Ada Palmer

Sometimes France and Spain unite to invade the Holy Roman Empire.

Sometimes England and Spain unite to keep the French out of Italy.

Sometimes France and the Empire unite to keep Spain out of Italy.

Once students created a giant pan-European peace treaty with marriage alliances that looked likely to permanently unify all.

4.

Great crowns, only to be shattered by the sudden assassination of a crown prince.

Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.

The assassination of that crown prince is telling.

In this run of Palmer's simulation, a single student's decision, perhaps made impulsively, perhaps strategically, eliminated what looked like an inevitable unification of Europe.

A marriage alliance that seemed to guarantee peace for generations evaporated in an instant.

One moment of violence redirected the entire course of the simulation's history.

Small things matter.

Or as Palmer herself puts it, the marriage alliance between Milan and Ferrara makes Venice friends with Milan, which makes Venice's rival Genoa side with Spain, and pretty soon there are Scotsmen fighting Englishmen in Padua.

This is the pattern that emerges from repeated runs.

Certain outcomes seem inevitable, a powerful cardinal wins the papacy, war breaks out, but the specific path history takes turns on moments like these, moments where a single action cascades into consequences no one could have foreseen.

Palmer's students aren't learning to predict outcomes.

That would be impossible in a system where a single assassination can shatter a continental peace.

They're learning something else.

How to navigate a world where small causes can have large effects, where the direction of those effects remains unknown until they unfold.

Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.