What Machiavelli would do about climate change
Major climatic shifts have long been a feature of human society. But the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to man-made rather than cyclical causes of contemporary climate change. And with those changes, we’ve seen nearly annual rises in global temperature averages. Today’s climate change has also caused general climate instability resulting in water supply shortages and devastating droughts; tropical systems dumping feet of water on cities such as Houston; and people freezing to death during cold snaps linked to the polar vortex.
Our experiences with climate-related extreme weather are reminders that even as we invest in long-term solutions looking forward, we should also look to the past for information about how human societies attempted to mitigate the disastrous immediate effects of climate change in their own times. One place to look is the age of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Borgia and Medici popes and Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” The Italian Renaissance, often seen as the dawn of our own modern age, occurred during one of the greatest periods of climatic instability, known as the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1300 to 1850. As historian Brian Fagan argues, heightened volcanic and seismic activity, a decrease in solar radiation and shifts in ocean current patterns caused a general global cooling. The Little Ice Age brought with it cooler and wetter summers, longer and colder winters, and violent storms that caused widespread and intense flooding.
Few places were hit by the floods of the Little Ice Age quite like Renaissance Italy. Many of its cultural centers, including Rome and Florence, are on major rivers. Rome’s Tiber River was especially prone to flooding. A January 1310 flood that struck Rome, for example, was an astounding 50 feet above sea level. Monuments such as the Colosseum and the Roman Forum were inundated.
When the father of the Renaissance, Francesco Petrarch, arrived in Rome in 1337, he found a city that had been ravaged by floods directly resulting from the Little Ice Age. Petrarch lamented that the city’s dire state was the result of the papacy’s relocation to Avignon, a small city in southern France. The popes moved there in 1305 after Pope Clement V, a Frenchman, refused to return to Rome because of his allegiance to King Philip IV and because of the lawlessness of Rome’s nobles.
The ensuing political vacuum only exacerbated the Roman response to climate-related disasters. The combination of climate change and poor government response often left the Eternal City without basic civil services. After floods and earthquakes, some structures were left to nature rather than repaired or restored. St. John Lateran, one of the city’s most important ancient churches, was all but destroyed by a fire in 1307, and rebuilding it was anything but efficient. Dilapidated ancient monuments such as the Colosseum were either vandalized for stone or turned into fortified family compounds.
Petrarch couldn’t believe that the papacy had succumbed to French pressures to relocate to Avignon and allowed Rome’s nobles to embrace factionalism. He believed that the popes should reside in Rome to protect or restore its treasures after natural disasters. Papal absenteeism and the nobles’ ignorance caused Petrarch to believe that “nowhere is Rome less known than at Rome itself.”
But it didn’t have to be that way. The popes could have returned home and opted not to be puppets of a foreign regime. The nobles could have set aside their differences. And perhaps something could have been done to ensure that, even if natural disasters could not be prevented or predicted, their impact could be lessened. “Indeed,” Petrarch asked, “who can doubt that Rome will rise up again once she begins to recognize herself?”
Petrarch wasn’t alone. In the 1440s, Flavio Biondo, a historian in Rome writing after the papacy finally did return from France, looked back on the fall of ancient Rome in the 470s and saw parallels to Renaissance Rome’s struggles. As Rome fell in the last decades of the fifth century, foreign invaders and earthquakes had damaged the aqueducts that brought drinking water into the city. But rather than repair the aqueducts, ancient Rome’s elites used their tattered fragments to construct fortified palaces. Just as ancient leaders scrambled to hoard the scraps of empire, Biondo believed that popes in his own time were not doing enough to prevent Rome’s elite from destroying ancient monuments for their own gain.
As successive popes such as Eugenius IV and Nicholas V aimed to restore Rome after their return from France in 1420, monumental building projects multiplied. But Biondo was furious to see his contemporaries quarrying precious marble and travertine from ancient structures that had been damaged by repeated floods and earthquakes to build private palaces rather than build a city that worked for everyday Romans.
Machiavelli, perhaps the most famous voice of the Italian Renaissance, agreed. In his “Prince,” written in 1513 while he was in exile for his opposition to the powerful Medici family, Machiavelli argued that human affairs came down to a 50-50 struggle between fortune and human ingenuity. Machiavelli likened fortune to torrential rivers that overflow their banks, destroy fields and ravage cities. But societies can “take precautions,” Machiavelli explained, “constructing dykes or embankments.” Had his contemporaries confronted dangers, natural or man-made, “this flood would not have caused the great changes it has, or it would not have swept in at all.” Machiavelli wasn’t just speaking metaphorically about the deviousness of popes and princes. He knew there was always a great risk that Florence’s Arno River, like the Tiber, would flood, both during the Little Ice Age and after. For Italians writing during the Little Ice Age, floods were not abstractions. They and other natural disasters were real-life threats that required immediate intervention to mitigate their destructive forces. Petrarch, Biondo and Machiavelli all understood that disaster can strike when it’s least expected. Earthquakes, fires and floods cannot always be predicted. Such is the whim of fortune.
But Renaissance thinkers knew that the struggle between nature and society calls for immediate intervention as well as long-term solutions focused on the common good.