this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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I greatly recommend Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" if you have a lot of time, mild history literacy, and an interest in the Renaissance even passing. She talks a lot about Nick the practical statesmen who just didn't want to see Florence get repeatedly invaded, conquered, and looted.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135916.html

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[–] megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

it does not seem that he thought it was a good way to run a state, but the necessary way if you were going to be an authoritarian ass hat.

If the ruler was to be an unelected, unaccountable tyrant, then this was how they need to behave to not collapse in on them selves and become prey to all those around them.

It’s a very interesting interpretation of the work, that aligns fairly closely with a lot of modern scholarship around the dynamics of authoritarian regimes.

It was a job application. He thought republics were the best way to run a society and spends a lot of time in his other works talking about how that should happen and why princedoms kind of suck, actually.

Not that he was a human rights believer or anything, quite far from it actually.

Also, those meme seems to be implying he ruled Florence which is very wrong.