Thread by @qst_alphavinyl

Emilia-Romagna, where we are spending this #Giro stage, is a region which has experienced unstable times for centuries, especially during the Middle Ages, when its central position in the Peninsula made it the object of ambition of many powerful men of the era,

including Cesare Borgia and Louis Xll, the King of France. The former was the son of Pope Alexander Vl (whose controversial actions during his 11 years as the head of the Catholic Church more or less ignited the Protestant Reformation) and wanted to unite and rule all of

Italy – hence his motto “Aut Caesar, aut nihil”). The latter invaded Italy and enforced his claim on several territories, taking advantage of Ludovico “Il Moro” Sforza's incredible diplomatic error of rolling out the red carpet for the French back in 1494 in an act of panic,

when by inviting King Charles Vlll and his 60 000-men army across the Alps to take Naples, he kicked off a series of events that would continue to have a lasting impact on the Peninsula and many of its city-states years later, including the creation of a Holy League.

The Holy League was an unlikely but very strong alliance between the Borgia Pope, Ludovico Sforza (who in just a couple of months came to regret his huge political blunder), Venice, Siena, Mantova, several other minor Italian states, but also the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I

and Ferdinand II of Aragon. One of the most fascinating things about this relentless fight for power and the political turmoil in which the Peninsula was plunged into is that it led to several consequences that ended up having a huge impact on art, military engineering,

science and even political philosophy. The reason for all this is that an improbable and at the same time mouth-watering fellowship formed, comprising Cesare Borgia (one of the Pope’s five children), Niccolo Machiavelli (who thanks to an anonymous benefactor

– most likely a friend of his father’s, a former member of the public office – had climbed Florence’s political ranks astonishingly fast) and was dispatched by the Signoria in 1502 as a diplomatic emissary to negotiate and later accompany Borgia in order to find out his true

intentions – and Leonardo da Vinci, who worked in the services of the Pope’s son, but also acted as a spy for Florence, which felt continuously threatened. In fairness, Leonardo shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The end of the 15th century found him in Milano –

his place of refuge following a notorious scandal in which he had been involved in Florence (and of which he was cleared only with Lorenzo the Magnificent's help – where after finishing his masterpiece “The Last Supper” (one of history's most influential works of art) at the

Dominican monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie, he began working in the former ballroom of the Corte Vecchia on the gargantuesque “Gran Cavallo”, a 70-ton bronze statue that Ludovico Sforza wanted to erect in memory of his late father Francesco Sforza.

It was in Milano that Leonardo met Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli, one of the leading mathematicians of the age, who arrived there after publishing his renowned “Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita”. Together with Pacioli, he began working on

“De divina proportione” (whose title refers to the golden ratio, which had obsessed so many before him and continues to do so today) – which would be printed in in Venice, a couple of years later – for which he provided some spectacular geometric illustrations.

Written in vernacular Italian, the book set a new standard for writing about algebra and sought to include all the mathematical knowledge available at the time, but its influence didn’t quite stop there, as Pacioli was among the first to recognize

the study of economics as a liberal art. Leonardo also studied mathematics under Pacioli, which would eventually lead to his famous drawing “The Vitruvian Man”. But after Louis Xll invaded Italy and defeated Sforza – who in the meantime had requisitioned the

huge quantities of bronze for his army – Leonardo was left jobless and forced to flee Milano (which remained in French hands for more than a decade), which he did after apparently giving some kind of assurance to the French King and his new ally, none other than Cesare Borgia.

Everything became clear in 1502, when Leonardo da Vinci joined Cesare Borgia as his chief engineer, inventing military machines, strengthening walls and key fortresses, producing a stunning bird’s eye view map of Imola, adding his contribution to several successful sieges,

some of which he witnessed from first row, and which later made him regret his inventions and put many of his ideas to bed. This doesn’t mean that Leonardo completely lost interest in military science as in his valuable notebooks were found several projects that centuries later

would be brought to life, such as the multi-barreled cannon (used in the American Civil War), the armored vehicle and the bridge over the Bosphorus. But maybe the most important thing about his time in Borgia’s service is that while roaming Italy with his new employer and his

fellow Florentine Machiavelli, Da Vinci discovered the landscape that he would later use as background for Mona Lisa, many believing that Ponte Buriano, the seven-arch stone bridge built across the river Arno, is the one whose design was used in his most famous painting.

As for Niccolo Machiavelli, who was equally fascinated and terrified by Borgia during the months spent around “Il Valentino” (often under his own steam, once the Signoria refused to send any more money or call him back despite his pleas) as the latter’s military campaign kept

dragging on, he realized that truth could only be reached by perception and observation, and this helped him write “The Prince”, which was published in 1532. It didn’t take long before “The Prince” inspired outrage and shock across Europe and revolutionize political thinking for

the next five centuries, as well as (ironically) lead to the Machiavelli's downfall. Originally entitled “De Principatibus” (Of Principalities), written in vernacular Italian, which had become common practice since Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and never published during Machiavelli’s

lifetime, the book was an attempt to win favour with the Medici family. So profound was the impact of Machiavelli’s political treatise that it could be seen in many works over the next couple of centuries, including the ones of René Descartes, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and even

William Shakespeare, whose “Merry Wives of Windsor” comedy features a character that protests his honesty by asking “Am I politic? Am I subtle? Am I a Machiavel?”. All this serves as solid and irrefutable proof that it took just a couple of decades since the book was printed for

Machiavellianism to properly develop as a concept and ideology. Last but not least, after his father’s death in the beginning of the 16th century, Cesare Borgia tried to maintain control over the territories he had conquered and pursue his ambitions, but found the task more and

more difficult in the political climate that was beginning to change in that part of Europe. Fooled by the powerful Giuliano della Rovere, betrayed by Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, Cesare Borgia quickly lost all the support he still had, was imprisoned in Naples and later

in La Mancha, and with this, his dreams of unifying Italy forever evaporated. He somehow managed to escape and recapture Viana (but not its castle), only to be killed by several enemy knights at the siege there, in an ambush at the first hours of the day.