It's Pancake Day! Time to EAT PANCAKES in HONOR OF MACHIAVELLI! What do pancakes have to do with the founder of modern political science? Our boy Nick was obsessed with pancakes! & wrote about them at length in his "Art of War." Why pancakes? He'd been studying the ancients of course! 1/? - ThreadSky

adapalmer.bsky.social • 4 days ago

It's Pancake Day! Time to EAT PANCAKES in HONOR OF MACHIAVELLI!

What do pancakes have to do with the founder of modern political science?

Our boy Nick was obsessed with pancakes! & wrote about them at length in his "Art of War." Why pancakes? He'd been studying the ancients of course! 1/?

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seanmatthews1.bsky.social•4 days ago

Excellent little thread (book, by the way, is sitting on my to-read shelf at the moment).

natusm.bsky.social•4 days ago

Maybe more Machiavelli and less fucking Jesse Singal, bro?

adapalmer.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yay! Plenty more Nick to enjoy!

rattmathkamp.bsky.social•3 days ago

I made crepes before realizing what day it was. I suspect they are close enough.

ladydeirdre.bsky.social•4 days ago

This is interesting and all kinds of delightful. And I'm glad I have leftover pancakes in the fridge, bc now I'm hungry! 😄

christiegolden.bsky.social•3 days ago

This is a fantastic thread, informative and amusing, and also will help boost pancake sales everywhere. Mission accomplished. (Loved it, shared it, thank you!)

jennereh.bsky.social•4 days ago

📌

adapalmer.bsky.social•4 days ago

Young Nick (as I like to call him in life, riffing on his posthumous nickname "Old Nick" which became another name for the Devil thanks to Machiavelli's wicked reputation) worried A LOT about war, especially about what made ancient Rome's armies better than the armies of his own day. 2/?

luboo.bsky.social•4 days ago

"Old Nick" is a reference to Machiavelli?!?! That is both so obvious and totally mind-blowing

freerangestats.info•4 days ago

The idea that Old Nick the name of the devil comes from Machiavelli seemed too good to be true when I read the post above, and unfortunately turns to be a pretty minority, long shot view on its origins. https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/old-nick-etymology-word-origin/

adapalmer.bsky.social•4 days ago

It didn’t come from it, the two merged & amplified usage. People esp in England in the wake of the publication of Hobbes’ Leviathan associating the two causing a revival in the usage of Old Nick in its newly gained double sense.

freerangestats.info•4 days ago

Ah that sounds more plausible! Thanks.

adapalmer.bsky.social•4 days ago

He discusses equipment, training, camp layout, cavalry vs. infantry, very lofty questions like the attitudes of people and the role of honor in a society, and very fine grain things like how wide the gaps are between squads of spearmen on a field. And then he gets to his rant about pancakes 3/?

adapalmer.bsky.social•4 days ago

A big challenge of pre-modern warfare was moving STUFF, especially the FOOD for the men AND HORSES. It made big armies hard. Like the rocket equation, the more you carried the more horses you needed to carry it, so the more feed & supplies for horses you needed to bring, more horses, more horses 4/?

adapalmer.bsky.social•4 days ago

A common solution was to acquire food as you moved, by buying it or pillaging it. This meant warfare was much easier & cheaper in agriculturally rich areas, part of why invading Ireland or Russia was a losing prospect, but you could merrily invade France or Italy & count on rich fields & flocks 5/?

adapalmer.bsky.social•4 days ago

But it also meant that armies did a lot of damage to places they traveled through, and Nick talks a lot about the severe discipline necessary to keep men from emptying granaries & raiding farms. 6/?

adapalmer.bsky.social•4 days ago

The truest proof of masterful command disciplined troops, quoth Machiavelli, is if you can camp for the night around a fruit-laden apple tree and leave the next day with all the apples still on the tree, not stripped by the men. 7/?

bryanboyle.bsky.social•4 days ago

Great thread!

hermeticseal.bsky.social•4 days ago

I made pancakes for the first time in years this morning. Good stuff.

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