Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. hem, 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.…

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