Leonardo

Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer

Leonardo, Gutenberg, Ada Palmer

The dissolution of the Western Roman Empire forced Italian city-states to develop distinct republican or monarchical structures, with Florence establishing a unique merchant-led oligarchy that leveraged the Medici family's banking network to manipulate political outcomes. Concurrently, an educational movement attempting to forge virtuous "philosopher princes" through classical texts failed, prompting Niccolò Machiavelli and later Francis Bacon to replace character imitation with a pragmatic political science focused on analyzing specific historical decisions. This intellectual shift coincided with the maturation of paper and printing technologies, which dismantled medieval knowledge scarcity and enabled the rapid dissemination of information necessary for the scientific method to emerge from artisanal practices into a systematic engine for anthropogenic progress.