José Antonio Páez

It was part of the early myth of Venice that her policies were not directed by individuals but by some sort of corporate awareness of the eternal needs of the Republic. Niccolò Piccinino is said to have remarked on one occasion that he would like to serve Venice ‘because while princes are mortal, the Republic will never die’.

The most pressing political issue of the period, however, came not directly from Rome but from Caesar in Gaul. He had left Italy in 58 BCE on a five-year command, and this was rolled on for another five years in 56 BCE – with the warm support, in public at least, of Cicero, who pointed to the danger of Gallic enemies much as he had earlier pointed

In December of that year the senate voted by a majority of 370 to 22 that Caesar and Pompey should simultaneously give up their commands. Pompey was actually in Rome at the time, but since 55 BCE, thanks to another piece of ingenuity, he had been the governor of Spain, doing the job remotely, through deputies – an unprecedented arrangement that bec

Simón Bolívar, their liberator, suggested an answer as early as 1815: there would never be, he acknowledged, a United States of Latin America.86 One reason was geography. It might be easier to rule an empire from its seaports than from its interior, but this didn’t prepare a nation to rule itself: the internal barriers of climate, topography, habit

Manuel Quezon embodied the contradictions of colonialism. The desire for the colonizer’s approval, the demand for autonomy, conciliation, violence—Quezon contained multitudes.

Pope Alexander VI, also during Leonardo’s lifetime, had multiple mistresses and illegitimate children, one of whom was Cesare Borgia, who became a cardinal, commander of the papal armies, an employer of Leonardo, and the subject of Machiavelli’s The Prince.