on in the city republics in Italy and that it's Florence and Venice and Siena that are republics rather than monarchies where citizens are getting together to debate and discuss liberty and abstract philosophical concepts of how to rule best and how to be the best citizen. And that this stimulates new ideas and political economy and that that causes everything and therefore democracy is what causes the renaissance and ends the bad no good middle ages and democracy is therefore the correct trajectory for modern life and these are just two examples both of those are 19th or early 20th century examples where people will suggest a different thing that is the cause of this everything getting better and will therefore use it to make a claim that their faction their political party, their momentum, their country, their language group, their corporation with its logo that invokes something renaissance about it, whatever it is, is somehow a continuation of the X factor that caused the end of the dark ages and the beginning of this movement toward modernity, which is why every time a historian comes in with even a very moderate argument of, hey, here's data about banks. Looks like there was banking at the beginning of the Renaissance. It gets transformed via journalists and then pundits into a much more extravagant claim that X is the one and only cause of the transformation from a stagnant no good period into a golden and forward moving age.

So that's what gets made out of the idea of Renaissance. When we then look for the origin of the word, the word itself is an 18th century word that is come up with to describe the artistic output and all those beautiful things that you go to the art gallery to see which are part of the grand tour which is a mandatory part of the education of a wealthy gentleman or lady in that period and in the 19th century. When you go before that to discussions of can there be a kind of a rebirth or cultural transformation in the period itself then they're not thinking about banking they're not thinking about economics they're not thinking about political change in the same way we are and this is where after pointing out that golden age is a propagandistic term dark age is a propagandistic term the whole concept of this is popular and famous because of propaganda I then say okay if carve away the propaganda and try to see what's there. What are they actually talking about? Because I do think there's an important change in the Renaissance though is largely one that continues trends that are already starting in the middle ages which were themselves very dynamic. And for everything someone says is new in the Renaissance, some of medievalist will pop up and say, "Here's an example of it in 915." But rarer and then they become more and more concentrated over time as things continue.

Zooming into the Renaissance itself, what I see on paper is actually desperation and then desperate measures in response to desperate times. Right? So there's a wonderful letter that Machiavelli received in 1506 from a friend of his, Bento, who was commanding the Florentine armies at the time and they knew each other through military background. Machiavelli had been writing a history of the decade they just lived through which is the decade that spans the year 1500. And his friend wrote to him and said, "Machiavelli, you must finish your history of this period. But because without a good history of it, future generations will never believe how bad it was and they will never forgive us for having lost and destroyed so much and defended ourselves so poorly."

He's talking about the decade in which Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo carves a David and in which Raphael is also doing the first of his famous and beautiful fresco work. This is the peak if we look at the artistic output that's in museums. This is the peak of what makes us when we visit Florence or Venice look around and say, "Wow, this looks like the city of a golden age." But being on the ground, it felt like an apocalypse. And ironically to us, a huge part of the reason is progress. Progress was having the bad side effects that progress does. There had been lots of technological progress. It means artillery was bigger. City walls get blasted down faster. There had been political progress which meant centralization of power in more coherent states. They could therefore raise larger armies and fight bigger wars.

Commerce was booming and people were traveling with goods back and forth. All of the roads and ships were starting to interconnect again which meant diseases move faster. Outbreaks happen more often and the life expectancy goes significantly down. From the medieval average of 35 to the Italian city republics of the Renaissance which have the average life expectancy of 18. 35 down to 18. And people are always like, "Whoa, that number is too low. You're forgetting to exclude child infant mortality." I'm like, "Actually, both of those numbers include infant mortality." So the number is low, but the change is the really important part, right? That it got that much deadlier. And most of those deaths are from one of two causes. One is children dying of disease between the ages of three and 12. Not in infancy, but in the period after you've survived the really risky time, but outbreaks of the pox and everything else are happening much more often in vulnerable childhood. More and more kids are not making it to adulthood. The other half, men dying in war and from murder in the political chaos and factionalism and feuding of what really was a living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet for 300 years is a good characterization of Italian history in which there are constant family on family and faction on faction feuds within cities causing strife and in which if Romeo commits a murder his family absolutely expects they can just go to the prince of Verona and demand that he be let off without consequences and he will be because he's from one of the top families of the city.

So Italy was suffering from disunity, civil war, city-on-city war, increased disease, larger scale armies, and Italy especially was extra vulnerable to warfare and chaos because it was the best place to have a war. Italy is warm and it's agriculturally rich, so you can loot all the food your army needs as you're going through. You don't have to worry about having all the extra wagons to carry food with you, which is really difficult in this period. And the winters aren't that bad. And all these cities hate each other. So, if you're attacking one city, you can usually get its neighbors to team up with you to help sack it. And then you can turn around and betray them and sack them later, but it's too late. And these cities are incredibly rich because Italy is the center of the biggest mercantile industries of this period. I mean, we think about big oil and big auto. So, for them, it's big wool, big olive oil, and big finance eternally, all of which have their center in Italy. And so, these cities have literal piles of gold in their bankers' basements. They have no allies. They have tiny armies because they're city-states without very much countryside. So, they have small populations, can't raise large armies.

If you're a king and you want to conquer something, do you want to go after the tiny friendless city state that's literally filled with piles of gold, or do you want to go after anything else? Right? There's a wrong answer to this question. You want to have your wars in Italy. In fact, the wars of this period are named the Italian wars. They're named that by the French during the Reformation, French Wars of Religion when old knights would sit around and say, "Oh, remember the good old days of the Italian wars back when our wars were in Italy? Man, the wars in Italy were so much better than having to have wars here at home. We want to go back to Italy, not for vacation, but to have a war." Yeah, like the good old days wars. So if you are living in the place that's the best place to have a war and life expectancies are going down and all your neighbors hate each other and within your city factions are feuding each other so that someone like Machiavelli sees blood literally run in the streets multiple times in his lifetime during feuds and regime changes.

You're desperate for something that seems to promise stability and strength. And so starting actually 100 years before Machiavelli in the late 1300s, the most famous name associated with this is Petrarch, but mostly because everyone else who was part of the movement died of the Black Death and he was the survivor. So he's the famous name. Thought that the means to try to unify and pacify Italy was to look backward to ancient Rome and say this was a period when Italy was stable and was strong and was unified. We conquered the French and the Germans and Iberia then instead of the other way around. Can we figure out what they did and replicate it? Can we imitate the arts of the ancients? And we are familiar with the fact that the Renaissance starts imitating ancient architecture, ancient anatomy study doing the beautiful sculptures and one-point linear perspective comes back. So they're doing these beautiful perspective paintings all of that coming from ancient manuscripts. We're used to the technology side but their focus is more at first on the education side.

Can we reconstruct the library of books that raised Cicero and that raised Seneca and that raised Julius Caesar who was brave and able to unite people and be a charismatic leader. Can we reconstruct the library that raised Brutus not the one who killed Caesar but the ancestor whose example he was trying to live up to when he took that brave action. The first Roman Brutus who when he was consul his sons plotted to take over the republic and make him king and he executed his own sons for treason for trying to make him king. Imagine living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and imagining Lord Montague sentencing Romeo to death for trying to take over the republic. No, it would never happen. So you read about these ancient figures who cared more about Rome than they did about their sons or their own wives. And it sounded like that was the hopeful lifeline. If we could reconstruct these libraries that raised the ancients, maybe the next generation of our rulers, the next generation of merchant princes and dukes and counts and young Romeo and young Tybalt and young Juliet will have the ethics and the virtues of Seneca and Cicero who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the state and maybe then they will rule wisely, be more successful and cause unity.

And so desperate is Italy for this project that even though this is a period when a single manuscript book costs as much as a house in terms of the labor and materials costs to produce. So that building a library is a multi-multi-million dollar undertaking that only the ultra wealthy can do. The ultra wealthy do it because it's that or get sacked by the French. So, you invest your money in ships heading east to Constantinople to look for rare manuscripts, in expeditions over the Alps to look for rare manuscripts, in copying and constructing the libraries and raising the next generation on Greek and Latin and Plato with the hope of raising princes who will act like the ancients did. And instead they get Cesare Borgia and political disasters and murders and feuds and terrible battle popes and everything gets worse not better over the century and a half of trying to apply this method.

And Machiavelli is of the generation that grew up on this hard-won, hard-earned set of books, saw the terrible wars that were fought getting worse, not better, and said, "Actually, I think we're not in a golden age. We've done all the things we thought might make a golden age. We've got all the art. We've even got all the books. We've raised the princes on them. The princes are murdering and betraying each other. And this has not made Italy more unified. It has made it bloodier. We need to stop and we need to rethink."

So there was a project to make a golden age. There was an effort to make a golden age. They sat down and said we need to imitate Rome. We need to make ourselves into a golden age. And they tried and they then judge themselves to have failed. And that judgment is happening in the early 1500s. And then they start trying to figure out new ways and new methods questioning everything, reading more. And it's no coincidence that it's the end of the 1500s and the beginning of the 1600s that gets us the scientific method and new approaches and Galileo and Descartes and Francis Bacon all of whom are saying okay well the previous era didn't work what new thing can we try in other words the Renaissance was by its own measure a failure but it was the failure that made the libraries with which we figured out that we were wrong about so many things with which we were then able to try again and arrive eventually at the scientific method and the things that do move us into the world we're in.

So the Renaissance is a step toward modernity. Is it a beautiful time to be alive? No. It's a time that felt like living through an apocalypse, much like today feels like living through an apocalypse. And we don't know whether 200 years from now people will decide that this is a golden age. Maybe they will. They'll look at the sparkly stuff we leave in museums and they'll make their decisions based on that and not on our lived experience just like we did about the Renaissance. But they will be correct as we are about the Renaissance that it's a time of change and a whole lot of stuff happening. And that that stuff is going to have effects which will have more effects which will have more effects which will result in change. Will it result in what we wanted? No. The Renaissance didn't result in what they wanted either. But the stuff that was created, the technologies, the discoveries, the libraries gave the next generations the tools to do better and to do better and to do better, which is a useful and I think for us powerful reminder that so long as we work hard to make things, we work hard to make knowledge, we work hard to share that knowledge, we work hard to improve education, we are laying the foundations for later generations to do even better than we are. And what we need to then not do is burn it down because that just slows it down.

Which we truly didn't. Yeah.

But they're using it to different purposes and you know Ovid and Virgil and Boethius are the backbone of education throughout the Middle Ages and everyone is studying Latin and everyone knows the names of all the Caesars but they have different ideas about what this is for and they have especially different ideas about what study and learning are for. And the Renaissance guys come in with this. Our current political system does not work. The purpose of study is to transform our ruling class and make them into different people.

Not as is more often articulated in the Middle Ages, the purpose is to have an educated ruling class and educated priestly class who will lead us well and teach us how to go to heaven. And in which a lot of the goal is heaven and the Renaissance people come along and say heaven is still the powerful and important force. Religion is still at the center of what we're doing. But we're also thinking that making you virtuous will make you a more successful ruler on earth if you imitate all the classical things. And so also we pretend the way we're imitating classical things is the right way to imitate the classical things. The way our medieval predecessors were imitating classical things was bad and wrong way of imitating the classical things. And medieval people are very just and medievalists are very justly justified in saying but you know the whole crowning of Charlemagne calling him Caesar discussing this as the new Roman Empire that happened in 800 AD extremely medieval extremely imitative of Rome keeping you know following Roman law having Roman law codes.

We're doing all the Roman stuff all the way through but all it takes is someone to come along and say you haven't really been doing this. The way I'm doing it is the really doing this way for everyone to be like, "Oh, I guess we haven't really been doing this because we haven't been doing that one thing that the new guys are doing." So, for example, if you look at Renaissance Latin, you know, classical Latin was a spoken language that people spoke. Medieval Latin was simpler than that because it's a second language for everybody. And if you've been in language class, you know perfectly well that every so often your teacher is like, "We're going to learn how to say because." Here are three different ways to say because. This one is really difficult. It uses the subjunctive. This one is also really difficult. It uses participles and tenses. The third one is really simple and you just use a word that means because and then you have another clause afterward. You're like, "Well, the third one is way easier than the other two." And then you have your homework and it's like translated a thing that says because and you're like I want to use the third one because it's way easier than the other two. That's what medieval Latin is. It's just people being like well I'm going to say this the simple way because the other two are necessarily complicated and it's a second language for everyone. So it becomes a simplified version of the languages. It uses the simplest grammar. Right?

So the Renaissance people come in and say, "Oh, that is bastard terrible. No good Latin. We're going to write Latin where we refuse to use the easy way to say anything. We're going to use only difficult participles and the subjunctive. We're going to use the subjunctive as often as we possibly can." I send sentences of Renaissance Latin to a friend of mine who's a high school Latin teacher to use to punish students who misbehave in class. And then she's like, "Take this sentence." And they're like, "Oh my god, that sentence has three future passive participles in it." And she's like, "None of them is necessary in any way. Now translate it." Because they're not trying to communicate with these sentences. They're trying to show off how good their Latin is.

So if we compare language to walking across a room, they don't want to get to the other side. They want to do an elaborate gymnastics routine to show off that they can do three back flips before they get to the other side of the room. And the sentence doesn't actually need to do that. They're just doing it to show off. That's what medieval Latin doesn't do and what Renaissance Latin does. It's just a gymnastics routine forever. And then they say, "See, this is real classical Latin, and what those people were doing was terrible." And people try to read it, and they're like, "Wow, this is really hard to read. The key people writing this must be really smart." And politicians find that useful because they're like, "Hey, I can hire that guy to write my Latin correspondence." And then when my enemies receive my letters, they'll be like, "Whoa, this guy's really smart. I have no idea what he's saying. He really sounds like an emperor. We don't want to fight this guy." And they do, right? They do hire these guys.

Like after the death of Henry V when England is under infant king Henry VI and all the nobles are quarreling with each other over who gets to be king. This is what is Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses, Henry VI plays and what Game of Thrones is based on, right? All those fractious nobles, they all hired Italian Latinists to come from Florence to London to write intimidating correspondents in difficult to read Latin so that they could write letters back and forth to the English lords and the English lord secretaries be like, I have no idea what the king is saying, but he has really impressive participles, so we should probably obey him because if he has participles this impressive, he's probably also friends with the pope, right? I mean, no one else has participles like this. So you can intimidate people a lot with this ornamentation just by using antiquity differently and using antiquity more showy and more ostentatiously.

And as soon as they invent this the rapid adopters are kings and monarchs who are weak on the throne. The weaker the monarch the faster they adopt the renaissance. And they're like yeah you know I'm Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. I'm literally the last surviving 12-year-old boy who was in prison when the last king was massacred. And nobody wanted to be king because kings kept getting massacred. So, they took me out of prison and made me king and I'm scared as heck. How am I going to get the Hungarian nobles to take me seriously? I know. I'm going to get my portrait done looking like I'm a Roman on a Roman coin. And I'm going to marry an Italian princess who knows Latin and Greek and bring her out here with all of her artist friends. And we're going to build a neoclassical palace. And I'm going to get a big library from Lorenzo de' Medici. And then when the Hungarian warlords visit me in my neoclassical palace with my giant library and my intimidating Italian wife spouts Greek at them, they'll be like, "Holy [__] I don't want to fight this guy. He's an emperor. Sure, you can be king of Hungary" and it works. And it's way cheaper than war.

So, if we talk about war is politics by other means, art is war by other means. They compete with each other via this in the same way that modern countries compete with each other at the Olympics in a non-military opportunity to show off your wealth and strength by showing off how much you can lavish on your athletes, right? And so it's actually a symptom of political weakness when you see people be rapid adopters of Renaissance culture. Which is why the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East don't do it, right? And there was a point at which Mehmed II was like, "Oh, this sounds cool. I'll bring some guys to my court." And he brings some guys to his court. And then when he dies, his son Bayezid is like, "We do not need this. Our culture is the wealthiest, strongest, and best culture anywhere. We do not need to adopt."

And here's the fun part and that comes back to the why Germany and England fight over the Renaissance. Notice if you redefine power as I'm powerful because I have Latin and Greek and Roman stuff and I have busts of all the Roman emperors in my house. And it's very easy to redefine power that way. Let's actually pause in the middle of this and I'll show you how it works and then I'll show you why it's a funny puzzle and why the Ottomans get to reject it. So imagine for a moment that you are the French ambassador to Rome. And you're on your way to Rome because a new pope has been elected and it's your job to go deliver the obedience oration. Every king has to send a special ambassador. Every polity in Europe has to send a special ambassador. Every time there's a new pope and you have to bring an expensive gift and make a long speech, the text of which is I'm an important ambassador from a powerful king. And he's so glad you're the pope. Congratulations. Only have to do that for like two hours. And so you're kind of bored with this, but it's really important and you're going to meet with lots of other important envoys in Rome.

And you're on your way and you have to stop off in Florence. Florence is a disgusting place to have to stop off. It's a merchant republic. There are no nobles there. If you're an envoy for the French king, you're at least the son of a count, right? Nobody who isn't of noble blood is in the political classes. Florence is this weirdo merchant republic that executed its nobility in a merchant uprising. So, there's literally not a single human being in this city of rank to talk to you, except for one or two visiting foreign nobles like yourself. And Florence has the international reputation of being Europe's sodomy capital. The verb for anal sex in six European languages is to Florentine. And in the French law code, you can be indicted for sodomy on the grounds that you've ever visited Florence in your life. That's enough evidence. So, you have to go through this disgusting pit of scum and villainy in which there's nobody worthy to actually host you because there's no local lord, but you at least have the address of your dad's banker and you're going to stay with him for the night and then move on from this stupid, disgusting merchant republic.

But then you get there and in the streets you see these statues, beautiful, huge, lifelike, almost looking like they're going to come to life statues that are like the ancient Roman statues that you've seen like a severed hand that are miraculously realistic and you have no idea how they were ever made. But these are obviously brand new. And you come to the house of the banker and you knock on the door of his palace and he meets your excellency humbly at the gates and apologizes that he is unworthy to host your excellency and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, you are unworthy to host me, but whatever." And you go in and then you're inside his house and suddenly you're in a space like nothing you've ever seen before with sunlight streaming in through these wide rounded arches so that it's so light and airy. It's almost more like outside than the cramped city streets. Wait, wait. You have seen something like this before. The Roman ruins in the backyard of your father's castle looked like this. But that art is gone. Nobody knows how to build like that anymore.

And around the courtyard are busts of all the Roman emperors in order. And above them are portraits of this banker guy and all the members of his family. And in the middle of the courtyard is another of these breathtaking bronze statues that looks like it's about to

come to life. And you're like, bronze is also what you make cannons out of. If these guys are really good at that, that's intriguing. But then you're distracted because in the corner there's a bunch of guys in weird robes speaking a language you've never heard before. And you're like, "Who are those guys?" And your host says, "Oh, they're Platonists. They're speaking ancient Greek." And you're like, "But Plato is lost." And ancient Greek is lost. We have like only fragments of this. We've never had. And he's like, "Oh, we have lots of Plato in ancient Greek here. Look, here's my grandson, Lorenzo. He's just composed a poem in three parts in ancient Greek about the nature of the soul. Would you like to hear him recite?" And now there's a six-year-old boy reciting a poem at you in ancient Greek about the parts of the soul. And you're like, "Where am I? What is happening?" And that is the moment at which Cosimo de' Medici turns to you and says, would France like to make an alliance with Florence.

And you can say no, right? That's the moment you can say no. The king of France is going to come over the Alps with the giant juggernaut army the size of which Italy has never seen. And we're going to come here. We're going to burn all this down and we're going to take the sacks of gold out of your basement.

Or you can say yes, let's make an alliance. Send me an architect and a bronzemith and a sculptor and a Greek tutor and a Platonist and we're going to do the court in France like this. And then when the envoys from England visit or the envoys from Aragon visit, they're going to feel like uncultured hoodlums, right? Like I feel right now. It's redefined what nobility means and what culture means to be you have the Roman stuff you win. And it's really effective for somebody who has, you know, money and context but not political authority to redo his court like that. So whether you're in Spain, whether you're in Hungary, whether you're in London, the trappings of antiquity are a winning game politically to intimidate others and make them take you more seriously than your rivals.

But it's a game in which Italy automatically wins because nobody is ever going to have more Roman stuff than Italy where you just dig a hole and find the Lekythos. Like Italy is so full of Roman stuff. Everyone in Italy will always win at the most like Italy game. So when the Ottoman world looks at this and is like a political world in which we automatically lose because the winner must always be Italy. No, we will not play this diplomatic game. We will continue to have our own culture and our own architecture and, you know, our own books and our own vastness in which we are best and we will not play the loser's game in which Italy will always be more Italy than the rest of Europe when Europe defines being cultured as having Roman stuff.

Which is how Europe, the rest of Europe, which is in a terrible desperate power game of thrones crisis and they are all weak on their thrones and they do all adopt this quickly and they start doing everything up like Roman palaces. That's how we get to an 18th and 19th century in which like Berlin and London are in a fight about which of them is the new Athens and you're like, Athens is right there, guys. It's right there. Athens still being Athens. And they're like, no, no, no, no, we are Rome up here in Berlin. Berlin is totally Rome. And you're like, Rome is also right there. Be in Rome. No, no, no. Rome isn't Rome. We're Rome. And you're like, why are you trying to be Rome? This is the answer. That they created a new definition of political strength and authority and most importantly legitimacy.

Political legitimacy was redefined as having Roman stuff. And that's how we kick off this competition where every other power wants to have the most Roman stuff. And like we're building Versailles in France. What are we covering it with? Roman pediments and inscriptions in Greek and Latin. Yes, we're French, but we're covering Versailles with Roman pediments and inscriptions in Greek and Latin and the fleur-de-lis, which we're putting in the, um, the fleur-de-lis, which is a symbol of Roman power that comes from alluding to Roman sites. You know, all of these Roman symbols, we're covering Versailles with them because even at Versailles, the more Roman it is, the more legitimate it is. And it gets the rest of Europe sucked into this weird competition where you have to be more Roman than real Rome at which you cannot succeed.

So you propagandize and especially in the 18th and 19th centuries after the Reformation, Berlin and London, their technique is saying, oh well, you know, the disgusting rot of Catholicism has ruined the Mediterranean world and therefore, you know, the true spirit of ancient Rome has come as a refugee from terrible Italy up to live here in the true free-spirited Protestant world of country X. Which is how you get these surreal reconstructions of and imitations of Italian stuff in northern European countries. And you're like, why are England and Germany fighting with each other over which of them is Rome? I don't understand. Neither of them is Rome. And this is why they have to be Rome because they've accepted its definition of legitimacy. And then you just come up with excuses for explaining why Rome isn't Rome. You're Rome.

I got into this for a completely different reason. I was trying, as a person interested in Marxist historiography, I was trying to figure out the origin of capitalism, something that has doomed like everybody for 200 years. [laughter] The big 400-year-shaped hole there. But one of the things I noticed in doing research, I got interested. Okay. When did this idea of Christendom fade into this idea of Europe? And there's like this 200-year period where this happens is right around now. And, you know, it has something to do with the Ottomans. [laughter] Like and the fall of the Roman Empire, aka the Eastern Roman Empire, aka the Byzantines.

But the more unstable things get, the more people want a new source of legitimacy.

And, you know, the Thirty Years' War is really destabilizing and shakes the French monarchy, the Habsburg Empire is getting really unstable. I mean, I work a lot on the 1490s and in the 1490s it's genuinely the case that if you just took every king in Europe and rotated them one clockwise, they would all be on a throne they have a better claim to than the one they're on. Because the king of England has a claim to the throne of France. The king of France has a claim to the throne of Naples. The king of Naples has a claim to the throne of Aragon. The king of Aragon has a claim to the throne of Castile. The king and queen of Castile has a claim to the throne of Portugal. The king of Portugal has a better claim to the throne of England than the king of England does. And then there's a whole separate mess going on over in the Holy Roman Empire. Although I will point out that Maximilian Habsburg has a decent claim to both England and Portugal as well. So every king is in a weird upstart position practically.

There are very few monarchs who aren't anxious that there is someone out there who actually has a better blood claim to their throne than them. What do you do when someone else has a better blood claim? You come up with other ways to seem kingly. And if your palace is awesome and your portrait looks like Caesar and you're bringing impressive books and libraries, you've turned antiquity into a language of power. A language of power that projects strength and intimidation. There's a reason that all of these big historic libraries have incredibly imposing entrances and intimidating architecture. Right? Venice builds its great library directly across from the Doge's Palace in front of San Marco. Because what are the three things that intimidate and scare somebody? The seat of justice where people are executed. The church where the bones of St. Mark are going to zap you from heaven if you piss off this saint. And the library full of secret knowledge and esoteric rare capacities.

Right. Library building is a power projection tool. Building neoclassical facades, building archways, all of this is a power projection tool. And you get rapid adoption of power projection tools from monarchs who feel weak on their thrones. And you tend to get more stable, we're just going to keep doing what we've always done, just bigger and more expensive, when you have monarchs who are stable on their thrones.

Yeah. Tons. I mean, it's a period when, oh, a friend of mine and I were just looking at a prayer letter that a man wrote for his 60th birthday in which he was thanking God for all of the blessings that he had had in his life, that he was wealthy, that he had sons, that his business was thriving, that his wife had survived more than 10 years after their marriage.

And that he had himself seen 10 summers without war in his 60-year lifetime. And that he considered that an amazing and exceptional blessing from God that he had seen 10 years of actual peace, not consecutively, but spread around in the course of 60 years. This is a period of constant warfare. Guido Ruggiero very cleverly refers to the Ghibelline faction fights as Italy's 300 Years' War. And it doesn't really stop at the time it's said to stop. It's really more like a 500-year ongoing faction war. And there are periods that people call peace. There's the famous Peace of Lodi, which for a while political scientists were very excited about, which is a big peace signed between the major Italian powers of Rome, Venice, Milan, and Florence, and Naples, from basically the 1430s up until it's broken in the 1490s. 60 years of peace, TM, during which there are no fewer than 11 other wars between these powers and their small neighboring powers. The Ottomans invade.

There are, you know, the Pazzi Wars happen in this period. The, what's it called? The War of the Conspiracy of the Barons happens in that period. A whole lot of border wars between Venice and Milan happen in this period. So the quote-unquote Peace of Lodi actually saw war every summer. It's just that these were the small-scale wars and not the big-scale wars in which powers are picking on their smaller neighbors or fighting each other through proxy border wars and not full-scale war. But that's not peace. The only period of extended peace Italy has ever known was that period in the Pax Romana under the good gay emperors, right? Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius. Italy was in actual peace for a few decades. Then there's no other patch in the entire historical record in which Italy sees extended stable peace because it's such a good place to have a war. It's so agriculturally rich, you can just feed off the land. So everyone wants to always have war there. Plus all the cities hate each other. So for that reason...

The instability was constant through the Middle Ages as well. And this is again why we don't want to draw a line and pretend that it's flatline and then up somehow. It's a constant building wedge as the population increases, the centralization of power increases, the size of military increases, and therefore the scales of the same thing get larger. That a lot of things are just building steadily throughout the whole Middle Ages, and they seem to come to a peak in the Renaissance just because they're reaching high saturation. But it's, you know, it's boiling a frog in a pot. It's not that it was always cold and then suddenly boiling. The water temperature was rising constantly.