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 company 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….