Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Today, I'm chatting with Ada Palmer, who is a Renaissance historian, a novelist, a composer based at the University of Chicago. And today, we're discussing your book, Inventing the Renaissance. Ada, thanks for coming on the podcast.

**Ada Palmer** (0:11)
Been looking forward.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:12)
First question, you got in this period in the late 15th century, early 16th century in Italy, all these different republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa, and that seems unusual, both for the time period and for the place.

**Ada Palmer** (0:30)
Yeah.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:30)
What gives?

**Ada Palmer** (0:31)
One of the big reasons that the Italian city republics are clustered in Italy is that when the Roman Empire dissolved in the West, individual cities then needed to self-govern. And this is true all across Europe, right? And those individual cities could no longer get the centralized Roman government to oversee supply routes, keep the roads free of bandits, you could no longer import and export goods at scale, you could no longer rely on central infrastructure, you had to support things yourself. Larger, wealthier towns were able to make this transition because they could support themselves from the local resources and the farms attached to them. So the larger, wealthier towns surrounded by good agricultural land were more successful at converting over to, okay, let's have a senate like the old Roman senate, let's have our top families form a council, they will rule, we'll set up a republic. A weaker town that can't support itself as well is much more prone to one wealthy family realizes that they can get goons and take over and declare themselves the monarch of the area. Or worse, this town cannot self sustain, it doesn't have enough. People there can't get food, they are scared, they're afraid of being robbed by people who are desperate. But outside of town, there is a wealthy villa that belongs to a noble family and they have bodyguards. Hey noble family, if I move next to your villa and work for you, will you protect me with your bodyguards? So towns emptied out and villages, as in villa and its environs, developed as a result. And a village was a monarchal structure in this sense, that was the migration of people out of a town into the protection zone of a local lordling. And then those villages grew to different scales, some of them cities, some not. So Italy had great agriculture and great agricultural land. So more of Italy's cities were able to sustain themselves as towns and be republics.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:39)
I feel like the big take of your book is, they were trying to resuscitate Roman virtues. What were the virtues that the Roman emperors had, which allowed the safety and good government, etc. to work. And I don't understand the connection between reading Cicero and contemplating the virtues of a great emperor to dot, dot, dot, science and technology.
Maybe there isn't one, but do you think there is one? And what exactly is that connection?

**Ada Palmer** (3:12)
As with many processes, the answer is there are multiple steps, and it's complicated. And some of the steps are realizing that the earlier steps didn't work. So Petrarch, who lives through the Black Death, and lives in a moment when Italy is wracked by civil war, and foreign mercenary troops are raiding and pillaging, Italy is wracked by bandits. When Petrarch survives the Black Death after losing so many friends, he gets a letter, two of his friends are alive. He had given up that anyone he knew would survive, but two of his younger scholar friends are alive. They're going to come visit him on the way they were attacked by bandits. And one of them was killed and the other was lost in the mountains and wounded, and he didn't know that his friend was alive for another year and a half. So the bandits are very real in this period. And Petrarch looks around him and says, this is an age of ash and shadow. What we need is to imitate the arts of the ancients. Let's try to figure out how the Romans did it. And specifically, the problem is our leaders. Our leaders are selfish. Our leaders care more about their wealth and their family honor and their power than they do about the people. This is where Romeo and Juliet is really helpful for us to understand, right? Lord Montague and Lord Capulet, as their goons are knifing each other in the street, they care about defeating each other. Do they care about the good of Italy? Do they care about the good of the city of Verona? No. Their feud is harming the city of Verona and they don't care. They demand that Romeo get away with murder because he is their son, right? That is not service to the state. Petrarch reads about the Ancient Roman Brutus, not the one who killed Caesar, but the ancestor to whom that one was trying to live up. Brutus, one of the first consuls of Rome, and he learned while in office that his sons were plotting to take over the state and make him king. So he executed his own sons for treason against the state. Can you imagine Lord Montague wanting to execute Romeo for treason against Verona? He would never do that. So when you're living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and you read about these Ancient Roman figures as described in the lofty biographies of someone like Livy, you read them and you say, wow, if only our leaders would act like that. Well, how were they raised? Can we raise our leaders the same way? Can we make libraries filled with what young Cicero read and what young Brutus read? What did they read? Well, they read Plato and they read Homer. So we need these things. Can we recreate the educational environment that produced them? Petrarch suggests this, his students and successors embrace this idea and pour money into traveling across the Alps to look for manuscripts, traveling to Constantinople to purchase manuscripts from the wealthier East where books are common, and bringing them back to assemble these libraries, and then raise tutors like Marsilio Ficino, who can know Greek and Latin, and surround the young princes and princesses of Europe with these values in the hopes that they will act like Brutus and not like Cicero. This is based on an assumption that education is very much like osmosis, that if you're exposed to something, you'll imitate it. And the uptake of this is strong because Italy is also full of upstart rulers who just seized power five minutes ago by having a coup in their state and have no legitimacy and no right to be ruling what they're ruling and are resented by their people. But they can dress up like a Roman emperor and they can have a parade with allegorical figures of the virtues next to them. And they can invest in an impressive palace that has a pediment on the front and looks like a Roman building to the eyes of the period and cover themselves with the trappings of antiquity. And then people might look at them and say, Oh, this guy is different from what we've had. This guy is like the Caesars. The days of the Caesars were pretty good. Maybe we want this guy. Maybe he's not going to be a tyrant. Maybe he's going to be a good prince and he's going to make a golden age. And so the first dream is idealistic. Let's make better rulers. The adoption is self-serving and propagandistic. Hey, I'm a tyrant, but I can seem like something better than just a tyrant. If I make myself look like Julius Caesar, then people will like and respect me. Or in the case of Florence with the Medici, we are merchant scum and we are dirt compared to everybody around us. We're not even one of the important families of Florence. We're like three ranks down, even on the standards of merchant scum. We're extra scummy merchant scum. But if we can have Latin and Greek and quote Cicero and seem like the ancients, people will take us seriously and respect us and talk to us. Even if we don't have it. So let me give an example. Imagine that you are an ambassador from France, and you're on your way to Rome because a new pope has just been elected. Whenever a new pope is elected, every country in Europe has to send a special ambassador whose job it is to deliver a long-winded oration that says, I'm the ambassador from a very wealthy country and a very powerful prince, and he's so glad you're the pope. Congratulations. You only have to do that for like an hour. And you have to give a gift to the pope and it has to be very impressive, and you have to be a really important person. You're like the most important person who can leave your country without causing a political crisis. You might be the heir to the throne, for example. And so you're on your way, or you might be a more minor ambassador, but you're at least minimum the son of a count. And you're on your way to Rome, you're heading along the length of Italy, you're going to go through Florence, it's on the way. But there's nobody there worth talking to because it's just a pit of scum and villainy. And in fact also filth and depravity, because of course Florence is the sodomy capital of Europe. And to Florentine is the verb for anal sex in several different European languages. And in the laws of France, you can be indicted for sodomy on the grounds that you have ever once in your life even visited Florence. That's considered evidence enough. So you're on your way to this matchlessly filthy dive of scum and villainy. And then you approach the city, and there are these statues. And they look like ancient statues, the kind that are so lifelike, that it's as if they're about to breathe and move. You've never seen an intact new statue like that. That isn't something we know how to do.