Some degree of public support is indispensable. But if a ruler must choose between being feared without love or being loved without fear, he must sacrifice the love.109 On the other hand (say the Discorsi)“a multitude is more easily governed by humanity and gentleness than by haughtiness and cruelty….110 Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius did not require the pretorian guard nor the legions to defend them, because they were protected by their own good conduct, the good will of the people, and the love of the Senate.”111 To secure popular support the prince should patronize art and learning, provide public spectacles and games, and honor the guilds, always, however, maintaining the majesty of his rank.112 He should not give the people liberty, but should comfort them as far as possible with the appearances of liberty. Subject cities, like Pisa and Arezzo in the case of Florence, must be dealt with vigorously, even cruelly, at the outset; then, when obedience has been established, their submission may be made habitual by gentler means. Indiscriminate and prolonged cruelty is suicidal.113
The ruler should support religion, and should himself appear to be religious, whatever his private beliefs.114 Indeed, it is more important and profitable to the prince to seem to be virtuous than to be so.
Though a prince need not possess all the virtues, to seem to have them is useful; as, for example, to seem merciful, loyal, humane, religious, and sincere; it is also useful to be so, but with a mind so flexible that if the need arise he can be the contrary…. He should be careful to let nothing fall from his lips that is not instinct with the five qualities mentioned, and must appear to those who see and hear him all compassion, all faith, all humanity, all religion, all integrity…. One must color his conduct, and be a great dissembler; and men are so simple, so absorbed in present necessities, that they are easily deceived…. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few know what you are; and those few dare not oppose the opinion of the many.115
To these precepts Machiavelli adds examples. He notes the success of Alexander VI, and thinks it entirely due to marvelous lying. He admires Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain for always putting a religious front on his military enterprises. He praises the means—warlike courage and strategic skill mingled with diplomatic craft—by which Francesco Sforza rose to the throne of Milan. But above all he holds up as his supreme and almost perfect exemplar Caesar Borgia:
When all the actions of the Duke are recalled, I do not know how to blame him; but rather it appears to me that I ought to offer him for imitation to all those who are… raised to government…. He was considered cruel; nevertheless his cruelty reconciled all the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty…. Having a lofty spirit and far-reaching aims, he could not have regulated his conduct otherwise; and only the shortening of the life of Alexander, and his own sickness, frustrated his designs. Therefore he who considers it necessary to secure himself in his new principality, to gain friends, to overcome enemies by force or fraud, to make himself at once feared and loved by the people, to be followed and revered by the soldiers, to exterminate those who have power or reason to hurt him, to change the old order of things for new, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to destroy a disloyal soldiery and create new, to maintain friendship with kings and princes in such a way that they must help him with zeal and offend him with caution, cannot find a more lively example than the actions of this man.116
Machiavelli admired Borgia because he felt that his methods and character, had it not been for the simultaneous illness of Pope and son, would have gone far to unite Italy. Now, in concluding The Prince, he appeals to the young Duke Lorenzo, and through him to Leo and the Medici, to organize the union of the peninsula. He describes his countrymen as “more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, pillaged, and torn, and overrun by foreign powers.” “Italy, left as without life, waits for him who shall heal her wounds…. She entreats God to send some one who shall deliver her from these wrong and alien insolencies.”117 The situation is critical, but the opportunity is ripe. “Italy is ready and willing to follow a banner if only some one will raise it.” And who better than the Medici, the most famous family in Italy, and now heading the Church?
Who could express the love with which Italy would hail her liberator, with what thirst for revenge, what stubborn faith, what devotion, what tears? What door would be closed to him?—who would refuse him obedience? To all of us this barbarous dominion is a stench in the nostrils. Let therefore your illustrious house take up this charge, with that courage and hope with which all just enterprises are undertaken, so that under its standard our native country may be ennobled, and under its auspices may be verified those words of Petrarch:
Virtù contr’ al furore
Prendera l’arme e sia il combatter corto,
Che l’antico valore
Negl’ Italici cuor non è ancor morto—
“Manhood will take up arms against madness, and brief may the combat be, for the ancient valor is not yet dead in the veins of Italy.”
4. Considerations
So the cry that Dante and Petrarch had sent up to alien emperors was here raised to the Medici; and indeed, had Leo lived longer and played less, Machiavelli might have seen the liberation begin. But young Lorenzo died in 1519, Leo in 1521; and in 1527, the year of Machiavelli’s death, Italy’s subjection to a foreign power was complete. Liberation would have to wait 343 years until Cavour would effect it by Machiavellian statesmanship.
Philosophers have been well nigh unanimous in condemning The Prince, and statesmen in practising its precepts. A thousand books began to appear against it on the morrow of its publication (1532). But Charles V studied it carefully, Catherine de’ Medici brought it to France, Henry III and Henry IV of France had it with them at their death, Richelieu admired it, William of Orange kept it under his pillow as if to memorize it by osmosis.118 Frederick the Great of Prussia wrote an Anti-Machiavel as a prelude to outprincing The Prince. To most rulers, of course, these precepts were no revelation, except as revealing injudiciously the secrets of their guild. Dreamers who thought to turn Machiavelli into a Jacobin fancied that he had written The Prince not to express his own philosophy but, by sarcastic indirection, to expose the ways and wiles of rulers; however, the Discourses expound at greater length the same views. Francis Bacon ventured a condoning word: “Our thanks are due to Machiavelli and similar writers, who have openly and without dissimulation shown us what men are accustomed to do, not what they ought to do.”119 Hegel’s judgment was intelligent and generous:
The Prince has often been cast aside with horror as containing maxims of the most revolting tyranny; yet it was Machiavelli’s high sense of the necessity of constituting a state which caused him to lay down the principles on which alone states could be formed under the circumstances. The isolated lords and lordships had to be entirely suppressed; and though our idea of Freedom is incompatible with the means which he proposes… including, as these do, the most reckless violence, all kinds of deception, murder, and the like—yet we must confess that the despots who had to be subdued were assailable in no other way.120
And Macaulay, in a famous essay, pictured the philosophy of Machiavelli as a natural reflex of an Italy brilliant and de-moral-ized, and long since accustomed, by her despots, to the principles of The Prince.
Machiavelli represents the ultimate challenge of a revived paganism to a weakened Christianity. In his philosophy religion becomes again, as in ancient Rome, the humble servant of a state which in effect is god. The only virtues honored are pagan Roman virtues—courage, endurance, self-reliance, intelligence; the only immortality is a fading fame. Perhaps Machiavelli exaggerated the enfeebling influence of Christianity; had he forgotten the lusty wars of medieval history, the campaigns of Constantine, Belisarius, Charlemagne, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, and Julius II of recent memory? The Christian morality emphasized the feminine virtues because
men had the opposite qualities in ruinous abundance; some antidote and counterideal had to be preached to the sadistic Romans of the amphitheater, to the rough barbarians entering Italy, to lawless peoples striving to subside into civilization. The virtues that Machiavelli scorned made for orderly and peaceful societies; those that he admired (and, like Nietzsche, because he lacked them) made for strong and warlike states, and for dictators capable of murdering by the million to enforce conformity, and of incarnadining a planet to extend their rule. He confused the good of the ruler with the good of the nation; he thought too much of the preservation, seldom of the obligations, never of the corruption, of power. He ignored the stimulating rivalry and cultural fertility of the Italian citystates; he cared little for the magnificent art of his time, or even for that of ancient Rome. He was lost in idolatry of the state. He helped to free the state from the Church, but he shared in setting up for worship an atomistic nationalism not visibly superior to the medieval notion of states subject to an international morality represented by the pope. Each ideal has broken down under the natural selfishness of men; and a candid Christian must admit that in preaching and practising the principle that no faith need be kept with a heretic (as in violating the safe-conduct of Huss at Constance and of Alfonso of Ferrara in Rome), the Church herself was playing a Machiavellian game fatal to her mission as a moral power.
And yet there is something stimulating in Machiavelli’s forthrightness. Reading him, we are brought face to face, as nowhere else so vividly, with a question that few philosophers had dared discuss: is statesmanship bound by morality? We may come to at least one conclusion: that morality can exist only among the members of a society equipped to teach and enforce it; and that an interstate morality awaits the formation of an international organization dowered with the physical power and the public opinion to maintain an international law. Till then the nations will be as beasts in the jungle; and whatever principles their governments may profess, their practice will be that of The Prince.
Looking back upon two centuries of intellectual revolt in Italy from Petrarch to Machiavelli, we perceive that its essence and basis lay simply in lessened concern for another world, and a rising affirmation of life. Men were delighted to rediscover a pagan civilization whose citizens were not worried about original sin or a punitive hell, and in which the natural impulses were accepted as forgivable elements in a vibrant society. Asceticism, self-abnegation, and the sense of sin lost their hold, almost their meaning, in the upper strata of the Italian population; monasteries languished for lack of novices, and monks and friars and popes themselves sought the joys of the earth rather than the stigmata of Christ. The bonds of tradition and authority relaxed; the massive fabric of the Church weighed more lightly on the thoughts and purposes of men. Life became more extrovert, and though this often took the form of violence, it cleansed many souls of neurotic fears and disorders that had darkened the medieval mind. The unfettered intellect disported itself happily in every field but science; the exuberance of emancipation hardly comported, as yet, with the discipline of experiment and the patience of research; that would come in the constructive aftermath of liberation. Meanwhile, among the educated, the practices of piety made room for the worship of intellect and genius; the belief in immortality was commuted into the quest for enduring renown. Pagan ideals like Fortune, Fate, and Nature encroached upon the Christian conception of God.
For all this a price had to be paid. The brilliant enfranchisement of the mind sapped the supernatural sanctions of morality, and no others were found to effectually replace them. The result was such a repudiation of inhibitions, such a release of impulse and desire, so gay a luxuriance of immorality, as history had not known since the Sophists had shattered the myths, freed the mind, and loosened the morals, of ancient Greece.
CHAPTER XX
The Moral Release
1300–1534
V. THE FOUNTS AND FORMS OF IMMORALITY
NOWHERE are the prejudices of the historian so likely to mislead him as when he seeks to determine the moral level of an age—unless it be in the kindred inquiry into the decline of religious belief. In either case the dramatic exception will strike his eye and turn it from the unrecorded average. His vision will be further blurred if he approaches the problem with a thesis to prove—as, for example, that religious doubt brings moral decay. And the records themselves are ambivalent, capable, according to the selective bias, of proving almost anything. The works of Aretino, the autobiography of Cellini, the correspondence of Machiavelli and Vettori can be stressed to convey the odor of disintegration; the letters of Isabella and Beatrice d’Este, of Elisabetta Gonzaga and Alessandra Strozzi can be quoted to paint a picture of sisterly tenderness and ideal family life. The reader will have to be on his guard.
Many factors entered into the moral decline that accompanied the intellectual exaltation of the Renaissance. Probably the basic factor was the growth of wealth that resulted from Italy’s strategic position on the routes of trade between western Europe and the East, and from the flow of tithes and annates out of a thousand Christian communities into Rome. Sin became more prevalent as more funds were provided to meet its costs. The spread of wealth weakened the ascetic ideal: men and women came to resent an ethic that had been born of poverty and fear, and that now ran counter to both their impulses and their means. They heard with rising sympathy the view of Epicurus that life should be enjoyed, and that all pleasures are to be accounted innocent until proved guilty. The charms of woman triumphed over the prohibitions of theology.
Perhaps next to wealth the main source of immorality was the political unsettlement of the times. The strife of factions, the frequency of war, the influx of foreign mercenaries, and, later, the invasion of Italy by foreign armies recognizing no moral restraints on Italian soil, the repeated disruption of agriculture and trade by the ravages of war, the destruction of freedom by despots who replaced peaceful legitimacy with autocratic force: all these disordered Italian life, and cracked the “cake of custom” that normally conserves morality. Men found themselves unmoored in a sea of violence. Neither state nor Church seemed able to protect them; they protected themselves as best they could, by arms or craft; lawlessness became the law. The despots, placed above the law and dedicated to a short but stirring life, indulged themselves in every pleasure; and their example was followed by the moneyed minority.
In assessing the role of religious unbelief in releasing the natural immorality of mankind, we must begin by distinguishing the skepticism of the lettered few from the persistent piety of the many. Enlightenment is of minorities, and emancipation is individual; minds are not freed en masse. A few skeptics might protest against false relics and bogus miracles and indulgences offering promissory notes for cash; but the people accepted them with awe and hope. In 1462 the scholar-Pope Pius II and some cardinals went out to the Milvian Bridge to meet the head of the Apostle Andrew, which was arriving from Greece; and the scholar-Cardinal Bessarion pronounced a solemn oration when the precious figment was deposited in St. Peter’s. The people undertook pilgrimages to Loreto and Assisi, flocked to Rome in jubilee years, made the stations of the cross from church to church, and mounted on their knees the Scala Santa which, they were told, was the very stairway that Christ had climbed to the tribune of Pilate. Powerful characters might laugh at all this while their health was good, but rare was the Renaissance Italian who did not ask for the sacraments on his deathbed. Vitellozzo Vitelli, the rough condottiere who had fought Alexander VI and Caesar Borgia, begged a messenger to go to Rome and seek papal absolution for him before Caesar’s handy man tightened the noose around his neck. Women especially worshiped Mary; almost every village had a miracle-working icon of her; now (c. 1524) the Rosary became a favorite form of prayer. Every decent house had a crucifix and a holy picture or two; and before one or more of these, in many homes, a lamp was kept burning endlessly. Village squares and city streets might be adorned with a statue of Jesus or the Virgin, placed in a separat
e tabernacle or a niche in a wall. The festivals of the religious calendar were celebrated with a pomp and magnificence that gave the people thrilling interruptions to their toil; and every decade or so the coronation of a pope offered processions and games that to antiquarians recalled the spectacles of ancient Rome. Never was a religion more beautiful than when the artists of the Renaissance housed and carved its shrines, and painted its heroes and legends, and drama, music, poetry, and incense joined in the colorful, odorous, sumptuous worship of God.
But this, again, is but one side of a scene too diverse and contradictory to be briefly described. In the cities many of the churches were left relatively empty of men then as now.1 As to the countryside hear Archbishop Antonino of Florence describing the peasants of his diocese about 1430:
In the churches themselves they sometimes dance and leap and sing with women. On holydays they spend little time on divine service or hearing the whole Mass, but most in games or taverns or contentions at the church doors. They blaspheme God and His saints on slender provocation. They are filled with lies and perjuries; they make no conscience of fornication, and of worse sins still. Very many of them do not confess even once a year; far fewer are those who take Communion…. They do little to instruct their families in the manner of faithful folk. They use enchantments for themselves and their beasts. Of God, or their own souls’ health, they think not at all…. Their parish priests, caring not for the flock committed to them, but only for its wool and milk, do not instruct them through preaching and the confessional, or by private admonitions, but walk in the same error as their flocks, following their corrupt ways.2