No but Dante Alighieri wrote about how he went to Hell and saw all the people he didn’t like there. - ThreadSky

arobertswrites.com • 7 days ago

No but Dante Alighieri wrote about how he went to Hell and saw all the people he didn’t like there.

Reposted from Sam Wilson

“The Borgias, for all their many sins, never posted crude or spicy memes to the socials.”

Comments

lukebro92.bsky.social•7 days ago

Dante was the writer of the best known self-insert fan fiction in history

kaurifish.bsky.social•7 days ago

Someone has never read Dumas' "The Celebrated Crimes of the Borgias."
I had to tap out halfway through. I have a strong stomach, but not that strong.

jowiph.bsky.social•7 days ago

My all-time favorite is still Galileo taking Pope Urban's arguments on geocentrism and putting them in the mouth of a character more or less named "Simpleton"

arobertswrites.com•7 days ago

And people wonder why Galileo got excommunicated lmao, when you create a thinly veiled caricature of someone and name it “Stupid Dumbass” they get a bit upset.

jowiph.bsky.social•7 days ago

Thank you! I can't begin to express how hard it is for some reason to explain to people that Galileo wasn't a martyr for science, he was just a dick to the Pope—his friend and patron who had explicitly given him permission to write about heliocentrism!—in the most publicly humiliating way possible

arobertswrites.com•7 days ago

Shit, I would’ve been mad too!

deadbarchetta.bsky.social•7 days ago

Rather than studying Jupiter, we should have made the Galileo probe to go into deep space like Voyager so it could insult the Pope of some undiscovered alien world

jowiph.bsky.social•7 days ago

(I mean, it also didn't help that he was a layman trying to interpret scripture for people during the Counter-Reformation, but calling the Pope an idiot was the big thing)

joea64.bsky.social•7 days ago

I've always thought that if they had so chosen, Urban could have chosen to have Galileo read the riot act over the latter's habit of being an utter ass to everyone.

joea64.bsky.social•7 days ago

That's a plot point in Eric Flint and Andrew Roberts' alternate-history/time-travel novel "The Galileo Affair". Specifically, the "uptime" Catholic priest who's one of the chief protagonists explains to other uptimers that Galileo basically called his (former) friend Urban VIII an idiot in print.

joea64.bsky.social•7 days ago

The plot twist is that Urban himself, who's well aware of the judgment of history on the Church's treatment of Galileo as well as its eventual change of mind on his theories, has the grace to be looking for a way to avoid making the original history's mistakes again.

joea64.bsky.social•7 days ago

A couple of other, even funnier, things; one of the Inquisitors sitting on Galileo's court is a Jesuit priest who clashed with Galileo over the nature of comets, disputing Galileo's asserting that they're optical illusions...and turns out to be right!

jonruttenberg.bsky.social•7 days ago

Dante who now?

awesome-communist.bsky.social•7 days ago

Dante was so real for that

lizardky.bsky.social•7 days ago

It would not surprise me in the least to learn they (Borgias) paid people to spread rumors about their enemies and had handbills and pamphlets full of scandalous gossip made, though. They were in power just as the new Big Tech of the day (the printing press) was taking off, after all.

joea64.bsky.social•7 days ago

And he also made sure to put all the pre/non-Christian notables he admired and respected, including Saladin, in what was basically the old Greeks' Elysian Fields, *outside* the boundaries of Hell.

arobertswrites.com•7 days ago

Surprisingly, a lot of medieval Europeans liked Saladin because more they they liked Christianity they liked winners, which the western crusaders were generally not.

arobertswrites.com•7 days ago

*more than they

joea64.bsky.social•7 days ago

They also considered him to be an exemplar of the way of chivalry.

arobertswrites.com•7 days ago

Also important!

lukebro92.bsky.social•7 days ago

Meanwhile Muslims not of his branch of Islam have had a pretty negative view of him before modern nationalism...

fleezlow.bsky.social•7 days ago

There's the layperson view of history which is like "a Skittle would kill a medieval peasant" and there's IMO a more accurate layperson view of history that if you brought people from the past to now and taught them how to use a smartphone they'd be messy online gossips in about 3 months

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