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Vlad, Meet Rinaldo [1]
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Date: 2022-08-11
To paraphrase George Santayana: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. (In fact, I suspect that’s what he meant all along.) So while it’s probably fair to say that Vladimir Putin, being intelligent and reasonably well-educated – or as well-educated as one could be growing up in Soviet Russia – has some knowledge of history, I doubt that he pays much attention to anything that happened before Peter the Great, or west of the Oder River. (It’s been reported that Putin rather fancies himself a modern-day Peter; if so, there’s a nice built-in irony there, but we’ll go into that later.)
So let’s consider something that one suspects doesn’t loom large in Putin’s world-view: the politics of Quattrocento (15th-century) Italy. Like other parts of Europe, Italy wasn’t a country but a collection of city-states,duchies, and minor princedoms. They were variously at war or allied with each other, the alliances shifting as circumstances changed. A few regions were more stable, though, and one with a longer shelf-life than most was Tuscany, dominated by the city of Florence.In the centuries before the rise of the Medici, Florence alternated between a peculiar form of republic and one or another tyrant, which in this sense means only a ruler without constitutional authority.During this period, Florence managed to bring all of Tuscany into its orbit, with one exception: the city of Lucca, about 50 miles away towards the coast. They tried often enough, but Lucca was pretty stubborn (you may be getting the picture now).
The last of the pre-Medici rulers was one Rinaldo degli Albizzi . Despite all the previous failures, he was more or less fixated on annexing Lucca. It went something like this (all the quotes are from The Medici by Ferdinand Schevill, published in 1949):
Rinaldo expected, rightly, that the Florentines would rally behind the cause.But he also figured – does this start to look familiar? – “that Lucca seemed...so completely isolated politically that it would go down to defeat before a helper could arrive…” So in 1429, he decided to attack.
I imagine you already know what happened. “Rinaldo’s rosy expectations turned out to be a bundle of bad guesses. The Lucchese got prompt and abundant help from their neighbors...the mercenary armies engaged by[Florence] made their usual bad showing, and the headlong Rinaldo...gravely bungled the successive campaigns…”
Rinaldo’s war dragged on four more years, by which time he and the Florentines were so sick of it they made peace with Lucca. It did not go well for Rinaldo after that. “When the Florentines enthusiastically backed Rinaldo’s war...they had done so in the persuasion usual among war-makers that success was as good as assured. Again like war-makers before and since...they heaped the blame on their unhappy leader.” Rinaldo lasted only a year or so after the end of the war; in September,1434, The Florentines elected a government partial to the merchant family that would be the de-facto rulers of Florence for the next three centuries: the Medici. Rinaldo was sent into exile, and Cosimo, the head of the family, took over.
The parallels are telling. Putin (“like war-makers before and since”)thought he’d have a romp in the park, that no one else would care, and that his army would run roughshod over everything in a week or two. And now he’s waist-deep in a Big Muddy of his own making. But Vlad’s exploit almost certainly won’t last four years. Either he’ll lose decisively before the end of the year, or he’ll start a nuclear war, in which case, it won’t matter to any of us.
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If Vladimir Putin really does see himself as the second coming of Peter the Great, then maybe his knowledge of Russian history isn’t so good after all.It’s true that Peter I managed to cobble together a sort of Russian Empire out of the various kingdoms of Moscow, Vladimir, Kiev, etc. (It’s that last one that probably gives Putin his excuse for invading Ukraine.) But it isn’t what really made him Great. What he did is what Putin is dead set against: he opened Russia to western Europe. Peter admired the cultures and technical progress of the western countries, none more so than France, from which he imported language, dress, and advisors. He learned shipbuilding in the Netherlands when the Dutch were at their peak as a seafaring nation. In short, his attitude towards the west is the antithesis of Putin’s. As tsars go, Vlad is a lot closer to Ivan IV – you know, the one they call “the Terrible”.
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