Ada Palmer: observation

Transcript context

…Okay, I’m back with Ada Palmer, who is a science fiction author, composer, and historian at the University of Chicago. Today, I want to talk to you about Machiavelli. He writes The Prince. He dedicates it to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici and gives it to him in 1513. He says in the final chapter, “You’re the only person who can bring Italy from its current place of ruin and ravage.” Why were things so bad? What is the historical context in which he’s writing The Prince? I’m going to give a two-part answer to that, although of course with any granular history there can be many parts. The papacy is part of it, and then the city-state structure of Italy is another part of it. I’ll start with the city-state structure. There’s a principle in politics that when there’s long continuity of a government, and the government has been in power a long time, that government has a lot of legitimacy. People believe in its institutions. People are used to it. Even if you complain about it, it’s the government. When you break that—when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing—it doesn’t have that same staying power. So it’s very common when there’s one regime change for there to then be five regime changes, rapid fire, over and over. We see this with how many iterations the French Republic goes through: the French Republic, and then restored monarchy, and then republic, and then monarchy. When a long thing cracks—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—you get chaos. England’s Wars of the Roses are similar. There was one stable dynasty for a long time. The moment that a king is overthrown, then you have overthrow, overthrow, overthrow, overthrow for a long time, because the thread of continuity was cut. In Machiavelli’s lifetime, that thread of continuity is cut for the majority of cities in Italy. And that guarantees, from his perspective, that there are going to be more, and more, and more overthrows in those governments. When Machiavelli was born, there were six or seven city-states in Italy that had had their governments uprooted recently. By the time he’s writing The Prince, it’s dozens, in fact, the majority of these places. So it’s volatile. Almost no government has staying power. Almost every government is ripe for yet another replacement, yet another replacement, yet another replacement. That’s half the answer of why he perceives there to be this urgency and this guarantee that there cannot be stability. The other half is the papacy. The papacy, of course, is a long and evolving organism. The papacy is one of the oldest institutions in the world now. It was one of the oldest institutions in the world even then, even though this is 500 years ago. As we all know, when you have power centralized in an authority, especially an executive, there can be changes in how that executive uses that power. Each one sets norms for the next one. Over the course of Machiavelli’s lifetime and just before, a bunch of consecutive popes expanded executive power, especially in the military side, and launched more wars, or did more arbitrary overthrow of governments. You have a number of city-states that are directly ruled by the papacy, and in theory, the pope can appoint anybody to be ruler of that city. Here is a pope. He has an illegitimate son. He wants his illegitimate son to be ruler of something, so he overthrows the government of a city and puts in his son. The next pope does it to three cities. ere is a pope. He has an illegitimate son. He wants his illegitimate son to be ruler of something, so he overthrows the government of a city and puts in his son. The next pope does it to three cities. The next pope does it to five. Soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. This creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to, because there is no predictability to who’s going to be pope next. It isn’t hereditary. You can’t plan for it. The next pope is elected. As is often the case with elections, very frequently the next pope will be elected by a coalition of all the people who hate the current pope. One of the things that electoral politics does is that it tends to swing, in which those outside of power work hard to get into power with the next regime. Let’s assume the average length of a papacy is ten years in this period. So every ten years, you suddenly have a completely unpredictable new monarch who’s almost guaranteed to be one of the enemies of the old monarch, and will therefore rip up and replace all of the things that that monarch tried to do with new things. So Machiavelli, when he’s writing the last chapter of The Prince, is looking around and saying, “Okay, we have a perfect storm. Practically every polity in this region has just had the thread of legitimacy cut. Its institutions have no traditions. Its people have no investment in its current rulers. These are all pawns that have been knocked over before and barely stood up again. They’re ready to fall.” Meanwhile, nothing will stop the turnover of popes. The only thing that could stop the turnover of popes would be one person gaining enough power and ascendancy near this region, who has staying power, who has sons and heredity, that he can do what Cesare Borgia tried to do: have enough power near the papacy to strongly influence the next pope to create a kind of stability that’s otherwise impossible.…

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