Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 4 The Historian of Florence

Shortly after the completion of the Discourses, a sudden turn of Fortune’s wheel at last brought Machiavelli the patronage he had always craved from the Medicean government. Lorenzo de’ Medici — to whom he had rededicated The Prince after the death of Giuliano in 1516 — died prematurely three years later. He was succeeded in the control of Florentine affairs by his cousin, Cardinal Giulio, soon to be elected pope as Clement VII. The cardinal happened to be related to one of Machiavelli’s closest friends, Lorenzo Strozzi, to whom Machiavelli later dedicated his Art of War. As a result of this connection, Machiavelli managed to gain an introduction to the Medicean court in March 1520, and soon afterwards he received a hint that some employment — literary even if not diplomatic — might be found for him. Nor were his expectations disappointed, for in November of the same year he obtained a formal commission from the Medici to write the history of Florence.

The composition of The History of Florence occupied Machiavelli almost for the rest of his life. It is his longest and most leisured work, as well as being the one in which he follows the literary prescriptions of his favourite classical authorities with the greatest care. The two basic tenets of classical — and hence of humanist — historiography were that works of history should inculcate moral lessons, and that their materials should therefore be selected and organized in such a way as to highlight the proper lessons with maximum force. Sallust, for example, had offered an influential statement of both these principles. In The War with Jugurtha he had argued that the aim of the historian must be to reflect on the past in a ‘useful’ and ‘serviceable’ way (IV.1–3). And in The War with Catiline he had drawn the inference that the correct approach must therefore consist of ‘selecting such portions’ as seem ‘worthy of record’, and not trying to furnish a complete chronicle of events (IV.2).

_{5. Machiavelli’s writing desk in his house in Sant’ Andrea in Percussina, south of Florence, where he composed The Prince in 1513.}

Machiavelli is assiduous about meeting both these requirements, as he reveals in particular in his handling of the various transitions and climaxes of his narrative. Book II, for example, ends with an edifying account of how the duke of Athens came to rule Florence as a tyrant in 1342 and was driven from power in the course of the following year. Book III then switches almost directly to the next revealing episode — the revolt of the Ciompi in 1378 — after a bare sketch of the intervening half-century. Similarly, Book III concludes with a description of the reaction following the revolution of 1378, and Book IV opens after a gap of another forty years with a discussion of how the Medici managed to rise to power.

A further tenet of humanist historical writing was that, in order to convey the most salutary lessons in the most memorable fashion, the historian must cultivate a commanding rhetorical style. As Sallust had declared at the start of The War with Catiline, the special challenge of history lies in the fact that ‘the style and diction must be equal to the deeds recorded’ (III.2). Machiavelli again takes this ideal very seriously, so much so that in the summer of 1520 he decided to compose a stylistic ‘model’ for a history, the draft of which he circulated among his friends from the Orti Oricellari in order to solicit their comments on his approach. He chose as his theme the biography of Castruccio Castracani, the early fourteenth-century tyrant of Lucca. But the details of Castruccio’s life — some of which Machiavelli simply invents — are of less interest to him than the business of selecting and arranging them in an elevated and instructive way. The opening description of Castruccio’s birth as a foundling is fictitious, but it offers Machiavelli the chance to write a grand declamation on the power of Fortune in human affairs (533–4). The moment when the young Castruccio — who was educated by a priest — first begins ‘to busy himself with weapons’ similarly gives Machiavelli an opportunity to present a version of the classic debate about the rival attractions of letters and arms (535–6). The dying oration pronounced by the remorseful tyrant is again in the best traditions of ancient historiography (553–4). And the story is rounded off with numerous instances of Castruccio’s epigrammatic wit, most of which are in fact stolen directly from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers and are simply inserted for rhetorical effect (555–9).

When Machiavelli sent this Life of Castruccio to his friends Alamanni and Buondelmonti, they accepted it very much in the spirit of a rehearsal for the large-scale historical work that Machiavelli was by then hoping to write. Replying in a letter of September 1520, Buondelmonti spoke of the Life as ‘a model for your history’ and added that for this reason he thought it best to comment on the manuscript ‘mainly from the point of view of language and style’. He reserved his highest praise for its rhetorical flights, saying that he enjoyed the invented deathbed oration ‘more than anything else’. And he told Machiavelli what he must have wanted most of all to hear as he prepared to venture into this new literary field: ‘it seems to all of us that you ought now to set to work to write your History with all diligence’ (C 394–5).

When Machiavelli duly settled down to compose his History a few months later, these stylistic devices were elaborately put to work. The book is conceived in his most aphoristic and antithetical manner, with all the major themes of his political theory reappearing in rhetorical dress. In Book II, for example, one of the signori is made to confront the duke of Athens with a passionate oration on ‘the name of liberty, which no force crushes, no time wears away, and no gain counterbalances’ (1124). In the next book one of the ordinary citizens declaims an equally lofty speech to the signori on the theme of virtú and corruption, and on the obligation of every citizen to serve the public interest at all times (1145–8). And in Book V Rinaldo degli Albizzi attempts to enlist the help of the duke of Milan against the growing power of the Medici with a further declamation on virtú, corruption, and the patriotic duty to offer one’s allegiance to a city that ‘loves all her people equally’, and not to one that, ‘neglecting all the others, bows down before a very few of them’ (1242).

The most important precept the humanists learned from their classical authorities was that historians must focus their attention on the finest achievements of our ancestors, thereby encouraging us to emulate their noblest and most glorious deeds. Although the great Roman historians had tended to be pessimistic in outlook, and had frequently dilated on the growing corruption of the world, this had usually prompted them to insist all the more vehemently on the historian’s obligation to recall us to better days. As Sallust explains in The War with Jugurtha, it is only by keeping alive ‘the memory of great deeds’ that we can hope to kindle ‘in the breasts of noble men’ the kind of ambition ‘that cannot be quelled until they by their own virtus have equalled the fame and glory of their forefathers’ (IV.6). Moreover, it was this feeling for the panegyric quality of the historian’s task that the humanists of the Renaissance chiefly carried away from their study of Livy, Sallust, and their contemporaries. This can clearly be seen, for example, in the account of the purpose of history that appears in the Dedication to the History of the Florentine People which the chancellor Poggio Bracciolini completed in the 1450s. This affirms that ‘the great usefulness of a really truthful history’ lies in the fact that ‘we are able to observe what can be achieved by the virtus of the most outstanding men’. We see how they come to be activated by a desire ‘for glory, for their country’s liberty, for the good of their children, the gods and all humane things’. And we find ourselves ‘so greatly roused up’ by their wonderful example that ‘it is as if they spur us on’ to rival their greatness.[7]

There is no doubt that Machiavelli was fully aware of this further aspect of humanist historiography, for he even refers admiringly to Poggio’s work in the Preface to his own History (1031). But at this point — after following the humanist approach with such exactitude — he suddenly shatters the expectations he has built up. At the beginning of Book V, when he turns to examine the history of Florence over the preceding century, he announces that ‘the things done by our princes, abroad and at home, cannot, like those of the ancients, be read of with wonder because of their virtú and greatness’. It is simply not possible to ‘tell of the bravery of soldiers or the virtú of generals or the love of citizens for their country’. We can only tell of an increasingly corrupt world in which we see ‘with what tricks and schemes the princes, the soldiers, the heads of the republics, in order to keep that reputation which they did not deserve, carried on their affairs’. Machiavelli thus engineers a complete reversal of prevailing assumptions about the purpose of history: instead of recounting a story that ‘kindles free spirits to imitation’, he hopes to ‘kindle such spirits to avoid and get rid of present abuses’ (1233).

The entire History of Florence is thus organized around the theme of decline and fall. Book I describes the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west and the coming of the barbarians to Italy. The end of Book I and the beginning of Book II relate how ‘new cities and new dominions born among the Roman ruins showed such virtú’ that ‘they freed Italy and defended her from the barbarians’ (1233). But after this brief period of modest success, Machiavelli presents the rest of his narrative — from the middle of Book II to the end of Book VIII, where he brings the story to a close in the 1490s — as a history of progressive corruption and collapse. The nadir is reached in 1494, when the ultimate humiliation occurred: Italy ‘put herself back into slavery’ under the barbarians she had originally succeeded in driving out (1233).

The overriding theme of the History of Florence is corruption. Machiavelli describes how its malign influence seized hold of Florence, strangled its liberty, and finally brought it to tyranny and disgrace. As in the Discourses — which he follows closely — he sees two principal areas in which the spirit of corruption is prone to arise, and after drawing a distinction between them in the Preface he employs it to organize the whole of his account. First there is a perennial danger of corruption in the handling of ‘external’ policies, the main symptom of which will be a tendency for military affairs to be conducted with increasing indecision and cowardice. And secondly, there is a similar danger in relation to ‘the things done at home’, where the growth of corruption will mainly be reflected in the form of ‘civil strife and internal hostilities’ (1030–1).

Machiavelli takes up the first of these issues in Books V and VI, in which he chiefly deals with the history of Florence’s external affairs. However, he does not undertake — as he had done in the Discourses — to provide a detailed analysis of the city’s strategic miscalculations and mistakes. He contents himself with offering a series of mocking illustrations of Florentine military incompetence. This enables him to preserve the accepted format of humanist histories — in which there were always elaborate accounts of notable battles — while at the same time parodying their contents. The point of Machiavelli’s military set pieces is that all the engagements he describes are wholly ridiculous, not martial or glorious at all. When, for example, he writes about the great battle of Zagonara, which was fought in 1424 at the start of the war against Milan, he first observes that this was regarded at the time as a massive defeat for Florence, and was ‘reported everywhere in Italy’. He then adds that nobody died in the action except three Florentines who, ‘falling from their horses, were drowned in the mud’ (1193). Later he accords the same satirical treatment to the famous victory won by the Florentines at Anghiari in 1440. Throughout this long fight, he remarks, ‘not more than one man died, and he perished not from wounds or any honourable blow, but by falling from his horse and being trampled on’ (1280).

The rest of the History is devoted to the miserable tale of Florence’s increasing corruption at home. When Machiavelli turns to this topic at the start of Book III, he first makes it clear that, in speaking of internal corruption, what he chiefly has in mind — as in the Discourses — is the tendency for civic laws and institutions to be ‘planned not for the common profit’ but rather for individual or sectarian advantage (1140). He criticizes his great predecessors, Bruni and Poggio, for failing to pay due attention to this danger in their histories of Florence (1031). And he justifies his own intense preoccupation with the theme by insisting that the enmities which arise when a community loses its virtú in this way ‘bring about all the evils that spring up in cities’ — as the sad case of Florence amply demonstrates (1140).

Machiavelli begins by conceding that there will always be ‘serious and natural enmities between the people and the nobles’ in any city, because of ‘the latter’s wish to rule and the former’s not to be enthralled’ (1140). As in the Discourses, he is far from supposing that all such hostilities are to be avoided. He repeats his previous contention that ‘some divisions harm republics and some divisions benefit them. Those do harm that are accompanied with factions and partisans; those bring benefit that are kept up without factions and partisans.’ So the aim of a prudent legislator should not be to ‘provide that there will be no enmities’; it should only be to ensure ‘that there will be no factions’ based on the enmities that inevitably arise (1336).

In Florence, however, the hostilities that have developed have always been ‘those of factions’ (1337). As a result, the city has been one of those unfortunate communities which have been condemned to oscillate between two equally ruinous poles, varying ‘not between liberty and slavery’ but rather ‘between slavery and licence’. The common people have been ‘the promoters of licence’ while the nobility have been ‘the promoters of slavery’. The helpless city has in consequence staggered ‘from the tyrannical form to the licentious, and from that back to the other’, both parties having such powerful enemies that neither has been able to impose stability for any length of time (1187).

To Machiavelli, the internal history of Florence since the thirteenth century thus appears as a series of hectic movements between these two extremes, in the course of which the city and its liberties have eventually been battered to pieces. Book II opens at the start of the fourteenth century with the nobles in power. This led directly to the tyranny of the duke of Athens in 1342, when the citizens ‘saw the majesty of their government ruined, her customs destroyed, her statutes annulled’ (1128). They accordingly turned against the tyrant and succeeded in setting up their own popular regime. But, as Machiavelli goes on to relate in Book III, this in turn degenerated into licence when the ‘unrestrained mob’ managed to seize control of the republic in 1378 (1161–3). Next the pendulum swung back to ‘the aristocrats of popular origin’, and by the middle of the fifteenth century they were seeking once again to curtail the liberties of the people, thereby encouraging a new form of tyrannical government (1188).

It is true that, when Machiavelli arrives at this final phase of his narrative in Books VII and VIII, he begins to present his argument in a more oblique and cautious style. His central topic is inescapably the rise of the Medici, and he clearly feels that some allowance must be made for the fact that the same family had made it possible for him to write his History. While he takes considerable pains to dissemble his hostility, however, it is easy to recover his feelings about the Medicean contribution to Florentine history if we piece together certain sections of the argument which he is careful to keep separate.

Book VII opens with a general discussion of the most insidious means by which a leading citizen can hope to corrupt the populace in such a way as to promote divisive factions and acquire absolute power for himself. The issue had already been extensively treated in the Discourses, and Machiavelli largely contents himself with reiterating his earlier arguments. The greatest danger is said to be that of permitting the rich to employ their wealth to gain ‘partisans who follow them for personal profit’ instead of following the public interest. He adds that there are two principal methods by which this can be done. One is ‘by doing favours to various citizens, defending them from the magistrates, assisting them with money and aiding them in getting undeserved offices’. The other is ‘by pleasing the masses with games and public gifts’, putting on costly displays of a kind calculated to win a spurious popularity and lull the people into forfeiting their liberties (337).

If we turn with this analysis in mind to the last two books of the History, it is not difficult to detect the tone of aversion underlying Machiavelli’s effusive descriptions of successive Medicean governments. He begins with Cosimo, on whom he lavishes a fine encomium in chapter 5 of Book VII, praising him in particular for surpassing ‘every other in his time’ not merely ‘in influence and wealth but also in liberality’. It shortly becomes clear, however, that what Machiavelli has in mind is that by the time of his death ‘there was no citizen of any standing in the city to whom Cosimo had not lent a large sum of money’ (1342). The sinister implications of such studied munificence have already been pointed out. Next, Machiavelli moves on to the brief career of Cosimo’s son, Piero de’ Medici. At first he is described as ‘good and honourable’, but we soon learn that his sense of honour prompted him to lay on a series of chivalric tournaments and other festivities that were so elaborate and splendid that the city was kept busy for months in preparing and presenting them (1352). As before, we have already been warned about the harmful influence of such blatant appeals to the masses. Finally, when Machiavelli comes to the years of Lorenzo the Magnificent — and thus to the period of his own youth — he scarcely troubles to suppress the rising note of antipathy. By this stage, he declares, ‘the Fortune and the liberality’ of the Medici had so decisively done their corrupting work that ‘the people had been made deaf’ to the very idea of throwing off the Medicean tyranny, in consequence of which ‘Liberty was not known in Florence’ any more (1393).

Despite Florence’s relapse into tyranny, despite the return of the barbarians, Machiavelli felt able to comfort himself with the reflection that Italy had been spared the worst degradation of all. Although the barbarians had conquered, they had not succeeded in putting to the sword any of Italy’s greatest cities. As he observes in The Art of War, Tortona may have been sacked ‘but not Milan, Capua but not Naples, Brescia but not Venice’ and — finally and most symbolically of all — ‘Ravenna but not Rome’ (624).

Machiavelli ought to have known better than to tempt Fortune with such overconfident sentiments. For in May 1527 the unthinkable happened. During the previous year, Francis I had treacherously entered a League to recover the possessions in Italy which he had been forced to cede after his crushing defeat at the hands of the imperial forces in 1525. Responding to this renewed challenge, Charles V ordered his armies back into Italy in the spring of 1527. But the troops were unpaid and badly disciplined, and instead of attacking any military targets they advanced directly on Rome. Entering the undefended city on 6 May, they put it to the sack in a four-day massacre that astounded and horrified the entire Christian world.

With the fall of Rome, Clement VII had to flee for his life. And with the loss of papal backing, the increasingly unpopular government of the Medici in Florence immediately collapsed. On 16 May the city council met to proclaim the restoration of the republic, and on the following morning the young Medicean princes rode out of the city and into exile.

For Machiavelli, with his staunchly republican sympathies, the restoration of free government in Florence ought to have been a moment of triumph. But in view of his connections with the Medici, who had been paying his salary for the past six years, he must have appeared to the younger generation of republicans as little more than an ageing and insignificant client of the discredited tyranny. Although he seems to have nurtured some hopes of regaining his old position in the second chancery, there was no question of any job being found for him in the new anti-Medicean government.

The irony of it all seems to have broken Machiavelli’s spirit, and soon afterwards he contracted an illness from which he never recovered. The story that he summoned a priest to his deathbed to hear a final confession is one that most biographers have repeated, but it is undoubtedly a pious invention of a later date. Machiavelli had viewed the Church’s ministrations with disdain throughout his life, and there is no evidence that he changed his mind at the moment of death. He died on 21 June, in the midst of his family and friends, and was buried in the church of Santa Croce on the following day.

With Machiavelli, more than with any other political theorist, the temptation to pursue him beyond the grave, to end by summarizing and sitting in judgement on his philosophy, is one that has generally proved irresistible. The process began immediately after his death, and it continues to this day. Some of Machiavelli’s earliest critics, such as Francis Bacon, felt able to concede that ‘we are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do’. But the majority of Machiavelli’s original readers were so shocked by his outlook that they simply denounced him as an invention of the devil, or even as Old Nick, the devil himself. By contrast, the bulk of Machiavelli’s modern commentators have confronted even his most outrageous doctrines with an air of conscious worldliness. But some of them, especially Leo Strauss and his disciples, have unrepentantly continued to uphold the traditional view that (as Strauss expresses it) Machiavelli can only be characterized as ‘a teacher of evil’.

The business of the historian, however, is surely to serve as a recording angel, not a hanging judge. All I have accordingly sought to do in the preceding pages is to recover the past and place it before the present, without trying to employ the local and defeasible standards of the present as a way of praising or blaming the past. As the inscription on Machiavelli’s tomb proudly reminds us, ‘no epitaph can match so great a name’.