He despised the Soderini merchant republic, accustomed to defend its liberties with gold instead of arms. And he had no faith in the people or democracy:
To speak of the people is to speak of madmen, for the people is a monster full of confusion and error, and its vain beliefs are as far from truth as is Spain from India…. Experience shows that things very rarely come to pass according to the expectations of the multitude.… The reason is that the effects… commonly depend on the will of a few, whose intentions and purposes are nearly always different from those of the many.75
Guicciardini was one of thousands in Renaissance Italy who had no faith whatever; who had lost the Christian idyl, had learned the emptiness of politics, expected no utopia, dreamed no dreams; and who sat back helpless while a world of war and barbarism swept over Italy; somber old men, emancipated in mind and broken in hope, who had discovered, too late, that when the myth dies only force is free.
VI. MACHIAVELLI
1. The Diplomat
One man remains, hard to classify: diplomat, historian, dramatist, philosopher; the most cynical thinker of his time, and yet a patriot fired with a noble ideal; a man who failed in everything that he undertook, but left upon history a deeper mark than almost any other figure of the age.
Niccolò Michiavelli was the son of a Florentine lawyer—a man of moderate means, who held a minor post in the government, and owned a small rural villa at San Casciano ten miles out of the city. The boy received the ordinary literary education; learned to read Latin readily, but no Greek. He took a fancy to Roman history, became enamored of Livy, and found for almost every political institution and event of his day an illuminating analogue in the history of Rome. He began, but seems never to have completed, the study of law. He cared little for the art of the Renaissance, and expressed no interest in the discovery of America; perhaps he felt that merely the theater of politics was now enlarged, while the plot and characters would remain unchanged. His one absorbing interest was politics, the technique of influence, the chess of power. In 1498, aged twenty-nine, he was appointed secretary to the Dieci della Guerra—a Council of Ten for War—and held that post for fourteen years.
It was at first a modest function—compiling minutes and records, summarizing reports, writing letters; but he was in government, he could watch the politics of Europe from an inside observation point, he could try to forecast developments by applying his knowledge of history. His eager, nervous, ambitious spirit felt that only time was needed before he would be at the top, playing the heady game of state against the duke of Milan, the Senate of Venice, the king of France, the king of Naples, the pope, the emperor. Soon he was sent on a mission to Caterina Sforza, Countess of Imola and Forlì (1498). She proved too subtle for him, and he came back empty-handed, chastened. Two years later he was tried again, accompanied Francesco della Casa as associate envoy to Louis XII of France; della Casa fell ill, and Machiavelli had to head the mission; he learned French, followed the court from château to château, and transmitted to the Signory such alert intelligence, such keen analyses, that on his return to Florence his friends acclaimed him as now a graduate diplomat.
The turning point in his intellectual development was his mission, as aide to Bishop Soderini, to Caesar Borgia at Urbino (1502). Called back to Florence for a personal report, he celebrated his rise in the world by taking a wife. In October he was again despatched to Caesar. He joined him at Imola, and arrived at Senigallia just in time to note Borgia’s happiness at having successfully ensnared, and strangled or caged, the men who had conspired against him. These were events that stirred all Italy; to Machiavelli, meeting the brilliant ogre in the flesh, they were lessons in philosophy. The man of ideas found himself face to face with the man of action, and did him homage; envy burned in the young diplomat’s soul as he realized the distance he had still to travel from analytical and theoretical thought to a magnificent crushing deed. Here was a man, six years younger than himself, who in two years had overthrown a dozen tyrants, given order to a dozen cities, and made himself the very meteor of his time; how weak words seemed before this youth who used them with such scornful scarcity! From that moment Caesar Borgia became the hero of Machiavelli’s philosophy, as Bismarck would be of Nietzsche’s; here, in this embodied will to power, was a morality beyond good and evil, a model for supermen.
Back in Florence (1503), Machiavelli perceived that some members of the government suspected him of having been swept off his mental feet by the dashing Borgia. But his industrious scheming to advance the interests of his city regained for him the esteem of the Gonfalonier Soderini and the Council of Ten for War. In 1507 he saw the triumph of one of his basic ideas. No self-respecting state, he had long argued, could entrust its defense to mercenary troops; they could not be relied upon in a crisis; and they or their leader could almost always be bought by an enemy armed with sufficient gold. A national militia should be formed, said Machiavelli, composed of citizens, preferably of vigorous peasants used to hardship and the open air; it should be kept always in good equipment and training; and it should serve as the last firm line of the republic’s defense. After long hesitation the government accepted the plan, and empowered Machiavelli to realize it in action. In 1508 he led his new milizia to the siege of Pisa, where it acquitted itself well; Pisa surrendered, and Machiavelli returned to Florence at the height of his arc.
On a second mission to France (1510) he passed through Switzerland; his enthusiasm was aroused by the armed independence of the Swiss Confederation, and he made it his ideal for Italy. Returning from France, he saw the problem of his country: how could its separate principalities unite to protect Italy if a united nation like France should decide to absorb the whole peninsula?
The supreme test of his militia came too soon. In 1512 Julius II, furious against Florence for having refused to join in expelling the French from Italy, ordered the armies of the Holy League to suppress the republic and restore the Medici; and Machiavelli’s militia, assigned to defend the Florentine line at Prato, broke and fled before the trained mercenaries of the League. Florence was taken, the Medici triumphed; Machiavelli lost both his reputation and his governmental post. He made every effort to appease the victors, and might have succeeded; but two ardent youths, conspiring to re-establish the republic, were detected; among their papers was found a list of persons on whose support they had counted; it included Machiavelli. He was arrested and tortured with four turns of the rack; but no evidence of his complicity having been found, he was released. Fearing rearrest, he removed with his wife and four children to the ancestral villa at San Casciano. There he spent all but the last of his remaining fifteen years, fretting in hopeful poverty. But for this disaster we should never have heard of him, for it was in those hungry years that he wrote books that moved the world.
2. The Author and the Man
It was a dreary isolation for one who had lived at the very core of Florentine politics. Occasionally he would ride into Florence to talk with old friends and explore any chance of re-employment. Several times he wrote to the Medici, but he received no reply. In a celebrated letter to his friend Vettori, then Florentine ambassador in Rome, he described his life, and told how he came to write The Prince:
Since my last misfortunes I have led a quiet country life. I rise with the sun, and go into one of the woods for a few hours to inspect yesterday’s work; I pass some time with the woodcutters, who have always some troubles to tell me, either of their own or their neighbors’. On leaving the wood I go to a spring, and thence up to my bird-snaring enclosure, with a book under my arm—Dante, Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, such as Tibullus or Ovid. I read their amorous transports and the history of their loves, recalling my own to my mind, and time passes pleasantly in these meditations. Then I betake myself to the inn by the roadside, chat with passers-by, ask news of the places whence they come, hear various things, and note the varied tastes and diverse fancies of mankind. This carries me to the dinner hour, when, in the compa
ny of my brood, I swallow whatever fare this poor little place of mine, and my slender patrimony, can afford me. In the afternoon I go back to the inn. There I generally find the host, a butcher, a miller, and a couple of brick-makers. I mix with these boors the whole day, playing at cricca and tric trac, which games give rise to a thousand quarrels and much exchange of bad language; and we generally wrangle over farthings, and our shouts can be heard in San Casciano town. Steeped in this degradation my wits grow moldy, and I vent my rage at the indignity of fate….
At nightfall I return home and seek my writing room; and divesting myself on its threshold of my rustic garments, stained with mud and mire, I assume courtly attire; and thus suitably clothed, I enter within the ancient courts of ancient men, by whom, being cordially welcomed, I am fed with the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born, and am not ashamed to hold discourse with them and inquire the motives of their actions; and these men in their humanity reply to me; and for the space of four hours I feel no weariness, remember no trouble, no longer fear poverty, no longer dread death; my whole being is absorbed in them. And since Dante says that there could be no science without retaining that which is heard, I have recorded that which I have acquired from the conversation of these worthies, and have composed a pamphlet De principatibus, in which I plunge as deeply as I can into cogitations upon this subject, discussing the nature of princedom, of how many species it consists, how these are to be acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost; and if you ever cared for any of my scribbles, this one ought not to displease you. And it should be especially welcome to a new prince; for which reason I dedicate it to his Magnificence, Giuliano…. (December 10, 1513)76
Probably Machiavelli has here simplified the story. Apparently he began by writing his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, completing his commentary on only the first three books. He dedicated these Discorsi to Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, saying: “I send you the worthiest gift I have to offer, inasmuch as it comprises all that I have learned from long experience and continuous study.” He remarks that classic literature and law and medicine have been revived to enlighten modern writing and practice; he proposes likewise to resuscitate classic principles of government, and apply them to contemporary politics. He does not derive his political philosophy from history, but selects from history incidents supporting the conclusions to which he has been led by his own experience and thought. He takes his examples almost entirely from Livy, sometimes in his haste basing arguments on legends, and occasionally helping himself to morsels from Polybius.
As he proceeded with the Discourses, he perceived that they would be too long, and too long delayed in their completion, to serve as a practical gift to one of the ruling Medici. Therefore he interrupted the work to write a summary that would embody his conclusions; this would have a better chance of being read, and of bringing a fair return in the friendship of the powerful family that now (1513) ruled half of Italy. So he composed Il principe (as he came to entitle the book) in a few months of that year. He planned to dedicate it to Giuliano de’ Medici, then ruling Florence; but Giuliano died (1516) before Machiavelli could make up his mind to send the book to him; so he rededicated it, and sent it, to Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, who made no acknowledgment of it. It circulated in manuscript, and was surreptitiously copied; it was not printed till 1532, five years after the author’s death. Thereafter it was among the most frequently reprinted books in any language.
To his own description of himself we can add only the anonymous portrait of him in the Uffizi Gallery. It shows a slender figure with pale face, hollow cheeks, sharp dark eyes, thin lips tightly closed; obviously a man of thought rather than of action, and of keen intelligence rather than of amiable will. He could not be a good diplomat because he was too visibly subtle, nor a good statesman because he was too intense, grasping ideas fanatically as in the portrait he tightly clasps the gloves that affirm his semigenteel rank. This man who so often wrote like a cynic, whose lips so often curled into sarcasm, who plumed himself on such perfect mendacity that he could make people think he lied when he spoke the truth,77 was in his heart of hearts a flaming patriot, who made the salus populi the suprema lex, and subordinated all morality to the unification and redemption of Italy.
There were many unlikable qualities in him. When Borgia was up he idealized him; when Borgia was down he followed the crowd and denounced the broken Caesar as a criminal and “a rebel against Christ.”78 When the Medici were out he condemned them eloquently; when they were in he licked their boots for a post. He not only visited brothels before and after marriage, but sent his friends detailed descriptions of his adventures there.79 Several of his letters are so coarse that not even his most voluminous and admiring biographer has dared to publish them. Nearing fifty, Machiavelli writes: “Cupid’s nets still enthrall me. Bad roads cannot exhaust my patience, nor dark nights daunt my courage…. My whole mind is bent on love, for which I give Venus thanks.”80 These things are forgivable, for man was not made for monogamy; but less pardonable, though quite in harmony with the custom of the times, is the complete absence, from all of Machiavelli’s considerable surviving correspondence, of any word of tenderness—of any word—about his wife.
Meanwhile he turned his able pen to divers forms of composition, and rivaled the masters in each. In a treatise on the art of war (L’arte della guerra, 1520) he announced to states and generals, from his ivory tower, the laws of military power and success. A nation that has lost the martial virtues is doomed. An army requires not gold but men; “gold alone will not procure good soldiers, but good soldiers will always procure gold”;81 gold will flow to the strong nation, but strength departs from the rich nation, for wealth makes for ease and decay. Consequently an army must be kept busy; a little war now and then will keep the martial muscles and apparatus in trim. Cavalry is beautiful, except when faced with sturdy pikes; the infantry must ever be regarded as the very nerve and foundation of an army.82 Mercenary armies are the shame and sloth and ruin of Italy; each state should have a citizen militia, constituted of men who would be fighting for their own country, their own lands.
Trying his hand at fiction, Machiavelli wrote one of Italy’s most popular novelle, Belfagor arcidiavolo, bursting with satiric wit on the institution of marriage. Turning to drama, he composed the outstanding comedy of the Italian Renaissance stage, Mandragola. The prologue struck a new note, making a novel curtsey to critics:
Should anyone seek to cow the author by evil-speaking, I warn you that he, too, knows how to speak evil, and indeed excels in the art; and that he has no respect for anyone in Italy, though he bows and scrapes to those better dressed than himself.83
The play is an astounding revelation of Renaissance morals. The scene is laid in Florence. Callimaco, hearing an acquaintance praise the beauty of Lucrezia, wife of Nicias, decides—though he has never seen her—that he must seduce her if only to be able to sleep in peace. He is disturbed to learn that Lucrezia is as famous for her modesty as for her beauty; but he takes hope on being told that Nicias frets over her failure to conceive. He bribes a friend to introduce him to Nicias as a physician. He professes to have a potion that will make any woman fertile; but, alas, the first man who lies with her after she has taken it will soon afterward die. He offers to undertake this mortal adventure, and Nicias, with the traditional kindness of characters to their authors, consents to be replaced. But Lucrezia is obstinately virtuous; she hesitates to commit both adultery and murder in one night. All is not lost; her mother, lusting for progeny, bribes a friar to advise her in the confessional to go through with the plan. Lucrezia yields, drinks, lies with Callimaco, and becomes pregnant. The story ends with everybody happy: the friar purifies Lucrezia, Nicias rejoices in his vicarious parentage, and Callimaco can sleep. The play is excellent in structure, brilliant in dialogue, powerful in satire. What startles us is not the seductive theme, long hackneyed in classical comedy, nor even the merely physical interpretation of love, but th
e turn of the plot upon the readiness of a friar to counsel adultery for twenty-five ducats, and the fact that in 1520 the play was produced with great success before Leo X in Rome. The Pope was so pleased with it that he asked Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici to give Machiavelli some employment as a writer. Giulio suggested a history of Florence, and offered 300 ducats ($3,750?).
The resultant Stone Florentine (1520–5) was almost as decisive a revolution in historiography as The Prince in political philosophy. It is true that the book had vital defects: it was hastily inaccurate, it plagiarized substantial passages from previous historians, it was more interested in the strife of factions than in the development of institutions, and it totally ignored cultural history—as did nearly every historian before Voltaire. But it was the first major history written in Italian, and its Italian was clear, vigorous, and direct; it rejected the fables with which Florence had embellished her origins; it abandoned the usual chronicle year-by-year plan, and gave, instead, a smooth-flowing and logical narrative; it dealt not merely with events but with causes and effects; and it forced upon the chaos of Florentine politics a clarifying analysis of conflicting families, classes, and interests. It carried the tale along on two unifying themes: that the popes had kept Italy divided to preserve the temporal independence of the papacy; and that the great advances of Italy had come under princes like Theodoric, Cosimo, and Lorenzo. That a book with such tendencies should have been written by a man seeking papal ducats, and that Pope Clement VII accepted its dedication without complaint, illustrates the courage of the author and the mental and financial liberality of the Pope.
The History of Florence gave Machiavelli occupation for five years, but it did not satisfy his longing to swim again in the muddy stream of politics. When Francis I lost everything but honor and his skin at Pavia (1525), and Clement VII found himself helpless against Charles V, Machiavelli sent letters to the Pope and to Guicciardini, explaining what could yet be done against the imminent Spanish-German conquest of Italy; and perhaps his suggestion that the Pope should arm, empower, and finance Giovanni delle Bande Nere might have delayed destiny awhile. When Giovanni died, and the German horde advanced upon Florence as a rich and plunderable ally of the French, Machiavelli rushed to the city, and, at Clement’s request, prepared a report on how the walls might be restored to make it defensible. On May 18, 1526, he was chosen by the Medicean government to head a board of five “Curators of the Walls.” The Germans, however, by-passed Florence and headed for Rome. When that city was sacked, and Clement was a prisoner of the mob, the republican party in Florence once more expelled the Medici and restored the republic (May 16, 1527). Machiavelli rejoiced, and hopefully applied for his old post as secretary of the Ten for War. He was turned down (June 10, 1527); his dealings with the Medici had lost him the support of the republicans.