Today I'm chatting with Ada Palmer,

who's a Renaissance historian, novelist, and composer based

at the University of Chicago. Today we're discussing your

book, Inventing the Renaissance. Ada, thanks for coming on the podcast. Been looking forward. First question. You've got in this period—late

15th century, early 16th century—in Italy all these different

republics: Venice, Florence, Genoa. That seems unusual both for the

time period and for the place. 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. This is true all across Europe. Those individual cities could no

longer get the centralized Roman government to oversee supply routes

or 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. The larger, wealthier towns surrounded

by good agricultural land were more successful at converting over. 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 realizing that they

can get goons and take over, declaring 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 and 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 a villa and its

environs—developed as a result. A village was a monarchal

structure in this sense. It was the migration of people

out of a town into the protection zone of a local lordling. Then those villages grew to different

scales, some of them cities, some not. Italy had great agriculture and

great agricultural land, so more of Italy's cities were able to sustain

themselves as towns and be republics. 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 this safety, good government, et cetera, to work? Stability. And I don't understand the

connection between reading Cicero and contemplating the virtues of a great

emperor to… science and technology. Maybe there isn't one, but

do you think there is one?

What exactly is that connection? As with many processes, the answer

is that there are multiple steps, and it's complicated, and some

of the steps are realizing that the earlier steps didn't work. Petrarch, who lived 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 hope 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. 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. The bandits are very real in this period. 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. 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. 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 was 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. 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? 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. Then they 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 Lord Montague. 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. Then people might look at

them and say, "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. We are dirt compared

to everybody around us. We're not even one of the

important families of Florence. We're 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." 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 am the ambassador from a very wealthy

country and a very powerful prince."

And he's so glad you're the pope. Congratulations. Only you have to do that for an hour. 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 the most important person

who can leave your country without causing a political crisis. You might be the heir to

the throne, for example. Or you might be a more minor ambassador,

but you're at least the son of a count. 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. Ugh. There's nobody there worth

talking to because it's just a pit of scum and villainy. In fact, also filth and depravity

because, of course, Florence is the sodomy capital of Europe. To Florentine is the verb for anal sex

in several different European languages. 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.

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. You ride through the city a bit, and it's

a large, impressive city, and you get to the cathedral, and it has this massive

dome, way bigger than anything you've ever seen except for old Roman ruins. You come to the banker's house, and

your servant knocks at the door. The banker greets you humbly at the door

and apologizes that his humble palace is not worthy to host Your Excellency,

and you're like, "Yeah, it's not. You're correct." He invites you in, and

the instant you step inside, you're in a space like nothing you've ever seen

before with white light streaming in through this airy, rounded windowed

courtyard that feels cleaner and more outdoors than the outdoors did, because

something about the air is cool and fresh.

It's like nothing you've— Wait, wait. It is. It's like the Roman ruins in the

backyard of the castle where you grew up. But we don't have the

ability to do that anymore. All that's lost. In the middle of the square is another

one of these bronze statues that looks like it's about to come to

life, except it's shining and new. It hasn't even turned green yet. Around the courtyard are busts of

all the Roman emperors in order, and above them are portraits of this

guy and the members of his family. Off in the corner are some men

wearing robes that look like the robes the ancients wear. You say, "Who are those guys?"

He says, "Oh, they're Platonists. They're speaking ancient Greek." You

say, "I thought I didn't understand that language, but ancient Greek is lost. We don't have ancient Greek." He says,

"We have lots of ancient Greek here." You say, "And also, we don't

have the works of Plato. They're also lost." "Oh,

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?" Now there's a ten-year-old 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. None of this

has existed for a thousand years." That's the moment that Cosimo de'

Medici turns to you and says, "Would you like to make an alliance with

Florence?" And you can say no. You can say, "No. My king is going to come over the

Alps with his enormous army, and we're going to descend upon this city, and

we're going to sack it, and everyone's going to let us because it has no

friends because it doesn't have any nobility, so it can't marry anybody,

so it has no meaningful allies. And also, it's in the middle of

this Guelph-Ghibelline feud, so all of its neighbors hate it and

they're just going to let it burn. We're going to take the enormous

piles of gold that are in your basements and go home rich, and all

of this will be gone like a dream." Or you could say, "Yes,

let's make an alliance. Give me a bronzesmith and an

architect and a Greek teacher and a

Platonist, and we're going to take

all of these things, and we're going to do the French court like this. Then when the ambassador from

Portugal comes, he's going to feel like an uncultured fool,

just like I feel right now." The power dynamic just

flipped upside down. Suddenly, the condescending nobleman

is in awe of the merchant scum. That's what the art and the culture

does as a propagandistic tool. The next stage of it then is, "Okay,

we've raised these princes like this, and they have the Latin, and they have the

Greek, and they can impress everybody." Then they fight a bigger, nastier,

worse war than any of the earlier big, nasty wars, with more deaths and more

betrayals and bigger cannons knocking down cities and burning whole areas. The wealth is centralized, so

the mercenaries are more numerous because people can produce more. The first generations raised by this

are supposed to be philosopher princes,

and instead we get Cesare and Lucrezia

Borgia, both of whom had Latin and Greek and Cicero and Plato when they were kids. Then they grow up, and Cesare sets fire to half the world. That is the war Machiavelli watched. Machiavelli was raised on

all of the Cicero and Livy. He was raised on the Petrarchan project. He has this famous, beautiful letter

that he wrote in exile, where he's describing his day to his friend. Most of the day is wasted, and he

mucks around hunting for larks. Then he goes to a pub and gets drunk in

the company of uncultured countrymen. Then he goes home, and he gets dressed

in the court robes, the court finery that he would wear back when he was

an ambassador to popes and kings. Attired thus, he enters his library

to hold commerce with the ancients. He loves this the way Petrarch

wanted him to love it. But he observes these wars, and he

observes virtuous princes like Guidobaldo

da Montefeltro, who does every single

thing you're supposed to do virtuously. He has all the Plato, and he has all

the libraries, and he has all the art. And he gets betrayed and his city taken

away from him and loses everything. And he watches terrible people

like Cesare Borgia and Julius II make terrible choices and succeed. He says, "Okay, clearly Petrarch was

wrong that just reading Cicero would make successful rulers like the Caesars. But I still feel in my heart

a deep power in the classics." So he says, "What if the libraries

are what we need, but we need to use them differently?" He proposes what we would

think of as political science. We observe historical examples. We say, "Okay, here are five examples

of battles that happened next to rivers. We'll put those examples side by

side and see what decisions the commanders made to try to figure

out which one worked better." We use history as a casebook of

examples of what worked and what didn't.

We imitate what worked, and

we avoid doing what didn't. Instead of feeling that reading about good

men will make us good, we read about wise choices, and we imitate those choices. This is one of the reasons

Machiavelli is described by his contemporaries as a historian. He says we need to use history

and use the classics differently. He proposes that. He isn't very popular in his own day. It takes a long time for that to catch on. Many people for decades after him are

still trying to use absorption by osmosis. But he's writing that in the early

1500s, so it's been a little over a century since this started. We have to remember how

long this process is. From Petrarch's first call to Machiavelli

writing that is as long as from Yuri Gagarin's space flight back to Napoleon. The childhood of Napoleon to the space

race, that's Petrarch to Machiavelli. We think of it as one time

period, but a lot changed. They had a plan. They tried the plan.

They brought the plan to its maximum. They raised all the

princes in this new way. The wars happened. It clearly failed. Machiavelli then thinks

about why it failed. We're still only halfway

through the Renaissance. Shakespeare's grandparents

have barely been born. We have a lot more time to go. So what do we need? We need new ways of thinking about it. We're reading the ancients,

and we have bigger libraries. We have the printing press now. We're having libraries in smaller towns. More and more people can read. It's easier and easier

to get an education. More people are starting

to learn about science. It also is important that they're

inventing micro technologies of book production like footnotes

and glossaries in the margin that explain the hard vocabulary. When Petrarch's successors like Ficino

were young, you had to be a masterful Latinist to read these ancients. You had to have an enormous vocabulary. There are no dictionaries. There are no glosses. There's nothing to help you. Only a tiny slice of expert classicists

could actually read this stuff.

A hundred years later, there are

translations into the vernacular. There are footnotes that

tell you the hard vocabulary. Any med student can read Lucretius'

discussions of materialist information. When Poggio found it, there were two dozen

people in the world who could read it. A hundred years later, 30,000 people

can read it in the 30 print editions that are printed before 1600. When all different kinds of people read

it—med students, law students, people in different countries, people in

different places—they ask new questions. They wonder whether they

can test the hypotheses. They do test the hypotheses. They're the generation that

discovers that the heart is a pump. They're the generation that takes

seriously the question, "Maybe there are atoms, and maybe that's

how diseases work, and maybe we can develop the germ theory of disease." That's the 1560s, 1580s, 160 years after Lucretius comes back,

because it takes generations of work

to build the libraries, to have the

libraries, to use the libraries. So when we get to 1600, which is almost

exactly 200 years after this begins, a little bit more, we've had time to say,

"Let's build the libraries, have the libraries, use the libraries, or realize

we failed in how we use the libraries, and use the libraries differently." That's the generation of Francis

Bacon and Galileo who say, "Hey, let's use the information differently. Let's use nature as a casebook

of examples the way Machiavelli said we should use history. Let's examine, let's doubt, let's

rethink, let's do stuff in new ways." Just to make sure I understood,

the chain of causation here. We've got to resuscitate the virtues of

the Romans, therefore read what they read. To do that, you need

to build the libraries. You build the libraries, you

resuscitate all those arts. Then you just need to have people

be literate, have people think about

information in a new way to analyze it. And that analysis lends itself not

just to the history of leaders, but also to the nature of the world. Whenever I hear a story about how

this is why the scientific revolution happened, why the Industrial Revolution

happened, I'm like, but there are so many stories and it's just hard to figure

out why this one over the other ones. There's a dozen other

stories you could tell. I had a previous guest, Joseph

Henrich, who has this theory that the Catholic Church was breaking

down these old kinship-based networks that the rest of the world had. It was encouraging guilds, encouraging

these kinds of centers where people could get together and discuss ideas. There are probably twenty

other stories you could tell. Why this story? Two different reasons. One, I think it's useful to think

about how for new ideas to flourish and new ways of running the world to

happen, you need a fertile environment. In the same way that for forests

to grow, you need enough topsoil.

It takes a while to get that topsoil. It takes a while to get enough books. You need to have enough books for a bunch

of people to be reading and thinking. You also need to have networks of

information moving this stuff back and forth so that they can have

discourses of ideas with each other. You can't publish a scientific

journal until there are journals. You need to have developed this

ecosystem of information and knowledge. People talk about it sometimes in

terms of increasing literacy rates as if higher literacy makes there be more

books instead of the other way around. In fact, there's a lot more literacy than

people imagine in even medieval Italy. Florence had a male literacy

rate of ninety percent. As of the sixteenth century? As of the twelfth century. Because everybody's in the merchant world,

so you have to be able to send letters. You have to be able to read account books. You have to be able to calculate

your tab at a restaurant. But of those people, how

many have read a book?

Very few. They've read letters, they've

read tallies, they've read indexes, they've made notes. The difference between being literate

and being book-literate is different. In the same way that some people

watch television but don't watch very many films, while other

people watch lots of films. You can be literate and have never

read a book because there might be almost no books in the entire city in

which you grew up if it's 1200 or 1500. But if it's 1600, there are definitely

books in any medium-sized town. So literacy transforms into access to

scientific, intellectual, legal, all sorts of different worlds of ideas. The other person you quoted who's

talking about transformations in networks of power from being less

family and clan-centered to being more guild-centered… The guilds are

major generators of ideas as well. The guilds can own libraries by 1600. If you went to a guild hall, it will have

a bunch of books about its own trade.

That would not have been true in 1100. Those changes are all real,

they're all intermixing, and they're all parallel to each other. You need all of these things together. One of the focuses I have is

sometimes there are more steps to something than you think. We tell this story of the Renaissance,

of how they rediscovered these ancient texts, and then we got science. That's true, but it is an

oversimplification and too wide a zoom. If I said that in the French

Revolution, Napoleon rose to power and spread nationalized warfare

across Europe, and then we landed on the moon, I've skipped some steps. We know that about modernity, but we

don't remember that about earlier periods. Obviously all the stories are somewhat

true, but to the extent that this is a part of the story, you're building up

libraries of classics and … setting up

a network of information exchange that

leads to the Scientific Revolution… The reason this feels salient right

now is that a lot of people have this idea that they're going to

make AI go well by doing X thing. Maybe some of those things work, but it's at the same time frustrating

but also funny and interesting that historically nobody has a good track

record of being able to say, "I will do this thing so that this huge

unanticipated change in history will go my way, or according to my values." Right. I think "go my way" as opposed to "go

well" is a really important distinction. Petrarch wanted a world with these values. He thought, for example, that this

would be a triumph for Christianity and what we would call Catholicism,

though there's only one Christianity from his point of view at the time,

except for the East, which is different.

He was sure that when we found the

ancients, fundamentally all of their philosophy would agree with Christianity. The ancients were wise, therefore

they will be correct, and Plato will ninety percent agree with Christianity. It just needs a little shaker of the

Trinity on top to be Christianity. When he says, "Go find these

ancients," he is in a world that doesn't have the ancients yet. He's just guessing what's

going to be in these books. But he says, "If we find them,

they will uphold good values," and everyone believes him. Then they go find them, and

they squabble with each other. There are Hedonists and Epicureans and

Stoics and all sorts of chaotic things, much more plural than he anticipated. It makes a world that in turn has giant

wars, which he would not like, and a crisis, and Machiavelli's critique of the

ancients, and then the new science and the new philosophy, and eventually Galileo,

none of which resembles what Petrarch imagined if he had specifically described

the future he was trying to make.

But then we get to the propagators

of Bacon's scientific method, meaning Voltaire and Montesquieu,

who are also big campaigners for inoculation against smallpox. The first major disease eradications start

to begin under that immediate influence. Science gets us to the germ theory

of disease gets us to modern hygiene, which gets us to vaccines,

which gets us to penicillin and the treatment for the Black Death. Petrarch thought he would make

a world which shared his values. Instead, he made a world that

doesn't share his values but is capable of curing a disease he

never imagined would be curable. If you showed him this

future, it would be scary. It would be weird to him because

it does not embrace his values. Our values are different. He would be horrified by democracy. He believed that only a tiny

elite has the capacity to rule. If we had a time-traveling Petrarch,

he would really wrestle for a long time to wrap his head around

democracy as a functional system. He really thought in oligarchic terms. But he would see the wonders we've

created, especially the fact that

we can treat the Black Death, and

he would weep for joy seeing that. He did not create a world

that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well. We have many examples of that. Trains and bicycles come in, and

we get feminism because it's easier for people, especially women, to

move freely and independently. They can organize. They can mobilize. We get suffragettes. Did the inventor of the train intend

for there to be women's liberation? No. Did it go the way he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes. It's

important here to zoom in a little

bit on Florence's own government system and how and why it's weird,

in order to understand what rank Machiavelli actually holds in it. All of these republics, except

Florence, are modeled on ancient Rome. The ancient Roman model was an

oligarchic republic in which within the city there are certain noble

families, usually founding families who made the city in the first place,

who are the senatorial families. Hereditarily, when they come of

age, the men of the family are automatically in the senate. From among them are elected

the consuls, high senators, or the head of state if there is one. You have a small slice of the

population that are fully enfranchised members of the republic who

rule over the commoner majority. That is how Venice works. That is how Genoa works. That is how Bologna and

Siena for the most part work. That's how the Swiss Republic works. That's how all of these republics work.

Florence was like that for quite a while,

but when republics fell, they usually fell to noble families who are the foremost,

the strongest, the military class. If you're a military leader in this

period, you have to have noble blood. No soldier is going to follow a

commander who doesn't have noble blood. That would be weird. Those threats to the independence

of the republic almost always came from the nobility. After one particular near miss

in which the city was nearly taken over, they decided to get

rid of the nobility of Florence. They massacred most of them, cut their

heads off, put them on pikes, burned their houses down, raked salt into the

earth, and had a party on their graves, the way you do in the period when

you're getting rid of a class of people. There were a few noble families

that they really liked who had not been part of negative stuff. They allowed them to officially

renounce their nobility. They renounced their nobility,

changed their names, and declared themselves commoners.

They set up a commoner republic. What that meant was the senate

consisted of members of merchant guilds. A member of a merchant guild here

means the owners of workshops. It’s not the guy who sits at the

loom weaving, but the guy who owns the warehouse full of looms

where the workers are working. The head of the sculpture works,

the head of the architectural firm, not the bricklayers who

are actually laying the bricks. Bourgeoisie is an anachronistic word, but we're

talking about the owners of the means of production who are themselves commoners. They are very wealthy, but from

the point of view of the diplomatic corps of any other society, all of

the ruling people and all of their ambassadors are noble-blooded. If you're an ambassador, you're

automatically noble-blooded. Nobody's going to take an

ambassador seriously who isn't. From the perspective of every other

polity in the world, the rulers of Florence are the rank of their valet.

There is no nobility left in the city. In fact, Florence can't run its own

armies or head its own police, because you're not going to surrender if you're

told to surrender in the name of some guy who doesn't have a coat of arms. That would be weird. So they actually have to hire a

nobleman to come to the city and be their chief of police to arrest people

in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor. One at a time, they'll invite

a skilled military commander nobleman who will come to the city. He'll be podestà. He'll live in the palace,

which is also the prison. He'll arrest people. He'll enforce the law. They will pay him handsomely at the end

of the year, escort him to the gates, and then banish him from the city for

life on pain of death so that he cannot return and make use of the power that

he had in the city to try to take over. They're very wary of any nobleman. They've set up a really weird

republic—weird from the perspective of everyone around them—in which a bunch

of merchants are trying to share power by being lotteried into the senate.

You put names in a bag. You examine all of the

merchant members of guilds. You choose which ones are fit to

serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane, not so deeply in debt

that they could be manipulated by the people whom they owe money to. Their names go in a bag. You choose nine guys at random. They rule the city. They are put in a palace where

they rule the city from that tower. They're actually locked in the tower

for the duration of their time in office because if they left the tower,

they could be bribed or kidnapped. They rule the city for

two or three months. At the end, they are thanked for

their service and escorted out, and then a different nine guys share

power for the next three months. It's a power sharing that is designed

to be tyrant-proof because you need consensus of nine randomly selected

guys to decide to do anything. Oh, it's not even a majority

vote, it's consensus? It's consensus. Previously you were describing

"kill the nobles, salt the earth". I'm almost thinking early communists.

But then you say it's the heads of

the merchant guilds who are in charge. I want to understand why

merchants and entrepreneurs have notable status in Florence. What is it about the

culture that makes it so? Also, the Medici, the most powerful

people, their job is usury. It's like the church— It's important to remember they

were nobody when this set up. They were a minor important family. But the culture is getting started where

somebody like that could be respected. How does that happen? An important part of it is when you

have a merchant capital, everybody works for somebody who works for

somebody who works for the boss. If you are a major merchant in

Florence, you're importing and exporting wool to and from all across Europe. You have employees all across Europe. You're buying mass bulk wool from England,

importing it to Florence to use olive oil that you've bought from Naples to process

into high-quality wool, which you're

then exporting to Germany and France. You are a very interconnected businessman. You have a lot of contacts, you have a lot

of clout, and the employees who work for you look to you for their safety net as

well as their political representation. We're very accustomed in the modern

period to thinking of the government as being our big safety net. If we wonder who is going to fund

the hospitals, whose job is it to take care of orphans, we think of

the government, or maybe the church. But in this period, if you're

killed and you leave orphans behind, it is your employer whose

duty it is to take care of them. If you are injured and can no longer

work, it is your employer who will support you for the rest of your life

while you are disabled and find you work that you can do with that disability. A huge portion of the

safety net is your employer. Are you in trouble with the law? Your employer will supply

your defense attorney. Your employer will supply the persuasive

note to the judge that they would very

much appreciate if their person got off. This is the system known as the patronage

system, and it existed in ancient Rome. It exists and saturates the medieval and

the Renaissance worlds in which everyone is in a very interconnected hierarchy. So if you're a brewer and your son

gets in a barroom brawl and punches somebody out and the person's nose

breaks and they die in the brawl and your son is suddenly in trouble and you

say, "Oh no, I don't want my son to be executed," you turn to your landlord. Your landlord turns to his landlord. They turn to one of these major families. These major families are massive

landowners that own dozens of apartments within the city. Hundreds or thousands

of people work for them. So it makes sense to everyone to be

represented that way, like having a council of the CEOs of all of the

organizations that employees work for, when your corporation also

supplies your social safety net and you see your representation there. It's also a world that's used to thinking

in terms of hierarchy and very unused

to thinking about real democracy. It really doesn't have any confidence

in what we would recognize as democracy. We talk about these republics, and

we're very excited by the fact that they give more power to the people

than a monarchy does, but they're still incredibly narrow oligarchic republics. When we read Machiavelli, he talks

a lot about the popolo, which we translate as "the people." He talks about how important it is that

the popolo are respected and have a voice, that the popolo are armed, and

the government shows respect for the people by allowing them to be armed. We read this and we're like,

"This feels really familiar. This feels like documents of the

founding of the US where we're respecting and arming and trusting the people." Popolo meant the top 4%

economically of the population, the members of the merchant guilds. That's the popolo. He's talking about a narrow-slice

oligarchy being heard, a narrow-slice oligarchy being respected. We didn't realize that in the

nineteenth century when we were excitedly translating The Prince

and reading it as quasi-democratic.

We now have read more documents

of the period and realize how people use these words. Florence in this period goes through

five different forms of government. It's this republic of nine

dudes in a tower, as you were saying, before 1434, and then— There's a gradual takeover. There's a gradual, what we

could call regulatory capture. But an interesting detail about Florence,

even as the Medici take over, is that the Medici know the people of Florence are

very deeply invested in this republic and very deeply invested in its institutions. Therefore, they have to respect

those institutions and proclaim respect for those institutions. So they're going to sustain people in

the named offices that there used to be. They're going to continue to

let the guilds be important and have important offices. There was a mandatory outfit that people

wore who worked in the republic. The garment over there in the

corner is a lucco fiorentino.

This was the garment you were

mandated by law to wear if you held office in the Florentine Republic. To us, we look at it and say, "It's

a long red robe. It looks very Renaissance." To them, it looked like a

toga because of the way it was draped. They thought of this as a toga. They're cosplaying the Roman Republic. Wearing a Florentine toga while

in office was something that you did to represent your fealty to

Cicero and republican values. The dukes made their men

continue to wear these. In fact, the first Duke, Cosimo I, would

wear one to costume balls as if in his heart he longed not to dress like a duke,

but to dress in a toga like a republican. It's doubly ironic because when the

Roman Republic turns to the Roman Empire, they still have the senate. They still have all these

old institutions, even though it's no longer a republic. The Roman Senate keeps

meeting until 1200 AD. It's sort of doubly ironic that they are

doing the same thing, but in the 1500s.

And it means that more rights are

granted to the people of Florence than to other cities that fell

to monarchies at similar points. The monarchs of Florence know they

have to be careful, they have to respect rights to a certain amount,

and they can't run roughshod over them. There's a really cool building

that I love in Florence. If you've been there, there's the famous

bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, which has little jeweler shops all along it. When you get to the end of it, there's

this funny overhead corridor, the Vasari Corridor, which was built by the dukes of

Florence to connect the old city palace where the senate used to meet—where they

had to have their seat of power—to their new palace across the river, which was

much bigger, where they could have grand balls and things that dukes need to have. Because they're so terrified of being

assassinated by their own people, they built this overhead walkway

that goes from one end of the city to the other so that they could walk

in safety without being assassinated. This is a sign of a weak duke.

But also, when he was building it,

it's going across the roofs and sometimes blasting off the second

stories of different people's houses. Most people, when His Grace the

Duke says, "I'm gonna blast the top story off your house," would say,

"Yes, Your Grace, please continue." There are literally severed heads of

people who resisted still rotting on spikes in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. But they get to this one

point where there's a very old tower, a 500-year-old tower. This belongs to the Mannelli family,

who are descended from peers of Julius Caesar and can trace their genealogy

all the way back to an old Roman gens. When the duke says, "We want to

knock the top off your tower," they say, "No, this is our tower. This tower has been ours since before

the Medici existed as a named family. You may not knock the top off." And the duke does not knock the top off. The corridor goes around in this

awkward square around that tower, because he knows that if he violates

something as traditional and core to

the civilization as the property rights

of somebody who has owned something for a long time, there will be rebellion,

civil war, dissent, and resistance. These are monarchs who know that

they are weak and are therefore careful, and therefore more rights,

like property rights, exist. Meanwhile, across the river in Ferrara,

Duke Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara used to wander around Ferrara buck naked with

a sword in one hand and his dick in the other, to show off that nobody would

ever possibly try to harm a Duke d'Este. He and his siblings used to do things

like, if they liked a musician, kidnap them and lock them in a tower so that

nobody else could hear them, or if they wanted each other's musician, send

goons to kidnap each other's musicians. They also used to recreationally

murder each other's servants when the siblings were tiffing with each other. That is what you do when you

don't fear your people and when you feel confident in power. They are much closer to tyrants

than the Medici are ever able to

be, even after the republic falls. That's what's so neat. Because the resistance failed, if

we're looking at it in black and white. The republic fell. There wasn't a republic anymore. There was a duke. He took over, and the old system was gone. But because the republic fought so hard

and because the people really believed in it, the people had a lot more rights,

and the tyrant was a lot less tyrannical because there had been that fight. It's a great example of how even when

resistance loses, resistance wins. I think there's an interesting parallel

to today, not to be too on the nose, but sometimes people debate the odds

that America becomes a Putinist kind of country within a couple of decades. I think the odds are actually quite low. Just because even though constitutionally,

or at least in precedent, the president is very powerful, the

republican expectation is so strong. The amount of resistance faced, even

when you successfully do something, demotivates the next escalation.

The only thing that makes resistance

weak in the US is when people feel as if partial victory is failure. Remembering moments like how Florence's

resistance all the way to the end meant that there was more liberty for the next

several centuries, even under the tyrant, is what we need to remind ourselves, that

partial victory is an important thing. Even if the worst were to happen and

there were to be tyranny, that tyranny would be so much weaker because there

was a lot of resistance, and traditions of resistance and structures would

develop that would continue to exist. I think you should discuss the fact that

the Medici are the bankers for the papacy. What does that mean? Why is that necessary? How are they able to make money off of

that from the interest on the float? When Cosimo de' Medici swings the

contract as banker for the pope, it's important to remember that when

you can't wire transfer money in the pre-modern world, collecting taxes is a

very difficult and complicated system.

It is generally done by the

centralizing power that has the right to tax delegating somebody local. If you're in a town, there'll

be a local tax collector. It's his job to go around to everybody

and collect taxes, send a portion of those taxes home to the central power,

and keep a remainder to pay himself. The central power will say, "We expect

X amount of taxes from this area." When you hear about wicked tax

collectors, it's because if you are told, "We want 10,000 florins worth of

tax from this town," but you extract 15,000, you can keep the other 5,000. The 10,000 is what you need to send

to the central power, so the more you extract, the more you get paid. This delegate system, in which there's a

local tax collector and even a more local tax collector below him who might collect

tax from a particular village, means that you depend a lot upon the person

whose job it is to collect your taxes. When Cosimo is papal banker, he is the

person collecting and channeling the money from every church in Christendom when

everybody puts a coin into a collection

box or pilgrims come and put money. All of the wealth that's supposed

to flow back to the papacy is actually flowing to Cosimo. Cosimo is passing it on to

the papacy after taking a cut. That is a lot of money moving quickly. There is also a lot of ability

to make contracts and contacts. We all know how important networking is. He rises in prominence from a banker

to somebody who has enough money to effectively take over his state via

manipulating the guys-out-of-a-bag system. To discuss that again briefly, if you

have a system where you lottery people, sortition is the technical term for it. This is a very old form of government. Ancient Athens used it. It actually works really well. But like any institution,

it is corruptible. In the same way that you can corrupt

voting by bribing people or manipulating the machines or manipulating voters, you

can also corrupt sortition by bribing the people who pull names out of the bag. Or you can use the simpler

mechanism which Cosimo uses first.

If you're a giant bigwig in the city

and you employ a third of the people in the city and they’re on your payroll,

and nine guys at random are chosen out of a bag, three of them are going

to be your guys, just statistically. If you tell all your guys, "I want

this policy, this policy, and this policy, and if you have questions,

send for me and I'll tell you what to do," when the plurality on a random

council all have a plan and it's your plan, you effectively control the city. In that way, the Medici effectively

controlled this lotteried system, because they guaranteed that the

plurality, in a situation that doesn't have a majority, will always be them. But of course, there's a chance to that. In 1430 and 1432, Cosimo has bad luck, and the lottery draws

a lot of people who dislike him and doesn't draw any of his guys. They immediately declare him

a traitor to the state, arrest him, and lock him in a tower. And he bribes his way out. He offers the equivalent of about

$300,000 to the guard outside the cell

and $700,000 to the captain of the

guard to smuggle him out of the tower. He wrote in a letter later that they

were the two most foolish men he'd ever met because he was Cosimo de' Medici. He would happily have paid them

tens of millions of dollars to let him out of there, but they weren't

ambitious enough to think to ask for more than a few hundred thousand. So he escapes, and then the next

election they happened to elect entirely people who just loved Cosimo. They invited him back to the city

in triumph, declared him father of the fatherland, and arrested

and persecuted all of his enemies, who turned out to be guilty of tax

evasion and all sorts of other things. That was the moment

that his grip tightened. And he's like, "I'm going to stop

simply controlling a plurality, and I'm going to start bribing the people

who actually run the elections." His famous quote about this is, "It is

dangerous to be rich and not powerful." You need the power to defend yourself

in a situation like King of the Mountain, where when you're on top,

everyone will try to knock you down.

This is the system into

which Machiavelli is born. His family has worked for the

Medici family for generations. He grows up expecting to

work for the Medici family. But the problem with heredity is

that sometimes you get a weak link. And in the moment that Machiavelli is

in his early twenties, he is coming of age, about to work in government for the

first time, a government in which he is not, in fact, even fully enfranchised. That's one of the fascinating things

about the degree of his patriotism. You weren't allowed to serve in

government office fully—the lotteried offices—if your family was deep in debt. His grandfather had a

lot of unpaid tax debt. So he worked his whole life for

a government of which he was not even quite a full citizen. That shows a deep love of country, but it

also shows that even people who could not be in office deeply loved and cared about

this republic and the important liberty they felt they had being ruled by the 5%

instead of being ruled by one dictator.

To us, that isn't a very big difference. They’re still both not democracy. We would say they’re both not liberty

in the sense that we want liberty. But it's an inch more

liberty than monarchy. Even that small amount of

liberty, people loved it. People were willing to fight for it. People were willing to go to the

streets, wave their banners, and say "libertas" for the republic. Because they were invested in it,

Machiavelli observes, they sustained it. But eventually, one particular

Medici—I'm not saying names because they all have the same names over and

over, and it's really confusing—comes to power quite young and weak. He's basically 20 when he's suddenly in

charge of a very precarious republic. Right then, the French are

invading Italy, and he's scared. He botches the diplomacy with France

and falls into disrepute, and the city takes the opportunity to kick him out. The subsequent regimes, which are an

independent republic again, are the ones for which Machiavelli works.

He was part of the regime that

ruled while they were in exile. When they returned, they

viewed him as an enemy. He didn't actively organize to

resist them, but his name was found on a list of potential people

that an anti-Medicean resistance movement had intended to recruit. He is arrested, tortured, exiled,

and in exile writes The Prince. He dedicates it to the very

family that exiled him because they now control Florence, and

he will only work for Florence. He doesn't want his manual of the

great secrets of statecraft to be in the hands of anybody but his homeland,

so that it will defend his homeland. When Florence exiles you, they tell

you, "Go to this place and wait, and if you're good, we'll invite you back." Florence has been doing this for ages

because Florence actually used this as the core of its diplomatic corps. When you have no nobility, you

can't have ambassadors in the full-on noble ambassador sense. There's nobody in the city of

sufficient rank to go talk to the

kings, to play chess with the sultan,

and do all the things you have to do to be a proper ambassador. What Florence did instead is exile

people and say, "Okay, we're exiling you. You go to Bruges. Be our contact in Bruges. You go to London. Be our contact in London. Be good. Send us letters informing

us what's going on. When we have diplomatic needs to talk to

the king, we're going to send letters to you, and you're going to forward them. If you're good, you get to come back." So being in exile is sort of

being on probation, but also being entrusted with state matters. That's not quite what

they did with Machiavelli. With Machiavelli, they banished him to

a hamlet in the middle of the Tuscan countryside near nothing important and

said, "Go sit in the country and rot, and if you're good, we'll invite you back." What everyone expects is that Machiavelli

will break that promise and leave. Because he's a well-known statesman,

a scholar, a playwright, and a historian, and there are dozens of

cardinals in Rome and other cities

that would love to employ him. Kings of England love

employing Florentines to work for them as secretaries. Kings of Naples love employing Florentines

to work for them as secretaries. He might go get a job tutoring the

daughters of the Duke of Milan, the way Francesco Filelfo did when he was kicked

out of Florence for opposing the Medici. There are lots of places it's expected

an exiled Florentine intellectual will go where he will have the ear of

power and be able to exert influence. He will be a mover and shaker at the

court of Milan or Naples or England. Instead, when they say to Machiavelli,

"Sit in the country and rot, this is a test," he passes the test and sits

in the country faithfully and rots. If he had wanted to go be an intellectual

power broker, the correct move is to run off to Rome and say, "I will give

up the chance to go home the way Dante did, but I will be a Florentine in

exile, and I will write important things. I will live at the house of wealthy men

who will support me and give me the ear of power, and I will exert my influence

in that way." He does not do that.

He stays in the country and he rots,

and he continues writing letters home saying, "I will serve you or nothing. Bring me home to serve my country." That is a weird thing to do, and not

normal for the many other Florentine intellectuals who experienced similar

banishments in the same period. How do we know that he wasn't just

trying to get back into power? The answer is you read

his personal letters. You read the way he talks about

love of his country, and you read the way he talks to his friends. You read the letters he wrote when he

discusses writing The Prince, and you read the comments he exchanges with the

other friends that he shared it with. His other works—his comic play,

which was a big hit, his history of Florence, which was well known at the

time—those he published and circulated. The Prince he kept in very close private

circles, circulating it only with trusted, intimate friends, and then

the copy that he sends in to Florence. Yes, it's a job application:

"Please bring me back. I will work for you. I will be loyal. I support my city more than any

particular iteration of my city. I support my country more

than any particular regime or

group that might be in power. Whatever is in power in my

city, I will be faithful to it." You see him expressing that

in lots of different ways. When in The Prince he says you can and

should do all of these ruthless things to keep power, we have to remember that

the end justifies the means when the end is the survival of your country. It's not that the end, in

general, justifies the means. Machiavelli feels very strongly that

regime changes bring civil violence, and civil violence sheds blood. He has seen the streets of his

city run with blood before. He thinks that even life under a tyrant

is better than life in a civil war, which is usually not life at all,

given the massacre of the people and external conquest that are likely as

a result of another regime change. So he says, "Don't push for regime change. Even if the regime is tyrannical, more

people will survive by sticking with the tyrant than by changing the regime."

I want to talk about the printing press. One thing I didn't realize before

reading your book is that not only does Gutenberg go bankrupt after making the

most significant invention of a millennia, but his apprentices also go bankrupt.

This is at a time when people like

Cosimo are willing to pay on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per book. So with the guy who invents a way to make

this way cheaper, how is this possible? The problem is printed books are a

mass-produced commodity in a world that does not have distribution

networks for mass-produced commodities. Mass production is incredibly

rare in this period. Coins are mass-produced,

but that's really about it. Almost everything is artisanally produced. When you have a mass-produced

product, you need a distribution mechanism before you can sell it. The great example is that technically

e-books existed the first time anyone typed a book on a computer. Certainly in the 1970s there

was such a thing as an e-book. But there was no market for e-books until

the Kindle came out and made a commodity way to buy and sell e-books, then the

e-book industry came into existence. So the e-book as a commodity

is several decades younger than the e-book technically existing. In the same way, you're Gutenberg.

You have figured out how to

produce 300 copies of a book for the cost of one copy of a book. You do so. You print your Bible. You have 300 Bibles. You sell seven of them to the seven

people in your small landlocked German town who are legally allowed to read

the Bible in a period in which only priests are allowed to read the Bible. Congratulations, Mr. Gutenberg,

you have 293 Bibles, and you can't sell them, and you go bankrupt. There has to be a distribution

mechanism for books to find their market because there are certainly

300 people in Europe that want this, but there are not 300 people in one

location where it's being produced. So Gutenberg goes bankrupt. The bank seizes his press. They try to go into the business. The bank goes bankrupt. There is so much overhead. You spend hundreds of thousands of

dollars on the production cost of the books, and then you get nothing back. Gutenberg's apprentices build presses. They go bankrupt. They flee their debts, flee the country,

leave Germany, and go to Venice. Venice is the airport

hub of the Mediterranean.

Venice is where you change boats. If you're sailing from A to B,

you go to Venice, you change boats, you get to the next place. The hub system has always worked well. So if you're printing in Venice, you

print 300 Bibles, you give ten Bibles to each of thirty ships' captains

going to thirty different cities. They can sell them. The first economically

sustainable circulation of print is enabled by the hub system. Then book fairs come into

existence in which printers will spend all year printing a book. They go with a thousand copies of

their book to a book fair where there are a thousand other printers. They all trade, and then they go

home to their town with five copies each of 200 books instead of a

thousand copies of one book, and then they sell them in bookshops. Things like the Frankfurt Book Fair,

which still exists today, developed as the distribution mechanism. There's a slow growth

and a slow saturation. That's really cool because one of the

things people think is unique about our present information revolution is

that we're living in this sequence of

successive information revolutions. We had the computer, the

computer was exciting. Then we had the personal computer, then we

had the internet, the cell phone, social media, and now we have different social

media networks coming in successively causing crises one after the other. And then we have LLMs and

other applications of machine learning and generative AI. It's easy to think of each of these as

different tech revolutions, as if we've just had ten tech revolutions in a row. But really, they are all deeper

penetration of one tech revolution: the development of the computer. These are all applications of computers. In the same way, the printing press

comes in in 1450, and it isn't done shaping the world instantly. It takes forty years to even

be economically sustainable. It's not until the 1490s that

printers are making money. And then in the 1510s, it's time for

pamphlets and pamphlet distribution. Now there's news, and news is suddenly

done by print, and that's a revolution

on the same scale as the difference

between computers and cell phones. We get the Reformation, which is enabled

by pamphlets in exactly the same way that the Arab Spring is enabled by cell phones. Then we get the newspaper, another

new application of the same technology that follows, like social media. It's one information revolution

having multiple successive revolutionary applications as it

disseminates and eventually saturates. It moves on a timescale quite similar

to the timescale in which the digital one is happening as well, so that

print keeps hitting Europe with successive revolutions for 150 years. And every couple of decades, or

every decade, there'll be a new bang. Suddenly it's possible to get a

printed pamphlet from Wittenberg to London in seventeen days. Oh my God, we can coordinate our

resistance movement against the Catholics. Boom. The Reformation happens. That wasn't possible even a decade earlier

when it took months to get a pamphlet

from one end of Europe to the other. So it's best to think of these very

much in parallel, the print revolution and the digital revolution, as one big

technological change in information that then has successive applications

as that one technology finds new forms and disseminates more deeply and keeps

having consequences over decades. It's not multiple separate revolutions. It's one ongoing information revolution. Maybe other eras also have this and I just

haven't read the books about them, but from your book, I thought, "Oh, history

just seems to be happening really fast, and seems to have sped up, especially

religious and political history." Obviously, the things happening in

Italy, but even aside from that, you have Martin Luther and the Reformation,

and then just twenty years later England splits off from the Catholic Church,

which is unprecedented in two millennia. Then it has a bunch of tumults

that flop, flop, flop so that every decade feels different. Here you are in 1506 being

nostalgic for how the world was

completely different in 1490. And you're like, "That's pretty fast." Here we are in 2026 often

feeling nostalgic for how things were in the year 2000. Is it fair to trace that back

to the printing press or its offshoots, or is it just embedded? It's more that history

has always moved fast. But when we teach it in high school,

we're trying to move over large chunks of time quickly, and so

we pretend that it moved slowly. We have this lie that there

were long periods of stagnation. But you can zoom in anywhere, and

you're going to find every decade feels different, and people in the 1320s

are nostalgic for people in the 1300s. It's always felt like history

was moving very quickly, and things rose and things fell. It's the lies we tell ourselves in

history books written in the 19th century that are trying to group all of these

things together and make modernity special that confuse us about this. I'm working on a paper right

now about the video game Civ. Civ is the number one teacher

of history in the world. It has shipped 70 million copies,

and 65 percent of people on Earth

who have technology play video games. Civ is the number one teacher of

history, bar none, since 1991. What does Civ tell you? Civ tells you that in antiquity, a turn

is fifty years, and then in the Middle Ages, a turn is twenty-five years. Once you get into the Industrial

Revolution, a turn is ten years, and then five years, and in modernity,

a turn is just one year because in one year, as much happens now as

happened in fifty years in antiquity. That lie is also what

our textbooks tell us. But it doesn't matter where we zoom in. Any time I go to a talk where any

historian is zooming in on any decade in any time and place, it

always feels like it's moving as fast as our present is moving. I guess the difference is that

technologically, we know that they weren't moving as fast. Technologically, they were moving fast. We just don't care about

those technologies anymore. That’s interesting. They were constantly

inventing all sorts of things. We just take them for granted. The invention of chairs with backs, the

invention of scissors, the invention of improved metallurgy so that steel could

do things steel couldn't do before.

There was always technological

change happening. I'm in the middle of reading an

amazing book about how, when you look at the paintings of Raphael

and the few paintings we have by Michelangelo, the colors look like

they're really glowing, like gemstones. How did that happen? When you compare them to paintings

from just a hundred years earlier somehow the colors are flatter. I'm not talking about the

anatomy being more realistic. That's separate, but

the colors are flatter. The answer is there was a sequence of

revolutionary adaptations in how to process oil and how to process colors

and mix them together, and then those were used to create fake gemstones,

and there was a major industrial leap forward in the fake gemstone industry. Then people who were making picture

frames realized they could use the same techniques from the fake

gemstones to make fake gold by painting yellow over the surface of tinfoil. And then those were used by

artists who were like, "Wait, I want to make things that look like

they glow like fake gemstones." There were eleven major technical

revolutions over the course of 120

years that led to those colors changing. Obviously progress has been happening

in individual fields over time. But in this macroscopic view, and this is a big part of your book,

there's a reason that people living in the fourteenth century would say,

"Look, the best time to be alive was when the Romans were around, and since

then it's just been the Dark Ages." If they stood in relation to the Roman

Empire as we stand to them, we would obviously notice that the world has

seen so much progress since then. It clearly seems like the pace... It's hard to figure out when we

are lying and when we are right where we say the pace picked up. One thing that makes the pace

pick up in modern day is simply the population grew and grew and

grew and is now much, much larger. The majority of people who ever lived

in the entire history, since humans have been humans and not hominids,

have lived in the last 200 years

because the population became massive. How did the population become massive? Our agriculture and

our hygiene enabled it. How did our agriculture

and our hygiene improve? Half of that is continuing on

the artisanal level to invent new things in the same way that the

artists invented better colors. Agricultural workers invented

better technologies, and agriculture was constantly improving. You're correct that with the

arrival of the systematic scientific method just after 1600, there is a

deliberate societal desire to create intentional anthropogenic progress. I'll zoom in on the arguments made in

1600, then I'll zoom out and unpack them. In 1600, the idea is that history

up until now has been unsystematic. People have discovered things at

random, but we can create a method in which we observe the world and use

inductive reasoning to figure things out from those observations to create

systematic descriptions of the secret

motions that underlie nature, and

from that work out technologies that are good and useful for humankind. If, as we make our observations of nature,

we publish them and share them with each other, we can create a community

of scientists that will share all of these discoveries with each other and

with the world and therefore benefit it. This is where, when I'm doing this in

the classroom, I deliberately provoke and shock my students with the fun claim that

Leonardo da Vinci was not a scientist. What I mean by that is that to be a

scientist is to publish your results and share them with a community of

other scientists so that they can test them, so that the whole human

civilization progresses a little bit. When my friends who are chemists or

my friends who are particle physicists discover something, the next goal is

to share that discovery with everyone so everyone's knowledge advances. What does Leonardo do? He writes everything he discovers

down in coded mirror writing so that nobody but him can possibly use it. He refuses to share even with his

students and assistants the secrets of

what he's doing because Leonardo does

not want to contribute to human progress. Leonardo wants to make unique

masterpieces so that hundreds of years later, people will see them and

marvel and say, "How did he do it? No one else has ever been able

to replicate that method." He wanted to be marveled at by the

future exactly the way he and his peers marveled at the works of the ancients. They look at something like the Colosseum

or the Pantheon in Rome with its enormous dome, and they say, "How did they do it? If only we could work that

out, we could make one and then make sure no one else could." Brunelleschi, who built Florence's famous

beautiful dome, deliberately burned all of his notes and schematics so that nobody

else would be able to replicate his work. That is an inventor, and an engineer, but

in the sense of a community of scientists, this is not a servant of human progress. This is actually a saboteur of

human progress, if anything, who deliberately makes progress and then

tries to cut it off at that point

so that no one else can be his peer. That is what you did as a learned

inventor in the 1400s and in the 1500s. But as you get to 1600, the

suggestion is different, and here I'm going to use Francis Bacon's

gorgeous simile of the three insects. There are three types of

knowledge wielders, says Bacon. First, there is the ant, who is

the encyclopedist, who gathers information from all around the world. He learns everything he can, and he

piles it up into a great big pile. He makes an anthill, and he sits on top. If he has the biggest anthill,

the biggest pile of knowledge, then he's proud of having made it. But all he does is

assemble it and possess it. It's a beautiful library,

but nothing comes from it. The second type is the system weaver,

the spider who spins elaborate webs of beautiful, intricate, logical theory. You admire them, and you can get

entranced and ensnared in them easily because they're so beautiful.

They're almost hypnotic. But there's nothing real in them. They're all just spun out of the

body of the spider himself, the theorist theorizing from his own mind. The third kind, says Bacon, is the

honeybee, who, gathering from among the fruits of nature, processes what

he gathers through the organ of his own being to produce something which

is sweet and useful for humankind. That is the scientist who gathers

from nature to produce something sweet and useful for humankind. With this rhetorical call, and with

Francis Bacon's portrait on the title page, the English Academy of Sciences

is founded and starts publishing. The standard switches over from "You

are not a great achiever because you built the dome" to "You are a great

achiever because you worked out how it can be done, and you shared that sweet

and useful thing with all of humankind." Bacon says if we do this, if we make

academies of sciences, we can make

sure that every human generation lives

in a better condition than the past. We'll have better

agriculture, fewer famines. We will have refrigeration. We'll have chicken in winter. We will have all of these

things that we aspire to. If we collaborate, each generation's

experience will be better than the last. He says that to be a scientist is

the ultimate act of charity because there is no greater act of charity

than to give a gift to every human who will ever live after you. That is the rhetoric of what you

would feel was happening if you're alive in the 1620s and 1630s. Galileo is publishing his observations,

and Descartes is publishing his systems. They've just discovered that the heart

is a pump and that they were totally wrong about the four humors theory. The blood circulates, and they're

trying to figure out what it does. They have magnification, and

they can see worlds of complex patterns on the wing of a flea. It sounds like the whole world

is suddenly coming into view, and

we're at the beginning of progress. If we zoom out, we would say there'd

been progress the whole time. People had always been inventing things. Agriculture in France was better

in 1300 than it was in 1000. Plows got better, seed got better,

cabbages were bred to be bigger. People worked out better pots. There were always artisanal inventors. In fact, that's a lot of

what Bacon is observing. He worked in the patent office as

a young man, and he would see a carpenter come in to patent: "I

have invented a better chisel. I've invented a thing that goes like this. I'm going to patent it." He would

realize that it was workers and workmen and handicraftsmen who were

inventing the really useful tools. He wanted to make this systematic. We would say there was always

anthropogenic progress. In 1630, they realize there

is anthropogenic progress. They think there hasn't been. They think they're beginning, and

that history up until this point has been stagnant, but now it's going

to suddenly be full of invention as,

for the first time, there will be

deliberate anthropogenic progress. Really, we would say there always

was and that it's accelerating, and at this point, we realize it

and articulate and describe it. You've probably seen lots of graphs

of history with the hockey stick graph structure, where it's flat

for a long time and then zhoops up. They'll put that zhoop after the

invention of the scientific method. It depends on what we're graphing,

whether that zhoop is appropriate. It also depends on how much

you zoom in or zoom out. It's true, we do get to inventions

that result in enormous increases in population 150 years after Bacon. Would we have anyway, even if

it hadn't been systematized? Probably a bit later, and we would

have a slightly flatter hockey stick. But we would still have hockey sticked. In the same way that when you put

mice on an island without mice, they breed and they breed and they breed

and they breed and they hockey stick. Humans would also have hockey sticked. But would we have hockey sticked later? Would we have hockey

sticked with more pain?

When mice hockey stick, they also

starve to death and eat each other. We haven't done that yet. Go us. Was that science? Probably. There are a lot of factors to it. So is it true that everything

accelerated after 1620? In one sense, yes. In another sense, it's a continuation

of a curve that was already curving. I think you might have answered

a question I was about to ask. The book you recommend on your website,

The Renaissance in Italy, I keep forgetting the name of the author. Italian names are tough.

Guido Ruggiero. In some part, he has this question: Look,

in Italy, as you mentioned, in Venice, they've really scaled the printing press. As a result, you have the

metalworking for fine typesetting. Separately, milling technology for

water mills and windmills is advanced, along with gears for watches. So he asks, why didn't Italy

have the Industrial Revolution?

I wonder, do you stand by the answer you

just gave, or is it a different theory? Part of it. But another is, we cannot underestimate

how much richer per square meter Italy is than everywhere else. Italy is the breadbasket, and it's also

the center of Big Oil, which is to say Big Olive Oil, which was both fuel oil for

light and industrial oil for production, as well as cooking and eating oil. And the other major major industry

of the period, which is Big Wool. If you're already the center of Big

Finance, Big Wool, and Big Oil, do you need an industrial revolution? You're already economically on top

through the power of agriculture. It makes sense for it to have been

a sort of industrial backwater area. What was England producing? Crappy quality wool? England was so aware that it couldn't

process wool into high quality without masses of olive oil, which it couldn't

produce, that England just exported its crude wool to Florence in order

to have Florence, with its olive oil

reserves, produce the fine quality. Think about how a wool suit isn't

itchy, but a wool blanket often is. That wool suit isn't itchy because

lots of olive oil went into the process of producing it, at

least at pre-modern tech levels. So do you want England to produce

your itchy wool that people will only pay a small amount for,

or do you want to export it? It makes sense for it to have

been somewhere industrially ambitious that wasn't already

economically on top to have done it. That's one reason that industrialization

doesn't kindle in Italy. Italy is agricultural

land and a finance world. It doesn't feel like it

needs a new industry. Another factor is mining. This land is more valuable as

a farm than it is as a mine. You don't want to rip it up. Another is it's so subdivided

because those rich cities are still mostly independent, whereas

a centralized crown in England is more able to pass legislation to

facilitate a massive transformation. No city really wants to be the one where

the giant industrialization is happening.

It's awful for the city. Note that the industrialization of

the Industrial Revolution was mostly outside of the wealthier centers of

England in the second-tier towns. They grow massively into huge

industrial areas like Lancaster. So those are a plural bunch of reasons. But I would have also thought that the

competitiveness between different Italian city-states would have made it so that

if they get better textile machines before you, it's a disaster because they're right there. This is not going to sound

plausible to anybody, but it's true. We've been looking at some documents

recently which pretty much confirm that they did figure out how

to make industrial looms in the 1400s, and they didn't want to. They wanted to make

luxuriant artisanal fabrics. This, by the way, was another

interesting thing from the book. With the first printed books,

there's not this market of commodity

things that are produced cheaply that the average person is going

to be like, "Oh, if I can get this for $10.99, I'll go buy it." So they're trying to make this

thing look like it was produced as artisanal luxury grade. Right. The first printed fonts look like

handwritten scripts, and often have a blank space to illuminate it so that

it looks just as fancy as manuscripts. One thing I wanted

to ask you, back to the printing press. Not only does printing get

cheaper, but around this time, paper itself also gets cheaper. So not just reading, but

writing gets cheaper. Do you as historians see a marked

change in this period in the amount of records that are taken and,

as a result, our understanding? A huge amount rests on whether

you have a cheap writing surface. Rather than looking first at the

Renaissance, let's look at what we think of as the fall of Rome. One of the biggest things that happens

there is that Western and Northern Europe lose access to papyrus. Papyrus is the cheap writing

surface of antiquity. It is an easy plant-based writing surface. You take this tall, thin water reed

that is fibrous like asparagus. You slice it into ribbons. You set them out in the sun, a

bunch of them parallel to each other sitting on a stone like noodles. You put a second row of noodles

perpendicular to that on top, and then they dry in the sun,

and they are naturally sticky. They stick to each other. They produce a sheet.

Practically no labor has gone into this. You've sliced, you've laid out, boom. Papyrus is a very inexpensive writing

surface, and this is what enables Rome to have a bureaucracy and to

have libraries in any mid-sized city. People can send letters back and forth. There can be enormous tax records. Sometimes when Egypt and Rome are

at war, Egypt will be like, "No, we are angry. We'll stop exporting

papyrus." No papyrus to Rome, and then Rome's infrastructure will fall

apart overnight because you can't do anything if you can't write stuff down. Papyrus is a warm weather plant. It is killed by frost. You cannot grow it

north of the frost line. So France, Spain, even most of

Italy, you can only grow papyrus down in the very tip down in Sicily. Without papyrus, what you're writing on is a dead sheep. If you think of the price of a

head of lettuce and the price of a leather jacket, you're understanding

the difference between a sheet of

papyrus and writing on a dead sheep. Every page of a medieval

book is as expensive as that much of a leather jacket. A handwritten medieval book handwritten

on parchment costs as much as a house, so that a small pocket copy of a

book costs as much as a studio condo. A big illuminated fancy Bible, you're

spending on that what you would spend on a villa in the countryside. This is an enormous expense. To have a library is to be

not just rich, but mega-rich. Only the wealthiest cities

contain anybody who has a library. The great library of the University

of Paris—the library from Europe's perspective—has six hundred books. There's definitely more than

six hundred books in this room. Every kiosk at an airport

selling Dan Brown novels has more than six hundred books. This is nothing. At the same time as that, in the Middle

East, sultans have libraries of over a

thousand books or five thousand books. There are libraries in Sub-Saharan

Africa with thousands of books. There are libraries in China with

thousands of books because they have cheap paper, rice paper. The Middle East has papyrus. Europe, and only Europe, is

writing on a leather jacket. What changes around this time? How is Europe able to get paper? Still zooming in on the fall of Rome. Rome had lots and lots

of books on papyrus. They start falling apart

because papyrus is brittle. Most of our knowledge from

antiquity is not lost at the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It's lost between 400 and 600 A.D.

when the papyri are falling apart. Here you are with a library of a

thousand books, and you can only afford to make a hundred new books. You have to choose which hundred of

these thousand to save because there literally is not enough industry

on your continent to make enough leather to copy down all this text. You have to pick. The majority of what we lost

from antiquity, we lost then.

We lost it when the

papyri were falling apart. This also distorted what survived because

most of the copying out was done by monks. When you have a thousand books and you

can only save a hundred of them and you're a monk, you're like, "What will I save?

I know, Saint Augustine. I love Saint Augustine." This is why we have more

surviving work by Saint Augustine than the entirety of all pagan classical Latin. The subjective tastes of the people

in power at the moment the papyri were falling apart ended up being an

unintentional moment of censorship that biased what survives from antiquity. Paper technology hits Europe in 800 A.D.,

so we're talking about a four-hundred-year famine of a cheap writing surface. Paper is nowhere near as cheap

as papyrus because you need to gather rags from used clothing. You immerse them in water, and you beat

them violently using a mill for a very long time until they become a pulp. You then scoop that pulp up on a

screen, and the fibers lock together.

It's sort of a slurry

that looks like grits. You lift up the slurry, and it locks

together into a sheet of paper. It's not as cheap as just growing

papyrus, and it's much more labor. You have to build a paper mill. If parchment is a leather jacket

and papyrus is buying a head of lettuce, this is somewhere in between. What's in between a

leather jacket and a... This feels like a trick question. This is somewhere in between,

getting yourself a dozen frozen prepackaged meals, which are

complex and have many ingredients. A lot of industry went into

producing the actual packaging, more so than a head of lettuce. So it's ten times as expensive,

but it's still a tenth as much as the leather jacket. Paper comes in, and people

are very wary of it. Paper is clearly not

as strong as parchment. Parchment is really tough stuff. People start using paper for rough

drafts, letters, sketchbooks.

When you're doing the sketch before doing

a painting, you might do that on paper. But Europe has paper for four hundred

years before the earliest state document is ever written on paper, to give you

a sense of how people are wary of it. It disseminates slowly. It's still expensive. It requires industry and production, but

it is a tenth as expensive as leather. Paper disseminates slowly through Europe. Again, this is one of these things where

there was always technological change, and all technological changes are gradual. Paper comes in in 800. It's being trusted by 1200. When printing begins, they're printing

on paper, but they even print on vellum. If you're a really rich person,

you would be like, "Please print two copies on vellum for me." Dukes like the Dukes d'Este, Isabella

d'Este—the sister of the duke who walked around buck naked to show off that he

could—specially ordered all of her books to be printed on vellum even when the

rest of the print run was on paper.

These are the very books being

produced in Venice by the apprentices of Gutenberg who ran away. At that moment in the 1490s, if you're

really rich, you might be invested in these newfangled printed books,

but you're still not trusting paper, even though paper has been there

for six hundred years at that point. So again, gradual adoption of

technologies and gradual trust in paper. They're still using parchment for things,

gradually less and less, but substantially over the course of the 1600s. You can even find things written on

parchment in the 1700s and 1800s. British Parliament still did its

records on parchment up until ten years ago, and the Vatican still does

its official records on parchment now. This is a digression, but the

numbers of how expensive a book is didn't make sense to me just based

on how much scribe time it took. You say it's $600,000 per

book, and then separately, it's five months of scribe time. I'm like, how much are

the scribes getting paid?

But if it's the paper...

What changes with Gutenberg? The paper and the ink. But a lot of it is scribe time. But Gutenberg still needs paper, right? Yeah, Gutenberg needs paper. That's why he goes bankrupt. He borrows the equivalent of about

$1.5 million to buy paper, and then doesn't make back $1.5 million

worth of material when printing it. This is what makes printing a risk. You have to start buying

the paper up front. You need to buy it in a big lot

so that it matches, because people don't want the paper to suddenly be

a different color within their book. You're investing a lot up front, and

you're not getting anything back until you produce this slow print run, which

is why printers start printing pamphlets. They can have one press that's

slowly printing a valuable book that will take six months to print. Next to it they have another press

that's printing pamphlets where in two days they've printed a fashion report on

what everyone was wearing at the royal wedding, which they can sell right away. It's much cheaper, but it means

they have something they can

sell two or three times a week. So you have the pamphlet

following the book, printing cheap news, printing scandal rags. Why is it cheaper?

Because the material is cheaper? Just because it's only five pages long. Oh, I see. Got it. I could grab one if you want to see one. So if we look at some examples. I'll show you these one by one. For example, this is a pamphlet. Naked pages, short text,

hand-stitched together. It would take two or four days

because you print the front side and then the back side.

It's cheap. It's ephemeral. You print a thousand of them. You sell a bunch around the town. You sell a bunch to news writers who are

going to and from other cities, who will buy them and bring them to the next town. If you've printed news in Milan,

people who are going to Florence will want to buy your news to go there.

It might be a report of a siege. It might be what people were wearing

at the royal wedding. My favorite title of a pamphlet was

"The Scandalous Tale of a Doctor from Padua and How He Seduced His Maid,

Murdered His Wife, Murdered the Maid, Cut Out Her Heart and Ate It, and

How He Was Justly Punished by God." That was the title of the pamphlet. These things circulated around. Some of them were nonsense,

some of them were real news. Most were combinations. But you can sell something like

this cheaply in a couple of days. Often they would have a cheap blue cover. You have seen this color before. This is the color of laundry

lint, because fundamentally laundry lint is what paper is. You take rags of old clothes, you put them

in water, you beat them until they become a pulp, and you skim it out with a sieve. Laundry lint is what rag paper is. If you don't bleach it, it's this generic

blue-gray color, which is sort of the average color of what human beings wear. That's a copy of The Gentleman's Magazine,

another example of technology taking

a leap forward in the 18th century. When they invented the newspaper, they

immediately had the problem of, "Oh, no. Newspapers contradict each other. We don't know what's true. We have to fact-check stuff."

That one has a great fold-out. I think there's a procession or something. That is what everybody

wore at the state funeral. Instead of photographs, we have this

fancy, "Here is what everyone was wearing at the state funeral." Very exciting. Your laundry lint, if you don't bleach it,

remains the color that it on average was. In the 18th century, they have newspapers. The newspapers are reporting

news, but they don't quite say the same thing as each other. The problem becomes, how

do we know who to trust? The Gentleman's Magazine was developed,

and every week they would publish a roundup of that week's news saying

what each newspaper said about it, where they contradicted each other,

analyzing who's right and wrong. It was the fact-checking. This is the first magazine. It invented the word "magazine"

being used in this context. It was an intellectual response

to the fake news problem of how we reconcile what happens with newspapers.

You see these many iterations: they

invent the printing press, then they invent the pamphlet, then they invent

the newspaper, then they invent the magazine to cope with the newspaper. The newspaper is invented to cope with the

pamphlet because you don't know whether to trust the scandalous tale of the doctor

from Padua and how he murdered his wife. Is he real? We don't know. But if somebody publishes a newspaper

that serially prints news every week, they have a reputation. They have to be respectable. You're not going to subscribe to them

if you catch them printing nonsense. The serial nature of a newspaper was

a form of accountability that made people willing to trust it over time. The newspaper is a way of

fact-checking the pamphlet. The pamphlet is a way of making money

while you're printing your longer book. I will also let you

have a look at papyrus. Thank you. You can see the plaid pattern

of the papyrus because it is made of two layers of strips. And there's a papyrus scroll.

That's modern papyrus. The thing about papyrus is

that in addition to being cheap, it's very brittle. It works better in a scroll than

it does folded over because the folded edge cracks really easily. If you try to make this into a codex

book, it's going to be very fragile. Here you go. This is a real 17th-century letter in

absolutely indecipherable handwriting. On parchment? On parchment. You can even tell, because that's cheap

parchment, which side was the outside of the animal and which side was the inside. The handwriting is in some sense

bad, but it's also very well aligned. Tiny and precise. But here is good parchment. It is hard to believe

that it's animal skin. These are pages from a book

of hours from about 1480, individually hand-calligraphed. You can see that one

has a hole through it. They wrote around the hole because it's

too valuable to not use that sheet.

These are paper thin. You can barely tell, if you look

carefully, which side was the outside of the animal and which

was the inside because one side has tiny little speckles of pores. Where is this from? A book of hours. This is probably a French book of hours. A book of hours is a personal prayer book. Bible quotes, objects of meditation. The book would be fat and small. This was the most common

manuscript in the Middle Ages. You would carry it around in your

pocket, and you'd pull it out different times of day for personal prayer. But it also has big margins so that

you can take notes in it, write down addresses, have friends write notes in it. You use it almost like a day planner. It's the smartphone of the period

in which you make all your notes or write down people's names. You might have celebrities you

meet sign your book of hours. All sorts of neat things go

into the margins as you use this to organize the day.

That would be extremely interesting as a collector's

item, random people's book of hours and what kinds of things they recorded. Oh yeah. Think of a leather jacket, but how much

more industrial effort went into making leather literally paper-thin like this. Huge amounts of industrial effort go

into making the pages of such a book. My favorite example of this kind of

distribution and diffusion taking longer than you would think for a

very fundamental technology—well, this is now my favorite example, so

my second favorite example—is oil. I interviewed Daniel Yergin, who wrote

this big book about the history of oil. In the 1860s, Drake strikes

oil in Pennsylvania. It's in the 1910s that the car is

invented, the internal combustion engine is put into a thing which

you sell millions of copies of. Until then, oil is just used for

kerosene, which is just for lighting.

The actual gas is just thrown away. In fact, when the light bulb was

invented, people were wondering whether Standard Oil was going to go bankrupt

because the main use case had gone away. Oh, neat. I always think of Julius Caesar's

description of Britain when the Romans first get there. He says, "The people of Britain

are so poor, they can't afford to burn wood, so they burn rocks." We know he's talking about coal. Oh, I thought it was satire. No, he's talking about coal. They had coal in the days of Julius

Caesar, but they didn't figure out its massive industrial utility

until many, many years later. There is this interesting question

of why the Romans didn't have the Industrial Revolution because they

had these huge silver mines in Spain and elsewhere, but no coal. You have the Industrial Revolution

when you feel you need to. That's the thing about Gutenberg as well

that a lot of people don't think about. People are like, "Gutenberg was

an inventor and invented a thing,

and then it had an impact." No. He was living in the middle of a library

building boom in which there was a huge demand for books that spiked. He invented the invention in

response to that cultural change. It isn't by chance that we got

the printing press in 1450. There was a huge boom of library

buildings starting in the 1410s, and inventors were trying to figure

out ways to make books cheaper. They were making smaller books. They were using paper more. Paper surges before the Gutenberg

movable type printing press. So Gutenberg isn't a random

genius out of nowhere. It was the moment that

people needed more books. We were going to get the invention. One thing you say in passing in

the book is Martin Luther comes up at the exact right time, because

you've got Savonarola in the 1490s, and he's another prophet type. I guess he's the modern analog of somebody

like Khomeini in Iran, setting up a theocratic government, but too early.

Machiavelli you say is too late because

the censorship is already in place. What is the censorship that is in

place by the time of Machiavelli? What is the alternative world? Machiavelli, remember, is

contemporary with Luther. It's just that he circulates his

stuff very briefly and very privately. He doesn't want a pamphlet version

of his ideas out there because he only wants Florence to have it. Luther hits the sweet spot

when the pamphlet distribution network had just developed. When Savonarola printed pamphlets,

they only circulated around Florence and its neighbors, Siena and Pisa. It took months for them to get farther. His movement was quickly crushed. When Luther makes the Ninety-five

Theses public, they're in print in London seventeen days after

he releases them in Wittenberg. The pamphlet runners go foom, foom, foom,

and get the news there, and things are printed overnight and come out that fast. But it seems like you're hinting that

within the next two decades, there's

a new censorship regime across Europe. A new censorship regime responds. The censorship regime is very effective

at shaping what is printed in books, but can never keep up with pamphlets. In the same way that the government can pressure CNN,

the government can't pressure random people on a social media network. You're not going to be able

to keep up with that speed. One of the funny problems that the

Inquisition always had when trying to persecute printers is that printers worked

in the information distribution industry. They were the people who paid the news

writers, whose job it is to move as fast as humanly possible between cities. Which meant that news

always reached them first. If a printer was ever convicted by

the Inquisition, they would find out before the Inquisition could

possibly get there to arrest them. The Inquisition never succeeded

at arresting printers. They'd always skipped town by the time

the Inquisition got there, because if you employ the news writers,

you find out first what's going on.

The Inquisition can't keep up. When we look at censorship, there's

an intersection of four factors as to whether censorship is possible. One of them is law: Is it legal

for the censorship to happen? Another one is the technology. Is it actually possible

to censor this thing? You cannot censor whatever moves the

information fastest because it will move the information faster than you can move. Even if that one printer had to skip

town, he will set up shop somewhere else, a new person will take over his shop,

and the information will still move. So pamphlets become unpoliceable. You can try to police them, you can

partially police them, but keeping pamphlets from moving around… They're

anonymous, they're quick, they're produced overnight, they move quickly. You just can't keep up with them. Couldn't they just punish print

shops for publishing things? Just say, "This is what we like,

and if you do something we don't like, we'll punish you," which is

how censorship in China works, for example.

They did. So the printer skips town.

The printer moves to the next town. There is a cost to that. There's a human cost to evading that. You've had to leave your home and

friends behind and move to a new place, but they don't get you. It's also very easy to deny that

the pamphlet came from you at all. The print industry proves very difficult

to censor, and we're experiencing the same thing with social media. Everyone is like, "Censor the pornography

on this social media channel," and they're like, "We just can't. It's too fast. There's too much." Or, "Censor

the hate speech." "We just can't. It's too fast, there's too much." There are too many pamphlets,

and they could crack down on one particular pamphlet shop. We have records of this. There's a brilliant analysis in

Anton Matytsin's book, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. He has a great description from the notes

of a raid on a clandestine bookshop. This wasn't the printer, this was the

underground bookshop that was selling illegal books, and they're raided. It has all the details of how

angry the people were about different things that the shop had.

So there was censorship and there were

crackdowns, but it was a censorship that could not actually prevent circulation. It could restrict it, it could

make it harder, it could make it scary, but it couldn't prevent it. Before books become cheap, unless you're fantastically wealthy,

you're reading the same couple of books—if you've ever read a book—again

and again throughout your life. Cosimo de' Medici's father owned,

I think it was twelve books. I want to understand the intellectual

significance of rereading the exact same book again and again. Maybe the reason Petrarch loved Cicero

so much is, imagine reading the same book twenty times, hitting the same joke again

and just meditating on every single point. There's got to be a difference

in intellectual culture as a result of treating these things

as the equivalent of the Bible. You really feel like you get

to know the person intimately. You develop a personal relationship

with the ancient author. You are participating in a conversation

across the diaspora of time.

It's a one-way conversation. You're responding to them, the

future will respond to you. But there is a great deal of intimacy. Petrarch talks about his friend Cicero

and being betrayed by his friend Cicero. He finds new works of Cicero that he

hadn't read including some of Cicero's letters in which Cicero is not following

his own stoic philosophical precepts and is being petty, yelling at people

about real estate, and getting all upset after his daughter's death. You know how people get manic when

there's been a death in the family and start quarreling about everything? Cicero gets like that, and

Petrarch is heartbroken. To him it means even the wisest

man in history could not conquer that urge to become irrational

and petty in the face of grief. If even Cicero became irrational and

petty in the face of grief, does that mean humanity is doomed to forever be

irrational and petty in the face of grief? He talks about Cicero breaking his

heart and his foot, because the

book fell on his foot and broke

it, and he got a bad infection, and he was bedridden for months. Totally different topic, but in 1492, Columbus comes to the New World. They discover the New World. What is the reception of this news? I was just at a conference a week

ago in which we confirmed that there's a Vatican document from 1100 or maybe 1200—I forget the exact year—that

recognizes the existence of Vinland, i.e. Canada, where they got the

information from the Vikings. Oh, interesting. They thought it was just

a little thing, but yeah. So they're rediscovering the New World. Would it be the equivalent of

finding out there are aliens today? Why wasn't it considered more significant? Why wasn't the consensus, "This is

the main thing happening right now, we've discovered the New World"?

When I teach my class on the 1490s,

the students, many of whom are American, always have trouble wrapping

their heads around people thinking that the New World isn't a big deal. A big part of it is that they find the

Caribbean islands, and they find the coast, and they think this is small. The way I put it to my students is,

the news comes back, we've found something across the water to the west. It might be even as big

as the Canary Islands. They've found something, but they

don't realize they've found something the scale of Europe and Africa. Actually, it's not as big as

Europe and Africa, but they found something humongous. That's part of it. Another part of it is no matter how

big and important something far away is, it's hard to bring your mind

out of the petty squabbles that are happening right around you, especially

when they feel like life or death. If it's 1492, what is happening? France is about to invade Italy. Europe might be embroiled in the

largest war it's seen in fifty years. The papacy has just been

taken over by Spain.

Spain is suddenly trying to

throw its weight around in Europe in a way that's unprecedented. The Ottomans have just invaded Italy

and Hungary and might be coming again. Also over there, there's a new thing. Okay, great. We'll worry about that when we're not

having three wars at the same time. But guys, we're having

three wars at the same time. Oh my God. And then Martin Luther hits Europe

like a ton of bricks when they still haven't even figured out that this

is a continent and not an island. In the same way, if you're in a country

and it's having a tumult, you worry a lot about its tumult, even if a larger

tumult is happening in a faraway country. It's hard to bring your mind

out of Europe at crisis to be like, "Hey, this is a thing." The other is they're inventing

lots of new things, and it falls into the sphere along the rest. They're discovering the existence

of sub-Saharan Africa, where they thought there was basically one

country's worth of stuff, south of the Sahara, Ethiopia and nothing else. Then they're like, "Oh my God, there's

a whole big thing that sticks out." They're also discovering

that the heart is a pump.

That's a bit later, but

they're discovering all sorts of stuff at the same time. The discovery of the New World,

especially when they realize how big it is, becomes an intellectual challenge

where they say, "Wait, does this mean all the maps we've had are wrong? Does this mean the ancients

were wrong about geography? Does it mean the world is a lot bigger

than we used to think the world is? Let's worry about that the same way

we worry about revolutionizing our mathematics and figuring out that

the sun doesn't go around the Earth." These are things that

are paradigm shifting. But on the other hand, does it matter

whether the sun goes around the Earth or the Earth around the sun when the

French are invading right now and we need to get the defenses going, and

there's a giant civil war happening, and we're about to be betrayed? It does matter, but it

also doesn't matter. Any decade is concerned by its

tumults and often fails to recognize the importance of what's around it. That’s true of every decade. One fun game when I study the history

of censorship, which I work a lot

on—my next non-fiction book is

gonna be a book on the history of censorship—whatever they're looking at, they're always wrong, from our

perspective, about what they should be worried about censoring. If we had a time machine and our goal is

to go give them advice… Here we are in the French Enlightenment, Voltaire and

Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade and La Mettrie's articulations of materialist

atheism are flying around Europe. What is the Inquisition worried about? It's worried about Jansenist treatises

about the nature of the Trinity. Jansenism is sort of like a

Calvinist version of Catholicism. Do you want to have an incredibly

terrifying authoritarian God who hates you and tells you that your soul is

a worthless spider that deserves to be hurled into fire, but also have

to obey the arbitrary pope in Rome? Then Jansenism is for you.

It has all the grimness of Calvinism

and all of the authoritarian centrality of the Roman Catholics. This was a heresy that was abroad

in the Enlightenment, and they are so much more worried about Jansenism

than they are about Voltaire. Remember that very chapter in Matytsin's

book I mentioned where they are raiding the clandestine bookshop. They're like, "Voltaire, fine. The banned Encyclopédie, which is gonna

revolutionize all thought in Europe, fine. letters of Diderot, Rousseau, fine, fine. Jansenist treatises about

the nature of the Trinity! Throw the book at these guys! This is the worst thing!" They really

are obsessed with this incredibly petty minor heresy to the degree that when

the Encyclopédie is banned by Rome… France likes the Encyclopedia. This is Diderot and d’Holbach’s

big project of universal education, to print an encyclopedia that

will collect all world knowledge. They articulate it as, "Should a

new dark age come upon humankind and even one copy of the encyclopedia

survive, it will be sufficient to

reconstruct all human progress." That's the goal of this thing. It's advancing incredibly radical ideas

about biology, about statecraft, about reforming the law to be rational instead

of traditional, all sorts of stuff. When that is banned by Rome, Paris is

commanded... Paris loves this book. The king likes this book. The queen likes this book. She's on record saying it was so cool

being able to look up the technology that was used to make her silk pantyhose. She just loves it. Everybody loves it. France allows it to circulate

despite its controversial content. But Rome says, "No, you

must ban this book." So they agree they're gonna have the

ceremonial burning, and they march the Encyclopédie up to the fire. Then they get some Jansenist treatise

about the nature of the Trinity and burn those instead, because they

don't want to burn the Encyclopédie. They love it. They want to burn this other thing. This is always true. If we had a time machine for the

Inquisition in the 1540s, we would

say, "Guys, Machiavelli, he's really

important. He's really revolutionary. You gotta be looking at this." Or we would say Lucretius's De rerum

natura, which I did my dissertation on… Many people are familiar with

Greenblatt's book, The Swerve, which credits a lot of change to the materialist

science that this poem articulates. There's a much more complex story,

which you know is told in my book, which refers to Greenblatt's. If anyone enjoyed The Swerve, you would

really enjoy the more detailed zoom-in that Inventing the Renaissance has. But we would say, "Guys,

you should censor this." We literally have letters of inquisitors

writing to each other saying, "We don't need to bother censoring Lucretius. Only learned people can read it,

and they know perfectly well that the false stuff is false, so it'll

just circulate and it's fine. What we need to worry about

censoring is all of these fine minutiae of Protestantism." The 1545 edition of the Index of Banned Books

says in its introduction, "We shall put the names of arch-heretics in all caps." When I first read that, I was like,

"Ooh, I want to see all my favorite

arch-heretics be in all caps." I eagerly flip to M, and

Machiavelli is not in all caps. He was not important

enough from their position. The all caps authors are all

minor Protestant theologians. They're all people like Calvin and

Zwingli and Luther and Melanchthon. They're all doing stuff that

we would say does not matter. But an era is always wrong about what

ideas and what circulation and what changes are the really big ones and

are always much, much more worried about, "Oh my God, the Prince of Spain,

which princess is he gonna marry? This is going to determine whether

Spain is or isn't annexed by Germany. This is the most important

thing that has ever happened in the entire stream of time." People are like, "We've

discovered another continent," and they're like, "We don't care. We just wanna know who's

gonna marry Charles." That's a very profound observation. It was really interesting to learn from

your book that of all the thousands of people killed during the Inquisition,

one guy was executed for atheism. Science-related stuff. And even he had these ideas

of reincarnation or...

I think probably the number executed

for atheism would be about 100. There are 12 total trials

of scientists about science. Galileo is one. Giordano Bruno is one. Giordano Bruno is the only one executed. Of those 12 trials, only

three were convicted. Hundreds of thousands of trials for

Judaizing, which is theoretically contaminating Christianity with

Jewish thought, and all of these other minutiae of oppression and

segregation of populations, executions for paganism, meaning practicing your

indigenous religion in a colonized space… Hundreds of thousands of

executions for that, one for science. I recently got interested in

the story of Kepler just because the way he discovers the laws of

planetary motion is so whimsical with the theory of Platonic objects. While he's going through Brahe's

data and coming up with the laws of planetary motion, he is the imperial

mathematician for the Habsburg emperor, which basically means that

he's doing astrology for a general.

Will we win the battle or whatever. Then he gets excommunicated, not

for the laws of planetary motion, but because he's a Lutheran. In fact, his mother is tried for witchcraft. Again, has nothing to do with science,

it’s just because she's also a Lutheran. Milton of Paradise Lost fame wrote our

first big defense of the free press. This is in the moment in the early

1600s when England doesn't yet have systematic censorship law. It has ad hoc, "Hey, this book is bad,"

but it doesn't have systematic, "You must submit all books to a censor," the way

the Catholic world does by that point. The Catholic world developed it

in order to fight Protestantism. There's a lot of support for creating

censorship in England at the time because there's anxiety about Papists

plotting against our nice non-Catholic country, trying to undermine it. There's a general feeling of anxiety. There's also deliberate moral panic whipped up

by politicians and power-seeking people who whip up a deliberate moral panic

about books, the same way in 1954 there

was a moral panic about comic books or

the same way there was a moral panic about Dungeons & Dragons in the '90s. There's a moral panic about scary

and dangerous books and pamphlets. So there's a movement to create

state censorship for the first systematic time in England. Milton writes this big treatise

about why freedom of the press is important, the Areopagitica. It’s a beautifully written

rhetorical piece that presents the importance of how we must trust

truth to rise purely to the top. We must let free voices move, otherwise

you're gonna create a situation where people are writing for the censor

first and for the public second. It will constrain people's

thoughts in the way that we know chilling effects and fear do. It's a beautiful treatise. He fails. The censorship regime passes. Paradise Lost is published

under the censorious regime. It goes through the censorship. The one line they tell him

to change is about astrology. They're like, "It's perfectly fine

having Satan be your charismatic protagonist and God be kind of a

jackass, and also having Satan spout

ferocious anti-monarchical rhetoric

copied from revolutionary pamphlets that are circulating in the British

colonies so that he's actually parroting republican, anti-monarchical rhetoric,

very dangerous stuff in the treatise. That's fine. But this one line about a comet

causing a thing to happen, no, no, no. Astrology is gonna

confuse people's souls." You're like, "Guys, speaking as a time

traveler, you're so wrong about what you're censoring." They always are. You have one sentence which

I couldn't trace down, which I found very interesting. You said, "In the late 17th century,

the most extensive library in all of Europe is the one in the

Vatican run by the inquisitors." Not the library, the most

extensive experimental laboratory. Daniele Macuglia is the scholar there. That's from his dissertation. I think it's been published

now, but I don't know if it's actually out in English.

It's out in Italian. He works on the Inquisition and

the immediate aftermath of Galileo. They saw themselves as guarantors of

truth and of accuracy in information. So they decided after Galileo that they

had a duty to verify the truth of the books that they were sent to censor. If people were going to be doing

mechanical experiments, they needed to repeat the mechanical experiments

to see whether they were true. So they effectively invented peer

review, which is to say they invented a second laboratory trying to

recreate the results of the first. There are these amazing people who by

day are inquisitors and by night are going home to write their own scientific

treatises as they do these experiments. It's not what we expect, but

history is never what we expect. Seems like a good place to close. Ada, thank you very much. Thank you.