Ada Palmer: observation

Transcript context

…lth to the Church. A widow who has no son and has property decides to piously leave this to a monastery. The Church gets wealthier and wealthier. As the Church gets wealthier, with wealth comes power. More and more power is in the state. This makes a stronger and stronger incentive for every ambitious family to send their second son into the Church. And this goes all the way down. We have personal letters of Machiavelli writing to and from relatives of his, where they’re debating the correct-sized bribe to offer to buy a priesthood for his little brother, Totto. They don’t want to offer too big a bribe, because it would impoverish the family. They don’t want to offer too small a bribe. They’ve heard that another family that’s after this priesthood offered an extra big bribe. That’s kind of not fair. How do they respond to being out-bribed? They just write about this as the most everyday, normal thing in the world. This is a wealthy merchant-prince-level family. They are in the top 5% of wealth and power in Florence, but not in the top 1%. But for them, too, it’s normal to talk about paying a bribe to get a priesthood. That’s just how it works. Every generation sees the Church get wealthier and have more power. Therefore the incentives to corrupt it are even greater. It even becomes a kind of prisoner’s dilemma system. If you’re the duke and you don’t manipulate the papacy, if you don’t bribe the pope, if you don’t work hard to get your brother to be bishop, and your enemies do, you’re screwed. So you even see it as defensive: “I must manipulate the Church. It’s the only way my people will be safe. If I don’t manipulate the Church, my enemies may manipulate the Church, and then there’s danger.” This happens all the way up to the scale of kings, where popes can make your enemy the most powerful bishop in your kingdom or can deny you the right to marry, because inevitably the person you want to marry is a cousin, and you’re going to need a special dispensation to marry them. The pope can prevent that and mess with your marriage alliances. You need the pope very desperately if you’re a king. You also need the pope all the way down. That means bribes and other kinds of incentives make the papacy more corrupt with each generation. So the papacy is worse in everyone’s lived experience than it used to be even a few popes ago. You see every generation for 100 years say, “Popes are much worse now than popes used to be when I was young.” Everybody says that. Dante says that in 1300. Machiavelli’s grandparents’ generation is saying that in 1400. Machiavelli is saying that in 1500. In everybody’s lived experience, the popes are getting more secular, more military, and more corrupt over time. It’s a gradual accumulation, and it comes to a peak, as such things do, triggering the reformation, when it becomes so bad that there has to be a massive move against it. , and more corrupt over time. It’s a gradual accumulation, and it comes to a peak, as such things do, triggering the reformation, when it becomes so bad that there has to be a massive move against it. Machiavelli, in an interesting way, anticipates this, because Machiavelli says, “All institutions are gradually corrupted and need to be reformed and returned to their foundations, or they will collapse under the weight of their corruption. ” He thinks that the papacy has been undergoing this, and that Christianity has been undergoing this. And that, if not for the fact that St. Francis of Assisi—and also to some extent St. Dominic a couple of centuries before his time—reformed the Church and brought in a lot more popular support, Christianity would already have cracked under the weight of its own corruption 200 years before, and that it will need such a restoration again—as any institution needs, as city governments need, as republics need—as corruption accumulates over time. One big way in which our world is different from 500 years ago is the focus on patronage and it being the basis of political power. It was much more prominent, right? So that’s something that would be interesting to understand.…

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