Dwarkesh Patel

This is a sign of a weak duke.

But also when he was building it, it's going across the roofs and sometimes blasting off the second stories of different people's houses.

And most people, when His Grace the Duke says, I'm going to blast the top story off your house, would say, yes, Your Grace, please continue.

Because there are literally severed heads of people who resisted still rotting on spikes in front of the Palazzo Ecchio.

But they get to this one point where there's an old tower, a very old tower.

a 500-year-old tower.

And this belongs to, I think it's the Minelli family, who are descended from peers of Julius Caesar and can trace their genealogy all the way back to an old Roman gens.

And when the duke says, we want to knock the top off your tower, they say, no, this is our tower.

This tower has been ours since before the Medici existed as a named family.

You may not knock the top off.

And the duke

Does not knock the top off and the corridor goes around in this awkward square around that tower because he knows that if he violates something as traditional and core to the civilization as the property rights of somebody who has owned something for a long time.

There will be rebellion, there will be civil war, there will be dissent, there will be resistance.

These are monarchs who know that they are weak and are therefore careful, and therefore more rights like property rights exist.

Meanwhile, across the river in Ferrara, Duke Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara used to wander around Ferrara buck naked.

with a sword in one hand and his dick in the other to show off that nobody would ever possibly try to harm a Duke d'Este.

And he and his siblings used to do things like, if they liked a musician, kidnap them and lock them in a tower so that nobody else could hear them.

Or if they wanted each other's musician, send goons to kidnap each other's musicians.

They also used to recreationally murder each other's servants when the siblings were tipping with each other.

That is what you do when you don't fear your people and when you feel confident in power, right?