Machiavelli and The Pisan War: Political Crisis and Cultural Creativity in Renaissance Florence, 1494-1509
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On November 9, 1494, the Pisan rebels proclaimed independence from Florence and reclaimed their city without a fight. Their audacious act marked the beginning of a long war between Florence and Pisa that ultimately ended with Pisa’s surrender in June 1509. As Niccolò Machiavelli’s chancery career (1498-1512) almost matches the entire duration of the Pisan War, one may ask about his role in the conflict as the secretary to the Ministry of War, and later, the founder and supervisor of the Florentine militia. Surprisingly, this topic has attracted little to no attention in historiography. Concerning this, one of the main goals of my dissertation is to bring to light Machiavelli’s engagement in the Pisan War and his contribution to bringing down the rebellious city. Additionally, as many events that Machiavelli experienced during the conflict inspired him to reflect on them in his writings, the purpose of this project is to show how the Pisan War affected Machiavelli’s intellectual formation. To achieve those goals, my dissertation draws mainly from Machiavelli’s early official letters and dispatches (Legazioni) and his first political writings. The use of Machiavelli’s post-1512 opere and contemporary Pisan and Florentine chronicles and histories serves to complement the main source material.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".