anghraine:
manymanytimesbefore:
stele3:
amuseoffyre:
spanishskulduggery:
mynamesdrstuff:
enjoloras:
Excellent history fact to remember;
Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo Da Vinci, most likely at the behest of the Borgias, once conspired to steal a river.
That’s right folks. They planned to change the course of the Arno River so that they could steal it from Pisa and make Florence accessible by sea.
Please take a moment to imagine that.
Please.
‘So we just divert the -’
‘Don’t worry they won’t notice a thing’
100% better than National Treasure.
This should be a wacky bromance heist film. We need more wacky historical heist films.
It gets better. I just had to go check on the veracity of this and discovered MORE.
Their plan failed, at which point Machiavelli decided to quietly fade out of politics…and went on to write The Prince, one of the most (in)famous pieces of Western literature.
Da Vinci, meanwhile, never forgot the river that got away. In fact, he made it the background of one of his most famous paintings–hell, one of the most famous paintings, period.
Yup, that’s the fucking river.
anghraine
Wellllllll
This was a much more incidental event than the above suggests (e.g., it had nothing whatsoever to do with Machiavelli fading from the political scene–he didn’t decide to leave, but rather fell from grace in the various upheavals of Florentine politics, got tortured, and was exiled to a small property where he wrote The Prince, and all the while he begged to be allowed back).
But the whole story of how Machiavelli farmed out Leonardo to Cesare Borgia to keep Cesare from invading Florence is amazing.
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