Inventing the Renaissance: Ada Palmer

A fun conversation about history

And now for something completely different. This Substack is mainly about economics and politics, but it does give me the freedom to wander afield now and then. And here’s something I hope readers will find both interesting and a welcome break from current events.

I think I first began reading Ada Palmer through her blog Ex Urbe, which is about, among other things, history, philosophy and gelato. Her day job is being a history professor at Chicago, but she’s also the author of a thought-provoking quartet of science fiction novels.

Ada was part of a panel we held at the Graduate Center on social science and science fiction, and has a new, fascinating book called “Inventing the Renaissance.” And I thought, correctly, that it would be fun to talk about it!

Transcript follows.

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Ada Palmer

(recorded 6/3/25)

PAUL KRUGMAN: So hi everyone. Paul Krugman again. I'm here with Ada Palmer.

This is going to be very different from the usual thing. I'm not going to talk economics or business or anything. Instead, Ada is...

ADA PALMER: Well, we might talk Big Wool and Big Olive Oil, the big industries of my period.

KRUGMAN: Yes, we might get to that, which is really pretty interesting. It turns out that the Renaissance economy (although part of the point is, was there really a Renaissance?) was a lot more interesting and complicated than we think. But I knew Ada, originally from reading her blog, Ex Urbe, which is about culture and Rome and Florence and Gelato. And we had a really fun session at the CUNY Grad Center on social science and science fiction. Ada somehow finds time to be a heavyweight historian of Renaissance Italy, but also to write really interesting science fiction books.

Uh, a Renaissance woman? Anyway, I'm reading Ada's new book, which is about the Renaissance, called Inventing the Renaissance. And, you know, it's a big book, it's many hundreds of pages, but I found myself really, really fascinated by it. So let's just talk about this and it'll be a change of pace. I hope people will appreciate getting off the trade wars and all that for a while.

And let's just start. The book is called Inventing the Renaissance, which is not at all what many people would think, which is like how Thomas Edison invented the age of electricity, but you mean something quite different. Do you want to talk about that?

PALMER: What I mean is, this ongoing and cumulative process of inventing and reinventing and re-reinventing, having a name for this point in time. And we talk about different historical eras, and for some of them, there's a crisp, clear date. An event that lets us define something, right? Everyone can agree that the French Revolution was an event and that it happened in a certain set of years and we know what we mean when we say French Revolution. But the Renaissance is the inverse of that.

The way you can tell that this is not in any traditional way an historical era is that if I’m on campus and I walk around and I ask my different colleagues, when is the Renaissance?

If I go out of my office and turn right and get to the English department and say, when is the Renaissance? They'll say, “oh, the Renaissance is getting going by 1550. And you know, Shakespeare is the core of the Renaissance. So when Hamlet debuts in 1600, that's the Renaissance.”

But if I turn left down the same hallway and end up where my colleagues in romance languages are and ask the Italianists, when is the Renaissance? They'll say, “oh, you know, the Renaissance is 1250 and Dante. And it's really getting going and at its peak by 1400 and it's really starting to end by 1450, so that 1500 is the tail end of it, you know, when Shakespeare's grandparents haven't been born yet.”

So that's your cue that the Renaissance isn't a specific set of events or an era in time.

Instead, it's the idea that there is this transitional phase between a fully pre-modern world and our world in which some change or set of changes started that somehow propel modernity and define the difference between our non-modern predecessors and us.

But everybody's idea about what those things are and when they happen and why they happen and which things define modernity are different because what this really is about

is modernity itself and very little to do with the reality of the time period we project this onto.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, it's a long time period, too. I was actually going to say starting with Petrarch, but even that, some of your colleagues would say, it's already practically over by then and ending with Shakespeare, maybe. So we're talking a couple of centuries there. There's a lot in the book about what actually happened during this time period, but a lot of it is about how we construct narratives and how we read or interpret history and I think if I understand correctly, maybe I'm being unfair, mostly we have the Germans to blame for this.

PALMER: I would say the Germans, the English in collaboration with them, yes. But a lot of the first major theorists of the Renaissance and Renaissance culture and cultural history in the 19th century are German. And core to that is legitimacy, right? Every regime, every cultural movement, every business, every person who wants to be important needs sources of legitimacy. And your sources of legitimacy can be past success, they can be scientific studies saying that you're right, it can be your own fame, they can be different sorts of things.

But one major source of legitimacy is history. If you can claim to be the continuation of some past thing that we think is good, you can make yourself seem legitimate. This is why so many capitol buildings are shaped like ancient Roman temples, because they claim and project the legitimacy and stability that we imagine of ancient Rome, right? And I mean, legitimacy in lots of directions.

Like, what is a zoo? It is showing that you have the international trade connections necessary to acquire all of these animals. A city having a zoo proves that it has cultural capital. It is also a form of legitimacy. But one major form of legitimacy is claiming past bits of history that we like and saying that you are the continuation of them. And so in the 19th century, when nationalism especially is on the rise, there's a lot of discussion of which bits of history get to be claimed by different successors.

You know, rationally, I would say that early Italy gets to be claimed by later Italy because they're the same place, they're descendants of the same people. But lots of projects get made to claim, you know, “No, London is the true new Athens because London is continuing the values of Socrates by having parliament or blah, blah, blah.”

KRUGMAN: Right.

PALMER: One can make these interesting rhetorical arguments that even if there's no direct cultural continuity between you and something, you're somehow claiming its continuity. And there's an effort on the part especially of Protestant Europe—so the Germanys and the Anglosphere—to claim the good parts of the Renaissance for them, which is where this myth of a secular or secularizing or anti-Catholic or anti-church Renaissance comes from. It’s part of the goal of distancing the Renaissance from

Catholicism in order to claim that Catholicism somehow poisons Mediterranean Europe and is why the true successors of the Renaissance aren't Mediterranean Europe, which was poisoned by Catholicism, but it's Northern Europe, which is free of Catholic poisoning, and therefore the true values of free thinking and the free-spirited celebration of the dignity of man, etc. are thriving there.

This is a rhetorical project of the 19th century, but it's also a midpoint, right? Because there had already been a bunch of different efforts to claim the Renaissance before that point and yet others after, although our modern one very much begins then.

KRUGMAN: And part of it is just, not exactly bad translation, but things not meaning what you’d think. So you talk a lot about the scholastics versus the “umanisti,” pardon my Italian pronunciation. And “umanisti” sounds like it might mean what we would now mean by humanist, but basically it doesn't at all, right?

PALMER: It means a grammar teacher who's teaching Latin and Greek in a new kind of middle school / high school curriculum. And indeed a lot of trouble with understanding this period or rather a lot of opportunities to turn this period into what you want it to be come from false friends. This moment where a word resembles something and it means something else.

One of the most telling ones is in Machiavelli and all through the 19th century into the 20th, there were lots of celebrations of Machiavelli as a theorist of democracy and a defender of the people. And Machiavelli talks a huge amount about the popolo the importance of the enfranchisement and power of the popolo and how a republic thrives when the popolo is fully enfranchised and fully involved in the administration of government. And people celebrate this as one of the first theorizations of democracy and therefore that it allows modern democracy to claim the Renaissance and say the reason the Renaissance Golden Age happened was the arrival of democracy and democratic thinking. This is one of many ways to claim the Renaissance.

However, having translated a bit more carefully, popolo means the 5% of the population that are the top economic elite, hereditary leaders of the merchant guild system. It doesn't mean “the people.” It means the 5%.

KRUGMAN: So even SPQR, the originals, they themselves were busy appropriating their version of a distant past, but the P in SPQR for Rome was not populous in the way we would mean it. “Populace,” right?

PALMER: It's the Roman citizen elite populace.

KRUGMAN: And then for the Renaissance cities, for Florence, this is an even smaller group.

PALMER: Even a smaller slice, right. And it's still important, it's still a very interesting set of political theories for him to be advancing, but it's an oligarchic political theory, not a democratic political theory. But in the 19th century, it gets read as a democratic political theory, and if you simply translate the same sentences differently, you can get something that feels like a democratic political theory. And this is one of many different ways people try to claim that the Renaissance was a golden age. The thing we are doing is the continuity of it.

And to briefly explain one other so that people have two examples to put side by side, you know, one of the theories about what causes this great burst of art and culture and

discovery and all of the stuff that we see in museums and love to go visit on the grand tour, was the advance of modern finance and the beginning of new methods of lending money; new methods of insurance and that finance as we know it, money lending on a sophisticated level, begins in the very late 1100s and is really getting going by the 1300s,

and thus it is banking that causes and enables all of the fruitfulness of the Renaissance.

Thus, claim books written in the mid 20th century, proto- capitalism is what caused the Renaissance.

And this theory is incredibly popular during the Cold War when you can say therefore the capitalist West is the continuation of the Golden Renaissance and the communist enemies are the continuation of the bad backward medieval dark ages, right?

You can see how rhetorically useful and legitimating that argument is. And so that suggestion of what caused the Renaissance was really popular for a while. At other points, other theories of what caused the Renaissance, such as democratization, are popular with people who want to claim that democracy is definitely the path toward the future. Whatever X is when X caused the Renaissance, if you run across an X that you can claim to be the continuation of, this is really useful to you.

KRUGMAN: I should say, I really want to come back to this, that none of this would work unless we did see a lot of stuff in this Renaissance that we admire. There's some damn good painting and architecture and innovative political thinking and a lot of other things going on. I think every professional historian now dumps on the notion of the dark ages, but if we were talking about the period that we used to call the dark ages, nobody would be claiming it, and in recreating the society of 11th century France, it's the fact that the Renaissance left us things that we value that makes it.

PALMER: But I mean, there are two reasons that it seems to have left us so many more. One is that the rhetoric of the Renaissance as a golden age kicks in even during the Renaissance itself. It's the Renaissance that invents itself as a golden age. And immediately afterward, so as early as the 17th and the 18th centuries, having Renaissance stuff made you part of this idea of a new golden age, it made you legitimate. Therefore, if you had Renaissance stuff, you kept your Renaissance stuff. If you had older stuff, you were like, “we'll knock that medieval church down and build a new church, we don't care, but the Renaissance one, we're keeping.”

So a much higher percentage of Renaissance cultural stuff survived than the percentage of medieval stuff that survives, not just because it's more recent. More Renaissance stuff survives than from the century right after. A disproportionate amount of Renaissance art survived because we decided that having Renaissance art was proof of legitimacy, so everyone kept it. And therefore we have an outsized footprint of it.

And when you go to museums, there's the Renaissance stuff always in the center on display as one of the treasures of the museum. There would be more medieval stuff if people had preserved it better.

KRUGMAN: One of the things you talk about that I thought was really fascinating is how Florence became Florence. Because Florence was certainly a major center of the Renaissance. You want to walk us through that?

PALMER: Yeah, so this is an arena in which we understand what causes this vast flourishing of art and culture. The answer is desperation and the effort to survive. So when you're an Italian city state, that means you're a large, sackable, wealthy city that needs to defend itself, but that doesn't have, the way Paris does, a vast kingdom around it from which it can levy troops. So you have all the vulnerabilities of being desirable for people to conquer you, but very few defenses. It's nearly impossible to raise an army domestically. You have to hire mercenary armies to defend you. Mercenary armies will never care as much as home citizens about defending the city. They're inherently bribeable. A man who can be bought can be bought by the other side.

Additionally, as banking gets going, these cities become staggeringly wealthy. The major northern Italian city states of Florence, Milan, Venice, these are three of the six largest and wealthiest cities in Europe, the others being Naples in the south of Italy, and then Paris. London will eventually catch up, but hasn't yet. And that means you have these vast centers of wealth, huge banks, wealthy banking families who literally have piles of bags of gold in their basements, right?

And also, all Italian city-states hate their neighbors. Every city-state hates the ones next door because they've been having a 400-year feud. This is the Guelphs and the Gippelines. And they're living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet, in which all of the noble families hate each other and are much more interested in knifing each other in the street than they are in any form of justice. And it's very easy to go to Lord Montague and say,

“Hey, will you help us take over the city? In return we'll murder all the Capulets for you.”

And you're, like, “This is a very tempting offer.”

So Italy is full of treachery, disloyalty and danger, as well as enormous bags of gold in the basements. Florence as the capital of the textile industry, the center of big wool, the biggest industry in Europe at the time, is especially wealthy and also especially friendless. First because of their goofy political system, in which, in order to prevent any of their local nobles like the Montagues or Capulets from taking over the city, their solution was to murder all the local nobles, cut their heads off, put them on spikes around the city center, burn their houses down, rake salt into the earth and build a new city hall on top, which is the beautiful Plaza Vecchio that everyone takes photos of when they’re in the city.

And to make a new government in which only the merchant elites, the popolo, the 5% extremely wealthy families, these are hereditary families, but they're not noble blooded.

KRUGMAN: Oh, yeah.

PALMER: Which means nobody in the city of Florence is actually of diplomatic rank, right? Diplomats have to be noble blooded. And also Florence has this international reputation as the center of permissive sexuality, perversion, and sodomy. And “to Florentine” is the verb for anal sex in six different European languages.

So this is the most sackable city in the world, right? It has no friends. Everyone considers it to be a pit of scum and villainy. It has enormous amounts of wealth just sitting right there. And nobody will think that you've really done very much harm to anyone who matters if you march on this merchant republic. So how do you defend yourself if you are this merchant republic?

Well, imagine for a moment now that you are the French envoy. There's been a new pope elected, you have to go deliver the usual greetings from the king and give a speech in Latin for an hour that says, “Congratulations, you're the pope. Our king is very powerful and he's so glad you're the pope.” This is what your job is.

On the way you're stopping off at different cities en route and you're stopping by Florence. And there's nobody in this city who's even of sufficient rank to actually talk to you, right? They're all of the same rank as your valet whose job it is to lead your horse.

There’s no one of worthy rank to host you for the night. So you're going to be staying with your dad's banker because you at least have his address. But this is going to be sort of the most humiliating night of your life because you're spending your time slumming it with your servant's kinsman.

Ah but instead, as you approach this large, fierce walled city, you see this enormous dome arching up above, of an architectural challenge and complexity like you've never seen. And you've seen domes and cathedrals at home and you know that building a dome a fifth this size is the great architectural achievement of your whole city. So what even is this?

And as you enter, you're coming past buildings where you see bronze statues that looks so lifelike, it's as if they're about to spring to life. You've never seen something like that before, except just the severed hand of an ancient Roman bronze that your father

happened to have in his collection at home. But these are huge and intact and new.

That technology doesn't exist. Nobody can do that, right?

And you keep going and you get as far as your banker's house and your servants knock on the door as you arrive and he comes out and humbly greets you at the door and apologizes that he and his humble home are unworthy to host your excellency, and you're like, “Yes, indeed you are, but whatever.” And he brings you inside.

But once you're inside, the space is like no space you've ever been in, with white light streaming in through these luminously constructed rounded arches. And wait a minute, wait a minute, you have seen this once. It looks like the Roman ruins in the backyard of your father's castle when you were growing up, but there are no buildings like that anymore. We don't know how to do that.

And all around the courtyard are busts of the Roman emperors, in order. And above them are portraits of this banker guy and the members of his family. And in the middle there are yet more astonishingly beautiful Roman bronzes. Except, wait, they're not Roman bronzes. They're new bronzes. And they're extremely naked and extremely distracting.

And in the corner, a bunch of men in weird robes are speaking a language you've never heard before. You say, “Who are those guys?

And your host says, “They're Platonists. They're speaking ancient Greek.”

And you say, “But ancient Greek is lost! Most of Plato is lost! We don't have any of these things!”

And he says, “Of course we have lots of Plato here! Look, here's my grandson Lorenzo, he's just written a poem in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul. Would you like to hear him recite it?”

And now there's a little boy reciting a poem at you in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul!

You're like, “Where am I?! None of this is possible!”

That's the moment when Cosimo d'Medici turns to you and says, “Would you like to make an alliance with Florence?” And you can either say no, and you can march in here with the armies of the king and you can sack this, you can take the gold home and burn it and France will be rich and all this will be gone.

Or you can say, ‘Yes. Let's make an alliance. Send me a bronze smith and an architect and a Platonist and a Greek scholar and we're going to do the court in France like this.

And then the next time an envoy comes from Portugal or Castile or England, they're going to feel as uncultured and worthless as I feel right now.’

They've turned on their head the hierarchy of who is cultured and who isn't, and they've managed to win by the self-defense mechanism of the culture victory instead of the military victory.

KRUGMAN: Okay, so one of the things I've really found compelling, maybe because it has some resonance with some things that we see in our own culture, is that you have Florence and other republics and they take very seriously this idea: We are republics. We are SPQF. We're a republic. Not, “We are the descendants of the Roman Republic.”

We are not a monarchy. We do not have nobility. We killed off all of the nobility. We have these hereditary wealthy families who seem to run everything and have all of the prestige, but they're not allowed to have big landed estates, and they're not allowed to call themselves nobility. To a 21st century person they may look like a kind of nobility, but they are definitely not nobility. And that means that they actually have a bit of a problem. First of all, there's the combination of extreme inequality and a hierarchical society with Republican manners. And, I think it's a little bit less so than when I was growing up in

America, but that's kind of what we're like, right?

PALMER: It’s the necessity of performing an egalitarian status, right? If you are from the wealthiest family in the city, you dress identically to your peers who are barely at the bottom of the top of the economic totem pole. And when you see all of these paintings of Florence and everyone is wearing exactly the same red robe, there is a performance of egalitarianism, even as there is the enjoyment of other details.

And I think it is a very American modern thing, which I can hammer home with a contemporary example. There was an exhibit called First Kings of Europe about the archaeology of the early Balkans that was at the Field Museum last year, I think. It was a great exhibit. And it was about the origins of inequality, fundamentally, and the origins of kingship out of the beginnings of wealth inequality. And in the gift shop, because the whole exhibit was about inequality, they made two t-shirts and two types of a micro brew specially made for the exhibit. And the beers were supposed to reconstruct the beer drunk by the kings and the beer drunk by the peasants at the same time. So you could get the king's beer or the commoner's beer. And then you could get a t-shirt with the king's beer label on it or the commoner's beer label on it. And I talked with the gift shop people and they said, “Yeah, and everybody buys the king's beer and the commoner's shirt.”

KRUGMAN: Yeah, that's funny. I've been spending some time in European academic circles for the last few weeks. With academics, maybe economics even more than other fields, it's very hierarchical. Even before there was Google Scholar, everybody knew the ranking. And I would be dealing with people I consider friends and on social occasions, maybe out drinking beer, they would keep on calling me Professor Krugman.

And it's like, ‘no, we don't do that. You use my first name.’

Now, in a lot of contexts, you better damn well remember what the actual academic hierarchy is, but the mannerisms are...yeah.

PALMER: The performance of equality.

KRUGMAN: And so Florence has even more, because in general, these wealthy Italian republics have a problem of: how do they deal with the rest of Europe, where if you aren't nobility, you're nothing? And yet they, as a matter of principle, insist that they have no nobility and they can't, and Cosimo de' Medici can't go in and say, “You know, really I'm a noble.” That will get back to the people, the popolo.

PALMER: And it's important here for us to remember that all the other city republics that we compare them to—Venice and Siena and Bologna and Genoa—all had nobility. They were republics, but they had nobility. And they had a noble Senate, the way ancient Rome had a Senate consisting of noble families, the sons of the noble families would automatically enter the Senate. The different republics had different structures for sometimes enabling non-noble participation or sometimes enabling new nobles to join the elites.

I was actually just doing a close study of this and there is a very direct correlation between how dysfunctional a Renaissance Republic was and whether it lacked a mechanism to allow new money to get power. When there wasn't a mechanism to let new money move into the elite status within the Republic, then the new money would break the Republic. But when there was a mechanism, when the one or two families, a generation that rise to super wealth through investment, have a way to then join the old elite, then things would be stable for hundreds of years.

KRUGMAN: Okay, and so the funny thing then is investing in culture, high culture, highly visible things become a way to sort of turn the tables on the nobility of Europe.

PALMER: There’s a very telling point at which, every time a new pope is crowned, every power in Europe has to send an envoy and a gift. And the kings and super important powers like Venice get received in one room, which is for the special elite envoys and everybody else, you know, from other places in another. And there was one year that they started inviting Florence to be in the elite room. And the Florentine ambassador was like, “What? This is so incredibly overwhelming. Oh my God.”

And they're like, “Yeah because you're going to be speaking the words of Cicero. We know what you've come with and the words of Cicero are as noble as a king’s, therefore you belong in this room.”

And so after envoys from emperors and kings, he gave a five-hour speech I believe in gorgeous Ciceronian Latin. Off book, right? Where everyone else is giving a short one and presenting, you know, a diamond covered chalice. But what he's presenting is the words of Cicero and those are nobility. So even though he isn't noble, his words are.

KRUGMAN: That's pretty amazing. And then it gets perpetuated, you say. Lots of places that had wonderful antiquity or Renaissance art, or whatever, it ended up being carted off to the British Museum or bought up by American robber barons. But Florence, because Florence was Florence...

PALMER: Yeah, so there's two things that protect Florence. One of them, the intelligent choice of an extremely smart woman, and the other the aftermath of its successful propaganda.

One is that when the Medici family, who eventually rise from being merchant elites to being dukes and conquering the city themselves, rule it up until the 18th century, and

then when the last Medici has no heir, she writes a will leaving all of the art to the city, on condition that it never leave the city. Which means that whenever there's an economic tumult, Siena will sell a painting to pay for a short-term emergency. Milan will sell a painting to take care of a short-term emergency. Florence cannot. And so in the sense of entail, this stuff can't leave Florence and can't be sold off. So Florence keeps it.

And in the coming crises of the 19th century and the 20th century, all of the other Italian cities lose some of their masterpieces. Florence keeps almost everything and becomes the place you have to go on the Grand Tour. So, because it turns into the place you have to go on a tour, it would be the ultimate barbarism to harm Florence.

And so Florence is treated with kid gloves by every side in every war because of the idea that it would be horrifying to harm Florence. So the Allied bombers were not allowed to bomb Florence, despite it being a major city. And there's only one bombing raid and it's a daylight raid. Normally bombing is at night. There’s one incredibly dangerous daylight raid just to take out the train station. They're not allowed to hit anything else.

And they would much rather risk the lives of men than risk the bomb hitting a museum because they do not want the enemy to be able to say “the Allies blew up X thing in Florence,” right? That would be the unthinkable barbarity. That is what the UNESCO World Heritage Site Program begins for. Making this list of beauties in the world, so beautiful that anyone who harms them is a barbarian.

Florence achieves that culturally through cachet via the Grand Tour, well before that point, which means it's protected. And that creates this self-fulfilling source base where

because Florence is more protected and more of its art survives, it looks like it always had more art. And so we believe it always had more art and then we study it more and then there are more books and exhibits about it and then more people visit it and then it gains more cachet and this cycle goes on and on.

There's also a lot of history through Florence because its paper archives survive with every receipt for candle wax and 30 million pages of documents survive from just the

financing of building the cathedral. There are whole language groups and cultures for which we don't have a tenth that much documentation for their whole existence at the same time period. Florence's paper survives. Why? Because nobody ever burned Florence because you would be a barbarian if you did.

So for example, in the second world war, when the Italian anti-fascist resistance was very active in Naples, the fascists punished the resistance by saying, “we will burn the Renaissance archives if you keep it up.” And the resistance did keep it up and they burned the Renaissance archives. They never dared issue a threat like that in Florence.

So Naples Renaissance archives burned deliberately in World War II. Florence has survived, right? And this is a cultural cachet question.

KRUGMAN: Okay, now one of the things I learned is that, the Renaissance—or this bunch of things that we call the Renaissance—was much more pan-European than we tend to think. One of the things that I didn't realize was that our picture of pre-industrial, pre-modern Europe as being a place where basically people never got more than 20 miles from where they were born, that was true in England basically.

PALMER: That was true in England and it was only true in England but that's where we studied it first and when you study a thing you assume that it worked like that. You multiply that out. Similarly all of our conclusions about the aftermaths of the Black Death were mostly England. Turns out England is an exception because, you know, it's a weirdo island over there. Of course it's going to be an exception but it took us a long time to realize that.

But a good way to think of it is: if a big engine of the Renaissance is a new kind of art, a new kind of music, a new kind of sculpture, this is an expensive elite object. And the utility of it is cultural cachet for elites, right? You can make your throne room or your palace or your ambassadorial receiving suite or your town hall have these things and therefore you look powerful. That means that the immediate transmission of it is hopping point to point between capitals, right? This transmits via the ambassador going to Florence, going to Rome, going back to London or Paris. And it therefore means that the Renaissance moves faster from Florence to Paris than it does from Florence to small towns in Tuscany outside of Florence.

This moves with the circulation of envoys and elites. And so the first adopters of the library building project that starts in Florence are Barcelona, Hungary and London. It jumps, right? Especially to places that need legitimacy. It jumps to weak kingdoms.

It jumps to places where there's been a civil war, where an uncertain monarch has just come to the throne, right? England is an eager adopter of this during the beginning of the reign of Henry VI, when the king is a nine-month-old infant and his uncles are squabbling over power. They hire Florentines to come decorate their stuff and write their correspondence for them and make it sound like the noble words of Cicero because they have a lack of stable power and they want some substitute for stability.

Matthias Corvinus, the Raven King, the great unifier of Hungary and bringer of the Golden Age of Hungary, was imprisoned as a youth, his elder brother executed. He was sort of desperately put on the throne as a compromise by men who were all like, “I don't want to be on the throne, I would be murdered.” He desperately needs to strengthen and advertise himself. He strategically says, “I'm going to marry an Italian princess. She's going to bring me all the Italy stuff. I'm going to write to Lorenzo to get him to send me books. I’ll get to build the first Renaissance neoclassical building outside of Italy.”

Boom.

“Because I desperately need that because I am an upstart warlord trying to lord it over other upstart warlords while fighting off the Ottomans. I have nothing. I need to seem like Caesar. So I'm going to have my portrait done by an Italian sculptor looking like Caesar.”

The weaker a monarchy, the more likely it was to quickly adopt Renaissance culture, which is one of the reasons that there's sort of less of it in France once the hundred years of war is over and France is fairly stable.

And also why the Ottomans are the ones who are able to say, “We don't need that. We're already vastly, staggeringly powerful. We don't need a new substitute for power.

We have power, thank you very much.”

KRUGMAN: And people, the artists, the intellectuals can circulate across Europe, partly because this is still a time when educated men speak Latin.

PALMER: Yeah, and a lot of them are also speaking French as well, but also because they have to be working for elites. This is an era when libraries are incredibly expensive, right? In the manuscript period up through 1300, 1350, a single manuscript book costs as much as building a house. Between the materials, the manual labor, all the manpower that goes into it. A little pocket Cicero is costing you as much as a studio apartment.

A big fancy illuminated book is costing you as much as a mansion in terms of just the actual materials cost of manual labor.

When the printing press comes in by 1500, a book instead of costing as much as a house costs a school teacher’s salary for one month.

KRUGMAN: Okay.

PALMER: It’s still a lot, but much, much less. And then you can have a library even in a mid-sized town. But when the Renaissance is getting going before 1450, when we're talking about Petrarch and these projects, only incredibly rich cities can have a library of any size. The library of the University of Paris, the greatest scholarly library in Europe in 1300, had 600 books.

KRUGMAN: I think I've got more than that on my Kindle right now.

PALMER: I mean, every kiosk in an airport selling us Dan Brown novels has more than 600 books, right? We live in an incredible era of wealth of books, but you know, the Ottoman Empire at that time had libraries of thousands of books. Sub-Saharan Africa had thousands of scrolls. Central Asian libraries had thousands of books. It's Europe, which doesn't have access to papyrus, the cheap writing surface. They’re stuck using parchment, the much more expensive writing surface, where if you're going to have a scholar and translate Plato, somebody is spending as much on that scholar as they would building an entire neighborhood worth of investment buildings. And they have to expect that the payoff of funding that scholar to work on Plato will be the same as building an entire neighborhood worth of investment buildings.

KRUGMAN: This is the scholarly work, right? Because the scholars themselves, as I read it, were actually pretty cheap.

PALMER: Yeah, a scholar is cheap, but if you're gonna have a scholar, you gotta have a library to sustain him.

KRUGMAN: Yes, right. It's not like the people whose names we remember, whose work we remember, not like they were making out like bandits, but it's the stuff that they were producing. Wow.

PALMER: Yeah, the salaries that historians have confirmed for the kinds of scholars who are translating the lost Greek and Latin works and doing this stuff, range from on the low end, the equivalent of $60,000 a year, to on the very high end, the equivalent of $500,000 a year. That's the income salary of such a scholar. On top of that, your patron is usually buying you a suit of clothes. But the ones who are making in the hundreds of thousands are the ones who are at the elite court being an advisor to the Duke. And the real reason they're getting paid that much is not their skill in Cicero, it's they're an advisor to a Duke. And they're getting paid.

They're getting paid a robust but not princely amount. And they're not getting paid as much as the more desirable things at court, like your mercenary commanders or your

lute player or your court dwarf, all of whom are earning much more than your Plato scholar. Because Plato scholars are easy to come by. Court dwarfs, not so much.

KRUGMAN: Wow. Now, there's some sense, that there was an accelerated pace of change, that somehow lots of things, like technology, culture, painting, music…

PALMER: I would say that yes, there's an accelerated pace of change and that there's two types of acceleration happening. One is that there had been a gradual acceleration all the way through the Middle Ages. And you read the part where I described this like, “this is a wedge of cheese and the wedge of cheese is getting fatter all the time.” At some point you can draw a line and say, “Hey, most of the cheese is on this side of the line. Let's discard the other part of the cheese.” But you needed that wedge getting wider the whole time, right?

There had always been development and acceleration during the Middle Ages. You reach a certain point at which we can see that that rise is very fast and it feels like an exponential increase. The more graphs I look at that are trying to track specific things, the more it doesn't look like an exponential as much as a linear increase, but it's big now and so it looks much bigger than it did before.

The other is, there is economic reconnection, right? When people talk about the fall of Rome, what one usually imagines is barbarians sweep into the neighborhood and then the next day everyone is covered with mud and now we're not wearing togas anymore, we're wearing medieval mud outfits. What The Fall of Rome genuinely meant was the falling apart of long distance trade routes. The ships are no longer coming from far away.

The wagons are no longer bringing trade goods from far away. This affects industry because you can no longer get specialized materials.

And if you were an ancient Roman glassmaker and you knew the secrets of how to make clear glass, well, you can no longer get the special sand from Anatolia that you needed to make clear glass. So that skill is no longer viable. Or you’re a high quality steel producer living in Wales. Well, you can no longer get the imported super high quality ash that was used for the carbon additives to make the high end steel. You are now a blacksmith working in iron, no longer working in steel because you cannot get the materials you used beforehand.

I think for at least half of your audience, the most vivid one will be maxi pads. Ancient Roman maxi pads were sea sponges harvested off the coast of Spain. If you live anywhere else in the empire, you've just been used to being able to get these lovely comfortable, reusable, washable maxi pads made out of sea sponges, and then the ships stop coming so when your current one wears out, sucks to be you. You're just gonna have to wad up a rag and stick it in there and be uncomfortable.

The goods that came from far away drop out. Imagine going to the grocery store and there's lots and lots of apples and there's lots and lots of radishes and there's lots

and lots of potatoes and there's no rice and there's no avocados and there's no citrus fruit because the things coming from far away go away so the technologies compress, the economies compress.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, I like the story about how Florence was the wool capital, but the wool was coming from England. England had lots of sheep, but to make wool that doesn't itch like hell, you need olive oil.

PALMER: You need the fine spray of olive oil which allows the flyaways, little tiny sticky outy fibers, to get wrapped back into the thread. And so in the Middle Ages when the seas are full of pirates and the ships are of lesser quality and you have lots of bandits on the roads, you just keep your ships at home and you make itchy wool and you're itchy.

Once the economy reconstructs a bit and things stabilize enough and finance is big enough, people will gamble, “Well, pirates might attack the ship, but it might make it.” It's more profitable to sell your raw wool to a Mediterranean power, which can then use the masses of olive oil to process that wool, produce high quality, lightweight, smooth,

itch-less wool and sell it back to you four or five times the price per yard as the best you could possibly get for the low quality wool you could produce at home if you can't get a hold of the olive oil.

So the interconnectedness of the economy needed to regenerate and that requires political stability. What it needs is either such high investment capital that even if half of your wagons get killed by bandits on the road, you make enough profit from the other half of the wagons to make up for it or getting the bandits off the road.

Once people decided to revive antiquity, and had this obsession with the Pax Romana,

that's what they're imagining. They're not imagining as we do in our Hollywood dramas, Caligula and Tiberius and the fun and corrupt emperors with their orgies, right? That's what we usually imagine. They are imagining The Pax Romana: that hundred years under the five good gay emperors: Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, which are the only recorded patch of extended peace in all of Italy's history

and the only time when there were no bandits on the roads and no pirates on the seas, right?

There are pirates on the seas in the Mediterranean now. We have still never matched the degree of stability and economic peace that was enjoyed then.

And so somebody like Petrarch, who we've mentioned a couple times but is often pointed to as the first sort of figurehead spokesperson of the Renaissance who articulates, “We live in an age of ash and shadow. We need to revive the arts of the ancients so we can make a golden age.”

He lived through the Black Death, not one of its later resurgences—well, three of its later resurgences—but also the big Black Death. And he watched his friends die one by one by one until it seemed there were none left. But then after the major epidemic passed, he got a letter indicating that two of his friends had survived. And with great joy and the hope that they’d be able to meet up and together grieve for the many friends they had lost, they set out to travel to join him and were attacked by bandits on the way and one of them was murdered and the other one was horribly wounded. He did survive but was missing in the woods for months and didn't get to see Petrarch for another two years.

So when he talks about a period when there were no bandits on the roads, he knows what it means for there to be bandits on the roads and the degree of danger is not small.

The degree of danger is a vivid, lived, deadly danger that affects every kind of travel. If even in the aftermath of the Black Death, the odds of getting to the neighboring town to visit your friend are 50-50 you die from bandits, nobody wants to invest in sending wool back and forth between England and Italy.

You need some increases of stability and peace or of the total investment. And with banking increasing profits, and we know how investments can make the profit margins of things skyrocket in weird ways, they're able to get to a state where, there still are pirates on the seas, but the payoff for this ship going is so high that even if we lose half of the ships to pirates, we still make a profit, therefore we still do it.

KRUGMAN: Wow. I guess the thought I have is not what we can learn from the Renaissance, but what we can learn from the power of narrative. If you had to say, what do you think are the false narratives that we're telling ourselves about our current era?

PALMER: So I think that actually the biggest problem, and I discussed this at length in the last portion of the book, is not a specific narrative, but a specific structure of

Narrative. We tell way too many stories—and historians and novelists are co-equally guilty of this—that are about protagonists. It's very easy to tell a story about protagonists.

It's very structurally simple. It's very narratively satisfying. Your protagonist can be a hero or your protagonist can be an economist or a city or a historical figure. Your protagonist can be Winston Churchill. Your protagonist can be a lot of things, but it's very easy to tell

a story in which one or a few people have great importance and influence and their actions shape what happens.

And when we tell those kinds of stories, we also tend to give them a heroic narrative where if they have any flaws and setbacks, they're heroic flaws and setbacks, right?

And they have a moment of crisis or a point at which they're betrayed or Machiavelli who’s often used as a sort of protagonist figure for the Renaissance is arrested and tortured and exiled, right?

I assign my students to read a letter in which Machiavelli is writing home to say, “My salary is late and my shirt is full of holes. It looks really scruffy. And here I am at the royal court trying to represent a textile capital and I look like a ragamuffin and I need my salary and I have to pay my rent. And I'm going to embarrass us in front of Cesare Borgia tomorrow. Where is my salary?” And he's just whining about money in exactly the way that all of us do.

And another of my favorite Renaissance letters is, “Dear Mom, I left my favorite purple bathrobe at home. Please bring it when you come visit. Sincerely, Lorenzo de Medici.”

Because we don't include the mundane in our descriptions of the people who have power over history. We make them feel larger than life. That’s sort of the Great Man narrative, or when we expand it beyond men, Great Person history.

KRUGMAN: There's a lot about women in the book, which we're not going to get to today, but...

PALMER: Tons of women, but Great Person storytelling. The inverse, which you get less in fiction but plenty of in non-fiction, is the Great Forces history. Like, “The wealth gap was X percent over Y percent and this much of the capital was in the hands of this social class, therefore the French Revolution had to happen.”

And those types of narratives are very useful as tools of analysis, but boy do they make it feel like an individual human being doesn't matter, right? Because what are you? You are one grain of sand in the machine that is going to tip over. And you don't have any power. So we feel powerless whenever we read either of these types of narrative.

Because either we are just a single grain of sand in a giant thing or we don't resemble the hero because we are here worrying about paying our electric bill and whether our shirt is going to make us look scruffy at work and we forgot our thing and need to ask our mom to bring it to us.

There's no less than four letters where Machiavelli's mother is bugging him to eat his vegetables and sending vegetables to him at the Royal Court of France. And then when she dies, his wife takes over and his wife is bugging him to eat his vegetables. When we tell stories, we elegantly remove these details that would make us realize that the people who had power in history are actually just as mundane as us and filled with just as mundane problems.

This, I think, is a huge part of where imposter syndrome comes from, because we don't resemble the people we see stories about doing things, even when they're in our own line of work. Because we know how much of our life went to “the laundry machine is broken and I have to deal with this silly mundane problem,” and “my office chair arm fell off. Now I have to fix my chair.”

And those elements of our lives are never in the narratives. And so we feel like those people with power over history are a marble bust on a pedestal and we're not. And we see this narrative being incredibly harmful, making people feel like they don't have power, making people feel like what they do doesn't matter, making people feel like everything is either going to be great forces [or great protagonists].

You know, we asked the question, if the Black Death caused the Renaissance, is COVID going to cause a stock market boom? And either the answer is yes or no, but either way, doesn't matter what any human being does. Or we're like, well, who are the protagonists of our current day? Let's try to construct a narrative around something.

You also see this a lot in extremist recruiting techniques. Kathleen Belew, wonderful historian friend of mine who works on the history of white supremacy, her new book project is looking a lot at how protagonist narratives as well as apocalyptic narratives get used for extremist recruitment. Either in the form of, you want to be the protagonist of your own life? Join our movement. Or Trump is the protagonist. Don't you want to be among the troops that are rallying to support Aragorn at the gates of Minas Morgal, right? Only he is a protagonist, only he has the power to change the world. Your duty is to rally behind him.

These types of persuasion are very effective because both protagonist narratives and great forces narratives leave us feeling like we don't have power. And I work hard trying to figure out how to make more plural narratives, as you see me doing in the intersecting lives chapter in the middle, that show how all of this is shaped by a bunch of different people all doing things, interacting with each other, all of them trying to work to make a future with ideas that they have, all of them mixing and resulting in a weirder, less predictable, but nonetheless different future than what they started out trying to make.

And I think we need that better account of agency in order to get over the universal imposter syndrome that we all feel when we look at the world and feel like, “I can't shape this the way a protagonist would.” And the answer is: “True, and neither can anyone else.”

KRUGMAN: I think I'm going to stop it there and say that what we learn from this is that history is about people. People who are complicated and sometimes genuinely heroic,

sometimes genuinely villainous, and most of the time need to be reminded to eat their vegetables. On that note, thanks so much.

PALMER: This has been great fun.