Dwarkesh Patel

When republics fell, they usually fell to noble families who are the foremost, the strongest, who are the military class, right?

If you're a military leader in this period, you have to have noble blood.

No soldier is going to follow a commander who doesn't have noble blood.

That would be weird.

And those threats to the independence of the republic almost always came from the nobility.

And after one particular near miss in which the city was nearly taken over, they decided to get rid of the nobility of Florence.

And they massacred most of them and cut their heads off and put them on pikes and burned their houses down and raked salt into the earth and had a party on their graves.

The way you do in the period when you're getting rid of a class of people.

There were a few noble families that they really liked who had not been part of negative stuff who they instead allowed to officially renounce their nobility.

And they renounced their nobility and changed their names and declared themselves commoners.

And they set up a commoner republic.

So what that meant was the Senate consisted of members of merchant guilds.

A member of a merchant guild here means the owners of workshops, not the guy who sits at the loom weaving, but the guy who owns the warehouse full of looms where the workers are working.

The head of the...

sculpture works, the head of the architectural firm, not the bricklayers who are actually laying the bricks.

So we're talking about the economic bourgeoisie is an anachronistic word, but we're talking about the owners of the means of production, but who are themselves commoners.

So they are very wealthy, but from the point of view of the diplomatic core of any other

society where all of the ruling people and all of their envoys and all of their ambassadors are noble-blooded.

If you're an ambassador, you're automatically noble-blooded.

Nobody's going to take an ambassador seriously who isn't noble-blooded, right?