Dwarkesh Patel

But outside of town, there is a wealthy villa that belongs to a noble family, and they have bodyguards.

Hey, noble family, if I move next to your villa and work for you, will you protect me with your bodyguards?

So towns emptied out and villages, as in villa and its environs, developed.

As a result, and a village was a monarchical structure in this sense that was the migration of people out of a town into the protection zone of a local lordling, right?

And then those villages grew to different scales, some of them cities, some not.

So Italy had great agriculture and great agricultural land.

So more of Italy's cities were able to sustain themselves as towns and be republics.

Well, as with many processes, the answer is there are multiple steps and it's complicated.

And some of the steps are realizing that the earlier steps didn't work.

So Petrarch, who lives through the Black Death and lives in a moment when Italy is racked by civil war and foreign mercenary troops are raiding and pillaging.

Italy is racked by bandits.

When Petrarch survives the Black Death after losing so many friends, he gets a letter.

Two of his friends are alive.

He had given up that anyone he knew would survive.

But two of his younger scholar friends are alive.

They're going to come visit him on the way they were attacked by bandits.

And one of them was killed and the other was lost in the mountains and wounded.

And he didn't know that his friend was alive for another year and a half.

So the bandits are very real in this period.

And Petrarch looks around him and says, this is an age of ash and shadow.