In 1506, Niccolò Machiavelli received a letter from a friend who had recently read the first part of a history he was writing about the decade they had just endured. The friend urged him to continue. If no one recorded these years properly, he warned, future generations would never believe how bad they had been. Worse, they would never forgive those who had lived through them for having lost so much, so quickly.
Ironically, that was the very decade in which Michelangelo carved the David and Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa. What posterity would remember as one of the supreme flowerings of European civilisation was experienced, by at least some of those who inhabited it, not as a golden age but as a scene of disintegration.
