Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. ici 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. e 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.…

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