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

Dwarkesh opens with the anomaly: late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Italy is crowded with republics — Venice, Florence, Genoa — which is unusual both for the period and for the place. Ada Palmer's explanation is structural. When the western Roman Empire dissolved, individual cities had to govern themselves, and that was true everywhere in Europe: no central government to keep the roads clear of bandits, no reliable long-distance supply routes, no central infrastructure. You supported yourself or you did not survive.

Whether a city could make that transition depended on whether it could feed itself from local farmland. Larger, wealthier towns surrounded by good agricultural land could: let us have a senate like the old Roman Senate, let our leading families form a council, and call it a republic.

A weaker town could not. Either one wealthy family got goons and declared itself monarch, or the town simply failed to sustain its people — who then looked outside the walls at a noble villa with bodyguards and asked whether they could move next to it and work in exchange for protection. Towns emptied out into villages, and a village in that sense was a monarchical structure: the migration of people into the protection zone of a local lordling.

Italy had unusually good agricultural land, so more of its cities could sustain themselves as towns — and therefore as republics. The political map of the Renaissance is downstream of soil.

Dwarkesh asks what the book's central claim amounts to: the Renaissance as an attempt to resuscitate Roman virtues. Which virtues? Palmer's answer is a single word — stability — and then the harder question: what does reading Cicero have to do with science and technology?

Palmer's answer is that there are multiple steps, that it is complicated, and that some of the steps consist of discovering that earlier steps did not work.

The starting point is Petrarch, who lived through the Black Death in an Italy wracked by civil war, raided by foreign mercenaries, and infested with bandits. Palmer makes the bandits concrete: Petrarch survives the plague after losing friend after friend, gives up hope that anyone he knew is left, and then learns that two younger scholar friends are alive and coming to visit. On the road they are attacked. One is killed; the other is wounded and lost in the mountains, and Petrarch does not know he is alive for another year and a half.

Petrarch looks around and concludes that this is an age of ash and shadow, and that the remedy is to imitate the arts of the ancients — to work out how the Romans did it. The specific diagnosis is about leaders: ours are selfish, caring more about wealth, family honour and power than about the people.

Palmer uses Romeo and Juliet to make the point vivid. Montague and Capulet, while their goons knife each other in the street, care only about defeating each other. Their feud damages Verona and they do not care; they demand that Romeo get away with murder because he is their son. That is not service to the state.

Against that, Petrarch reads about the elder Brutus, the first consul, who discovered that his own sons were plotting to make him king and executed them for treason against the state. Can you imagine Montague executing Romeo for treason against Verona? He would never. Read Livy's lofty biographies while living inside the plot of Romeo and Juliet, and the reaction is: if only our leaders would act like that.

The next question is how such leaders were raised, and whether the process can be reproduced. Fill libraries with what the young Cicero read and what the young Brutus read — Plato, Homer — and recreate the educational environment that produced them.

That is the programme. Petrarch's students and successors embrace it and pour money into travelling across the Alps in search of manuscripts, and to Constantinople to buy books from the wealthier East where they are still common, assembling libraries at home. Then they raise tutors like Marsilio Ficino, fluent in Greek and Latin, to surround the young princes and princesses of Europe with those values in the hope that they will act like Brutus and not like Montague.

The assumption underneath is that education works like osmosis — exposure produces imitation — and the uptake was strong for reasons that had nothing to do with idealism. Italy was full of upstart rulers who had seized power five minutes earlier, had no legitimacy, and were resented. But they could dress like a Roman emperor, parade with allegorical figures of the virtues beside them, and build a palace with a pediment that looked Roman to the eyes of the period.

Then people might look at them and think: this one is different, this one is like the Caesars, and the days of the Caesars were good. Maybe he will not be a tyrant. Maybe he will be a good prince and make a golden age.

So the first dream was idealistic — make better rulers — and the adoption was self-serving and propagandistic: I am a tyrant, but if I look like Julius Caesar, people will like and respect me.

Florence is the extreme case. The Medici were merchants — not even among the important families of Florence, three ranks down, and by the standards of merchant scum, extra scummy merchant scum. But with Latin and Greek, quoting Cicero, looking like the ancients, people would take them seriously even though they had no claim to it.

Palmer stages the demonstration as a thought experiment. You are an ambassador from France, travelling to Rome because a new pope has been elected. Every country sends a special ambassador — someone important enough to leave without causing a political crisis, an heir to the throne or at least the son of a count — to deliver an hour-long oration saying that he represents a very wealthy country and a very powerful prince, and to present an impressive gift.

Your route runs the length of Italy, and it passes through Florence. Ugh. Nobody there is worth talking to; it is a pit of scum and villainy, and also of filth and depravity, because Florence is the sodomy capital of Europe — to Florentine is the verb for anal sex in several European languages, and French law will accept a visit to Florence as evidence.

Then you arrive. There are statues that look ancient, so lifelike they seem about to breathe — and intact, which nobody knows how to do any more. The city is large and impressive, and the cathedral has a dome bigger than anything you have seen outside Roman ruins.

The banker greets you humbly at the door and apologises that his humble palace is unworthy of Your Excellency — and you agree that it is not. Then you step inside into a courtyard with white light streaming through airy rounded windows, air cooler and fresher than the outdoors, and it is like nothing you have seen except the Roman ruins in the courtyard of the castle where you grew up. Except that nobody can build like that any more. All of it was lost.

In the middle of the square is another bronze that looks about to come to life, still shining, not yet green. Around the courtyard are busts of the Roman emperors in order, with portraits of the host and his family above them. In the corner are men in robes speaking ancient Greek — Platonists, who have Plato, and a ten-year-old grandson named Lorenzo who has just written a poem in ancient Greek on the three parts of the soul and would be glad to recite it.

A ten-year-old recites at you in a language you thought was lost, about a doctrine you thought was lost, and nothing in the scene has existed for a thousand years. That is the moment Cosimo de' Medici turns to you and asks whether you would like an alliance with Florence.

You could refuse. You could point out that your king will come over the Alps, sack the city, and everyone will let him, because Florence has no nobility, therefore no marriage alliances, therefore no friends, and is caught in the Guelph-Ghibelline feud so its neighbours hate it and will watch it burn. You will take the gold out of the basements and go home rich, and all of this will vanish like a dream.

Or you could accept — and ask for a bronzesmith, an architect, a Greek teacher and a Platonist, and rebuild the French court this way, so that when the ambassador from Portugal arrives he feels like an uncultured fool, exactly as you feel now. The power dynamic flips. The condescending nobleman is in awe of the merchant scum. That is what art and culture do as a propaganda tool.

The next stage is the failure. The princes are raised with the Latin and the Greek and they impress everyone — and then they fight a bigger, nastier, worse war than any before it, with more deaths, more betrayals, bigger cannons knocking down cities and burning whole regions. Wealth is centralised, so mercenaries are more numerous, because more can be produced.

The first generations raised this way were supposed to be philosopher princes. Instead we get Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, both of whom had Latin, Greek, Cicero and Plato as children. Then they grow up, and Cesare sets fire to half the world.

That is the war Machiavelli watched. He was raised on Cicero and Livy, raised on the Petrarchan project — and his famous letter from exile describes the day that justifies it. Most of the day is wasted: hunting larks, drinking in a pub with uncultured countrymen. Then he goes home, puts on the court robes he wore as an ambassador to popes and kings, and enters his library to hold commerce with the ancients. He loves it exactly as Petrarch wanted him to.

But he also watches the wars. He watches a virtuous prince like Guidobaldo da Montefeltro do every single thing you are supposed to do — the Plato, the libraries, the art — and get betrayed, lose his city, lose everything. And he watches terrible people like Cesare Borgia and Julius II make terrible choices and succeed.

His conclusion is not that the classics are worthless but that Petrarch was wrong about the mechanism. Reading Cicero does not make successful rulers like the Caesars. Yet the classics still feel powerful. So what if the libraries are what we need, but we need to use them differently?

What he proposes is what we would now call political science. Take five battles fought next to rivers, put them side by side, and ask which decisions the commanders made and which worked better. Use history as a casebook of what worked and what did not: imitate the successes, avoid the failures. Instead of believing that reading about good men makes us good, read about wise choices and imitate the choices.

That is why his contemporaries describe him as a historian. He is not popular in his own day; it takes decades for the method to catch on, and many continue trying to absorb virtue by osmosis. But he is writing in the early 1500s — a little over a century after the project began.

Palmer's point about scale: the distance from Petrarch's first call to Machiavelli's writing is the distance from Yuri Gagarin's flight back to Napoleon. We compress it into one period called the Renaissance, but a great deal happened. They had a plan, they executed it, they brought it to its maximum, they raised all the princes this way, the wars happened, it clearly failed — and then Machiavelli asked why.

And they are only halfway. Shakespeare's grandparents have barely been born. What is needed now is new ways of thinking, and the material conditions are shifting: bigger libraries, the printing press, libraries in smaller towns, more readers, cheaper education, more people learning about science.

The micro-technologies matter as much as the printing press. Footnotes, marginal glossaries explaining hard vocabulary — when Ficino was young, you had to be a master Latinist with an enormous vocabulary to read the ancients at all. There were no dictionaries, no glosses, nothing to help. Only a tiny slice of expert classicists could read this material.

A hundred years later there are vernacular translations and footnotes for the hard words, and any medical student can read Lucretius on materialist physics. When Poggio found the text, perhaps two dozen people in the world could read it. A hundred years later thirty thousand can, across the thirty print editions issued before 1600.