Five rooms in five countries show how power has shifted in the Western World from the Fifteenth Century down to the present
And you can visit them all!
Five Rooms
Power is visible because it makes itself visible. It obeys three principles:
-Power follows commerce.
-It carries within itself, from the beginning like a death wish, the means of its own demise.
-It achieves its maximum expression just before the fall.
Its pathways, in the Western World, can be seen in five fascinating rooms spread over as many countries and as many centuries. And they are all open to the public!
Tuscany: The Center of the World
All three principles are illustrated in the first of the five rooms, a singular exhibit created by an elusive Renaissance ruler.
The room is the Hall of Maps at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, centerpiece and capital of the Italian province of Tuscany; the man is Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, last of the “great” Medici princes, personally austere, politically ruthless, a patron of the arts and a master of state terror.
Cosimo commissioned the work in the 1560s, at a time Tuscany’s, and Italy’s, power was waning. It serves, because of the maturity of its gestation, as a retrospective of its time and place. The Duke wished it to represent the totality of the known world. He also meant it as a memento to his own glory as master of the human cosmos, of which his own name was, not co-incidentally, a reminder.
He failed.
The room was never completed and should have included a glittering celestial globe, match to a doughty terrestrial twin, able to be lowered from the ceiling and spun “with the flick of a finger,” portraits and busts of the great men of antiquity, dwarfed by the breadth and glory of Cosimo’s vision, and rich details of the flora and fauna of the far corners of the earth.
But the failure was glorious. Fifty-three maps, rightly noted for their precision and detail, look like they could be used to plan a modern travel itinerary…anywhere in the world! Walnut cabinets contain examples of the scientific and navigational equipment of the time, bronze and silver artifacts and myriad other treasures. The forlorn terrestrial globe, blackened by time, presides over the scene.
Although, in its conception, the Hall of Maps was a testament to narcissism, in execution, the room is a monument to utility, science and trade. It teaches, in visual form, a modern lesson—power comes from knowledge and knowledge from attention to detail.
The Tuscans lived, and prospered, from this dictum.
An arc of cities in Northern Italy—Genoa, Milan, Florence and Venice—were the richest places in the West during the 15th Century. They presided over the Mediterranean, mediated between East and West, carved trade routes by land all the way to Bruges in modern Belgium and by sea to Egypt. They perfected banking and insurance, established universities and developed the cosmopolitan outlook of a society that trades with, and profits from, men of strange appearance and alternative faith, a world in which Jews, Muslims and homosexuals were welcome as long as they could paint, barter, keep ledgers, devise useful inventions or wrangle military equipment.
They fancied their world a Rinascita, or Rebirth of classical modes of art, thought and commerce. History calls it the Renaissance.
Power derived from the region’s unique geographic position and its people’s openness to knowledge. Britain’s rise, on the sturdy backs of her fleece-bearing sheep, was centuries away, while Tuscany’s was accomplished with the aid of silk, fur, dyes, protective tariffs and more than 80 banking houses, of which the Pitti and the Medici were the most celebrated and powerful.
Tuscany, with interruptions for religious zealotry, war and mismanagement, flourished from the rise of Cosimo de’ Medici, known as Pater Patriae, in the 1430s until the death of his namesake, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, in 1574.
The Duke, patron of the Hall of Maps amid much else, including the Uffizi Gallery, was sullen, cold-blooded and austere. Naldini’s portrait of him shows a stern middle-aged man with a trim beard. Garbed in ermine, he could easily pass for a Windsor king. But Cosimo was no mild-mannered George VI; more like Michael Corleone.
Duke Cosimo, however briefly, restored vitality to Tuscan industry and trade; he enriched his little dukedom and patronized her arts and artists, but he was no ruler of the cosmos. As the age of Leonardo and Michelangelo was passing, so was that of the Medici and the Borgias.
Power had shifted.
The rich but narrow Mediterranean yielded to the vast, forbidding Atlantic. Fortune favored the winds, and the winds were veering West.
The Rise of Spain
King Philip II was the most powerful man in the world.
His realm included, at different times, all of modern Spain, much of Italy and the Netherlands, for nearly two decades the crown of Portugal (the coach he rode from Spain to Lisbon to conclude negotiations for the unification of the Iberian peninsula can be seen at the Coaches Museum in Lisbon, a city Philip inhabited and improved during a two-year stay), vast colonies in the Americas and the distant Pacific islands named in his honor, the Philippines. He was even, during four years of marriage to Queen Mary, the de jure king of England.
He battled France, intrigued for power in Italy and meddled in the labyrinthian politics of the central European contrivance known as the Holy Roman Empire. In 1588 he hurled a fleet of 130 warships into a disastrous war of invasion against England. Late in his reign, he contemplated the conquest of China.
He ruled the first global empire, embracing half of Christendom, from a modest bedroom perched behind the magnificent Basilica of San Lorenzo el Real, part of Philip’s massive architectural undertaking, the combination church, monastery, fortress, palace and mausoleum known as El Escorial, 30 miles northwest of Madrid.
Philip reigned, from 1556 to 1598, in sickness and in health, but more often in sickness. The little bedroom is a monument to austerity. It contains a single bed– ornate curtains can be drawn for privacy—a metal foot-warmer, a chest, a few chairs and little else. From an aperture, when debilitated by gout, he could attend mass by looking down at the altar of San Lorenzo. A worrier, he paced at night, in a nearby study, so avidly and often he carved a path in the floor.
Philip’s rooms, too, teach a lesson—power as discipline. The King suffered no distractions. Even mass at the High Altar of San Lorenzo served his ends; it was not an interruption, but a jolt of godly zeal. He was drawn to only two things—God and power and probably apprehended them as co-terminus.
He lived for 71 years, 42 of them as King of Spain. A short, fair-skinned man with blue eyes, he was reserved to the point of diffidence. The King sometimes confounded visitors by donning a habit and mingling, anonymously, with the Escorial monks. He was a good listener. A penchant for sweets led to gout, and perhaps diabetes, in later years. The contraption servants used to transport him late in life can be seen near his monkish quarters in the Escorial.
As the Quattrocento belonged to Italy, the next century would be Spain’s, the Siglo de Oro.
How did power shift so quickly, and completely?
Spain possessed what Italy lacked–unity.
Italy, Niccolo Machiavelli complained as early as 1513, suffered “without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, lacerated, and overrun…(rotted by) ruin of every kind.”
It’s no accident Columbus discovered America in 1492, the year Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile expelled the Moors from Grenada, effecting the unification of what we today know as Spain.
As the Crusades had ignited trade between Europe and the East, with Northern Italy as pivot, guarantor and guide, the discoveries opened the world, first to conquest and then to commerce. Spain was supreme for a century because, as General Nathan Bedford Forest would say closer to our time, they got to the New World “the firstest with the mostest.”
Italy, once the crossroads of trade, became the crossroads of armies, with France, Spain, Austria and the Roman Catholic Church carving out often shifting zones of influence. Spain, under the steely guidance first of Charles V and then Philip II, secured its political unity and then embarked on a policy of nearly unchallenged Atlantic expansion.
But Philip, for all his conquests, religious zeal and attention to detail, was the last great ruler of Spain.
Why did Spain falter?
Spain’s decline is a lesson in modern economics. Its rulers, including Philip II, confused money with wealth. When New World gold and silver poured in too fast, Spain suffered bouts of debilitating inflation; when the spigots dried, the state went bankrupt. In flush times, both church and state spent millions on the soaring cathedrals and palaces that enchant us today, but little was invested in improved agriculture or husbandry.
But the biggest drain on the treasury was war. As with Rome in ancient times, a sprawling empire requires constant defense. Constant defense sometimes left Philip, and his empire, penniless.
As for Philip himself, his religious zealotry veered toward bigotry. Where the Italians had been tolerant, benefiting from the goods and skills of all, Spain excluded, and finally persecuted, Muslims, Jews, European Protestants and New World pagans.
Spain warred against the world and lost.
The “Sun King” Experiments with Land Power
In any panoramic view of Paris, the most prominent feature is the Eiffel Tower; the second is Les Invalids.
The latter is a sprawling complex, begun in 1670, including chapels, hospitals and, for those permanently disabled and destitute, living quarters for war veterans. It is highlighted by the lofty, gilded dome of what is now Napoleon’s tomb.
Before the Eiffel Tower (begun in 1887, completed in 1889), Les Invalides must have dominated the Parisian skyline.
Why?
France, by geography and choice, is a land power. It is surrounded by defenses, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine and the sea, but also by enemies, Spain, Britain, Austria and, in its many guises and mutations, Germany. Even distant Russia has had a hand in fighting, and sometimes defeating, France. To become France took many battles; to preserve it, within its “natural boundaries,” took more.
Many battles mean many invalids. Caring for them is an affair of state.
It is no accident that work on Les Invalids began under King Louis XIV.
It is said of Louis, known less narcissistically than Duke Cosimo of Tuscany as merely the “sun” king at the center of the planets and not the progenitor and pivot of the entire cosmos, that France’s most famous monarch never took a bath. He didn’t have to. He was coiffed, perfumed, bewigged and bejeweled daily by servants in the sumptuous chambers that served as the engine and headquarters of his power and the stage for its projection. He too was the most powerful man in the world but in a way both more ostentatious and less secure than his Spanish precursor, Philip II.
Louis reigned for 72 years, effectively ruling for 54 starting in 1661. He died in 1715.
He not only secured the “natural” borders of his country but shaped the character, identity, language, and aspirations of its people. He built roads, introduced a uniform code of justice, improved public safety, centralized the state by compelling the aristocracy to gather under his wing at Versailles, and trained, professionalized, and expanded the French Army even to the point of instituting a form of conscription in 1688. He taxed his people barbarously.
As a teenager, Louis was described as a “Young Apollo.” He was only five and a half feet tall, but sturdy and personable. Louis was no intellectual but, like Napoleon, he made up for it with a grinding work ethic. Even in modern terms, he was a brilliant administrator, arming himself with facts from multiple sources, delegating authority and encouraging his counselors to speak their minds frankly. It was said the King was the best-informed person in Europe.
Louis was as fixated on “glory” as Philip had been on God. He used his magnificent Versailles bedchamber to display it, and himself, to nobles, ministers, ambassadors and servants with a daily waking-up ritual (levee) and a nightly going-to-bed equivalent (coucher). It was from here that he governed France and grasped for power over Europe.
“Glory,” especially the military kind, culminated in a series of battles in the 1680s marking France as predominant on the continent. Louis, the “sun” King, could decree “a French Century” (le grand siècle).
But France was a land power at a time of expanding global colonization and trade. In the 18th Century, she would be outmaneuvered by the maritime power, diplomacy and entrepreneurial skill of Britain.
By 1701, when the War of the Spanish Succession erupted, Louis had turned brittle and arrogant, but he still longed for “glory.” A dozen years later, war had drained him and the French Treasury while filling Les Invalids to the brim. Heavy taxes, the military draft, blood and defeat might have ignited the French Revolution then and there except for the adroit diplomacy resulting in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713).
Within two years, the most storied of French kings would be dead.
And the French Century was over.
The Waterloo Chamber and the Rise of Britain
In 1755, an earthquake devastated Lisbon.
It marked the rise of Britain as a world power.
The Portuguese made the same mistake as the Spanish, confusing gold with wealth. Gold they had plenty of, gushing like oil from crown-controlled mines in Brazil. They used it to pay contractors and suppliers, many of them British, in the rebuilding of their smoking, rubble-strewn capital (best seen in the evocatively preserved ruins of central Lisbon’s Carmo church and convent).
But the British didn’t spend their profits on splendid cathedrals and elaborate palaces. The contractors and suppliers were private citizens, the earliest expression of an emerging European, and eventually trans-Atlantic, bourgeois. They invested their money; they experimented; they took risks; the result was the Industrial Revolution.
Britain’s rise was propelled by three forceful vectors—investment in naval power; innovation; and a society so free in thought, discourse and action that Voltaire, as early as the 1720s, could declare, “How I love these people who say what they think!”
That Britain was not a land power worked to her advantage, or, as Shakespeare put it in Richard II, “This fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war…This precious stone set in the silver sea.” Britain was heavily invested in naval power as early as Elizabethan times and bested the Spanish Armada in 1588 with a combination of more numerous but smaller craft, some 200, with greater maneuverability. Pentagon-scale expenditure and organization began in the early 18th Century and continued until the Royal Navy dominated the seas (with one brief exception in 1781 when a British fleet was outmaneuvered by the French near a place called Yorktown in Virginia), humbled France at Trafalgar and the Nile, and “ruled the waves” until well into the 20th Century.
The British Navy was the perfect instrument to deliver the Industrial Revolution to the rest of the world, exacting a price through monopoly trade and colonization.
Among occurrences of novel and lasting consequence in 1776 was the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith’s book is both Bible and symbol of Britain’s leadership not only in machine innovation but also in the free-wheeling spirit of entrepreneurship that allowed for the spread of industrial processes first in Britain and eventually to every continent.
The Industrial Revolution, and the “New Men” it spawned and encouraged, changed the face of Britain. Author Daniel Defoe, early in the 18th Century, would write, “(Trade is) an inexhausted current which not only fills the pond, and keeps it full, but is continually running over and fills all the lower ponds and places about it.”
The Industrial Revolution enriched a nation. To such a people, war was not “glory” but distraction. Britain’s Prime Minister during the early Napoleonic Wars, William Pitt the Younger, met the French challenge with his country’s two most potent weapons—ships and money. He raised taxes, instituting the world’s first income tax, to bolster the Royal Navy. In eight years, the fleet’s manpower swelled from 15,000 to 133,000 with half again as many capital ships.
Napoleon was defeated not “on the playing fields of Eton” (a phrase attributed to the Duke of Wellington, victor of the 1815 battle of Waterloo, and pointedly denied by him), but in the shops and counting houses of Britain.
The British commemorated their victory over “the monster” in a curious way. The décor of the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, completed in 1831, does not celebrate so much as it instructs. The explicit intent was to honor the diplomats who put Europe back together in the wake of Napoleon’s rule as much, or almost as much, as the kings and generals who defeated him.
Nearly three dozen portraits adorn the chamber’s walls, registering kings, emperors, dukes and generals, even including aged Pope Pius VII. But space is also reserved for those who organized, and won, the peace, men such as Castlereagh, Nesselrode and Metternich.
But the room belongs, of course, to Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. Wellington was much like Dwight D. Eisenhower closer to our time, the indifferent cadet from a peripheral province (Ireland’s County Meath in Wellington’s case, Kansas in Eisenhower’s) rising to become the reserved but dogged army commander who, taming a balky coalition, wins the biggest military victory of the age, then goes on to head his country’s government at a time of peace and prosperity. Wellington shared Ike’s hatred of war, his disdain for protocol, suspicion of military establishments and warm regard for the lives and fortunes of the common soldier. Both men lived austerely, loved their country and, imprisoned in lukewarm marriages, pursued women. Most importantly, they personified the figure, essential to the health of a democratic society, of the modern Cincinnatus.
The Waterloo Chamber, still in use for great state occasions, marked both a beginning and an end. Napoleon was gone and Britannia ruled the waves, giving Europe, and much of the world, a hundred years of peace.
The Age of Keynes
The world we live in today began in a little room at a resort hotel in a remote New Hampshire village on the afternoon of July 22, 1944.
The signing, on that day, of the Bretton Woods Agreement, creating the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in the Gold Room of the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire and, more broadly, the effective endorsement by 44 countries of the spirit of rules-based international trade and investment inaugurated the far-reaching process known as “Globalization,” by which, more than 80 years later, nearly 200 countries, representing most of humanity, live or die.
Bretton Woods also inaugurated the reign, so far undisputed, of the U.S. Dollar.
It’s no accident the American Century was the dream of an Englishman.
John Maynard Keynes was not a man of his times. He was bisexual in a repressed and socially conservative age, a polemicist and popularizer, adroit in the use of communications media, droll, engaging and informal at a time when academics were expected to be stuffy and elitist; he was a broad-minded polymath, an art collector and critic, mathematician, philosopher, economist, adviser to, and bane of, prime ministers and presidents, in an era of specialization and prejudice; he was, in short, a man of our times, and appropriately so, since we live in the Age of Keynes.
The goals of the Bretton Woods Conference, largely realized by the more than 700 delegates, were limited, as befitting the plodding, empirical and voluntary nature of an enterprise encompassing more than half the world, but its aspirations were high. Concretely, the conference created the IMF, the World Bank and a framework for management of international currencies that was supposed to be permanent but ended up lasting only until 1971. Philosophically, it launched the idea of equal access to trade and investment for countries, and peoples, everywhere, including colonies of the aging European “powers” soon to become independent countries. Other aggregating institutions followed in its wake: the World Trade Organization, the European Coal and Steel Community, a plethora of United Nations agencies promoting global health and wellbeing, and, eventually, the European Union.
The mobile phone assembled in Asia with metals from Africa that rings inconveniently so a telemarketing agent in India can sell us services we don’t want while we’re sitting at a Mexican restaurant in a North American airport waiting to fly to Europe is the product of the global supply chains, international communications protocols and inclusive culinary culture humanity has been moving toward, like it or not, in the decades since history’s biggest war.
Lord Keynes (made a life peer as Baron Keynes of Tilton in 1942 in one of those quaint British conventions designed to confer recognition and honor without risk of any lasting damage to the authentic aristocracy) was a typically empirical British intellectual but with verve, audacity and a big-sky embrace the equal of any American cattle rancher.
His frank aim was “to solve mankind’s economic problem.” In a 1930 essay, he predicted that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today.” Keynes aimed for the stars, but empowered America. And yet the American dollar, although enthroned at Bretton Woods, merely reigns; it has never really ruled. Instead, “globalization” created the multi-layered world of today, in which Koreans, Indians and Brazilians can aspire to join “the progressive countries” until, perhaps, the American Century becomes Everybody’s Century.
In the same essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Keyes wrote, “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
Photo credits: Uffize Gallery; Celia Maria de Souza Murphy; Cincinnati Art Museum; Dn Trota Mundos; Louvre Museum; Zairon; Janos Korom; Apsley House; W. Lemay; Walter Benington
Coming in May: Once Upon a Time at the Copa…
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