Oct 12, 2026 · 23 min · 9 segments
Title: The Contest of 1401: How Losing Built the Renaissance Description: In 1401, plague-weary Florence held a competition for new bronze doors on its baptistery, and every entrant had to depict…
In segment one, I'm gonna call this a city that needed a miracle.
Like to understand why, a set of doors mattered so much, you have to understand what Florence had just lived through, okay? So let me paint a little picture for you.
About 50 years earlier, and we are in, let's say, 1347 and then 1348, the Black Death swept across Europe, okay? roughly a third of the population died.
So every three people, one of them was gone.
Every hundred of them, 33 to 35 are gone.
And in some instances, in some cities, massive amounts of population.
So it wasn't just like every three people, one person gets it.
It was like, in some instances, entire towns and civilizations were completely annihilated.
In other towns, maybe one or two people caught it.
And then they basically pushed those people out, and then the other people stayed safe.
But think about this, right? If you have 3 million people in a city, 1 million people were gone, okay? So roughly one-third of the population was gone.
And so this chronicler from nearby Siena who buried, unfortunately, five of his own children wrote that no one wept for the dead because everyone just expected to die next.
What a horrible time to live through.
And the plague, it just kept coming back.
And on top of that, the city was under this threat of a powerful Duke of Milan.
People know him as Visconti.
And he was gobbling up these Italian cities like one after another, after another.
And so what is a frightened, grieving, but very wealthy city do? Florence decided to make something beautiful, like a Powerful Merchants Guild, the Cloth Guild, known as something, it's spelled C-A-L-I-M-A-L-A, Ka-li-ma-la.
and you'll hear it pronounced a bunch of different ways, especially by me, announced that it would pay for a magnificent new set of bronze doors for the city's baptistry.
It's like this octagonal building where every Florentine baby was baptized.
Now think about this for a second, okay? In the middle of a plague, in the middle of a war, These folks, they were invested in art at the very doorway of baptism.
Like it was such an act of devotion.
In segment one, I'm gonna call this a city that needed a miracle.
Like to understand why, a set of doors mattered so much, you have to understand what Florence had just lived through, okay? So let me paint a little picture for you.
About 50 years earlier, and we are in, let's say, 1347 and then 1348, the Black Death swept across Europe, okay? roughly a third of the population died.
So every three people, one of them was gone.
Every hundred of them, 33 to 35 are gone.
And in some instances, in some cities, massive amounts of population.
So it wasn't just like every three people, one person gets it.
It was like, in some instances, entire towns and civilizations were completely annihilated.
In other towns, maybe one or two people caught it.
And then they basically pushed those people out, and then the other people stayed safe.
But think about this, right? If you have 3 million people in a city, 1 million people were gone, okay? So roughly one-third of the population was gone.
And so this chronicler from nearby Siena who buried, unfortunately, five of his own children wrote that no one wept for the dead because everyone just expected to die next.
What a horrible time to live through.
And the plague, it just kept coming back.
And on top of that, the city was under this threat of a powerful Duke of Milan.
People know him as Visconti.
And he was gobbling up these Italian cities like one after another, after another.
And so what is a frightened, grieving, but very wealthy city do? Florence decided to make something beautiful, like a Powerful Merchants Guild, the Cloth Guild, known as something, it's spelled C-A-L-I-M-A-L-A, Ka-li-ma-la.
and you'll hear it pronounced a bunch of different ways, especially by me, announced that it would pay for a magnificent new set of bronze doors for the city's baptistry.
It's like this octagonal building where every Florentine baby was baptized.
Now think about this for a second, okay? In the middle of a plague, in the middle of a war, These folks, they were invested in art at the very doorway of baptism.
Like it was such an act of devotion.
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