There will be eternal fame also for the inhabitants of that town, constructed and enlarged by him.
All communities obey and are led by their magnates, and these magnates ally themselves with the lords and subjugate them in two ways: either by consanguinity, or by fortune; by consanguinity, when their children are, as it were, hostages, and a security and pledge of their suspected fidelity; by property, when you make each of these build a house or two inside your city which may yield some revenue and he shall have...; 10 towns, five thousand houses with thirty thousand inhabitants, and you will disperse this great congregation of people which stand like goats one behind the other, filling every place with fetid smells and sowing seeds of pestilence and death;
And the city will gain beauty worthy of its name and to you it will be useful by its revenues, and the eternal fame of its aggrandizement.
[Footnote: These notes were possibly written in preparation for a letter. The meaning is obscure.]
Taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880.