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Ada Palmer
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Machiavelli's diplomatic strategy with Cesare Borgia was to pledge total loyalty and buy time, knowing Florence could not militarily resist — just hoping to be conquered last.
Machiavelli argues that no matter how skillful a ruler is, half of what determines outcomes is always fortune — entirely outside anyone's control.
With an average papal reign of 10 years, Italy faced near-constant political upheaval since each new pope, often elected by enemies of the prior pope, reversed prior policies.
In Renaissance Florence, perhaps 99 of 100 capital convictions ended in a fine rather than execution, because patronage networks intervened to win clemency for the accused.
Despite being tortured and exiled, Machiavelli refused lucrative positions at foreign courts and chose to remain in rural exile, writing The Prince as a loyalty demonstration to Florence.
Machiavelli did not circulate The Prince broadly; he treated it like classified state intelligence, sharing it only with Florence's rulers and his closest scholarly circle.
Machiavelli was the first European thinker to suggest that two political parties could coexist stably in a state, rather than one being exterminated by the other.
Cesare Borgia became popular with common people after conquering cities because his neutral justice — unbeholden to local factions — was fairer than anything they had experienced before.
The first version of authorial copyright emerged from Inquisition censorship licensing: printers who cleared pre-publication review gained monopoly printing rights, which England later imitated.
Giordano Bruno survived multiple Inquisition trials through patronage, but when he angered his patron, that patron turned him in — leaving him without protection and leading to his execution.
Florence could not afford armies sufficient to repel France, so it used spectacular art and cultural gifts as diplomatic tools — effectively buying peace for less than the cost of war.
Machiavelli hand-copied the entire text of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, integrating corrections from a manuscript, even though printed copies existed — illustrating the intimacy of Renaissance scholarship.
Renaissance thinkers saw human potential as recapturing ancient Rome, not advancing into an unknown future — making imitation of antiquity the highest intellectual ambition.
Renaissance scholars routinely disguised original thought as commentary on classical authors like Livy or Plato, because originality was out of fashion and ancient authority commanded greater respect.
Hobbes's Leviathan sparked a 40-year effort by European philosophers to refute it, which led scholars back to Machiavelli as the intellectual ancestor of Hobbesian thought.
Florence could not defeat Cesare Borgia — the math was simply impossible. Machiavelli's entire strategy was to pledge unconditional loyalty, betray centuries-old alliances, and whisper 'Florence is loyal' into the most terrifying conqueror's ear in Europe, buying nothing more than the promise of being conquered last.
Every generation left wealth to the church. Wealthier church meant more political power. More power meant more incentive for ambitious families to buy their sons into it — right down to Machiavelli's family debating the right-sized bribe for his brother's priesthood. The papacy wasn't corrupted by bad people; it was corrupted by a structural trap nobody could escape.
Death was the sentence on the books for almost everything. But in reality, your patron intervened, a word was put in, and you paid a fine. The one person who was actually executed was the one who had angered his patron. The entire justice system was a rehearsal for divine grace, with the patron standing in for the saint and the judge standing in for God.
Borgia massacred the ruling families of the cities he conquered, then installed neutral justice — and became wildly popular. For the first time in generations, the carpenter whose son killed someone got the same verdict whether he worked for the faction in power or the faction out of power. Machiavelli was startled. The lesson: feared but not hated works.
Every foreign court in Europe would have paid to hire Machiavelli. He turned them all down and chose to rot in a countryside hamlet, writing The Prince not for fame or publication but as a loyalty demonstration to the men who had tortured and exiled him. He wanted only one job: serving Florence.
'Machiavellian' means calculating and self-serving. Machiavelli gave up wealth, social life, career, and freedom to serve the government that tortured him — refusing to let his political secrets benefit any other state. He is possibly the least Machiavellian person in history.
The Inquisition required pre-publication approval for all books. In exchange, it granted printers a monopoly — the first copyright. England saw this, wanted the same mechanism, and copied it. The entire modern copyright system descends from Inquisition censorship licensing.
In the Renaissance, original ideas were out of fashion. If you wanted people to take your thought seriously, you dressed it up as Livy or Plato — even if you were attributing things to Aristotle that Aristotle never said. The Discourses on Livy is where Machiavelli's most radical political innovations are hidden, precisely because it had a bigger audience than an original work.
Florence couldn't afford armies to fight France. So it spent lavishly on art, architecture, and cultural gifts for French kings instead. Culture wasn't a surplus from peace — it was a rational substitution for unaffordable military spending. Florence was playing the culture victory because the military victory wasn't available.
The Inquisition had no jails, no arrest power, and no funding of its own. Everything depended on the local Duke. If the Duke liked heretics, the Inquisitor couldn't touch them. In Florence, a city of radical Platonists under radical Medici dukes, the Inquisition was nearly toothless.
Before Machiavelli, everyone agreed: two political parties in one state ends when one destroys the other. Florence literally salted the earth where its defeated faction's houses stood. Machiavelli looked at Siena and said — wait, maybe competition is better than massacre. That idea feels obvious now because we built entire democracies on it.
The Borgias did everything right. Cesare built an empire through brilliant strategy. Then he got food poisoning at the exact wrong moment, and it all collapsed. Machiavelli's conclusion: that's not a reason not to imitate them. Fortune controls half of all outcomes. You evaluate deeds on their most probable result, not on how fortune intervened.
The Prince drifted in obscurity until Hobbes's Leviathan hit European thought 'like a truck full of bricks.' Philosophers trying to refute Hobbes went back to Machiavelli as the ancestral monster. Then in the 19th century, newly republican governments needed a political framework without God — and Machiavelli was the only major theorist who didn't plug religion in.
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