Ada Palmer: prediction

Transcript context

…Can I ask about that real quick? When Lorenzo de’ Piero di Medici takes over, is he not that guy? That’s the second half of the answer. There is a huge difference between when the conqueror is from your city, loves your city, and wants to take care of your city, and when the conqueror is from the outside. When the Medici take over Florence, they want Florence, and they want Florence to be Florence. They want all of its beauty and all of its treasures to still exist and be theirs. They would never consider razing important parts of it to the ground. They would never consider threatening the Florentines with, “We will destroy your city walls,” or, “We will destroy your cathedral if you rebel. ” Any outsider would. So Florence looks more like Florence under a Medici duke than Milan looks like Republican Milan under a Visconti or Sforza duke, or than Ferrara, which has no remnants of its republic, does under the dukes d’Este, who can do anything they want, including murderously gouging each other’s eyes out and the city will never take one step against them. So Machiavelli is aware that if Florence has to fall, falling to the Medici is gentlest. It’s most volatile perhaps, because they aren’t going to be feared as much as an outside conqueror would be feared, but certainly gentlest. You preserve some important rights when you’re conquered from inside that you don’t when you’re conquered from outside. Obviously, we remember this period for producing all these great cultural artifacts, all these amazing buildings, all this art. Then we’re talking about the precariousness of the prince, the constant wars, how they’re literally fighting all the time. How is there this surplus that is available for all these different projects? You write in your book about how the older Lorenzo de’ Medici spends what would be today, because of the expense of building libraries and buying books, $30 million to build a library to educate his grandsons. How is there all the surplus available for education and arts and so forth in a period where everybody’s fighting everybody, and if you lose a war, your city will get, if not razed, at least the ruling faction of it will get killed?…

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