A great and wretched city: promise and failure in Machiavelli's Florentine political thought 9780674368996, 9780674725461

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I TATTI STUDIES IN ITALIAN RENAISSANCE HISTORY

3 Sponsored by Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Florence, Italy

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Promise and Failure in

Machiavelli's Horentine Political Thought

MARK JURDJEVIC

Hl Hil

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2014

Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jurdjevic, Mark. A great and wretched city : promise and failure in Machiavelli’s Florentine political thought / Mark Jurdjevic. pages cm. — (I Tatti studies in Italian Renaissance history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72546-1 (alk. paper)

1. Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1469-1527. Istorie florentine. 2. Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1469-1527—Political and social views. 3. Republicanism—Italy—Florence—History. 4. Florence (Italy)—Politics and government—1421-1737. I. Title. DG736.3.M333)87 2014 945'.506—dc23 2.01302.6743

for Caitlin and Norah

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Contents

Introduction: The Florentine Question I

1. The Savonarolan Lens 16

2. Roman Doubts 53 3. Nobles and Noble Culture in the Florentine Histories SI

4. A New View of the People 103 5. The Albizzi Regime in the Florentine Histories 132 6. The Virtues and Vices of Medici Power in the

Florentine Histories 149

7. The Failure of Florentine Institutions 179 Conclusion: Machiavelli's Republican Realism 206

Notes 217

References 273

Acknowledgments 2.85

Index 289

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A GREAT AND WRETCHED CITY

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Introduction The Florentine Question

Unlike many of his predecessors, such as Giovanni Villani or Leonardo Bruni, who idealized Florence without compromise, Niccold Machiavelli’s relationship to Florence alternated between love and hate.’

He frequently wrote witheringly scornful remarks about Florentine political myopia, corruption, and servitude yet also frequently wrote about Florence with pride, patriotism, and cultural chauvinism. As he memorably put it in book 2 of the Florentine Histories, Florence was “truly a great and wretched city.”* Scholarship on Machiavelli has fully appreciated Florentine wretchedness—the failure of its political culture—in Machiavelli’s political thought. But it has not investigated seriously what Machiavelli understood by Florentine greatness—or the promise of its political culture. This book exposes new aspects of Machiavelli’s political thought by adopting the perspective of his writings on Florence. The book’s approach contrasts with much of the scholarship on Machiavelli that focuses primarily on the Prince and the Discourses on Livy, texts in which Machiavelli relies heavily on the political culture of classical antiquity and republican Rome. The book is structured around two arguments. First, it makes a general argument that significant and as yet unrecognized aspects of Machiavelli’s

Introduction

political thought were distinctly Florentine in inspiration, content, and purpose. The book then advances the more specific argument that Machiavelli’s political and historical writings from the 1520s espouse a more engaged, activist republican agenda than any of his earlier writings. Machiavelli deployed a realist republicanism, specifically informed by Florentine history, in an attempt to stave off the rising autocratic tide that threatened to engulf Florence. Thus, from a new perspective and armed with new arguments, this book reengages the venerable debate about Machiavelli’s relationship to Renaissance republicanism. The Machiavelli who emerges from my analysis was willing to take bold risks in pursuit of a republican future for his city. An argument about the impact of Florence on a Florentine citizen might strike some readers as an unnecessary iteration of the uncontroversial axiom that context always shapes texts and their authors—more a point of departure than of arrival. There are certainly some uncontroversial observations about the relationship between Machiavelli and his Florentine setting. For example, Machiavelli inherited certain aspects of the genre of the Prince and the Discourses on Livy from preexisting Florentine political texts by Brunetto Latini, Leonardo Bruni, and others; his turn to antiquity for guidance and instruction derived from Florence's larger humanist milieu; and his search for effectual truth in politics grew out of his years of active political service, diplomatic and military, as a prominent figure in Soderini’s republic. But such observations do not identify with satisfying precision the specifically Florentine dimension of Machiavelli’s arguments, nor do they shed light on the genesis and trajectory of his political imagination in general. In much of the relevant scholarship, Florence and Florentine history seem to have offered Machiavelli only negative lessons, examples of how not to proceed efficaciously—always less interesting and less compelling than Machiavelli’s more dynamic and provocative positive lessons. There are legitimate textual reasons for that assessment of Florence's role in Machiavellian political thought. We derive most of our understanding of it from his first two famous works of political analysis, the Prince and the Discourses on Livy. In both works, Machiavelli rarely discussed Florence except occasionally to present his native city in negative contrast to an ancient example. The Prince discussed classical figures such as Scipio, Hannibal, and Agathocles and modern but non-Florentine figures such as Cesare Borgia,

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Introduction

Ferdinand of Aragon, and Julius II. Machiavelli did linger on one famous Florentine, the radical Dominican prophet Girolamo Savonarola, but did so largely to distinguish between successful armed prophets such as Moses and unsuccessful unarmed prophets, epitomized by the Florentine friar. In the Discourses, Machiavelli praised the beneficial consequences of class conflict between the Roman plebs and senators, Rome’s functional and martial

conception of religion, the Roman system of public indictments, and the city’s reliance on an armed citizenry.’ To the extent that the Discourses invoke Florence, Machiavelli frequently held up his city as an example of the pernicious consequences of ignoring Rome’s lessons. Simply put, we see few

Florentine examples in the development of his political thought in those two texts because he was, to a large extent, a critic of modernity who sought his answers in the non-Florentine past.

Machiavelli did write extensively, however, in prose and verse about Florence and Florentine affairs. Literary works predominate: his First and Second Decennale recounted in verse the trials and tribulations of Florentine and Italian history during the first phase of the Italian Wars; his plays, above all the Mandrake Root, were rooted in a clearly Florentine social milieu; and in 1520 he wrote a constitutional proposal for the city that tried to harmonize the reality of Medici power with a republican institutional framework. Of course the Florentine Histories, composed in the early 1520s, was his most sustained, complex, and far-reaching analysis of the course and significance of Florentine history. Few scholars, however, tend to read the Histories in the same light as the Discourses, namely as a series of historical reflections whose significance lies in what they reveal about political theory rather than history. Instead, scholars generally see Machiavelli’s writing on Florence as evidence of a shift from an early, politically engaged focus on politics to a later, politically resigned focus on history, a transition caused by and mirroring the transformation of Florence from the popular republic that Machiavelli served to an increasingly autocratic state dominated by the Medici family.* Thus situated

as part of a turn away from politics, it is unsurprising that most scholars have been disinclined to seek evidence of Machiavelli's active political convictions in this work.’ As a result, many have concluded that whatever political theory the Histories may contain consists principally of reiterations of Machiavelli’s earlier arguments from the Prince and the Discourses.°

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This book tries to demonstrate that the prevalence of those two views— that Florence served chiefly as a repository of negative examples and that the political theory underpinning the Histories passively recycled the convictions of the Prince and the Discourses—have obscured interesting and important Florentine dimensions of Machiavelli’s thought. The key to such a reading lies in making sense of the relationship between Machiavelli’s two

Florences, the one that drew his ire and contempt and the other that inspired his optimism and confidence. Machiavelli’s later writings, particularly the Histories, reveal a temporal distinction between his two voices for Florence and Florentine affairs. When he looked at the Florentine past, he perceived a dismal chain of failures. Yet

when he looked to the future, he saw promise and potential. His sense of scorn for the shortcomings of Florentine political culture in the past must have been a direct function of his considerable estimation of the city’s as yet unrealized political potential, hence his description of the city as simultaneously “great and wretched.” We easily recognize the wretchedness of Florence in Machiavelli’s political thought, but the perspective adopted by this book allows us to consider also the question of Florence’s greatness. What in particular did this greatness mean to Machiavelli, how did it inform his political thought, and what might it suggest about his interpretation of Florentine politics in the 1520s and his intentions in the Florentine Histories? In answering these questions, the book explains the origins of his conviction that Florence, in spite of its dismal past, possessed all the necessary material for a wholesale, triumphant, and epochal political renewal. Each of this book’s seven chapters addresses these questions. Chapter 1 examines Machiavelli’s enduring interest in Savonarola and the impact of his followers’ movement on Machiavelli’s thought. It argues in particular that the Savonarolan experiment furnished Machiavelli with his principal analytical categories and guiding political questions. Scholarship generally divides Machiavelli’s writing into two phases, an early one predominantly characterized by reflection on Roman history, and a later one dominated by

Florentine matters. Without wishing to diminish the significance of the Discourses and Machiavelli’s obsession with Rome, we should not overlook

that his first act of political analysis was his letter to Ricciardo Becchi analyzing Savonarola and Florentine politics. In particular, it is worth stressing the degree to which the Savonarolan moment was Machiavelli’s first prism

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Introduction

through which to reflect on enduring issues in his writing: the sources and limits of factional power, the role of prophecy and religion in republics, the conditions necessary for political redemption and renewal, and—most central of all—the power of culture and language in political life. Savonarola and his reception by the Florentines inspired the questions for which Machiavelli subsequently sought answers in Livy and the classical past. Just as the Savonarolan movement continued to have a considerable impact on Florentine politics after the friar’s execution in 1498, it continued to inform Machiavelli's later writings and his understanding of Florentine politics in the 1520s.

Chapter 2 contrasts the Roman republicanism of the Discourses with Ma-

chiavelli’s later Florentine republicanism, particularly as articulated in his constitutional proposal of 1520, the Discourse on Florentine Affairs after the Death of Lorenzo.’ This chapter cautions against deriving our sense of Machiavelli’s republican convictions entirely from the Discourses on Livy, the text that generally dominates much of the scholarship on Machiavelli and republicanism. Without disputing the largely Roman origin of many of Machiavelli’s most cherished republican convictions, the chapter argues nonetheless that the Discourses betray an undercurrent of doubt about the viability of the Roman model and that in small but illuminating ways Machiavelli distanced himself from the Roman model when he turned to the question of reestablishing a Florentine republic. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the contrast between Machiavelli’s early and later assessments of the character and psychology of nobles and people. In the Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli confidently attributed collective psychological traits to the people and the nobles: to the people he attributed a passive desire to live unmolested, and to the nobles he attributed an inherent desire to bully and dominate. On the basis of those characteristics, he championed the populist argument that the people constituted a crucial resource for constraining the destabilizing effects of elite ambition. When he began to reflect on Florentine history, however, his sense of the characteristics of each group and their political implications became more complicated. Although at first glance Machiavelli’s Florentine nobles seem to mirror perfectly the domineering instincts of elites that his early works condemn,

the Florentine Histories reveals that he believed that the people’s triumph over the nobility and the loss of noble culture directly paved the way for

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Italy’s servitude in the sixteenth century. His account of the people’s role in

Florentine politics departs from his earlier arguments even more sharply than his view of the nobles does. His new perspective in part reflects the subtleties and dynamism of the Florentine context, particularly the city’s fluid—by early modern standards—conceptions of social rank and status.® But his new perspective equally reflects an awareness that the people posed just as much of a potential political problem as did elites. And in books 4-6 of the Florentine Histories, he began to diminish the political significance of any apparent distinctions between people and elites altogether. The implications of that altered social outlook are evident in his later republicanism.

Machiavelli’s study of the Florentine nobles and people analyzed in chapters 3 and 4 sheds interesting light on a venerable debate about the respective roles of class and patronage in Florentine politics. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Gaetano Salvemini proposed a Marxist interpretation of Florentine politics in the late thirteenth century that pitted two clearly

distinct classes—feudal magnates and bourgeois popolani—against each other in a struggle for control of Florence.’ Nicola Ottokar, and after him Nicolai Rubinstein, influentially disputed the existence of the building blocks of Salvemini’s interpretation.’ Ottokar, focusing less on legal status and more on familial connections evident in business, politics, and marriages, argued that no clear class divisions existed, proposing instead an interpretation of Florentine politics in terms of patronage networks that each contained multiple social classes. Although Ottokar’s approach generally dominated twentieth-century historiography on Italian politics, variations on Salvemini’s class-oriented perspective have persisted in the work of Philip Jones and—more specifically for Florence—John Najemy.” The interpreta-

tion of Florentine politics by Machiavelli analyzed here directly engages this quarrel and integrates the two apparently contrasting perspectives. In Machiavelli’s view, Florentine political conflict in the thirteenth century initially reflected and was organized around meaningful class distinctions between noble and nonnoble families. But Machiavelli’s narrative reveals that over the course of the fourteenth century, the rise of patronage networks that transcended class boundaries displaced the earlier class-specific conflicts. Obscuring that transformation was the fact that those patronage networks—in his narrative, at least—continued to use the class-specific po-

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litical vocabulary of earlier conflicts in spite of its incongruity with contemporary social realities. Chapters 5-7 focus on a strategic pattern of connections between Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories and his republican constitutional proposal in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, both texts commissioned by the Medici around 1520.’* All three chapters share an overarching argument that whatever other work Machiavelli may have wished the Histories to perform, he certainly intended his narrative of Florentine history to explain, justify, and amplify key arguments from the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. Chapters 5-7

examine his assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the previous Florentine regimes and his synthetic view of the failure of Florentine political institutions. In the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, he defended and justified his innovative republican proposal in historical terms. He explained to his Medici audience that any return to allegedly successful earlier regimes, particularly the aristocratic Albizzean oligarchy and the informal shadow government of the fifteenth-century Cosimo and Lorenzo, would be doomed to inevitable failure because those regimes contained structural flaws and shortcomings that could not be overcome. In the Histories, he provided a systematic and detailed justification for the brief historical comments in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. Having discounted the institutional arrangements of specific earlier regimes, he went on to level an even greater critique at the defective nature of almost all Florentine political institutions. In the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, he argued that the Medici should build their regime on entirely new institutions, magistracies, and councils. The

Histories supports that argument by demonstrating in detail why any revival of earlier magistracies and institutions will inevitably cause discord, instability, and vulnerability for those in power. Read in tandem with the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, the wretched particulars of Florentine history explored in chapters 3-7 become part of Machiavelli’s larger argument about the moral and political necessity of reviving Florentine republicanism in the present and for the future. The conclusion summarizes the book’s principal arguments and situates my reading of Machiavelli in the larger debate about his role in and the significance of Renaissance republicanism. In particular, the conclusion resolves the puzzle of Hans Baron’s problematic “third” Machiavelli by showing how

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Machiavelli, in his writings on Florence, adapted the republican tradition so that it might address specific problems in the Florentine context of the 1520s

and hence remain relevant and politically necessary. The book thus concludes with a dramatic portrayal of Machiavelli as a rare example of a Renaissance intellectual who boldly deployed his talents on behalf of a cause that his city’s ruling family and its powerful lieutenants opposed.”

The chapters that follow are by necessity narrowly focused on demonstrating how the subtleties of the Florentine context informed and structured Machiavelli's writing and his sense of the potential for a republican revival in Florence. Collectively, however, these chapters make an argument with significant historiographical and biographical implications: that from a textual point of view, at least, Machiavelli’s Discourse on Florentine Affairs and the Florentine Histories espouse a more engaged, activist republican agenda than any of his earlier writings. Taking this argument seriously in turn suggests the necessity of reconsidering the evolution of his political thought. The constitutional proposal that he wrote for the Medici in 1520 plays a considerable role in this book. In that text he makes a number of provocative arguments that seem to clash with his usual lexicon and earlier arguments, thus posing stubborn interpretive problems for scholars that have tended to inhibit this work’s incorporation into mainstream interpretations of his political thought. Gennaro Sasso, for example, described this work first as stridently utopian and later as paradoxical, arguing that we should not see it as centrally connected to Machiavelli’s more sustained political convictions.“ More recently, recognizing some of this work’s more striking detours from earlier texts, Humfrey Butters has interpreted the text as evidence of “an increasingly aristocratic perspective” in Machiavelli’s later writing.” But, significantly, Butters views that turn as the result not of genuinely altered political convictions but of a tactical and strategic retreat from his earlier hard-nosed populism caused by his progressing rapprochement with the Medici and their elitist circle. Both views tend to dismiss the text as an idiosyncratic oddity in an otherwise largely consistent corpus.”® In contrast, this book shows that that text reflects serious and sustained

political convictions. The Discourse on Florentine Affairs was far from

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anomalous but was structurally connected, both textually and ideologically, to the Florentine Histories. In those two texts Machiavelli directed a

pugnacious republican challenge at the prevailing oligarchic wisdom of the Medicean ruling group and the autocratic inclinations of the Medici themselves.

This book attempts to show in detail that considered and committed republican convictions inspired the Discourse on Florentine Affairs rather than

any tactical political accommodations or wistful nostalgic sentiment for a lost republican cause. This is done by reading the Discourse on Florentine Affairs in tandem with relevant passages from Machiavelli’s Histories.” There

he reinforced with sustained detail every important argument he had earlier made about Florentine history and politics in the constitutional proposal.’® As a result, it seems problematic to argue that some temporary convictions connected to the Medici commission inspired the Histories’ big arguments. The seamless interpenetration between the Discourse on Florentine Affairs and the Histories’ grand narrative suggests that they were borne of a deeply held and considered vision of Florentine history. Those intertextual connections in turn cast new and interesting light on the Florentine Histories. The reading offered here synthesizes and reconciles the two dominant and seemingly contradictory readings of the Histories. Felix Gilbert argued for a utopian reading of the work, arguing that its structure implied a millenarian hope for political renewal similar to the one that concluded the Prince. Gilbert’s argument was primarily textual: the Histories documented Florence’s origins, brief period of confidence and power, and then steady decline down to Machiavelli’s times. For Gilbert, the depth of the city’s corruption in the final years of the Histories implied, given Machiavelli’s cyclical view of history, that the city would at some point inevitably begin a period of rebirth and ascent, even if Machiavelli himself could not perceive the precise circumstances causing that ascent. To this deductive argument Gilbert added some circumstantial contextual evidence—Machiavelli’s return to political life in the 1520s and his proposal for the papacy to arm the Romagna—suggesting an optimistic and engaged Machiavelli who might have had some grounds for entertaining hope for better things. However influential, Gilbert’s argument remained conjectural at best, given the degree to which its utopian argument hinged, somewhat counterintuitively, on precisely the absence in the text itself of any actual

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positive or utopian statements about Florence or any political developments that clearly suggested the arrival of a redeeming context. In contrast to Gilbert, a number of scholars read the Histories as primarily informed by Machiavelli’s overarching sense of pessimistic and resigned fatalism. Gennaro Sasso initially expressed this view most forcefully, arguing that the absence of the political reform or redemption in 1513 for which Machiavelli had so desperately hoped was a crushing intellectual blow with lasting effects on his political thought. Convinced that the earlier republican and subsequently Medicean mismanagement of recent crises had left Florence beyond salvation, he composed the Histories in a mental state that was dominated by “anguish for a world without future and without hope.” For Sasso, Machiavelli’s evident pessimism constrained his imagination and restricted his formerly expansive political and historical vision.”° Most scholars tend to read the Histories in one of these two ways. In an influential essay on Machiavelli’s treatment of the Medici, John Najemy revisited, reworked, and amplified elements of Gilbert’s reading. Najemy not only demonstrated, contrary to Sasso, that Machiavelli’s political thought in the Histories had become more complex rather than more narrow; he also showed in greater textual detail than Gilbert had how the Polybian logic of

cyclical history revealed a Machiavelli who “was never without hope or completely resigned.’ What for Sasso was the point of arrival—the overarching bleakness of the Histories—was for Najemy a point of departure. Recognizing that “there are no lawgivers ... in the Florentine Histories: no Moses, no Theseus, no Cyrus, no Romulus,’ Najemy proceeded to show how the Histories formally abandoned Machiavelli's earlier myth of the prince-

redeemer but replaced it with confidence in the instructional potential of history to “transform suffering into wisdom,” hence to teach the Florentines how collectively to reform themselves without the intervention of a prince

figure. David Quint and Salvatore de Maria, on the other hand, have shown how Machiavelli’s recurring use of irony in the Histories underscored the individual’s fundamental powerlessness in the face of the impenetrable, unalterable, and frequently capricious power of historical change. Although de Maria acknowledged Machiavelli’s reliance on certain aspects of Polybian historical theory, he saw Machiavelli as departing from the Polybian tradition in one crucial way: given the colossal scale of Italy’s destruction and

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servitude during the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Machiavelli had little confidence in or hope of the “upswing,” the ascent that, in Gilbert and Najemy’s reading, Machiavelli must have believed inevitably followed all tragic moments of collapse and ruin. For de Maria, the larger conclusions and arguments of the Histories are entirely consistent with Sasso’s pessimistic reading of the text: “Machiavelli, no doubt sharing in the prevailing mood of hopelessness, looks at both the present and the past, and sees no sign of an upward swing of the historical cycle. . . . It is, in fact, in irony that Machiavelli finds refuge from a world he sees as a stage in which man is doomed to a tragic end in a futile attempt to impose his will upon the immutable course of human history.”*’ In Quint’s reading, although Machiavelli may have remained cautiously and vaguely optimistic, his narrative strategy of incongruous pairings highlighting “the lawlessness of history” reflected a fundamentally ironic outlook dictated by his twin themes of corruption and decline.** Both readings of the Florentine Histories are a reaction to Machiavelli's puzzlingly constant and eloquent laceration of Florence’s self-destructive obsession with internal division. The utopian school infers better things to come from Machiavelli’s bleak account of the Florentine past and present. Sasso’s reading of Machiavelli as passive and politically resigned simply takes that bleakness at face value as the principal message of the Histories. Both readings attempt to make sense of the relentless and unflinching condemnation of Florentine political culture. The utopian school attempts to reconcile the Histories with Machiavelli's early confidence in the individual's ability to understand and manipulate the historical environment and Machiavelli’s stubborn sense of hope for better things, even during his most painful and hopeless hours.” Unable to integrate the apparently dark Histories with Machiavelli's earlier writings, the bleak school asserts a major psychological transformation sometime around the 1520s from Machiavelli engaged to Machiavelli irreversibly defeated. The structural and textual interconnections between the Histories and the Discourse on Florentine Affairs that this book charts suggest a different reading, one in which Machiavelli is neither politically resigned, paralyzed with despair, nor given to abstract utopian hopes for renewal. Simply put, he intended his vision of relentless failure in the Histories to elucidate a re-

curring problem in Florentine political culture for which his Discourse on

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Florentine Affairs was the solution. That work presented the radical argument to the Medici that they should establish a new, institutionally unprecedented republic that would ultimately render them unnecessary, as Najemy put it.*° In place of the weight of their authority, Machiavelli proposes a complex and original arrangement of new institutions that will “by themselves stand firm. And they will always stand firm when everybody has a hand in them, and when everybody knows what he needs to do and in whom he can trust, and no class of citizen, either through fear for itself or through ambition, will need to desire revolution.””’ The Histories demonstrate in detail the institutional configuration of every

single one of the city’s failed attempts to create such institutions. Read as urgent political commentary, every episode in and manifestation of Florence’s broken, limping failed political experiment leads directly and inexorably to the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. Najemy wrote not only that there

are no lawgivers in the Histories, but that “at least after the beginning of Book IV, no expectations of any.”** There is an indisputable absence of law-

givers in the Histories, but their absence may be meant to suggest that the Histories points to Machiavelli himself as the city’s redeeming lawgiver. The reading proposed here of the interrelationship between Machiavelli’s

later political and historical writings also has implications for the significance and modernity of the Florentine Histories. Most accounts of Machiavelli’s anticipation or creation of the modern political world focus on his dramatic reconfiguration of political morality in the Prince or his awareness and appreciation in the Discourses on Livy of the immutably conflictual nature of rival social groups.*” Without disputing such accounts, this book nevertheless suggests that the Histories represents Machiavelli’s most brilliant and penetrating understanding of the complex relationship between factions and state-building. Without any close parallel, this work provides

the most sustained analysis of the struggle between private and public forms of power to emerge from precisely the moment in European history when that struggle first began to tip decisively in favor of the state. Machiavelli plotted books 2-8 of the Histories in terms of a systematic exploration of the growth of Florentine public institutions.’° Such an exploration was an ambitious goal for a Florentine, since—more than any other medieval or early modern political community—the Florentine political landscape was never static. Machiavelli’s Histories demonstrates in detail the

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accuracy of Dante’s famous observation that the Florentines varied their constitution in a fruitless search for stability the way a sick woman confined to her bed constantly shifted her position in a fruitless search for comfort. However, Machiavelli evidently did not consider his analysis of that bloody, difficult search as merely a local Florentine issue. Viewed as a whole, the

Histories constitute a richly detailed case study of the constant and often brutal struggle necessary for a state to assert itself as an entity autonomous from and above the very families from which it derives its power. Through his elaborate reconstruction of every stage in Florence’s long history of political experimentation, Machiavelli revealed a grand, synthetic vision of the paramount need in self-governing republics for transparent institutions capable of withstanding factional manipulation.

His city had failed to realize such institutions, to be sure. Most of his analysis of institutional changes to the Florentine government reveal the process by which the government failed to strip the city’s factions of strength and usurp the loyalties of their followers or, worse still, the process by which the state itself was routinely hijacked by factions and transformed into a party

instrument. Through that analysis, however, Machiavelli made a powerful larger argument for a concept of public power that commanded the loyalties and passions of its citizens—and the Discourse on Florentine Affairs suggests that he believed that the creation of such a concept was possible for Florence in his own day.

His account of those pernicious processes not only rejects and condemns the patronage politics that gave factions their life and purpose, but— more important—is the most ambitious and successful attempt in Western political theory to understand the problem of factionalism. He constantly probes the motivations of various Florentine groups to enter into particular factions, their reasons for mistrusting public institutional alternatives, the ways factions pursue their goals, and the conditions that sustain them and cause their demise, leading ultimately to his awareness of the inherent weaknesses and limits of even the most successful factional systems. For example, the Histories shows how Cosimo’s system—viewed alternately as rational, functional, or innovative in much Florentine historiography sympathetic to

patronage politics—was the necessary logical outcome of the factional struggles and institutional failures that preceded it.*’ Machiavelli’s narrative demolishes that sympathetic view, explaining in detail why Cosimo’s

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following, by the very nature of its formation and purpose, could never be anything other than an ultimately dysfunctional beast predicated on threats, fear, and a borderline paranoid instinct for political exclusion.

An argument that the Discourse on Florentine Affairs and the Florentine Histo-

ries reveal Machiavelli's commitment to a republican Florence more than any of his earlier writings is an important enough point in itself, but it is all the more striking considering his primarily Medici audience. Unlike the Prince, which he dedicated to the Medici but which failed to attract their interest, these two texts were commissioned directly by the Medici and thus constituted for him a long sought-after and real opportunity for political advocacy. However much he may in practice have been willing to help the Medici consolidate their authority in Florence, in his writings he used that opportunity to try to steer the ruling family and the constitutional question that the Medici had not yet resolved toward a republican solution—even if that meant directly challenging the credentials and desires of the powerful members of the Medicean circle and of the Medici themselves. Robert Black recently highlighted this aspect of Machiavelli's political stubbornness, pointing to his unwillingness in November 1512, when his own political fate hung

in the balance, to “tell the Medici what they wanted to hear.” Machiavelli faced a similar predicament in the 1520s. Although the Medici

principate was not far off, few observers saw that outcome with any clarity, for the simple reason that the constitutional arrangement of the city remained an open question. Although the new Medici now had a power base in Rome on which to rely, their regime had little popular support. The regime was “probably the most despised of all Florentine governments,” in Najemy’s words.*’ Many in the Medicean circle could not envision such support ever materializing, leading Paolo Vettori, among others, to argue as a consequence that the Medici “must govern more with force than skill.”°* The Medici had no obvious candidate around whom to organize their power, and as a result they were themselves never entirely certain about how to institutionalize their

presence in Florence. Giulio’s position as a cardinal prevented him from leaving Rome for long periods of time. The Medicean circle mistrusted Giuliano and, fearing the largely hostile Florentine environment in which

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they found themselves, consistently rejected him as too inclined toward compromise and concession.” As the least bad choice, Pope Leo sent Lorenzo to govern the city, but he did so in a particularly controversial and autocratic manner. Following Lorenzo's death in 1519, there was no obvious figure on whom to anchor a Medici state.’° Rumors circulated in the early 1520s that Cardinal Giulio was inclined toward a republican restoration.” Thus, by the time Machiavelli was presented with the Medici commissions for the Discourse on Florentine Affairs and the Florentine Histories, the three constitutional alternatives that had dominated Florentine politics since 1494 all remained on the table: a popular republic, an aristocratic republic, and an outright autocratic state. A decade of informal Medici rule evidently did little to improve Machia-

velli’s receptiveness to compromise or willingness to tell those in power what they wanted to hear. Writing to his friend Francesco Guicciardini, Machiavelli mocked his own intransigent obstinacy in clinging to cherished ideas: “I am going to be as pig-headed about this idea as I am about my other ideas.”’* As debates circulated in the ruling group in favor of either an aristocratic republic or an outright princely state, the Medici invited Machiavelli to join the conversation, and he continued to adopt a contrary stance.”’

Machiavelli believed that establishing an autocratic state in Florence was both impractical and immoral. He believed that no closed oligarchic regime could endure for any significant period of time. He said so bluntly in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, and he wrote a history of Florence that offered a detailed historical substantiation of those convictions. We know, of

course, that he was more than ready to work for the Medici in pursuit of whatever goals they desired, so he was clearly no revolutionary. But at the crucial moment when he had access to the ear of the prince, he articulated his most sustained argument for the merits of a strong Florentine republic. The future of Florence and Tuscany nonetheless followed in the increasingly absolutist Spanish footsteps that dominated early modern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his Florentine writings, however, Machiavelli argued ably for the merits for all involved of following a different path. Wretched in many ways, Florence yet retained enough promise and potential to inspire Machiavelli to make one last gamble on a republican future.

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I The Savonarolan Lens

To begin to appreciate the Florentine content of Machiavelli’s political thought and his later activist republicanism, we need first to reconsider the impact on his thinking of Savonarola’s ascendancy in Florence and of the Savonarolan currents that remained in the city after the friar’s death. More than any other moment in the city’s history, the Savonarolan moment and the political controversies it created raised questions that Machiavelli’s writings subsequently explored in detail—the political uses of religion, the role of prophecy in the foundation of new modes and orders, the composition and purpose of factions, and the necessity of possessing one’s own arms. From his first political writing in 1498 to his constitutional text of 1520, he regularly meditated on the meaning and significance of the Savon-

arolan phenomenon in ways that reveal striking and relatively unappreciated aspects of his political thinking. Machiavelli’s understanding of Savonarola was considerably more complex than many have suggested. Owing to a disproportionately heavy reliance on two texts—Machiavelli’s letter to Ricciardo Becchi in 1498 and chapter 6 of the Prince—the general consensus is that he had a rather dim view of Savonarola himself, saw his conduct and political strategies as

The Savonarolan Lens

ineffective and unworthy of emulation, and interpreted his overall movement as a failure. There are certainly grounds in these two texts for such a view. At times, Machiavelli declared the Savonarolan experiment a failure, and he often used Savonarola as a foil against which to consider how a successful reformer

ought to proceed. The recognition of failure, however, is not necessarily synonymous with opposition or condemnation. Savonarola had failed, but Machiavelli thought frequently and creatively about the nature of the friar’s failure and its larger significance. In addition, Machiavelli had many other things to say in other texts, less widely commented on, that complicate that general view. This chapter considers the full range of Machiavelli’s commentary on

Savonarola.' It focuses not only on Machiavelli’s understanding of and thoughts about Savonarola himself but also on Machiavelli’s reflection on the broader Savonarolan movement and its impact on Florence—and especially its durability after the friar’s execution. The chapter makes three related arguments. First, reflection on the political meaning of the Savonarolan episode provided Machiavelli with a conceptual vocabulary and emerging convictions that helped determine the way he read Livy and other classical sources and hence informed key arguments in the Prince, Discourses, Florentine Histories, and Discourse on Florentine Affairs. Second, Savonarola’s sudden

rise to power provided a rare but enduring reminder for Machiavelli that Florentines could organize their politics around something larger than the usual factional quarrels. Savonarola therefore became crucial evidence of the potential for political renewal in Florence and hence helped shape the optimism that underlay Machiavelli’s later activist republicanism. And third, Machiavelli’s Discourse on Florentine Affairs was, among other things, an at-

tempt to explain to the Medici some important merits in Savonarolan republicanism and to show its compatibility with Medici interests. To appreciate these points, we need to remember just how unexpected and surprising the Savonarolan episode was. Preachers of repentance were of course a recurring feature of religious life during the Renaissance, and the Savonarolan apocalyptic variety was particularly prevalent following Charles VII's descent into Italy.* Earlier itinerants and mystics such as Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena may have had a far greater spiritual impact than Savonarola did on Italian religious life, but none even approached

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the kind of political influence he exercised. Even the sainted archbishop Antonino, one of the most influential and politically minded Florentine prelates of the fifteenth century, did not have a political following, did not through his sermons set the terms of political debate subsequently taken up by the priors and their senior advisers, did not represent the republic on ambassadorial missions to secular powers, and did not transform Florentine public space the way Savonarola so dramatically did.’ Machiavelli did not share Savonarola’s vision for Florence but must have

recognized that an essential ingredient in the friar’s success was his ability to infuse his factional politics with a transcendent cultural and ideological message. In his later writings, Machiavelli lamented time and again that Florentine factions fought for and gained power always for factional benefit and never for a cause that transcended faction; this is one of the deepest and most recurring problems he discusses in the Florentine Histories. One of the most striking features, then, of the Savonarolan episode for Machiavelli must have been Savonarola’s attempt to grasp the levers of power as a means to an end rather than as the end itself, as it so clearly was, in Machiavelli’s estimation, for the Ciompi, Albizzi, or Medici regimes. The friar’s success further proved to Machiavelli that Florentines, in spite of what their own political history suggested, were responsive to the kind of larger cultural and ideological language of politics required to instill in them a dynamic and regenerative sense of unity. This point can be connected to the final chapter of the Prince, Machiavelli’s thoughts on Moses, his conviction about the value of Roman religion and Numa, and his privileging the Great Council in his Discourse on Florentine Affairs.

The larger controversy over Machiavelli's interpretation of Savonarola and his impact on Machiavelli’s imagination is in many ways a controversy over how to read and interpret Machiavelli’s first political correspondence, the letter to Ricciardo Becchi of March 1498. The Florentine Signoria had ordered Becchi, the Florentine orator at the papal court, to persuade Alexander VI to allow Savonarola to continue preaching, and Becchi subsequently requested from Machiavelli an account of Savonarola’s latest sermons and an update on the politics surrounding them. Machiavelli wrote a detailed

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reply—his most sustained commentary on the friar—that focused on Savonarola’s tactics as a political figure, particularly the way the tone and implications of his sermons adapted to the rapidly shifting political landscape

in Florence and Rome. The letter is a fine example of Machiavelli’s dry humor, irony, and simultaneous dense immersion in and objective detachment from Florentine politics, all factors making it, like so much of his writing, difficult to interpret. Most scholars view it as a thorough and unequivocal indictment of Savonarola’s character and methods. Gennaro Sasso has argued that the “vehemently anti-Savonarolan” Becchi letter contains no trace of intellectual sympathy for Savonarola. Rather, Sasso’s Machiavelli inverted all of Savonarola’s arguments, divesting them in the process of their religious content and hence stripping away the principal source of the his charisma.* Donald Weinstein, although dissenting from Sasso’s view that Machiavelli remained permanently hostile to Savonarola, read the letter to Becchi in similar terms. Weinstein concluded that Machiavelli’s early judgment was uniformly unfavorable, that he considered the friar a “demagogue and liar who, to compensate for his political impotence, makes false innuendoes about his enemies.” Marcia Colish has concluded from the Becchi letter that Machiavelli “detested” Savonarola, seeing him as a “fraud, [a] hypocrite, and a demagogue,” and that Machiavelli continued to repeat that message in numerous places.® Roberto

Ridolfi, an apologist for Machiavelli and Savonarola alike, attempted to downplay the apparent extremism of Machiavelli's indictment by suggesting that it was an immature and superficially considered moment of rhetorical excess—by far the least plausible of all competing interpretations.’ Only a few scholars have offered dissenting readings. Mario Martelli has argued that in purely “technical terms” the Becchi letter renders a positive verdict in its recognition of Savonarola’s adaptability and skillful political instincts.° John Najemy concurs with Martelli, adding that Machiavelli particularly admired Savonarola’s recognition that religion required contextual interpretation.” Most interpretations of the Becchi letter, including the revisionist, are unusually literal and hence are an exception to the more frequently contextual reading of Machiavelli’s writings." Few scholars deny that the meaning of the Prince and the Florentine Histories were conditioned by a Medicean

audience, imagined or real, or that the Art of War was conditioned by

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The Savonarolan Lens

Machiavelli's plans for an actual Florentine militia. Put slightly differently, to use Quentin Skinner’s vocabulary, scholars recognize that Machiavelli intended to his texts to do work, to accomplish specific political and social goals often unmentioned in the texts themselves.” Yet the Becchi letter is almost universally read in the “sincere” mode, as a direct and transparent reflection of Machiavelli’s core convictions about Savonarola, related candidly to Ricciardo Becchi with no specific political purpose.” The letter is as laden with contextual subtleties, however, as any of Machiavelli’s writings, and they affect its reading significantly. When we read them in context, we see that the positive reading of Najemy and Martelli should be pushed further, in ways broadly compatible with similar readings of Machiavelli's subsequent writings on reformers and founders of states. Becchi’s request for Machiavelli's assessment of Savonarola’s latest sermons was hardly an unofficial expression of curiosity between friends but was a request by a major politician of the republic for an update on a controversial subject that Becchi himself had been embroiled in two years earlier. He was a venerable and experienced statesman in both the renewed republic and the preceding Medici regime. He had earlier been a recipient of and participant in Lorenzo’s personal patronage and by the mid-1490s had established close relations with the Roman court and Alexander VI’s entourage, particularly with the pope's first secretary, Cardinal Lodovico Podocataro, and Cardinal Giovanni Lopez.” In the first years of the renewed republic Becchi became the principal agent of the Dieci di Liberta e Balia in Rome. For example, in 1495, the Dieci asked Becchi—presumably because of his court contacts, since he was not yet an ambassador—to persuade Alexander VI to allow the taxation of Florentine ecclesiastical assets. In 1497 the Dieci made Becchi their formal ambassador at Alexander’s court and began relying on him to pacify the growing conflict between Alexander, Savonarola, and the Florentine government, which was at that point largely sympathetic to the friar."

Becchi faced an inherently difficult task since neither of the principal antagonists, Savonarola and Alexander, were diplomatically inclined by nature. But it seems that Becchi’s difficulties were increased by his reluctance to compromise hard-won alliances at the Roman court by persistent lobbying on behalf of a person for whom he had little sympathy. Cardinals Podocataro and Lopez had already warned Becchi against the Florentine govern-

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ment’s ill-considered loyalty to Savonarola. Becchi subsequently wrote to the Florentines on March 3 that his Roman contacts urged the Florentine government to think carefully about the consequences of their actions and to rectify their relations with Rome.” The atmosphere toward Savonarola in Rome was clearly poisonous, so to some extent the damning remarks about Savonarola in Becchi’s letters reflect the Roman setting rather than Becchi’s own convictions.

But there is nevertheless an evident growing impatience in Becchi’s cor-

respondence with Savonarola and the regime that tolerated him. As the conflict continued, Becchi elaborated with increasing detail the precise criticisms and mockery circulating in Rome of Savonarola and the Florentines. On March 22 he wrote: “To tell the truth—and consider if today, Holy Thursday, I desire to lie—here everyone laughs at the Florentine government that allows itself to be governed by a friar.”*° On March 26 he wrote that public

opinion in the Roman court viewed the authority permitted Savonarola and his fanciulli—gangs of boys who publicly enforced Savonarola’s moral agenda—as dishonorable, disgraceful, and outright dangerous, adding that given the ubiquity of such statements and the stature and authority of those

who voiced them, their judgment was difficult for him to contradict. He went on to detail the difficulties he faced because of the Florentine government’s loyalty, explaining that he had to negotiate every day with cardinals who had contempt for Savonarola and considerable disapproval for the regime that tolerated and therefore implicitly championed him. The pope, Becchi reported, was hostile to the Florentine government more over its patience with Savonarola than over any other matter; and even those who were well disposed to the city were convinced that Savonarola would become the cause of “scandals and ruin.” In short, the city had “lost its mind and reputation.” The Dieci clearly recognized the challenges they faced in Rome and perhaps also recognized Becchi’s diminishing resolve: shortly after the arrival of his despairing letters, the Dieci sent one of their secretaries, the committed fratesco and frequent Savonarolan interlocutor Alessandro Braccesi, to Rome to assist Becchi, whose task had become yet more difficult after Savonarola obstructed the incorporation of San Marco into the Tuscan-Roman congregation." Consider the audience for whom and the context in which Machiavelli

wrote his analysis of Savonarola in March 1498. Machiavelli was not yet a

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government official but had aspirations to become one and would be elected second chancellor shortly thereafter, on June 15 and 19." A senior politician,

prominent in both the republic and the preceding Medici regime, had sought Machiavelli’s opinion on the single most important and controversial aspect of Florentine politics, one Becchi himself had been closely involved in and frequently complained about. Scholarship has generally confirmed Ridolfi’s assertion that Machiavelli’s appointment was politically charged, that his success derived in part from apparent opposition to the friar’s following.*® The only source that offers any evidence of such opposi-

tion prior to the collapse of the republic is the Becchi letter, a means by which Machiavelli could signal to those in power his intellectual solidarity with the growing anti-Savonarolan sentiment in the city. He certainly had a vested interest in doing so. He was indebted to Bec-

chi as a patron and was seeking favors from Becchi’s powerful antiSavonarolan contacts in Rome. Earlier that year the Machiavelli family was engaged in a property dispute with the Pazzi family over land attached to the parish church of Santa Maria di Fagna. Machiavelli appealed for assistance to Becchi’s principal contact in Rome, Cardinal Giovanni Lopez, who ruled in favor of the Machiavelli. With elections in preparation and having already benefited from the patronage of the anti-Savonarolan Becchi-Lopez circle, Machiavelli must have wished also to underscore his understanding not only of the friar’s motives and tactics but of the Savonarolan faction as well, and his ability to articulate that understanding with pithiness and precision. More generally, given the context, he surely also wished to demon-

strate his perspicacity, prescience, and, most important, ability to deconstruct political phenomena into essential components. His statements about Savonarola in the Becchi letter should therefore be interpreted in terms at least as much of a crafted self-image he wished to convey to a particular audience as of a transparent reflection of his thoughts on the friar. The Becchi letter can be read as a literary reflection of Machiavelli’s desire to enter the republican government, just as the Prince and the Memorandum to the Mediceans

are always read as part of his efforts to join the Medicean regime that followed it. If we read Machiavelli’s analysis of Savonarola as an audition for a diplomatic post, as a way of showing Becchi his talent for breaking down skillful rhetoric—and Savonarola was as skilled an orator, if not superior, to any of

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the city’s diplomats—into basic political functions, even the most apparently anti-Savonarolan sentiments become considerably more nuanced. Rather than focusing solely on the image of Savonarola that emerges in the letter, it would be helpful to consider the self-image of Machiavelli that emerges and to consider the function of that image and the role that Savonarola plays in it.

Most scholars do not reflect on the Becchi letter as a self-portrait. For example, Gennaro Sasso and Martelli have both stressed the letter’s sarcasm, and Sasso in particular that Machiavelli wrote in an ironic tone to imply that anyone of relatively common intelligence possessed enough acumen to penetrate the political motives behind Savonarola’s sermons. But given the significance of Becchi’s stature and connections, surely Machiavelli’s goal was not to answer Becchi’s questions with observations that anyone of average intelligence could make but to impress Becchi with keen insight. The point of the letter was to show that few people were capable of reading Savonarola as effectively as Machiavelli. And it was essential for Machiavelli that the task appeared easy, hence the sarcastic remarks about Savonarola’s transparency. In rhetorical terms, the sarcasm did not so much underscore Savonarola’s dishonesty or hypocrisy as Machiavelli’s own casual brilliance as an observer and analyst of politics. In Weinstein’s reading of the Becchi letter, Machiavelli saw Savonarola’s rhetoric as an attempt to mask political impotence.** Over ten years later, of course, Machiavelli described Savonarola as an “unarmed prophet,’ someone defined in a crucial way as lacking coercive power. But Weinstein reads

Machiavelli’s later statements into the Becchi letter, where there is less emphasis on political impotence than on the willingness of Savonarola’s following to embrace conflict. Machiavelli focused on Savonarola’s understanding of prudence as alternating between cautious retreat and outright confrontation. In the Becchi letter, Machiavelli quoted Savonarola: “we ought to preserve His honor with the utmost prudence and regard for the times; and whenever the times call upon us to imperil our lives for Him, to do so; and whenever it is time for a man to go into hiding, to do so... . And so he added we ought to do, and so we have done; therefore, when it came time to rise up against violence, we have done so, as we did on Ascension Day,

because the honor of God and the times required it.”** Alison Brown has persuasively argued that Savonarola rarely expressed the transcendent

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pacificism often attributed to him but frequently called on his supporters to prepare for and embrace conflict and that it was precisely this muscular dimension of Savonarola that impressed Machiavelli.** She has not discussed the Becchi letter, though it reveals that Machiavelli was alert to this dimension of the Savonarolan phenomenon well before he began writing about Moses, Numa, and the political significance of religion. A “professional” contextualization of the letter also helps reconcile contrasting scholarly interpretations. For example, Marcia Colish, Sasso, and Weinstein read the letter as a straightforward indictment of Savonarola as a cynical political operator.** Najemy and Martelli on the other hand acknowledge that Machiavelli respected, even admired, Savonarola’s prudence—that

is, his political flexibility and tactical instincts.” Both judgments stem from Machiavelli’s highly political reading of Savonarola’s sermons. Colish, Weinstein, and Sasso all see Machiavelli’s political reading of Savonarola’s sermons as an indictment of hypocrisy, an implicit accusation that the friar’s priorities were more political than religious. Najemy and Martelli see Machiavelli’s fascination with the subtle political implications of Savonarola’s Old Testament language as an implicit claim that Savonarola was a skilled factional politician. If we remember that Machiavelli was in part communicating his own political skills and credentials to Ricciardo Becchi through the letter, we understand at least in part why Machiavelli’s analysis is relentlessly secular and political. He interprets all of Savonarola’s utterances in

terms of specific Florentine factional objectives because the ambassador Becchi needs a political rather than religious analysis of Savonarola’s sermons. And the rules of rhetorical effectiveness demanded that Savonarola must possess impressive tactical instincts, the better to highlight Machiavelli’s skill at seeing through the smoke and mirrors of Savonarola’s sermons. To conclude from Machiavelli’s tone in this letter—in particular its juxtaposition of irony and bluntness—that he was coolly dismissive of Savon-

arola is to privilege the letter’s rhetorical function at the expense of its content. Machiavelli certainly wished to communicate to Becchi a posture of critical distance from Savonarola, and the letter conveys Machiavelli’s detachment brilliantly, particularly in its provocative judgment of Savonarola’s character and political motivation. The content of the letter, however,

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complicates and contradicts its tone, betraying a far from straightforward fascination with the friar and the Florentine reaction to him.

Few have commented on the extraordinary richness of the letter, the degree to which Savonarola was Machiavelli's first occasion to meditate on the role of religion in public life, the formation of faction, and the power of rhetoric, speech, and culture. Machiavelli examined the relationship between Savonarola’s self-proclaimed powers of prophecy and the unity of his following and hence investigated the implications of prophecy as a political

phenomenon and religion as a source of political authority. Najemy has rightly stressed the recurring fascination in the Machiavellian corpus with Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian appeals to speak to God, which, given the emphases in the Becchi letter, can be read as larger investigations of the Savonarolan moment and its meaning for Florence. The Savonarola of the Becchi letter used biblical authorities to assure his audience that imminent

conflict and persecution would serve only to make the movement stronger and hence used the Bible as a call to arms, only to change tack by urging retreat, again on biblical authorities. As early as 1498, we see reflection on the alternately pacific and martial implications of Christian teaching in a political setting. Machiavelli's analysis of Savonarola’s combative rhetoric, particularly as its target shifted from internal Florentine adversaries to the pope in Rome, reveals the degree to which Savonarola bound his followers together by invoking a sense of embattled crisis. The letter thus also underscores the ideological dimension of factional unity. Most significant, given Machiavelli’s later writings, is the detailed consideration of Savonarolan political prudence. Machiavelli devoted the bulk of the letter to Savonarola’s political tactics, in which Machiavelli detected a complex mix of aggression, caution, foresight, cunning, and outright duplicity. Savonarola defied the pope’s ban on preaching but only after his retreat to the safe haven of San Marco, a relocation Savonarola defended with the realist argument that “when it comes to action, prudence is right-reason.””°

But even while explaining the value of retreat and temporizing, Savonarola continued to reinforce the comparison between himself as Moses and the Florentines as Jews, a rhetorical strategy that Alison Brown has demonstrated was geared around the recognition of the need for force and violence.*” Machiavelli frequently revealed admiration for Savonarola’s audacity: “Now

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that our friar was in his own house, if you had heard with what boldness he began preaching and with how much he continued, it would be an object of no little admiration.”’** Machiavelli also showed how Savonarola thought several steps ahead, integrating the political implications of one sermon with those of the next, always thinking strategically. Machiavelli was clearly struck by Savonarola’s combination of audacity, force, and craft—hence his famous final observation that Savonarola “acts in accordance with the times and colors his lies accordingly.””’

The most ubiquitous piece of evidence invoked to demonstrate Machiavelli’s antipathy toward Savonarola has been that blunt acknowledgment of Savonarola’s “lies” (bugie). But Machiavelli of course had a complex view of the relationship between duplicity and virtue. If we examine the passages from the Discourses that discuss the relationship among religion, deceit, and the origins of states, we hear interesting echoes of the Becchi letter. Weinstein has argued that Machiavelli, in spite of his early dim view of Savonarola, eventually came to see him in admiring terms as a political and religious founder figure. But most of the themes and problems Machiavelli explicitly uses to discuss founder figures in the Prince and the Discourses are implicitly evident in the Becchi letter. The apparent change in Machiavelli’s

thinking that Weinstein discusses, hence, is not a matter of categorical transformation from an early position to a fundamentally dissimilar later one. Rather, Machiavelli’s later judgments are the mature, fully articulated statement of themes that are present in fledgling form in the 1498 letter. In the Discourses 1.11, Machiavelli reflected on the origins of Roman religion and its contribution to Rome's political culture. Numa Pompilius, Romulus’s successor, introduced religion to the Roman people as a means of consolidating in peacetime the benefits of Romulus’s political accomplishments made possible by war: “[Numa], finding a very savage people and wishing to bring it to obey the laws by means of the arts of peace, turned to religion as something altogether necessary if he wished to maintain a wellordered state.”’® In Machiavelli’s estimation, Rome’s power and special destiny owed more to Numa’s introduction of religion than to Romulus’s introduction of arms, for two reasons. First, founder figures can establish institutions with more ambition and certainty amid religious peoples: “where there is religion, arms can be easily introduced, and where there are arms and not religion, the latter can be introduced only with difficulty.” Second,

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Numa’s religion inspired considerable fear—more than the Roman laws established by Romulus. For this reason, Romans were far more reluctant to

break an oath than to break the law, and that reluctance had considerable and frequent political utility.” Machiavelli analyzed Roman religion in terms of its political application and function, just as he analyzed Savonarola’s sermons in the Becchi letter roughly a decade earlier. Throughout his political works, Machiavelli was fascinated by religion as a political phenomenon and always thought about its impact on the political arena. For this reason, it is awkward to conclude, as Sasso, Martelli, and others have done, that Machiavelli’s political reading of Savonarola’s sermons constituted an indictment of Savonarola’s piety. Rather, we see a consistent approach to religious lan-

guage and imagery that Machiavelli first displayed in his reflection on Savonarola.

Machiavelli’s discussion of Numa’s duplicity, its constitutive role in the foundation of Roman religion, and the larger pattern to which it conforms all invoke the Savonarola of the Becchi letter. Savonarola’s context paralleled Numa’s in several ways. Like Numa, Savonarola attempted to impose his own vision on a fledgling regime. An elite oligarchy had expelled the Medici and, whatever vision of Florentine government they had pursued in doing so, had necessarily opened constitutional questions for debate. Savonarola also wanted to establish new ordini. Some were secular and political, like the law of appeal and the Great Council, but most were religious, like his organization of traditional youth groups into dedicated vehicles for the enforcement of his moral agenda, the bonfires of the vanities, and the attacks on gambling, prostitution, and sodomy. Savonarola defended all these new institutions in terms of divine approval and claimed through his status as a prophet to have special communion with God. In particular, Machiavelli's discussion of the generative effects of Numa’s deceit suggests that we should reevaluate the valence of Savonarola’s use of bugie. As Machiavelli saw it, Savonarola lied in his sermons to marshal support and to deploy his followers against his enemies, but it is not clear that Machiavelli criticized him for that weakness. Machiavelli may well have been stressing Savonarola’s skillful compensation for his political weakness— his status as a friar and religious excluded him from posts in the city’s gov-

ernment and he did not command a private army of bravi, the primary

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source of power for earlier factional leaders like Corso Donati. But Machiavelli’s subsequent discussion of Numa, Lycurgus, and Solon makes clear that that vulnerability was not the result of any specific characteristic of the friar himself, but rather was common to many religious reformers. That discussion instead considers lying a necessary, indispensable skill for all those ambitious and audacious enough to attempt to establish new institutions. Note also the dramatic difference in tone between his discussion of Savonarola in this chapter and the Becchi letter. His earlier rhetorical style of distance, certainty, and clarity—treflecting his jobless status and an antiSavonarolan audience—has vanished altogether. Writing in exile to republican politicians cast down from power, Machiavelli spoke in a different voice. Although he remained skeptical of Savonarola’s identity as a prophet, Machiavelli now acknowledged an ambiguity about that question that is absent in the Becchi letter. “The people of Florence do not suppose themselves

either ignorant or rude; nevertheless they were persuaded by Brother Girolamo Savonarola that he spoke with God. I do not intend to decide whether it was true or not, because so great a man ought to be spoken of with reverence.””’

This change in tone applied as much to Machiavelli's estimation of Savonarola’s following as to the friar himself. In the Becchi letter, he implied that only those unable or unwilling to follow Savonarola’s words closely could fail to see the contrast between the ostensible and actual purpose of his rhetoric. In the Discourses, however, Machiavelli restated his own skepticism in a way that showed respect and sympathy for his fellow Florentines’ fascination with Savonarola: “I do say that countless numbers believed him without having seen anything extraordinary to make them believe him, because his life, his teaching, and the affairs he dealt with were enough to make them lend him faith.”’* There is little trace here of the earlier provocative rhetoric—‘“he acts according to the times and colors his lies accordingly’ — composed for Becchi. Machiavelli subsequently acknowledged the complex-

ity of Savonarola’s appeal and tacitly acknowledged that his charisma mattered more than his technical status as a prophet. This acknowledgment further implies Machiavelli's recognition that human rather than prophetic and hence supernatural qualities were sufficient to inspire his fellow Florentines.

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According to him, Rome also owed more to Numa than to Romulus because Numa’s accomplishment was the harder to achieve. Machiavelli’s elaboration on this point returns us implicitly and explicitly to Savonarola, duplicity, and Machiavelli’s early reflections in the Becchi letter. Numa faced a greater challenge than Romulus because he wanted to establish unprecedented institutions in the city. Although he understood their importance, it was not sufficiently self-evident for others to be persuaded on his authority alone. He solved this problem by deceiving the Romans. He suggested—falsely—that he had communicated with a nymph, a supernatural figure, who had outlined to him the new orders he should bring to the Roman people. Machiavelli quickly generalized from Numa to Lycurgus, Solon, and “many others.” Such founder figures all recognized that an individual’s authority and reputation, however great, were inherently inad-

equate as the basis for new laws and institutions and hence that the appearance of divine communication was a fundamental prerequisite for institutional and cultural innovation. “And truly no one who did not have recourse to God ever gave a people unusual laws, because without that they would not be accepted. Because many good things are known to a prudent man that are not in themselves so plainly rational that others can be persuaded of them. Therefore wise men, who wish to remove this difficulty, have recourse to God.”””

Savonarola’s implicit presence in the discussion of Numa and Roman religion becomes explicit by the chapter’s end, where Machiavelli invokes Savonarola as evidence that Florentines are responsive to innovative reformers of institutions—hardly an effective rhetorical move for someone allegedly hostile to the friar. Machiavelli in effect credits Savonarola with having achieved a more difficult task than had Numa. It was easier for Numa to persuade the Romans of the supernatural approval for his plans because “those times were very religious and those men with whom he had to labor were untaught.” As a result, “he found it very easy to carry out his designs, since he was able easily to stamp on them any new form whatever.””®

Machiavelli concluded that anyone attempting to establish new orders will have an easier time of it in remote mountainous areas, where people are uneducated and uncultured, than in cities, where the corrupting effect of culture is concentrated. As Machiavelli put it, “a sculptor will more easily get a beautiful statue out of a rough piece of marble than from one badly

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blocked out by someone else.”’”” Although new institutions are easier to establish among the unlettered, Machiavelli insisted that it always remained a possibility even among the most sophisticated peoples. By way of example, he concluded the chapter on Roman religion with Savonarola, who had convinced the Florentines, “subtle interpreters of all things,” that God spoke to him directly.** The lesson of Savonarola’s success in this regard was optimistic and was one of several moments when Machiavelli implied that the prospects for political renewal were no worse in the present than they had

been in antiquity: “no one should therefore fear that he cannot carry out what has been carried out by others,” a recurring exhortation in Machiavelli’s corpus.”’

There are similar traces of Machiavelli's admiration and discussion of Savonarola’s accomplishment—not the ends pursued but his ability to persuade Florentines to embrace larger ends—in the final chapter of the Prince. On this topic, Weinstein has argued that the Savonarolan episode affected Machiavelli’s general outlook, the nature of the questions he posed, and in some cases the style with which he posed them. In particular, Weinstein stressed “the apocalyptic sense of world-crisis, the consciousness of living on the threshold of a new era, the idea of renewal—together with the problems related to this mode, as for example, the questions of Providence and free will, and of good and evil in human affairs.”*® For Weinstein, Machiavelli used the language of prophecy in direct dialog with Savonarola: on the one hand “no other mode of expression . . . conveyed so well his own passionate desire for his country’s rebirth and his belief in the need for a new order; this much he shared with the Savonarolans”; on the other Machiavelli’s fundamental criticism of Savonarola’s outlook was precisely its prophetic dimension, the privileging of Providence over action and the subordination of human action to it.” Weinstein is correct that Machiavelli was thinking about the Savonarolan example when he wrote that chapter and intended his audience to see that connection, but Weinstein’s sense of Machiavelli’s intention requires reinterpretation. Machiavelli was certainly convinced of the need for a new political order and abhorred the de facto enslavement of the Italian states by foreign powers. Writing in the wake of the republic's collapse and his own arrest and torture, he must have been, as Weinstein suggests, possessed of a passionate desire for political renewal broadly conceived, not only for him-

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self but also for Florence, the Medici, and Italy. And Machiavelli may well have adopted a prophetic tone as an ideal mode of expression to signal the depth of his desire for political renovation. But if Weinstein’s first contention is correct and Machiavelli did so, the second contention—that Machiavelli was at the same time signalling a critique of prophetic politics—seems strained at best because it requires him to speak in a language whose assumptions he rejected. Chapter 26 urged the Medici to introduce new institutions that would enable them to lead a unified pan-Italian army to expel the French and Spanish forces plaguing the peninsula. The chapter should thus be interpreted in tandem with the sixth chapter that discussed institutional innovation and the introduction of new customs. The final chapter spoke in a prophetic voice, explicitly invoked God and church, and implicitly invoked the Savonarolan milieu, and so should also be interpreted in tandem with Machiavelli's earlier analysis of Savonarola in the Becchi letter and his subsequent discussion of Roman religion in the Discourses 1.11. If we consider these passages together, we can see Machiavelli’s increasing appreciation of the role that prophecy plays in state formation and the degree to which Machiavelli’s reflection on Savonarola dictated the language of chapter 26. Machiavelli adopted the language of prophecy in the last chapter of the Prince not to signal his rejection of prophetic assumptions but because it was the only language appropriate for the foundation of a new state. The Becchi letter already displayed a contextually specific appreciation of the link between prophecy, new institutions, and political support—Machiavelli had identified Savonarola’s status as a prophet and his ability to use religion for political purposes as the central feature of the movement's strength. In the sixth chapter of the Prince, we see Machiavelli beginning to generalize from the Florentine context to the larger relationship between prophecy and state

formation. He discussed the considerable obstacles faced by legendary founders of states such as Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. His discussion of their difficulties concluded with his famous contrast between armed

Moses and unarmed Savonarola and the observation that “all armed prophets win, and unarmed ones fail.”’** This crucial observation from chapter 6 is central to Machiavelli’s adoption of prophetic language at the book’s close. The linguistic style and tone of chapter 26 were no less instructional than the chapter's specific political and military stratagems. The Medici should

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establish a new state and expel the barbarians and should follow his implicit advice and do so with religious language and imagery. To some extent, it followed that the Medici should adopt a religious banner simply because the context was propitious—the Medici ruled Florence and Rome and thus had the potential to fuse their territorial expansion with Roman spiritual and ecclesiastical leadership. But Machiavelli’s tone suggested a more universal connection between political renewal and Christian prophetic language. Lest his readers have forgotten earlier lessons, he specifically referred to the sixth chapter and its conclusion that armed prophets always win. Weinstein saw Machiavelli’s conflation in that chapter of the categories of prophet, lawgiver, and innovator as evidence that Machiavelli had begun to see Savonarola in more complex terms, as a founder figure in the mold of Moses, Cyrus, or Theseus. To that conclusion we can add that Machiavelli’s reflection on Savonarola in that chapter led to the prophetic language in the final chapter, to Machiavelli’s adoption of the mode of expression of a proven catalytic figure for the Florentines. He invokes chapter

6 in chapter 26 and deploys the language of prophecy and redemption to underscore that the political renewal of Italy under Medici leadership will require more than military might—the task demands leaders whose power appears to be the agent of divine will. Several years later, in the Discourses I.II, we see the connection between prophecy and political innovation, hinted at in the Becchi letter and implicitly championed in the Prince, finally articulated as an explicitly universal axiom of politics: “And truly no one who did not have recourse to God ever gave a people unusual laws, because without that they would not be accepted.”* Machiavelli generally wrote about Savonarola as a prophet with considerable more sympathy than in his discussions of other Florentine prophets. For example, he concluded a 1513 letter to Francesco Vettori with a detailed summary of the preaching of a self-proclaimed Franciscan prophet. Machiavelli’s assessment of the Franciscan was a study in contrast compared to the Becchi letter. The Franciscan and Savonarola both used prophecy as a means to an end: but for Savonarola it was a way to influence politics around his reform agenda and hence revealed his ambition, while for the Franciscan it was merely a routine attempt to increase his standing as a preacher. Machiavelli singled out Savonarola’s ability to make his sermons seamlessly engage Florentine politics and rally his following, while the Franciscan’s sermon

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was notable only for its incoherence and absurdity. Sasso has characterized Machiavelli’s tone in the Becchi letter as caustically sarcastic, but the Vettori letter of December 1513 is a far better example of that mode of expression. Machiavelli introduced his discussion of the Franciscan with the statement

that Florence was “a magnet for all the impostors of the world” and then proceeded to itemize the sermon’s inane prophetic claims.** He revealed toward the end that he was not providing a firsthand account but a summary of widespread gossip about the sermon. He had not in fact attended the sermon because he did “not observe such practices,” another indication of particular fascination with Savonarola, at least some of whose sermons he did

attend.*” Here we have the open contempt for those duped by the sermon missing in his commentary on Savonarola—the city’s fascination with the Franciscan’s sermon leaves Machiavelli paralyzed with demoralization.*° The prophets and impostors continued to preach, however, prompting Machiavelli’s impatient summation to Vettori in 1514: “There is nothing to tell you from these parts except prophecies and proclamations of calamities; if the prophets are telling lies, may God annihilate them; if they are telling the truth, may He convert it to good.”*’ Contrast these kinds of statements with the discussion of prophecy in the Discourses. We have already investigated the argument of 1.11 that all founders of states require “recourse to God.’** In that chapter, Machiavelli praised Savonarola’s “life, teaching, the affairs he dealt with” but expressed skepticism about Savonarola’s status as a prophet. The ambiguity about Savonarola’s prophetic powers, however, constituted effective proof that Florentines remained responsive to innovative reformers: “I do not intend to decide whether it [that Savonarola spoke to God] was true or not... but Ido say that countless numbers believed him without having seen anything extraordinary to make them believe him.”” But in 156 Machiavelli subsequently argued that all great events were either presaged by signs or predicted by prophets. He cited several examples of signs from antiquity and recent Florentine history—for example lightning striking the Florence cathedral before the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Palazzo della Signoria before the fall of Piero Soderini. But he provided only one example of a prophet—Savonarola—with whom he commenced both the chapter and the list of examples: “What causes it I do not know, but both ancient and modern instances indicate that nothing important ever happens ina city . . . that

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has not been foretold. ... And in order not to go far from home in proving this, everybody knows how much was predicted by Frate Girolamo Savonarola before the coming of King Charles VIII of France into Italy.””° Although he nowhere stated this explicitly, Machiavelli must have writ-

ten about Savonarola in a different mode than he usually deployed while discussing friars and prophets because he respected the degree to which Savonarola harnessed the power of religion in pursuit of political ends. In a sense, Savonarola and the Savonarolan moment in Florence were a republican counterpart to the rule of Cesare Borgia, through whom, among others, Machiavelli hoped to discern the verita effettuale of power. But studying Borgia illuminated one kind of power while studying Savonarola revealed another kind altogether. Machiavelli admired and studied Borgia’s creation

of and deployment of power and his superior understanding of how to maximize one’s effectiveness in the political arena, but the nature of Borgia’s power itself—its source—was the relatively straightforward coercive power of force and arms. Reflection on Savonarola was equally revealing about power, but a more subtle variety better suited to a republican context. Savonarola’s power was rooted in his ability to communicate to Florentines, inspire them, and persuade them that his vision of the city and its politics should be their vision. Studying Borgia’s power shed light on martial power more generally; studying Savonarola’s power shed light on the political application of speech, language, and culture. We see Machiavelli highlighting that dimension of Savonarola’s power in each of his three explicit statements of respect and admiration for the friar. The first adopted a reverential tone in its identification of the roots of Savonarola’s power in words and language. In the First Decennale, he wrote: “I speak of that great Savonarola who, inspired with heavenly vigor, kept you [Florence] closely bound with his words.’ The second, the conclusion to the Discourses 1.11, as already discussed, provides evidence of Machiavelli’s implicit sympathy for the Florentines’ fascination with Savonarola. But consider his wording again as part of a pattern connecting Savonarola’s political power to his learning and sermons: “[The Florentines] were persuaded by Brother Girolamo Savonarola that he spoke with God. I do not intend to decide whether it was true or not, because so great a man ought to be spoken of with reverence. But I do say that countless numbers believed him

without having seen anything extraordinary to make them believe him,

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because his life, his teaching, and the affairs he dealt with were enough to make them lend him faith.”’* Just as new princes attain power through their own virtu rather than inheritance or the force of others’ arms, Savonarola only became a powerful figure in Florence because he persuaded the Florentines that he enjoyed a special relationship with God. In the third statement of admiration, from the Discourses 1.45, Machiavelli again expressed respect for Savonarola’s intellect, this time in terms of its impact on Florentine political institutions: “After 1494 Florence reorganized her government with the aid of Frate Girolamo Savonarola, whose writings show his learning, his prudence, his mental power. Among other enactments to give the citizens security, he got a law passed permitting appeal to the people from the sentences of the Eight and the Signoria in political cases.’ The first and third of the previous examples of Machiavelli’s most blunt statements of admiration also contain his two most frank and explicit condemnations of the friar. Both condemnations refer to a single moment: Savonarola’s conduct during the aftermath of a failed conspiracy in 1497 to restore Piero de’ Medici to power. In the First Decennale, Machiavelli’s praise of Savonarola was immediately followed by an indictment of his impact on Florence: “[ Venice] brought against your walls your mighty exile; from this came burial for five citizens. But that which to many was far more distressing and brought on disunion was the sect under whose command your city lay. I speak of that great Savonarola who, inspired with heavenly vigor, kept you [Florence] closely bound with his words. But many feared to see their country ruined, little by little, under his prophetic teaching; hence no ground for your reunion could be discovered, unless his light divine continued to increase, or unless by a greater fire it was extinguished.”* In the Discourses 1.45, Machiavelli used Savonarola as an example of the lesson that authors of new laws should always abide by them. “Among other enactments to give the citizens security, he got a law passed permitting appeal to the people from the sentences of the Eight and the Signoria in politi-

cal cases. This law he urged a long time and gained with very great difficulty; but when, a short time after its confirmation, five citizens condemned to death by the Signoria on behalf of the government attempted to appeal, they were not permitted to do so; thus the law was not observed. This took away more of the Frate’s influence than any other event. . . . This happening was the more noticed inasmuch as the Frate, in all the sermons he delivered

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after this law was broken, never either condemned those who broke it or excused them; for he was unwilling to condemn their action, which was to his advantage, and excuse it he could not. This conduct, by revealing his ambitious and partisan spirit, took influence away from him and brought him much censure.” Reflecting on the 1497 conspiracy and Savonarola’s role in it—or rather absence of a role—led Machiavelli to conclude that Sa-

vonarola had not only failed to transcend the growing factional acrimony of Florentine politics, but had exacerbated it in ways that led ultimately to his own destruction. But in each expression of that conclusion Machiavelli began with a robust statement of praise for Savonarola’s intellectual talents and political engagement. To understand why, we need first to reflect on the degree to which Machiavelli’s criticism reveals that he interpreted Savonarola as primarily a political rather than religious figure, and what his interpreting Savonarola in this way does not imply. Machiavelli did not condemn Savonarola because he wanted to subordinate Florentine politics to religious ends or because Savonarola championed morality over necessity, or even because Savonarola failed to understand the necessity of force in politics. Most scholars, unlike Machiavelli, interpret Savonarola as primarily a religious figure and hence generally infer Machiavelli’s objections to Savonarola on the basis of Machiavelli’s larger critique of Christianity and the church’s contribution to Italy’s servitude to foreign powers. As a result, texts and passages where Machiavelli attempted to understand the causes of Savonarola’s success and failure—such as the Becchi letter’s analysis of Savonarola’s duplicity or chapter 6 of the Prince on the failure of unarmed prophets—are interpreted as indictments. But if we follow Machiavelli's lead and consider only his specific statements of reproach, we see that his principal objection to Savonarola was political. The friar failed to resolve the city’s increasingly acrimonious factional tensions—for Machiavelli the central problem of Florentine politics. Machiavelli’s criticism of Savonarola evaluated him with exactly the same category of analysis that he used for the Albizzi, Medici, and Soderini regimes. In the short run, those regimes came to power because they were effective party machines but in the long run collapsed or were overturned precisely because their actions were geared to serve the benefit of their own party rather than a more expansive notion of the common good. Savonaro-

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la’s tactical missteps during the conspiracy revealed to the city that he and his followers were exercising power similarly, a revelation that eventually led to Savonarola’s downfall. Machiavelli’s consistent coupling of praise for Savonarola with condemnation of his greatest political mistake suggests, however, that he was reluctant to classify Savonarola with the other party bosses of Florentine history. Except for the Medici, whose status as rulers and patrons implicitly or explicitly informed all Machiavelli’s utterances about them, Savonarola was the only figure from the prior two centuries of Florentine history in whom Machiavelli acknowledged even the potential to initiate a major transformation of political culture. In the last analysis, his commentary on 1497 makes

clear, Savonarola failed to become something greater than a factional leader, just as, for example, Corso Donati, Rinaldo degli Albizzi, or Piero Soderini had also failed. But nothing in Machiavelli’s treatment of those figures suggests that he had had even the dimmest hopes that they might do otherwise. They were revealing only of the limitations of the city’s political culture and tradition, variations on Florentine history's principal theme of shortsightedness and institutional failure. Machiavelli’s treatment of Savonarola on the other hand alternated between recognition of failure and recognition of the friar’s potential to establish a regime aimed at something larger than party advantage. In particular, Machiavelli’s treatment of Savonarola suggested that he admired Savonarola for combining the instincts of both the lion and the fox. In chapter 18 of the Prince, Machiavelli elaborated on the classical trope that effective rulers required the qualities of both man and beast, proposing the lion and the fox as models of force and cunning. A fox-like ruler knows how to pretend, dissemble, and make necessary actions appear intrinsically virtuous.’° As noted, Machiavelli expresses admiration in the First Decennale and the Discourses for Savonarola’s intellect and learning and appreciation in

the Becchi letter of the degree to which Savonarola’s intelligence was not limited to theology but also revealed itself in his political skills. Savonarola used his sermons to rally his party and hence to intervene in Florentine politics. He stressed political prudence, acknowledging in response to a shifting political context the legitimacy of both violent confrontation and tactical retreat. Perhaps most significant, he tailored the content of his sermons to address immediate political problems and thereby buttressed his party’s

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ideology with a religious aura inaccessible to his rivals. In short, he read the Bible politically and tactically, precisely the way Machiavelli in the Discourses 3.30 read the Bible to understand the historical Moses.’’ The interpretation

of Savonarola that is implicit in these details overlaps strikingly with the characterization of the fox in the Prince 18.

The implicit becomes explicit during Machiavelli’s epistolary exchange with Francesco Guicciardini in 1521. While on a mission to Carpi to help the Florentine republic expand its jurisdiction over some Franciscan convents, Machiavelli was assigned the additional task of hiring a Lenten preacher for the city. Writing to Guicciardini, in nearby Modena—he was governor of

Romagna—Machiavelli explained his strategy with typical humor and irreverence: “I was completely absorbed in imagining my style of preacher for Florence. ... Furthermore, they [the Florentines] would like their man to be prudent, honest, and genuine, and I should like to find one who would be madder than Ponzo, wilier than Fra Girolamo, and more hypocritical than Frate Alberto . . . for I believe that the following would be the true way to go to Paradise: learn the way to Hell in order to steer clear of it.”’® Marcia Colish and Weinstein have both argued that this letter to Guicciardini reiterates the Becchi letter’s principal image of Savonarola as a fraud and hypocrite—an odd conclusion, given Machiavelli's specificity. Machiavelli identified one of Savonarola’s principal Franciscan rivals, Domenico da Ponzo, as insane and identified Frate Alberto, not Savonarola, as the hypocrite. Savonarola on the other hand was “versuto”’—cunning, crafty, flexible, or adaptable. Nowhere in Machiavelli’s writings did he denounce that quality. On the contrary, it was one of two crucial qualities always possessed by an ideal ruler. The Guicciardini letter’s vision of Savonarola as a crafty manipulator rather than a fraud or hypocrite was indeed consistent with the Becchi letter, a pithy distillation of the Becchi letter’s analysis of a tactical factional leader who manipulates and fools many but whose stratagems are laid bare by Machiavelli’s gaze. Machiavelli also recognized that Savonarola knew how to deploy the instincts of the lion to frighten the wolves. This point is frequently overlooked, for three reasons. First, much of the scholarship tends to infer Machiavelli’s attitude toward Savonarola from Machiavelli’s larger criticism of Christianity’s praise of pacifism and his frequent contempt for monks and friars. But most of Machiavelli’s writing about Savonarola analyzed him

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primarily as a political rather than religious figure. Second, chapter 6 of the Prince—with its use of Savonarola as an example of the larger thesis that unarmed prophets always fail—tends to attract considerably more scholarly attention than other passages where Machiavelli assesses Savonarola and the question of force differently. Third, Savonarola was indeed versuto, as Machiavelli observed, someone able to champion a theoretical virtue but also to act against it when necessary. Like the prince of chapter 18, who “must have a mind ready to turn in any direction as Fortune’s winds and the variability of affairs require,’ Savonarola often urged peace and unity but also, as Machiavelli observed to Francesco Vettori, regularly declared “peace, peace, there will never be peace.” Unlike the other preachers of repentance Machiavelli regularly mocked, Savonarola used the influence conferred through his sermons to consolidate and strengthen his political following. As Alison Brown has persuasively argued, a significant dimension of that process of consolidation was Savonarola’s frequent deployment of martial rhetoric that sanctified political combat and readied his following for it.°* For example, in his sermons on Ruth and Micah from 1496, he said: “Iam a friar and I never saw arms; but ifI were allowed to, I would show you reasons to prevent you being so afraid.” ® He contrasted Florentine instability with Muslim stability, a virtue they earned by defending “themselves with the sword.”® As Machiavelli explained in the Becchi letter, Savonarola presented himself as the wrathful, vengeful Moses in his sermons on Exodus from March 1498: “Take this stab, Egyptian... and here’s another stab.” He preached against forgiveness of civil offenses, urging instead—again deploying a Mosaic precedent—an unflinching willingness to enforce the death sentence. To those who protested his apparent cruelty, Savonarola replied: “It’s you who are cruel who, for one pathetic man, put at risk the whole city.”®’ These comments seem hardly to fit the imagined reformer whom John Geerken described as someone who: “sought

to deracinate fortitude and strength by totally spiritualizing them... .In place of glory-seeking virtu, physical action, and vengeance, Savonarola sought humility, contemplation, suffering, and patience.” Brown went on to show the impact of “the tough Savonarola” on the development of Machiavelli’s political thought. In particular, she showed how Machiavelli’s two famous comparisons of Savonarola and Moses reflected an image of the friar created by Savonarola himself, who frequently

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identified himself with the martial Moses willing to kill for the common good.” Brown illuminated the way specific themes in Savonarola’s selfpresentation as a reformer in the Mosaic mold—particularly his rhetoric on arms, severe justice, prophecy, and the necessity of divine approval for new laws—affected the general development of Machiavelli’s political thought. But there are yet more precise links between the Savonarolan example, the question of force, and Machiavelli’s vocabulary in the Discourses that

suggest his indebtedness to Savonarola. We see this most clearly in Machiavelli’s discussion of envy in the Discourses 3.30. In other passages he discussed envy in generative terms, as an innate human tendency that inevitably and inexorably led to the formation of factions and political conflict.°° In the Discourses 3.30 he considered envy from a different perspective, as an obstacle to effective action by virtuous citizens. Given human nature,

the wise and ambitious will always face resistance to their plans, however necessary and beneficial to the republic, because of the envy of shortsighted and self-interested citizens. In virtuous regimes, such as the Roman republic, it is possible for wise citizens to extinguish envy in others without recourse to violence. In corrupt cultures, however, no amount of persuasion will convince men to accept higher reputation and status for someone else, even if their obstinacy means the ruin of their country. In such contexts, given the stakes and the intractability of the envious, a wise reformer has no recourse other than to destroy his envious opponents. Machiavelli’s first two examples of this problem were Moses and Savon-

arola. Moses, the successful armed prophet, recognized the solution to the problem of envy and carried it out: “He who reads the Bible intelligently sees that if Moses was to put his laws and regulations into effect, he was forced to kill countless men who, moved by nothing else than envy, were opposed to his plans.” In the 1520s, Machiavelli reiterated the value of the Mosaic example in his discussion of the Ciompi revolt in the Florentine Histories. In the midst of establishing new modes and orders, Michele di Lando, the leader of the fledging revolt, protected himself against envy by binding people to him through the distribution of favors and by constructing a gallows in the public square to instill general fear.°” In Machiavelli’s view, Savonarola understood the problem and its solution with the same clarity as Moses but failed to destroy the envious. Savonarola’s failure, however, was not the result of his disapproval of force or un-

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willingness to encourage conflict but was due to the nature of his following and his lack of formal power: “This necessity was well recognized by Frate Girolamo Savonarola. . . . [He] could not overcome envy because he did not have power enough and because he was not well understood by his followers who did have power. Nevertheless this envy did not continue through his ignorance, for his sermons are full of accusations against ‘the wise men of the world,’ and of invectives against them; so he called those who envied him and opposed his measures.”°° Machiavelli’s language, his reading of Moses, and his awareness of envy as a fundamental problem are all indebted to Savonarola’s commentary on envy. In his analysis of Machiavelli's contextualization of Moses, Geerken considered the sources for Machiavelli’s conviction that Moses’s opponents were primarily motivated by envy. In the absence of any obvious or authori-

tative biblical source—a line in Psalms mentions the presence of envy among Moses’s followers, but Exodus, the principal text, nowhere mentions envy—Geerken deduced Machiavelli’s conviction from Machiavelli’s larger

theoretical assumptions about envy as a major component of human psychology.

But Geerken overlooked a major source with which we are certain Machiavelli was familiar: Savonarola’s sermons on Exodus from March 2 and 3, 1498, which Machiavelli attended and scrutinized in detail at the behest of Becchi. In these sermons, Savonarola likened his followers to an army and identified his opponents as the envious: “I tell you that there are two armies: one of God and one of the Devil. These armies still fight today and in new ways: the army of God fights with faith, orations, and patience. The other fights with anger, hatred, and envy.” Savonarola drew a parallel, rooted in envy, between Egyptian persecution of the Jews and the hostility of his opponents: “I tell you that they [our opponents] have no faith; were there no

punishment by fire, you would see them leap to deny their faith. Those Egyptians also mocked the children of Israel, and as the text says, afflicted them because of envy: Et affligebant illudentes et invidentes eis. Today, our enemies do the same.”””

As Machiavelli later did in the Discourses, Savonarola identified envy as a fundamental element of human nature. Whereas Machiavelli located its ori-

gin in human psychology, Savonarola located its origin in Adam: “The first sin to enter into man... when he was created was pride . . . and the second

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was envy. ”’ From Adam these two sins entered the world, and they gave rise to all other evils. Machiavelli in the Discourses revealed the recurring role envy plays in the history of politics; Savonarola in his Exodus sermons displayed a historical vision of the role of envy in the Christian past: “The death of Christ came about through the envy and pride of the Scribes and Pharisees. One reads also of Abel, who was killed by his brother because of envy of his sacrifice... . Reading about the time of the prophets, you will see that they were persecuted and killed because of envy. The same is true of the time of the martyrs and at the time of the heretics, all the persecutions came from the envy of idolatrous and heretic priests. .. . You ought not to be amazed that we endure every day even great persecutions from evil priests, because they have always been the persecutors of the good.”” Given the parallels between Savonarola’s Exodus sermons and Discourses 3.30, it seems probable that Savonarola not only alerted Machiavelli to the catalytic role of envy in human history but also provided the principal interpretive framework Machiavelli used to analyze the political context that Moses and Savonarola both faced.

Weinstein has observed that Machiavelli’s chapter on envy is yet another example of Machiavelli including Savonarola in a larger analysis of transhistorical figures, suggesting that Machiavelli eventually saw Savonarola as a founder figure rather than a Florentine party boss. Although Weinstein described Machiavelli in this passage as having “a sympathetic understanding of Savonarola’s difficulties and a great toleration for his political methods,” he stressed that “toleration must not be confused with approval, or understanding with liking.”’’”? While this qualification might be true elsewhere in Machiavelli's corpus, it is problematic here. Discourses 3.30 is essentially a detailed elaboration on two earlier statements: that “excellent men in corrupt republics, as the result of envy and other ambitious reasons, are looked on as enemies” (2.22) and that able men, “having wiped out those

who envy them their lofty position ... are powerful, firm, honored, prosperous’ (the Prince, chapter 6).”

The title of 3.30 introduces a universal theme—how any citizen who wishes to convert his influence into some good work must first extinguish envy—and the examples that follow are variations on that theme, implying that Savonarola, at least as he is considered in this chapter, is attempting to make good use of his influence. The same theme follows also from

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Machiavelli’s other examples: Moses, whom Machiavelli again invoked as

a successful armed prophet, and Piero Soderini, the chief official of the republic Machiavelli served. Both Savonarola and Soderini failed to overcome the envious, Savonarola because of context and Soderini because of temperament, hence both were guilty of tactical failures.” But both were champions of the popular republic. There is no textual reason to contradict the interpretation of the logic and structure of this passage as implying that Machiavelli saw Savonarola’s efforts as a buona opera. After all, Machiavelli criticized Soderini’s conduct and outlook on a number of occasions, but no one would suggest that he did not share Soderini’s desire for a popular republic in Florence. In both passages from the Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli was interested in problems that virtuous reformers faced in corrupt republics, and it is difficult to see how his inclusion of Savonarola as an example of their difficulties does not imply that Savonarola was such a virtuous reformer. The Discourses 3.30 reveals a special fascination with Savonarola and implies an intellectual affinity with him. In spite of Machiavelli’s assertion to Francesco Vettori that he had little interest in the city’s prophets, his casual

comment that Savonarola’s “sermons are full of accusations against ‘the wise men of the world’” suggests that he attended them regularly. Mocking the savi was indeed a common theme in Savonarola’s sermons, but— significantly—not the two Machiavelli attended for Becchi. The sermons of March 2 and 3, 1498, totalling 57 pages of text, mention the “philosophers” and “wise men of the world” only once—hardly grounds for a general characterization of Savonarola’s sermons.”° But his writings and sermons, par-

ticularly on Ezekiel and Psalms, certainly did rail against wise men on a regular basis, and Machiavelli's accurate summation suggests greater familiarity with the friar’s thought than mere attendance of the two sermons of March 1498.

Machiavelli’s subsequent statement that Savonarola was misunderstood by his followers further suggests particular attendance at and meditation on his sermons. This remark appears at first rather audacious—Machiavelli in effect claimed better insight into Savonarola’s intentions than Savonarola’s own followers had. He did the same in the Becchi letter, but there he spoke of the friar’s “followers” (seguaci) in general terms. Here Machiavelli refers specifically to the political leadership of the Savonarolan movement, to

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veteran politicians like Paolantonio Soderini and Giovanbattista Ridolfi, and to his own friends and allies, such as Francesco and Niccolo Valori.’” In

the Prince, Machiavelli simply asserted that Savonarola was unarmed and hence was “destroyed amid his institutions while they were still new, as soon as the multitude ceased to believe him.””’ Machiavelli’s later addition that the political leadership of the Savonarolans failed to grasp their leader's

message dramatically alters the emphasis of that more neutral statement from the Prince. First and most significant, this addition shifts the responsibility for the failure of the movement away from Savonarola and onto the shoulders of the piagnoni leadership, who displayed a collective failure of vision. Second, we see that Machiavelli’s sense of Savonarola’s weakness has

little to do with his status as a friar or with the intrinsic qualities of his vision and his message. Third, we see that, in Machiavelli’s view at least, Savonarola shared Machiavelli's recognition of the need for force and the ability and willingness to compel belief when necessary. A complete consideration of the impact of the Savonarolan moment on Machiavelli’s political thought requires clarification of three related issues: the role of the Great Council in Florentine politics, its connection to the Savonarolan movement, and Machiavelli’s sense of the council’s political significance in the 1520s. J. H. Whitfield initially argued that Machiavelli was “an adherent of the Consiglio Grande all his life, and therefore [was] a follower, politically, of Savonarola.”” Whitfield’s provocative summation—

particularly its connotation of discipleship—was effectively refuted by Weinstein, who pointed out that it rested on two faulty assumptions: that Savonarola was the principal author of the reforms that culminated in the establishment of the Great Council and that supporters of the Council were necessarily supporters of the friar. Weinstein’s criticism was based in turn on two articles by Nicolai Rubinstein that demonstrated irrefutably that however much Savonarola may have supported the Great Council, the idea for its creation and the turn away from traditional Florentine republican institutions came from Florentine oligarchs. Rubinstein also emphasized that supporting the Great Council in 1495 did not necessarily imply support for the kind of governo largo popular republicanism so steadfastly championed by Savonarola. Many, Machiavelli and Savonarola included, wished to see the Great Council as the institutional anchor of a popular republic, but many others—particularly those who in-

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troduced the idea of the Council in Florence—conceived of it as the insti-

tutional anchor, like the Great Council of Venice, of an aristocratically controlled oligarchic republic.*° The general consensus is that Machiavelli championed the Great Council for motives that either had little to do with Savonarola or stood in direct contrast to Savonarola’s vision of the Council. Machiavelli’s promotion of the Great Council, however, did have a Sa-

vonarolan dimension, but to see it we need to shift the contextual focus from the 1490s to the 1520s. Scholarship on this question has focused on the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Great Council and Savonarola’s role in it. Rubinstein is certainly correct that during the early tumultuous years of the republic the Council neither was, nor was necessarily perceived as, an essentially Savonarolan institution. But twenty-five years elapsed between the formation of the Council and Machiavelli's composition sometime around 1520 of the principal text confirming his adherence to it, the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. From 1495 to 1512, the Great Council had become

“the hub of the Savonarolan system” and was venerated by the Savonarolans as the movement’s central symbol.” Their veneration was the logical extension and completion of an association with the Council begun by Savonarola himself, who from 1495 to his death in 1498 had routinely claimed that the creation of the Great Council was due principally to his efforts, vision, and spiritual agenda.* Those outside the ranks of the piagnoni saw Savonarola’s relationship to the Great Council in a similar light. In his History of Florence, for example,

Francesco Guicciardini wrote that the leaders of the movement that brought down the friar’s regime in 1498 believed that “with the friar gone, the Great Council would be finished; this is why they so vigorously opposed him, but in this they were deceived.”*’ The Medici had also acknowledged as early as 1512 the degree to which the Great Council had become identified with the piagnoni. On the family’s return to power, they converted the hall of the Great Council into a barracks complete with a tavern, a gambling hall, and a brothel—a public and symbolic statement of spite toward the Savonarolans.™*

The Savonarolans clearly got the message. In 1527, after Savonarolaninspired agitation had led to another expulsion of the Medici and the proclamation of the Third Florentine Republic, the new republicans insisted on both the physical and spiritual cleansing the Hall of the Great Council: “The

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hall being [already] clean and having been purged of every filth, it was none the less [again] purged and expiated by the priests with holy water, according to the holy ceremonies.”” To understand Machiavelli’s invocation of the Council and the role it

plays in his constitutional proposal, we need to consider the Florentine political context in 1520—in particular the escalating tension between the citys Medici rulers and the Savonarolan movement, and Machiavelli’s close ties to many powerful Savonarolan families. In that context, whatever the circumstances of its origin, the Great Council had a clearly Savonarolan cultural resonance.” The deaths of Giuliano de’ Medici in 1516 and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, in 1519, created a crisis for Medici rule in Florence. Leadership of

the family now resided in two ecclesiastics, Pope Leo X and the future Clement VII, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, for whom legitimate heirs were a categorical impossibility. Leo began to address the question of how to sustain Medicean hegemony in the absence of a clear dynastic hierarchy by canvass-

ing opinions from the pro-Medicean Florentine political elite and from Machiavelli—the first stage of the process leading to his appointment as the Medici’s official historian. Compounding the dynastic issue was the increasingly open hostility of the piagnoni, who viewed the succession crisis as incontrovertible evidence that the regime’s days were numbered and therefore as a rallying cry to fulfil Savonarola’s republican prophecies. The same circumstances, therefore, that ushered in the first stages of rapprochement

between Machiavelli and the Medici also ushered in renewed optimism and increased agitation on the part of the city’s Savonarolan opponents of the Medici.*’

In the intense confrontation between Savonarolans and the Medici in the early 1520s, each camp was further divided between martial advocates of outright confrontation and more conciliatory advocates of accommodation. Cardinal Giulio, the de facto ruler during Leo’s pontificate, was for accommodation: he periodically tried to make allies of the Savonarolan leadership and in response to their agitation for a broad-based government periodically suggested that the Medici were considering enlarging the regime. The majority of the Medici leadership, however, wanted confrontation. On Giulio’s departure for Rome following Leo’s death in 1521, they immediately began a campaign of aggressive persecution that led to the arrest, among others, of

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Niccold Valori, Machiavelli’s extended family member, loyal friend, and longtime political ally, and his son Filippo.** In the Savonarolan camp, there

were several collaborators with the Medici, including Niccolo Valori, and advocates of gradual internal political reform.” But just as the majority of the Medici party favored open persecution over reconciliation, the majority of the Savonarolans also favored open confrontation. According to Cerretani, three-quarters of Florence in the early 1520s opposed the Medici government, and their discontent was explosive. In 1520, inspired by a vision of

Savonarola, a friar from the convent of Santo Spirito was arrested for preaching the restoration of the popular government. The following year he instigated a small riot by chanting “popolo e liberta” in the Piazza della Signoria. Shortly thereafter, in response to a rumor that Cardinal Giulio had won the papacy, a larger riot broke out in which an angry mob destroyed

the stores in the Mercato Vecchio in the light of bonfires.’ The extent of anti-Medicean sentiment became yet more clear—dangerously so for Machiavelli—following the discovery in 1522 of a conspiracy to assassinate Cardinal Giulio.”* Machiavelli was indirectly implicated in multiple ways.

The two chief conspirators, Zanobi Buondelmonti and Luigi Alamanni, were both good and well-known friends of Machiavelli. Other conspirators, such as Antonio Brucioli and Diaccettino, were acquaintances of Machiavelli from the gatherings at the Orti Oricellari.”* The plotters intended to restore to power Piero Soderini, Machiavelli’s longtime patron and republican ally. In the trial records from the investigations that followed, Niccold Valori, another well-known loyal ally of Machiavelli, was mentioned several times as a principal conspirator.” The constitutional recommendation commissioned by the Medici sig-

nalled improved prospects for Machiavelli’s relationship with the ruling family. But those hard-won and long-awaited prospects must have been threatened by the perceived hostility of Savonarolan families close to Machiavelli, such as the Valori, and by growing Savonarolan-inspired agitation. Machiavelli composed the Discourse on Florentine Affairs in the midst of

this escalating tension between Savonarolan-inspired republicans and increasingly hard-line Mediceans and must have conceived of the treatise as a solution to it. He specifically invoked the recent conflicts and Cardinal Giulio’s difficulty in containing them: “Consider, then, Your Holiness, first of all, that by holding the city of Florence under these present conditions you

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risk, on the coming of accidents, a thousand dangers; and before they come, Your Holiness has to endure a thousand vexations unbearable by any man. (Of these vexations you will be assured by the Most Reverend Lord Cardinal, since he has been for these past months in Florence.)”** Machiavelli’s contrast between the current context and Cosimo I] Vecchio’s era makes the

point that the conflicts derived from widespread republican preference for the preceding regime: “In the first place, Cosimo’s government had the approval of the people generally, and the present one has their disapproval. The citizens of Cosimo’s time had never experienced in Florence a government that gave greater power to the people; the present citizens have experienced one that they think more just and that pleases them better.””’ The discovery in 1522 of a republican conspiracy organized by Machiavelli’s friends and allies, including Zanobi Buondelmoni, Luigi Alamanni, and Piero Soderini, can only have made those preexisting tensions more severe and urgent. An advocate of conciliation and rapprochement, ever optimistic about a republican solution to the city’s political dilemma, Machiavelli proposed a regime that fused Medicean and Savonarolan agendas. The Discourse on Florentine Affairs was, among other things, an attempt to justify the republican position to the Medici, explain its merits, and ultimately persuade them that their immediate political interests were not only compatible with a republi-

can regime but were best realized by one. At the outset, he ruled out any regime that combined republican and princely qualities as constitutionally defective and hence unstable. Any enduring solution must be “either a true princedom or a true republic.””° His first argument against a princedom hinged on expediency—it was far easier to establish a republic in Florence. “Now as to the princedom, I shall not discuss it in detail, both because of the difficulty of establishing one here and because there are no facilities for doing it... in all cities where the citizens are accustomed to equality, a princedom cannot be set up except with the utmost difficulty ... noble lords of walled towns and boroughs would have to be set up, who in support of the prince

would with their arms and their followers stifle the city and the whole province.”’’ He proposed a republican constitution specifically tailored to ensure that Medici power “may continue great and [Medici allies] may live in security. ’’* In practice, he achieved this by direct Medici control over the

staffing of magistracies and executive councils. While the two remaining

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Medici ecclesiastics lived, they could thus intervene in the republic’s election process whenever necessary and hence the regime would function as a de facto monarchy. However, on their deaths, the internal election process would become autonomous, thereby transforming the regime into a freestanding republic. Machiavelli must have had Savonarolan opposition to the Medici in mind, since he urged them to reopen the hall of the Great Council. He be-

gan by asserting that most of the city desired the return of the Council: “And therefore I judge that you are under the necessity of reopening the Hall of the Council of One Thousand. .. . Without satisfying the generality of citizens, to set up a stable government is always impossible. Never will

the generality of the Florentine citizens be satisfied if the Hall is not reopened.” But the early general remark quickly became more pointed as he revealed a special connection between the Council and opposition to Medici rule: “Your Holiness should realize that whoever plans to take the government from you will plan before everything else on reopening it; therefore it is a good scheme to open it with conditions and methods that are secure, and to take away from anybody who may be your enemy the opportunity for reopening it to your indignation and with the destruction and ruin of your friends.”"°* This was all but a specific reference to the Savonarolan republicans, whose ambition and hostility were both on the rise. By incorporating the Great Council into their regime, the Medici would not only deprive the piagnoni of their central political symbol, they would also provide major incentive for moderate Savonarolans to embrace the new regime. Machiavelli’s conviction that the Medici should reopen the Great Council was all the more loaded and striking given his recommendation that they abolish all other major councils and offices from the recent republican past,

recreating them in new institutional form and with new names. He urged the abolition of the Signoria, the Eight of Pratica, and the Twelve Good Men." He then argued to Leo that such changes were necessary because “when things are not well organized, the less there is left of the old, the less there is left of the bad... . Therefore, I believe it good to get rid of the jumble of councils that have existed for some time in your city . . . it seems to me necessary to abolish the Seventy, the Hundred, and the Council of the People and of the Commune.” Evidently, he considered the Great Council

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well ordered, since it was the only institution that he argued should be renovated rather than abolished and that should retain its original name. Machiavelli’s commentary on the strategic and symbolic power of the

Council and its centrality to any stable Florentine state was implicitly a commentary on the considerable power of Savonarola’s memory as an enduring political force. In the Prince, Machiavelli saw Savonarola in transient terms, as someone “destroyed amid his institutions while they were still new. '”’ But by the 1520s, more than twenty years after Savonarola’s death, we see in Machiavelli’s writing the recognition that the friar’s power and influence remained dominant forces in Florentine politics. Given the connection acknowledged by Mediceans and Savonarolans alike between the Savonarolan movement and the Great Council, Machiavelli’s insistence that the Council be reopened under its original name suggested at the very least

that he could not envision a regime enduring in the face of frateschi Opposition. When we compare the Discourse on Florentine Affairs with Savonarola’s Treatise on the Constitution of the City of Florence, we see some basic compati-

bility in the political outlook of Machiavelli and Savonarola that further accounts for Machiavelli’s insistence on the Great Council."°* The role of the

Council in the two treatises is identical. Both insisted on a broad social composition, made it the key mechanism for the distribution of office, and saw protections against its manipulation and corruption as the fundamental key to a functioning republican regime.” In spite of the alleged populism

of both Savonarola and Machiavelli, however, both limited the popular element to the distribution of office and specifically reserved the highest executive councils to the city’s eldest families. Machiavelli wrote that “some . . . citizens have ambitious spirits and think they deserve to outrank the others; these must be satisfied in organizing a government.”'”® His “arrangement, if it is carefully considered, will be recognized as giving dignity and influence

to the head of the government, for, evidently, weighty men, who have prestige, will always occupy the highest places.”’’’ Savonarola expressed the same conviction in different terms: “The citizens must not be asked to

assemble for every little thing. The priors should address important matters, while minor matters fall to subordinates. The council must, however, preserve always the right to distribute offices and benefices.”’”* Like Machiavelli, Savonarola praised severe justice and respect for the laws as central to

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proper republican culture.’”’ And Savonarola’s principal historical example was the Roman Empire: he argued that to perfect their republic, the Florentines should emulate the ancient Romans’ devotion to the common good, love of one another, and strict and severe justice.”

In a famous comparison, Gennaro Sasso concluded that Machiavelli accepted his times and context while Savonarola revolted against them. But in political terms, Machiavelli throughout his life remained stubbornly disin-

clined to acknowledge the prevailing winds of princely and centralized government in Florence. This chapter has tried to show that at least part of his confidence in the tenacity of the city’s republican convictions stemmed from his awareness of the durability of Savonarola’s message. We see this in Machiavelli’s recurring fascination with Savonarola and the city’s reaction to his mission. Machiavelli certainly did not share Savonarola’s particular fusion of popular republicanism and Christian morality, but they did share other points of view: the sense of living through a moment of transhistorical crisis, political populism, and a common excoriation of Italy’s ruling elites, particularly the papacy. More specifically still, given his later critique of the self-serving ideological hollowness of Florentine political culture in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, Machiavelli must have admired Savonarola’s ability to create and sustain a faction by appealing to a larger, transcendent cultural message. For that reason alone, Savonarola became for Machiavelli a catalyst for sustained reflection on Florence's republican problems. When Machiavelli himself set out to harmonize Medici priorities with

a republican constitution, he placed the Great Council and the piagnoni agenda at the center of his proposal. Looking ahead to the next chapter, we also see, through the full range of Machiavelli's commentary on the Savonarolan experiment, that meditation on the particular problems of Florentine politics gave nuance to Ma-

chiavelli’s political thought. Najemy has made a similar argument about Machiavelli’s understanding of princely power. In 1512-1513, when he composed the Prince, Machiavelli believed in the possibility of a virtuous and heroic individual reformer capable of regenerating the body politic through individual action. In the 1520s, however, when he composed the Florentine

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Histories, he had come to realize that factional leaders, even ones as successful as Lorenzo the Magnificent, given the considerable challenge of preserving consensus, could accomplish little more than managing and sustaining their following. When Machiavelli was thinking about Savonarola in terms of historical comparisons with Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus, Savonarola’s martial shortcomings seemed evident and uncomplicated. But Machiavelli’s commentary became considerably more ambivalent when he

was thinking from a broader historical vantage point about Savonarola’s long-term strengths and weaknesses in their Florentine context, in comparison with Albizzean and Medicean party bosses. While he continued to acknowledge Savonarola’s shortcomings, Machiavelli had come to appreciate several Savonarolan accomplishments of direct relevance for the possibility of an enduring republican regime in Florence.

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2 Roman Doubts

One of the primary reasons that some of the distinctive qualities of Machiavelli’s later republicanism, in particular the activist agenda of the Florentine Histories, have remained obscure is the understandably widespread assumption that Machiavelli sought and found all his republican lessons in ancient Rome. The historical richness, complexity, and depth of his Discourses on Livy, combined with his frequent condemnation of the corrupt present in favor of the martial pagan past, have led many influ-

ential scholars to conclude that he advocated a complete and unqualified return to the principles of Roman republicanism. The few studies that focus on his commentary on the Florentine republican experience generally conclude that it served primarily as a critical pejorative lesson on the consequences of neglecting Roman values. This chapter suggests, however, that Machiavelli had doubts about the

relevance and applicability of the ancient Roman example to Florence’s problems and needs. We see this most forcefully in his Discourse on Florentine

Affairs and his Florentine Histories. But we can also see his doubts in the Dis-

courses on Livy itself.’ It contains unexplained, largely unexamined, and fundamentally irreconcilable contradictions on the subject of citizens and

Roman Doubts

citizenship. The paradoxes of citizenship in the Discourses speak directly to the heart Machiavelli’s political thought and caution against overstressing the Roman underpinning of his republicanism. Simply put, on the surface the Discourses are a commentary on the virtuous citizenry of ancient Rome and an exhortation for the moderns to imitate the ancients, but there are deeper axioms and convictions in the text that deny Rome’s prescriptive value and even the possibility of the virtuous citizen. Understanding why such contradictory statements appear side by side leads to a better way of contextualizing the Discourses in the evolution of Machiavelli’s thought and to recognizing the conceptual novelty of his later republicanism. There is more to this dilemma than an unproblematic instance of his delight in paradox as a rhetorical and explanatory device.* It suggests that the Discourses should not be read as a self-contained and internally coherent summation of his thoughts on republics but as a critical thinking-through and comparison of Livy’s history with his own experiences. Reflection on ancient Rome led Machiavelli to elaborate one variety of republicanism, now famous, in the Discourses, but there are clear signs in that text of doubts and ambiguities about the Roman example. In his later republican writing we see a republicanism built on different foundations from the Discourses’ model, a new approach that addresses directly the contradictions from the Discourses and attempts to correct them. If we cease to read the Discourses as a static blueprint for Machiavelli’s republicanism, we can better perceive a

larger internal debate that led him to growing doubts about the viability of the classical approach to politics.’ The paradox of citizenship in the Discourses points to Machiavelli’s rejection of the assumptions of classical republicanism and marks a crucial and underappreciated transition in his own analysis of power. If we restrict the frame of reference to the Prince and the Discourses, we are confronted by a

classical paradox. If the frame of reference is expanded, however—if we historicize our reading of his corpus, interpret the key texts less in terms of regime preferences and more in terms of an ongoing and adaptive dialog about the structure and exercise of power—we see a broad transformation in his way of thinking about power from an early focus on individuals to a later sociological analysis of power rooted in frank skepticism about the limits and utility of individual action.* His earlier works saw power, politics, and reform in terms of individual action and potential, irrespective of a

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princely or republican context, but by his later works, he had concluded that the effective exercise of power and the requirements of genuinely transfor-

mative political action transcended the capabilities of single individuals, that power operated through larger collective structures and institutions. For this reason, it is problematic to speak of Machiavelli's republicanism or republican theory; we should instead recognize as discrete and conceptually different his earlier Roman and later Florentine republicanisms. This transformation in his thinking about power, although it occurred

independently of the constitutional forms in which power might operate, has direct implications for understanding Machiavelli’s republicanism. The increasing republican tone of much his later writing may have been the product of an ideological preference but was certainly also the result of his growing awareness of the sociological nature of power, rooted in observation of Florentine, not Roman, politics. When imagining how to establish stable political structures, analyzing historical change, and predicting future political change, he increasingly resorted to the vocabulary of collective structures and broad-based institutions of consent and assent, better suited to republics than princely regimes. It is difficult to appreciate the variation in Machiavelli’s republicanism while assuming that the Roman example entirely dominated his imagination. Hence, this chapter is devoted to an explication of those dilemmas of citizenship in the Discourses and to showing how Machiavelli’s entire approach to politics had subtly but significantly changed in his later works. Once one recognizes the significance of the paradoxes of citizenship in the Discourses, however, a number of significant historiographical revisions necessarily follow. The chapter questions two major axioms of the approach to Machiavelli deployed by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, two influential members of a larger “Cambridge School” that shares those axioms.

First, they consistently portray Machiavelli rearticulating and affirming central operating assumptions of the humanist approach to politics, notably in the vocabulary of civic virtue. Second and related to the first, they insist the Discourses, however radical or innovative at times, was essentially consistent with the classical or neo-Roman republican tradition that most humanists championed in one form or another. En route to a larger discussion of Machiavelli's later republicanism, this chapter attempts to show that each of these axioms about Machiavelli is questionable.

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Multiple aspects of the Discourses conflict with the interpretation of Machiavelli as a classical or traditional republican, an articulator of humanist themes. More particularly still, the Discourses pose problems for the related view of

him as a thinker committed to the cherished humanist notion that meaningful political reform can be accomplished through the inculcation of virtue in ruling elites. To appreciate the conflict, we need to consider some paradoxes of citizenship in the Discourses. Skinner and Pocock are undoubtedly expert readers of texts: Machiavelli did indeed make claims in the Discourses that the deep continuity tradi-

tionalists attribute to him. But to conclude from those passages that he offered a programmatic and entirely unqualified variety of republicanism requires ignoring other passages in which he interrogated and subverted his own models—or at the very least, revealed doubts and anxieties about the effectiveness and viability of the Roman example. The history of the Roman republic was teeming with extraordinary individuals, beneficial to the republic and harmful, and while Machiavelli certainly admired these heroic individuals and their contribution to Roman greatness—he devoted much of the third book of the Discourses to particular Roman citizens—he nevertheless expressed recurring and consistent anxieties about the actual impact of the virtuous citizen on the state, the way he will be perceived by his fellow citizens, and the psychological similarity between the capable, ambitious citizen and the aspiring tyrant. These doubts about the possibilities and merits of individual action speak directly to the question of Machiavelli’s continuity with fifteenth-century Italian republicanism. Skinner and Pocock concur that Machiavelli was essentially a humanist, at least to the extent that he believed one could create a strong and stable state by concentrating on inculcating the right character in individual citizens. There are certainly incidental arguments to that effect throughout the Discourses. But there are deeper, more structural arguments in the republicanism of the Discourses that the properly constituted state must endure and succeed in spite of its citizens, not because of them. Machiavelli moved further and further away from the earlier humanist assumptions that institutions can be transformed through the moral reform of individual citizens. To the extent that he spoke directly on this question, he rejected any such possibility.

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Machiavelli’s departure from humanist arguments is in part related to the audiences for whom and context in which Machiavelli and the humanists wrote. The humanists wrote for the Florentine elite; they were the educators of the elite; the implementation and appeal of their intellectual movement hinged on it being embraced and adopted by the elite, for whom its

political message of the virtuous citizen as the beating heart of a strong state was crafted. While Machiavelli also wrote for members of the elite, he was on the whole critical of their effect on Florentine history; the Discourses in particular was occasioned by meditation on the failures of the Florentine republic, not its virtues, and was written for people who no longer counted as real political actors.’ And whereas most humanists embraced a positive view of human nature, Machiavelli saw it as depraved and shortsighted. In 1:3, on the subject of the Tribunes of the People, he wrote: “As is demonstrated by all those who consider the well-ordered state—and history is full of examples—it is necessary for him who lays out a republic and arranges laws in it to presuppose that all men are evil and they will always act with the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have the chance.”® This was the consistent axiom on which Machiavelli constructed the rest of the Discourses. In the same

passage he spelled out the immediate implication of the previous statement: “This thing bears testimony to what I have said above, that men never do anything good except through necessity, but where there is choice and license, everything is quickly filled with confusion and disorder.”’ The certainty of individual selfishness was not only something a lawgiver should bear in mind in republican context—it was equally central to the maintenance of princely governments. Chapter 15 of the Prince observed that princes should not always practice the traditional virtues because, in a world of permanently self-interested citizens, the virtues were an ethical code that invited self-destruction.* Machiavelli went on to argue in chapter 17 that is it better to be feared than loved “because we can say this generally about men: they are ungrateful, fickle, simulators and dissimulators, shirkers of danger, eager for gain . . . love isa held by a chain of duty which, since men are bad, they break at every chance for their own profit, but fear is held by a fear of punishment that never abandons you.”’ Additional examples abound: the conviction of permanent human weakness was central to the

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Florentine Histories, the Tercets on Ambition, and many other works, including of course the Mandrake Root, in which the relentless pursuit of individ-

ual self-interest through systematic deception was the central operative premise. Because men never do good except by necessity, fear becomes the necessary and vital element in the proper configuration of the constituent parts of the city. Here Machiavelli followed Polybius directly in his general analysis of the cycle of constitutions, in which fear is the catalyst for change."° In the Roman case, Machiavelli argued that the tyranny of the Tarquins had the beneficial effect of keeping the nobility humble. Because the nobility feared the Tarquins, they were compelled also to fear the people, who might not take the nobles’ side against the Tarquins if treated badly by the nobles. This was not clear to the people until the expulsion of the Tarquins, after which the nobles no longer felt compelled to respect the people, since they had no natural and powerful ally; the nobles were then free “to spit out against the

people the poison they had kept in their breasts, and injured them in any way they could.” In place of the expelled Tarquins, Machiavelli explained, Rome needed an institution to replace them, some institution for the nobles to fear as much as they had feared the autocratic power of the Tarquins. Hence the creation of the Tribunes of the People, who not only had the power to forbid acts and decrees by noble magistrates but also could not be arrested and had the authority to have anyone put to death who obstructed the proper exercise of their office—in short, officials of whom the Roman nobles had good reason to be frightened.’* Without such fear, they could

always be counted on to rule in the destructive interests of faction and self-interest. Machiavelli revisited this argument in book 3 of the Discourses where he affirms the importance of political renovation, of restoring republics back to

their beginnings. Speaking generally, he declares that this can be accomplished by virtue of either a man or a law. But when he begins to offer historical examples and to speak with precision, it quickly becomes clear that political renovation primarily consists in restoring people’s fear of transgressing the law, and the best and most reliable way to do that is through punish-

ment. Hence, he goes on to praise the effects of “the death of the sons of Brutus, the death of the Ten Citizens, and that of Maelius the corn-merchant.

After the capture of Rome came Manlius Capitolinus’s death, the death of

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Manlius Torquatus’s son, Papirius Cursor’s prosecution of Fabius his master of the horse, the accusation against the Scipios.””” Machiavelli explained in the same chapter that the Medici understood the importance of fear. They and their partisans often remarked that every five years they needed to retake the state or risk losing power. He elaborated on the meaning of ripigliare: as the Mediceans used the term it meant restoring the same sense of terror and fear in the people that the Medici had initially inspired on first seizing the government. “When the memory of such

punishment disappears, men take courage to attempt innovations and to speak evil.”’* Najemy has argued that in this passage Machiavelli is “parody-

ing the concept of cycles,” but given the preceding discussion and Roman examples, nothing about it appears satirical—it is merely an extension of Machiavelli’s frank recognition of the necessity of fear in a well-ordered state.” For an alleged Aristotelian, classical, or neo-Roman republican, there is little trace of the Aristotelian notion of establishing the right education for the city’s elite to ensure that the aristocracy maintains a view of the common good, in whatever manner, form, or variation, however distant. Italian

humanists generally upheld the Aristotelian argument that education in and consideration of the moral virtues would transform citizens into inspired and selfless leaders, a conviction that Machiavelli shared, according to Skinner and Pocock."® Machiavelli did add that Roman citizens benefited

from good education, but his consequent elaboration revealed that he saw education as incidental, a byproduct of the much more substantive and important Roman conflicts, whose origins and features were structural and institutional.” That passage on the utter predictability of human selfishness that opens the Discourses does not just seem to contradict the humanist sense of how to achieve the proper governance of states; it is part of a larger pattern in Machiavelli’s writing and is specifically deployed against the humanists in the Prince, the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories. In chapter 15 of the Prince,

Machiavelli famously argued that apparent virtues are often not real ones and that any man who makes it his business to be good will surely be destroyed among so many who are not good. When he remarks in a discussion of the illusory qualities of the classical cardinal virtues that he will be thought conceited because he departs so strikingly “from the methods of

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others,” he all but explicitly condemns the naiveté and political immaturity of humanist political arguments.” Equally famously, the preface to the Florentine Histories set out Machia-

velli’s objection to the histories of his humanist predecessors Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, their aversion to reflection on Florentine factional strife, and his intent to reroute official historiography in accordance

with his political assumptions rather than those of the humanist chancellors.” One could argue that all of his reservations about humanism and poli-

tics are already implicit in this preface, read properly. He issued another critique later in the Histories in his discussion of the cycle of political affairs and the way philosophy tends to prosper only after excellence in arms. It cannot be a coincidence that this discussion opens the book of the Histories that treats Cosimo de’ Medici’s ascendancy over Florence following his triumph over the Albizzi faction that concluded book 4. Book 5 is the terminus a quo for his history of Florence under the fifteenth-century Medici. It begins with a discussion of the civic dangers of philosophy, what Machiavelli called onesto ozio. “Because after good and well-disciplined armies have brought forth victory, and their victories quiet, the virtue of military courage cannot be corrupted with a more honorable leisure than that of letters;

nor with a greater and more dangerous deception can this laziness enter into well-instituted cities.”*? He followed this statement with praise for the virtues of Cato, who, seeing the Roman youth corrupted by the honorable leisure of the philosophers Diogenes and Carneades, passed a law banning philosophers from Rome. Given Cosimo’s close and public association with Bruni, Ficino, and Poggio, Machiavelli’s discussion of the dangers of philosophy, especially considering its location in the larger narrative of Florentine discord and failure, implied that the political lessons of civic humanism had corrupted the Florentines and thereby helped the Medici dominate the city. We see a similar critique and rejection of the humanist way of thinking in the discussion of imitating the ancients that opens the first two books of the Discourses. Machiavelli was of course fascinated by the ancients and convinced that their experience contained valuable lessons for the present. In that sense, he shared the humanists’ central values. But his discussion of the value of the ancients in the Discourses quickly becomes barbed, targeting the central pieties of humanism. He criticizes those who take great delight in

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reading and hearing about ancient deeds—the humanists—for failing to recognize that ancient actions are replicable.*t The humanists, as he describes them, share his fascination but are more interested in admiring the ancients than imitating them. He hence condemns the incipient historicism of humanist historiography and the degree to which they emphasized an unbridgeable cultural and temporal chasm separating the present from the distant past. On the basis of these recurring operating assumptions, its already diffcult to identify Machiavelli as a proponent of the civic virtue approach to political theory, or at least of that approach as articulated by recent commentators. He can hardly be the chief exemplar, as Skinner would have it, of the view that where the citizenry are “virtuous, the institutions of government are of secondary importance,” since he repeatedly expressed the conviction that the individual is never virtuous and never will be so. Nor can he

be expressing, as Robert Putnam put it, a theory of civic community that depends on the citizenry to display “solidarity, trust, and cooperation,” since these are unlikely qualities in evil political actors and since a community where citizens interacted in terms of solidarity, trust, and cooperation would hardly need laws to instill fear in the same way that tyrants did before the rule of law. The strength and durability of republics cannot be reduced to the “civic virtue” of the citizenry, nor can it be broken down into constituent categories of solidarity, trust, and cooperation, simply because they will never be found.” Machiavelli should not be made to fit the early rhetoricians’ and humanists’ way of thinking about politics, particularly their conviction about the superfluity of institutions where the people are virtuous. He said so many

times. However, if we remain unsatisfied with his own declarations, his distance from that tradition of politics can be inferred directly from the Discourses.

He began the Discourses by identifying those features of the Roman republic that made it great and enabled it to survive, prosper, and expand, and his analysis looked at the role of the laws in restraining the people and obstructing their passions, at institutions whose primary and most important

function was to limit the damage caused by the innate, inevitable, and harmful political instincts of the citizens. This conviction led him to make the argument that so shocked his contemporaries, particularly Guicciardini:

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that the dissension and conflicts between the people and the senate were the key to Rome’s greatness.*” Where most of the Florentine elite lamented the unglorious squabbles of Rome’s internal history, Machiavelli recognized that the byproducts of those conflicts, chronic mutual suspicion and fear, inspired the specific content of the laws he so admired.

Consider the central laws and institutions and the type of citizen and political problems that they imply. Chapter 3 of book 1 asserts the central axiom on which the rest of his discussion builds: “hunger and poverty make

men industrious, and the laws make them good.”** From the outset, it is clear that Machiavelli was thinking about the compulsion of citizens, the prevention of their acting according to their instinct and nature, not of the transformation of their characters from essentially corrupt to essentially virtuous. People do not become good through the laws, or anything else for that matter; they are compelled to be good by being restrained from acting badly, just as they do not become naturally industrious but are compelled to be so by hunger and poverty. Machiavelli explored this basic assumption in several passages. Since men’s “ability appears the more where choice has less power,” a remark that already anticipates its elaboration, it would seem more wise to establish cit-

ies in barren sites, where human industry must compensate for what the environment and nature lack.*? However, he explained, security requires power, and power requires the kind of wealth that only fertile areas can provide, so cities should be founded on fertile sites. The material fact of reasonably easy and affluent living will necessarily—not probably—result in the laziness of its inhabitants, so the city should establish laws that will com-

pel its inhabitants to act in an industrious way, contrary to their natures: “the laws will force on her those necessities which the site does not force on her.”*°

Similarly, the powerful and the wealthy need to be forced to act in the proper way, contrary to their natures. In this case, Machiavelli argued that there should be a brake on their power, which will otherwise always degenerate into irresponsible tyranny. The properly constituted republic needs a system by which the people can publicly bring charges against ambitious and threatening citizens.*’ The elite are always likely to use their influence according to factional interests, and while that basic problem is not likely to change, a system of public charges enables the state to prosper from the

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general culture of suspicion and competition, since it at least has the virtue of being able to monitor itself. The same principle is at work in Machiavelli’s discussion of the dangers of slander and the need for laws that provide harsh punishments for slanderers. Slanders inspire the desire for revenge in the injured, and vengeance requires violence and the private resolution of justice, the stuff of factional discord, and only fear of the legal consequences will prevent people from slandering their rivals.** The value of Roman religion lies precisely in its ability to inspire fear. Since the Romans feared breaking an oath more than breaking the laws, religion and the manipulation of religion helped Roman leaders compel people to carry out actions that they would be unwilling to take by nature and instinct. In 1.13, Machiavelli provided several examples of religion’s power to compel and coerce.” In particular, he discussed the way the Roman nobles manipulated religion to frighten the people into selecting nobles as tribunes. The nobles used the city’s affliction by pestilence and famine as an argument that the people had angered the gods by excluding the nobility from the tribunate: “The result was that the people, terrified by this resort to religion, chose only nobles as tribunes.”’® The nobility again had recourse to religion in their conflict with Terentillus the tribune: “And one of the first defenses used against him was religion, which served them in two ways. As the first, they had the Sibylline books looked at and the response given that because of civil sedition, the city that year was in danger of losing her liberty. Though exposed by the tribunes, this prediction still put so much fear into the breasts of the plebeians that their ardor for following the tribunes was cooled.” Because the Romans had institutions for bringing public charges and punishing slanders, their political life did not suffer from the greatest factional affliction of the city-states of Machiavelli’s time: the introduction of outside forces and arms to help settle factional disputes. But lest there be any doubt as to where to assign blame when one party in a city summoned foreign arms, Machiavelli insisted that one can hardly blame the individuals in question, since all people share the same essential “evil humors” and therefore the same inclination to act in a destructive manner if they are not compelled to do otherwise. “Whenever one sees foreign forces called by one party of men that live in a city, one can be certain her bad constitution

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is the cause, since inside the city’s wall she has no method by which, without unlawful measures, the malignant humors that spring up in men can

find vent.” There is a deep and essentially unresolved conceptual paradox and anxiety at the heart of the Discourses that further distances Machiavelli from the civic virtue construct. He operated for the most part on the assumption that people were wicked, self-interested, and unreliable and therefore that the

wise republic should establish laws and institutions that obstructed such behavior to minimize its bad effects. But he also recognized that virtuous and capable individuals frequently appeared in public life and indeed that no republic could hope to last if it could not periodically rely on individuals of exceptional virtue during moments of crisis and need. Such an observation is by itself relatively unremarkable, but in Machiavelli’s thinking it speaks directly to his deeply rooted suspicion that the vir-

tuous citizen and the aspiring tyrant, if unobstructed by the state, are not different people; they are the same person at different stages of development. The fundamental character traits that make men ambitious and

capable will necessarily also make them arrogant and power-hungry. Obstruct their ambition, and one denies the republic the full benefit of their talents and capability, but acknowledge and permit the full expression of their talents and capability, and one inculcates the hubris that leads to tyranny and the erosion of liberty. Here we have one of the most substantial problems with identifying Machiavelli as a proponent of classical and humanist models of politics: those who followed these models strove to create virtuous citizens, but for Machiavelli, the virtuous citizen was as much a republican problem as he was a solution to problems of corruption. In some respects, it was the job of the state to prevent the full expression of the virtuous citizen's personality. Machiavelli explored this problem in the Florentine Histories’ treatment of Corso Donati, Maso degli Albizzi, and of course Cosimo de’ Medici. In the Discourses, we see this tension in several passages. For example, the well-organized republic should never forgo punishing a citizen who has acted badly, no matter how great and beneficial his otherwise salutary actions for the republic. Machiavelli used the example of Horatius, who performed a great service to the republic by overcoming the Curatii but who also committed the crime of killing his sister, for which he was brought to

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trial for his life. Machiavelli explained that to some it might appear that the republic acted with considerable ingratitude to Horatius, whereas he believed that the fault of the city lay in acquitting him, not bringing him to trial. He concluded: “no well-ordered republic ever cancels the demerits of its citizens with their merits.””’ If a good citizen performs good deeds, he will acquire reputation and will inevitably acquire such “boldness and con-

fidence that without fear of penalty he does some deeds that are not good... [and] will soon become so arrogant that all free government will disappear.’**

The paradox emerged in 1:18, during Machiavelli’s discussion of how to

maintain a free government in a corrupt city. He reasoned that to remain effective the laws had to be changed to adapt to the nature of the people. Laws formed when a people were relatively virtuous would not have the same effectiveness and would not perform the functions they were intended

to perform if the people had become corrupt. He then traced the decline of the Roman people’s virtue and showed how that decline was reflected in their laws. So where originally respect for religion and laws regulating slander and for bringing public charges against the rich were adequate for the needs of the state, over time as the people became more corrupt, and hence needed to be restrained in more ways than the initial laws conceived of, additional restraining laws were passed, regulating adultery, dress, elections, and other activities, in accordance with the gradual corruption of the citizens.” But he concluded that the likelihood of a city actually being able adequately to reform its laws to compensate for deficiencies in the citizenry was “almost impossible,” again for reasons rooted in his sense of human nature. To replace the laws a little at a time, as circumstances dictated, required prudent men “who can see these evils at a great distance,’ and such men were rare; furthermore, it required that the people as a whole displayed vision and flexibility about their laws and traditions, since their assent was necessary. Virtuous individuals may have those traits, but most people are shortsighted, thoughtless, and inflexible, so that method of reform is impossible.*°

The other alternative is to replace all the laws all at once, imposing them on a sluggish, unwilling people. Since the laws themselves are the problem, they can hardly be the conduit of reform, so this solution requires

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a virtuous and ambitious individual to transgress the laws, to attain authority through the unlawful means of arms and violence, and then to reshape the legal structure. We learn from chapters 17 and 18 of book 1, however, that such an outcome is always unlikely. In 1.18, he explains that to “reorganize a city for living under good government assumes a good man, and to become prince of a state by violence assumes an evil man; therefore a good man will seldom attempt to become prince by evil methods, even though his purpose be good; on the other hand a wicked man, when he has become prince, will seldom try to do what is right, for it will never come into his mind to use rightly the authority he has gained quickly.”’’ More generally, Machiavelli concludes chapter 17 by declaring that: “Anyone who tries to bring [the city] back to equality must use entirely extralegal means, such as few can or will use, as elsewhere I show in more detail.”’* The good citizen may desire the ends, the reformation of law for the common good, but will be loathe to adopt the means, the violent seizure of authority; the bad citizen will eagerly embark on the means but will not do so for public ends but to establish tyranny. Machiavelli introduced this basic conceptual dilemma in the psychology of the good and bad citizen and the connection between ambition, capability, and tyranny in a particular consideration of how to reform inadequate laws. But the discussion in 1:18 is merely a variation of a more universal dilemma that is everywhere in the Discourses, an essential paradox in the concept of citizenship: humble people who passively respect the laws make good citizens while ambitious people capable of swift action temporarily make great citizens, but even better tyrants. Greatness for a state can only be attained through the actions of individuals willing to give full expression to their energies, talents, and ambition, but the psychology of such individuals implies egoism, violence, and tyranny.” This is implied in the original act of fratricide that began Roman history. In Livy’s narrative, Romulus and Remus inherited a family curse, “the desire for kingly supremacy,’ which manifested itself soon after their decision to found Rome. They became rivals; ambiguous auguries led the people to divide into two camps, each supporting one of the brothers; and “from a war of words, anger quickly turned them to bloodshed” and the murder of Remus.*’ As sole sovereign, Romulus gave his name to the city. Hence the

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very name of the great republic Rome implies individual action in the form of tyrannical ambition, egoism, and fratricide. Cicero was troubled by the circumstances of Rome’s foundation and condemned the rash and egoistic ambition of Romulus.” It is true that in 1:9,

Machiavelli quarrels with Cicero, excusing Romulus for the murder of Remus, and excusing subsequently the Sabine Titus Tatius, by making the argument that only single individuals can found good states and that Romulus killed his brother not for his own benefit but for the common good.” But throughout the Discourses Machiavelli revisits the tensions and dilemmas implied in that fratricidal moment in ways that suggest a deeper discomfort with the conclusions he has drawn from it about autocratic power and the establishment of republics. In the passages just discussed, Machiavelli laid out the logic and rationale for his conclusion that corruption and decline, given the stuff of humanity, were ubiquitous and inevitable. But we should not be surprised by this conclusion, since it is merely the demonstration of the blunt thesis with which he introduced the entire work. In the early pages of book 1, he surveyed Aristotle’s typology of the six forms of government: the three good models—monarchy, aristocracy, and popular government—and their corrupt counterparts—tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy. The forms of government are highly unstable and easily slide from one to another because their external differences are too subtle for all but the wise to discern, leaving the multi-

tude deceived and unable to comprehend the transformations of their own states. This led Machiavelli to the conclusion that informs so much of

the rest of his analysis: “Hence if a founder of a state organizes one of these three governments in a city, he organizes it there for a short time only, because no precaution can be used to make certain that it will not slip into its contrary, on account of the likeness, in this case, of the virtue and the vice.”* Machiavelli initially applied the problem of the similarity of virtues and vices only to his discussion of the degeneration of constitutional forms. He later revealed, however, that it was a more ubiquitous and universal problem that insinuated itself deep into political life. In 1:33, to demonstrate why

it is best to temporize in the face of a challenge than to attack rashly, he cited the example of Cosimo de’ Medici, the first great architect of the

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Medicean domination of Florence. Cosimo inspired fear in his rivals owing to his exceptional reputation and influence, the product in part of his own talents but also of the lack of perception of the multitude, leading the more perceptive minority unwisely to attack him and ultimately pave the way for his ascension in the city. As the chapter heading makes clear, Cosimo was a political problem, though the vast majority failed to recognize that in him precisely because he displayed the classical virtues: magnanimity, liberality, learning, generosity. The moral of the anecdote is the virtue of temporizing: “I say, then, that since it is difficult to recognize these ills when they rise up (this difficulty being caused by the way these affairs deceive you in the beginning), it is a wiser decision to give them time when they are recognized rather than to oppose them.”** In Skinner’s discussion of this passage, he described Machiavelli as asserting that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance” and that “it is essential in the first place to learn the danger-signals—to recognize the means by

which an individual citizen or a political party may be able to get more power than is safe.”” But Machiavelli in this passage argued something quite different. The moral of the passage is that, given the impossibility of recognizing early dangers, it is always best to temporize than attack rashly. Machiavelli went to some lengths to explain that it is simply not possible for anyone to recognize early danger signals because they are always invisible. The evil of a tyrannical citizen or group does eventually become clear but only after

it is too late and too dangerous to confront it. “Many times... a citizen is allowed to get more power than is safe . . . ; then this mistake is allowed to run on so far that to attempt remedy is more harmful than to let it go on. Moreover, the recognition of these evils when they spring up is more diffcult inasmuch as it appears more natural for people always to approve the beginnings of things ... if in a state a young noble appears who possesses extraordinary ability, all the citizens turn their eyes toward him and agree, without reservation, in honoring him. Hence, if he has a bit of ambition . . . he soon gets to such a place that, if the citizens realize their mistake, they have few methods for putting a stop to the process, and if they try to make use of all those they have, they do nothing else than hasten his rise to power. “° To read this passage as an exhortation to learn to recognize early dangers misses the point entirely.

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Machiavelli returned to this argument on the subject of Medici power in the Florentine Histories. He had Niccolé da Uzzano assert: “We are motivated by the fear that Cosimo wishes to make himself prince of this city. But if we see things this way, others do not... . The things that make us suspect him are these: that he helps everyone with his money, not only individuals, but the government as well, and not merely the Florentines, but their hired military captains, too; that he helps this and that citizen who needs favors

from the magistrates; that through his favor with the common people, he brings this and that friend of his to higher political honors. Thus, it would be necessary to claim that our reasons for driving him out are that he is compassionate, helpful, liberal, and universally loved. . .. And although these are all methods that propel men who aim to establish a principate, nonethe-

less they are not seen as such.”*” As Machiavelli saw it, the virtues themselves are the best mask for deceit and ambition. He revisited the problem of the similarity of virtue and vice in his discussion of Francesco Valori in the Discourses. Valori displayed none of the virtues so shrewdly displayed by Cosimo. He was frankly arrogant and ambitious, and was hence perceived as someone likely to transgress lawful government because of his audacity and hot temper. His rivals began to form a faction to counter his influence; he likewise formed a counterfaction; and the inevitable result was that many citizens were hurt in the ensuing confrontation.** In the 1520s, Machiavelli returned to the problem posed by Valori in the Natures of Florentine Men, subsequently concluding that Valori

was fundamentally misunderstood. His patriotism, though passionate and often arrogant, was sincere. He labored to defend the republic but ultimately was brought down and assassinated because he was wrongly perceived as harboring tyrannical ambitions.” So in the case of Francesco Valori, the people perceived a threat where there was none and acted, creating vicious factional antagonisms. In the case of Cosimo de’ Medici, the people perceived no threat where there was a great one and failed to act. In both cases, the problem was exactly the similarity of the virtues and vices, rendering the majority unable to make meaningful distinctions between good and bad motives, actions, and personalities. If Machiavelli believed, as he seemed to in the Discourses, that the great majority cannot tell virtue from vice, whether assessing constitutional forms

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or individual citizens, how can it be asserted that he advocated in the same text an essentially classical or neo-Roman republicanism of virtue? How can any politics of virtue, for that matter, whether cardinal or Machiavellian, possibly be constructed when few can appreciate the difference between a virtue and a vice?

Beneath the overt statements of praise and admiration, Machiavelli's Discourses displays a recurring tension and doubt about the viability of Roman republicanism. How then do we interpret a republican text that extols the virtues of ancient Rome, analyzes and praises famous Roman individuals, yet also contains a probing critique of the possibilities of individual action? In a political world where the virtues and vices are all but indistinguishable, the virtuous citizen will be perceived as dangerous, creating factional discord, and the aspiring tyrant will be perceived as classically virtuous, creating the conditions for tyranny. When the survival of the republic requires a reformation in the laws, the good will shun the transgressing of public authority for

the common good, leaving the path wide open for the wicked to assume control for themselves, invoking a hollow and deceitful common good. And most citizens, Machiavelli concedes, will not even notice the difference.

The paradox diminishes somewhat if we expand our vision from a narrow focus on the Discourses to include Machiavelli’s later republican writing, the Discourse on Florentine Affairs after the Death of Lorenzo, which exhib-

its a republicanism built from different principles from the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories.’° From the paradoxes of citizenship discussed earlier, it seems clear that Machiavelli was not championing in the Discourses a straightforward revival of Roman republicanism but was thinking critically about its strengths and weaknesses and oscillating between optimism and

pessimism about the possibilities of individual action. He certainly expressed praise for the Roman model, but he also expressed skepticism and doubt, suggesting that his thinking about the nature of republican life had not reached a final resolution. By 1520, when he was commissioned by Leo X to propose a constitutional reform for Florence, his thinking had changed in subtle but substantial ways, revising a number of critical assumptions from the Prince and the Discourses.

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The Discourse on Florentine Affairs is a particularly useful and underused text for understanding Machiavelli’s later republicanism because it is thoroughly prescriptive. It is less problematic to make assumptions about how

he felt a republic should be constructed from a text commissioned by the very powers about to undertake the constitutional rearrangement of Florence; and he had good reason to believe, more at this moment than at any other period of his life, that the Medici were willing and prepared to listen to him. Najemy discussed Machiavelli's historical writings in terms of a broad arc in which an initial early interest in Roman history was slowly but surely superseded by an interest in Florentine history—and this, of course, had to be the case, since Machiavelli was at the same time slowly but surely returning to Florentine public life in his capacity as the official historiographer of the city.”’ Whereas the Discourses grew out of the discussions at the Orti Oricellari and was dedicated to former politicians cast down from influence and public power, the Discourses on Florentine Affairs grew out of Machiavelli's long-sought reconciliation with the Medici and his return to Florentine political life.* And whereas the Discourses blended theory with practice, discussion of how things ought to be compared with how they are, the Discourse on Florentine Affairs spoke directly to the world as it was, or at least to the world as Machiavelli saw it.

The following analysis is indebted to Najemy’s insights about the trans-

formation in Machiavelli’s thinking about the nature and structure of princely power. From an analysis of Machiavelli’s thoughts about the Medici, Najemy argued that Machiavelli's treatment of the family in the Florentine Histories represented his final act of “self-liberation from the myths of the Prince.’ In the Prince, the earliest of Machiavelli’s political works (1513), he

saw princely power in terms of virtually unbounded potential: a prince of sufficient sagacity and virtu could become a transhistorical reformer and redeemer of states, a lawgiver in the mold of Solon, Theseus, or Romulus. According to Najemy, already in the Discourses, Machiavelli’s fascination with power began to shift from the individual power of the prince to more collective structures and institutions, though clear traces of the princeredeemer figure remained.’* But by the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli’s thinking about the rise of the Medici, the nature of their power, and the scope of action available to them suggested to Najemy that Machiavelli had deconstructed the figure of prince-redeemer considerably further. Even the

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most virtuoso, charismatic leader of the fifteenth-century Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, was as much a prisoner of the factional system through which he operated as he was its maestro. By the 1520s, Machiavelli saw power

as a more subtle and difficult problem, “a complex network of factions and competing ambitions, of consensus and power,” in which “the prince could only maintain the system, not change it.” He concluded that the “lesson of Florentine history seemed to be that one man can actually do very little unless aided by others and the times.” This chapter’s interpretation of the Discourses shows that Machiavelli’s thinking about the role and nature of the citizen underwent a similar transformation. His increased awareness of power as a broad social phenomenon, something that necessarily had to operate through factions and fragile consensus, and something that constrained as much as it empowered applied just as much to citizens and clients of factions as to princes and heads of factions. Just as the Discourses was the moment of transformation in Machiavelli’s thinking about princes, this work was the moment of transformation in his thinking about citizenship. If we see the Discourses as part of an evolving understanding of power, we begin to see why this work contains not only notable exaltations of and admiration for heroic individual citizens of the Roman republic such as Bru-

tus, Camillus, and Fabius Maximus but also structural arguments about human nature and passion that deconstruct the ancient narratives of virtuous citizenship and expose them as myths. Machiavelli cast his republican template for remodeling the Florentine

government less in the classical vocabulary of individuals and virtue, whether princely or republican, and more in terms of institutions and collective structures of power that transcended any one individual’s impact or influence.’® The Medici commissioned the Discourse on Florentine Affairs and

the Florentine Histories in the same year (1520), and both texts suggest he had

worked through the limitations of constructing a political solution to society problems by considering the needs and habits of individuals, whether illustrious members of a powerful family or rank-and-file republican citizens. The Discourse on Florentine Affairs distributed power through complex congeries of social groups, sought to distribute authority as broadly as possible, and systematically diminished the significance of individual offices,

rather than collective councils—which suggests that Machiavelli had not

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forgotten his implicit argument in the Discourses that when power operates through individuals the result will always be bad, whether innately or because of perception. If we accept the standard reading of the Discourses, that for Machiavelli the “exhilarating hope . . . is that if we can find the cause of Rome’s success, we can repeat it,” we face an impossible question when we come to his republican blueprint for Florence: why is there not one single reference to Rome, to Livy, toa Roman statesman, or to any Roman example whatsoever?’’ We

need not infer his attempt to think beyond the Roman model, since he tells us directly of his intention. He begins by declaring the novelty of his proposal: the times require that new types of government must be considered.”° It soon becomes clear that by “new” he means not only new to Florence but new to his entire way of thinking. By 1520 Machiavelli has no intention of attempting or even desiring to imitate the Roman model. He does not invoke it, does not defend his proposal by establishing Roman precedent, and abandons many of his own arguments from the Discourses. He recommended the wholesale abolition of all major institutions and councils of the republican tradition: the Signoria, the Otto di Pratica, the Dodici Buonuomini, the councils of the seventy, hundred, people, and commune. In their place he suggested a hierarchy of interdependent councils, each the exclusive voice and expression of the three types of citizen: the aristocratic elite, the middle ranks, and the people. From the small but powerful circle of elite families a committee of sixty-five was to be elected for life and assume the responsibilities of the abolished Signoria. From the larger circle of middling families a committee of two hundred was to be elected for life and will assume the responsibilities of the abolished councils. From the people a committee of ideally one thousand, but at least six hundred, would reassume the functions of the Great Council. They would elect candidates to all the offices of the republic, except the members of the Sixty-Five and Two Hundred. Thirty citizens from the Sixty-Five and Two Hundred would form a court of appeal. Four rotational provosts would be chosen, either by the Medici or by the council, from the sixteen Standard-Bearers of the Com-

panies of the People; none of these provosts could be selected from the Sixty-Five, and their tenure would be restricted to one month to help distribute the office more widely through the city. Enactments of the councils of Sixty-Five and Two Hundred would require the presence of two provosts

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to be valid; not only would their presence during deliberation be required but also they would have the right to veto and appeal the legislation.” Maurizio Viroli and Gisela Bock, two of the few scholars associated with the “Cambridge School” who discuss this text, have concluded that Machiavelli is arguing for civic equality and equal access to political office. Viroli wrote: “Machiavelli's message is unequivocal: if a vivero politico is to be preserved, the highest magistracies must be open to the best citizens. The example to be followed once again is that of the Roman republic.”®” And Bock concurred: Machiavelli's equality is “legal and political, meaning equality before the law and equal access to office.”® Viroli makes explicit the traditional elements in Machiavelli’s proposal: in “connecting politico with civic equality, [Machiavelli] followed a convention of the republican political language of his time and restored a principle that Cicero and Livy recommended

as the necessary foundation of the respublica,” reiterating the argument of “republican writers and their humanist disciples” that the republic should allow for “equal access to the highest offices on the basis of virtue.” None of these statements can be substantiated by the text. Nowhere did Machiavelli discuss access to office on the basis of virtue, nor that there should be equality of access, and he certainly did not make any statement to the effect that the highest offices should go to the “best citizens.” In spite of the nominal equality of citizens that prevailed in Florence, Machiavelli explained that “nonetheless some of her citizens have ambitious spirits and think they deserve to outrank the others; these must be satisfied in organizing a republic’—hardly a ringing endorsement of the “best citizens.”°’ He describes such citizens as “important, influential, weighty,’ but nowhere is there a sense of a natural elite of exceptional virtue—merely a traditional aristocracy with traditionally egocentric views about their own significance and degree of entitlement. They must be placated, neither because they are virtuous nor because their service to the state is any better than that of the lower citizens but because their wealth and influence make them dangerous when discontent. To placate them, Machiavelli has proposed a model of government that strictly regulates who has access to office on the basis of class and social position. The elite exclusively dominate the top executive councils; the middle ranks exclusively control the legislative councils; and the people control the Great Council that appoints the minor magistracies. Machiavelli advocated controlled and regulated access to office, but there is

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not the slightest trace of an argument that there should be equal access to office.

The system of interlocking councils and ranks that Machiavelli proposed reveals that his thinking about the nature of liberty had changed from his earlier works—notably the complete disappearance of any notion of negative liberty. In central passages of the Prince and the Discourses, he attributed to the majority an essentially negative view of liberty. In political terms, the people merely wish not to be oppressed and in economic terms, they wish to live in prosperity and security. Skinner’s reading of the republicanism of the Discourses persuasively showed that the text fused the negative and positive conceptions of liberty.°* At heart, Machiavelli’s view of liberty was negative, defined quite explicitly as freedom from external constraint. Machiavelli went on to reason that one would always remain a slave if one had to depend on others for that freedom, that if one enjoyed freedom

from constraint but was not involved in the state that granted it, one enjoyed a freedom that was transient and accidental rather than structural and permanent. So one needed an instrumental sense of positive liberty, an extrinsic virtue that guaranteed the intrinsic virtue of negative liberty—hence the necessity of participating directly in the common enterprise of government. And Machiavelli's combination of the two conceptions of liberty was the primary reason Skinner situated him squarely in the neo-Roman camp.” By 1520, Machiavelli seemed to have lost confidence in that earlier view of the people as primarily satisfied by negative liberty. There are no statements to that effect in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, as we find in the Prince

and the Discourses, nor are there any arguments implicitly built on such a view of the people. To the contrary, he repeatedly and explicitly warned that the people can only be satisfied by giving them an outlet in the government for the expression of their political ambitions and identity. In this treatise, he has turned much more sharply toward an Aristotelian politics of common goals and purposes, in this case defined as the collective political self-expression of the entire polis.°°

He began his analysis by critiquing the failings of the Albizzean, fifteenth-century Medicean, and Soderinian regimes. Each failed to recognize the basic insight at the core of Machiavelli’s solution: that political im-

pulses are universal and inescapable and that any regime that hopes to last must provide for the political engagement of all its citizens. Having

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discussed how to satisfy and incorporate harmoniously the most important citizens and those in the middle, Machiavelli discussed the third rank, the general citizenry: “It is now left to satisfy the third and final class of men, which is the whole general body of citizens, who will never be satisfied (and he who

believes differently is not wise) if their power is not restored or if they do not have

a promise that it will be restored,’ and again, “without satisfying the generality of the citizens, to set up a stable government is always impossible.’ °” He then proceeded to clarify that “satisfaction” implies action and participation for its own sake in the deliberations of government.** As Machiavelli put it: “We do not see also how the generality of the citizens can be other than satisfied, seeing that part of the elections have already been made [for them] and the others seem as though little by little they would fall into their hands.”® In Machiavelli’s later thinking, the people have become irreducibly political.

The shift in his thinking about liberty and citizenship can be detected also by the omission of any reference whatsoever to economic prosperity. Throughout the Prince and the Discourses, he often returned to the connection between stable government and material prosperity. In both texts, he was led to such statements by his conviction that the generality of the citizens wish merely not to be oppressed, to be free to enjoy the fruits of their labor securely. In short, they wish to enjoy a negative variety of liberty, understood by Machiavelli in distinctly material terms, hence the emphasis on prosperity. Nowhere in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs did he warn the Medici against disrupting trade and levying extraordinary taxation, nor did he exhort them to concentrate on rebuilding the Florentine economy that had been stifled during the depredations of war and foreign invasion. He thought the surest route to building allies was entirely located in formal outlets for the people's political identities. He introduced a number of crucial variations from the republicanism of the Discourses. He not only made in effect a formal case for the legitimacy of

political innovation, but he also abandoned an earlier argument from the Discourses. He initially argued that anyone intent on renovating the govern-

ment of a city to make it satisfactory to all should maintain at least the shadow of the old structures and political forms: “you ought to strive to have these upsetting changes retain as much of the old as is possible, and if the magistrates are different in number and authority and term from the old

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ones, they should at least keep their names. And this, as I have said, he should

observe who intends to organize a constitutional government, whether of the type of a republic or of a kingdom. But he who intends to set up an absolute power, such as historians call a tyranny, ought to renew everything.””° Machiavelli advocated a self-governing republic, ultimately devoid of any Medici presence, yet he advocated the renewal of all but one council. He urged the Medici to reject the city’s defective traditions and establish a pure republic, but his procedures, reforms, and names were explicitly and inten-

tionally different. It now appears that to his mind reform was the best approach. He has also embraced in his treatise a considerably more Venetian style

of mechanized virtue, rooted in elaborately balanced and interlocking councils. For the first time, he has acknowledged and accepted the legitimate and influential institutional presence of the aristocracy and given them top-tier posts for life, much like the Venetian republic. His own discussion of the merits of his model assured Leo that it would operate independently of a director and hence that Leo “need keep only half an eye turned on it.”” The reliability of the system is institutional and procedural, not personal—reminiscent again of the Venetian model. His increased awareness of the broad manifestation of power and the complex challenge of incorporating the entire citizenry led him to a major revision in his social analysis of the state. In the Prince and the Discourses, he often observed that every state, whether princely or republican, consisted of

two parts: the nobility and the people. By 1520, he had introduced a third category of analysis: the middle ranks, a class with their own sense of identity, solidarity, and interests.’ He concluded: “Those who organize a republic ought to provide for the three different sorts of men who exist in all cities, namely, the most important, those in the middle, and the lowest.’” The Roman republic may have prospered from the tumults between the plebs and the nobility, but that can hardly be a prescription for modern times, Machiavelli must have realized, since the social makeup of city-states had become more complex. In Najemy’s analysis of the Florentine Histories, he showed that Machiavelli no longer saw the figure of the prince as existing outside the republic and its problems. Rather than being the solution to a republic’s problems, as the prince was presented in two early political works, “the prince was now

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seen [by Machiavelli] as its product and ultimate expression.””* Machiavelli’s

appreciation of the ubiquity of factions and the difficulty of managing them, let alone transcending them, led him to make several important distinctions regarding the practical operation of power in princely and republican regimes. We see in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs a similar collapsing of the conceptual distinction between the aristocracy and the people. In the Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli characterized the nobility as having a latent desire to rule and to dominate others, while the people were characterized as having merely the latent desire not to be oppressed. Put in slightly different vocabulary, the nobility saw their freedom in terms of Aristotelian positive liberty, of active participation in the government and its laws. For what does lording it over the people convey to the nobles other than their identity as active participants in the state and confirmation of the act of ruling? The people saw their freedom as essentially negative: their political activity was limited to finding ways to offset the nobility’s power over them. This view of the contrasting nature of nobles and people lay at the heart of a number of

arguments from the Discourses, most famously the argument that the people are better guardians of liberty, since “those should be put on guard over a thing who are least greedy to take possession of it.”” But he subsequently saw the people and the nobility equally in terms of positive liberty: their desires are equally political, the problems they pose are identical, and the solutions are identical—realizing a form of government that gives both of them their voices and roles in the common enterprise of governing. The safeguard of liberty is the dispersal of authority equally throughout multiple and mutually interdependent councils who each reflect the three broad social groupings of the city.

Before we turn to Machiavelli’s Florentine writings, several conclusions are worth repeating about his Roman and humanist allegiances. The republicanism of the Discourses did not always display compatibility with earlier humanist arguments about individuals, liberty, and virtue. Machiavelli reiterated assertions about human wickedness and fallibility with which he distanced himself from his humanist predecessors. Nor was his

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departure from “the methods of others,” as he put it, a question of minor revisions in the midst of much continuity. He shared few of the political assumptions of Renaissance humanists. He implied as much frequently in his writing, and his rejection of the civic virtue construct of republicanism is at the heart of the Discourses.

Machiavelli was clearly fascinated by the Roman republic, and he equally clearly believed that the causes of its success merited the deepest reflection and held significant lessons for the present. However, he was at the same time critically interrogating the ancient Roman example, deconstructing Livy’s narratives of heroism in light of his sense of human nature and the individual’s inability to transcend selfishness. Throughout the text, he included a number of insights and qualifications of his own that all suggest a deeper awareness of Rome as a collection of myths—inspiring tales no doubt but not a procedural blueprint for a republic that actually compensates for the problems that individuals inevitably create in the political arena. To read his celebration of Rome while glossing over his interrogation is to misread him. Nor was Machiavelli’s republicanism static; it changed over time.” He outlined one way of thinking in the Discourses, but in that text he revealed doubts that suggest he was still analyzing, considering, and revising his fundamental convictions. By the time he composed the Florentine Histories and the Discourse on Florentine Affairs he had altered his earlier analysis in notable

ways. In the 1520s he began to analyze power in terms of social groups and

structures of power, whether rooted in class, rank, or faction. He saw a broader range of social groupings in the polis than he had in the Prince and the Discourses, introducing the middle ranks as a mediating group between the aristocracy and the people. He came noticeably closer to the Venetian model of republicanism, revising earlier egalitarian arguments, instead arguing that each group should have its place and stake in the regime, but distributed by rank and influence, and elaborating a theory of mechanized virtue. More clearly than in any other text, he situated the regime’s power in a series of broadly representative interlocking councils and offices that dispersed authority outside the reach of any single individual. By the 1520s Machiavelli saw politics in terms of wider, and in some sense more predictable, social phenomena. In place of fortune limiting the individual, he now saw the individual as constrained by the broad social

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underpinnings of power. For this reason, his later writings concentrated more on collective structures of power, on elaborate constitutional mechanisms to create stability. In this sense, his republicanism was not the result of a straightforward Aristotelian notion of the good life or based on a vision of truly human ends and purposes for the individual. His later political writing, at least, seems to have grown out of a pessimistic view of individual potential that sought political stability in collective structures intended to

limit the impact of any individual action—and such structures happen to suit republics best. Perhaps most important, Machiavelli abandoned altogether his earlier favourable notion of the moderate political ambitions and collective wisdom of the people. His earlier positive view was a central structural axiom

on which many, if not most, of the arguments in the Prince and the Discourses rested. He first revealed his new perspective in the relatively brief Discourses on Florentine Affairs. But as he began to compose the Florentine Histories and to narrate the city’s chief political developments from its emer-

gence as an independent commune to the present, he expanded the schematic commentary of the Discourse on Florentine Affairs into a complex and sustained deconstruction of any meaningful distinction between the nobles and the people.

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3

Nobles and Noble Culture in the Florentine Histories

Whatever contradictions or apparent incongruities may exist between the Prince and the Discourses, these two texts share an identi-

cal vision of the contrasting nature of the people and the nobles. An axiomatic contrast between the immoderation of elites and the moderation of the

people underpins many of the most important arguments in these early works of political thought. For that reason, the similarities between those two texts—for example, the recurring argument, whether for a prince or a republic, that it is necessary to ally with the people to constrain elites—tend to occur in passages in which Machiavelli discusses politics as a function of competing and inherently antagonistic social groups. To gauge to what extent his thought had changed when he returned to

Florentine political life in the 1520s, it therefore seems apt to look at his treatment of Florentine social groups in his later writing and to consider the political lessons he derived from them. We continue to see in the Florentine Histories his instinct to interpret political life as a conflict between the people and the powerful few. And in many passages we see that he portrayed the Florentine nobles and people as consistent with the general patterns evident in his early writings. In most of book 2 and elsewhere, the Florentine elite,

Nobles and Noble Culture

whether the thirteenth-century warrior caste or the banking and guild elite who replaced it, transgress the laws, abuse the people, and vie for exclusive control of the government. In most of Machiavelli’s account of the early constitutional innovations of the commune, such as the Ordinances of Justice and the establishment of the standard-bearer of justice and the captain of the People, the aggrieved and injured people created these new offices to constrain the lawlessness of the city’s elite. The first sentence of book 3 certainly seems to suggest substantial continuity with his earlier vision: “The serious and natural enmities between the people and the nobles... [are] caused by the latter’s wish to rule and the former’s not to obey.”’ This chapter is the first of two, however, to argue that Machiavelli’s reflection on Florentine history caused him to reassess his convictions about both groups. This chapter focuses specifically on his treatment of the Florentine nobles and argues that during the composition of the Florentine Histories he had begun to equate the loss of Florentine noble culture with the city’s slavery to foreign powers. At first glance, given how thoroughly he narrates the nobles’ obnoxious conduct, such an argument may appear difficult. But Machiavelli directly and indirectly linked Florence’s early admirable achievements in large part to the city’s nobility and concluded that their destruction at the hands of the people, however justified, paved the way for the city’s eventual servitude. Further, he suggested at the conclusion of book 1 that the process by which the Florentine people eradicated their nobility was in fact part of a larger pattern throughout central and northern Italy, hence linking the conditions of Florence’s servitude with those of Italy itself. To appreciate fully the significance of Machiavelli’s commentary on the Florentine nobles and people, however, we need to begin by revisiting his more famous commentary on the two social groups in his early writings the Prince and the Discourses on Livy. He placed a clear, consistent, and fundamentally psychological contrast between elite culture and popular culture at the heart of the major arguments in these two works. He first laid out the essential axiom in the ninth chapter of the Prince, where he declared that “the people desire not to be bossed and oppressed by the rich; the rich desire to boss and oppress the people.”’ Those permanent, structural tensions always result in one of three outcomes: the civil princedom, liberty, or license. He omitted discussion in the Prince of contexts that produce liberty

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or license and focused instead on the ways the civil princedom arises as a byproduct of the permanent, structural tension between the two classes. If the people begin to suspect that they cannot withstand on their own the tyrannical ambitions of the nobles, they prop up one man and endow him with princely power so that he might protect them. If the people manage to resist the machinations of the nobles, the frustrated elite make one of their own a prince so that they can satisfy their immoderate desires under the cover of his power.

Machiavelli’s thinking remained unchanged when he turned several years later to writing the Discourses. In 1.5 he surveyed ancient and modern republics—Sparta, ancient Rome, and Venice—and divided their citizenry into two groups: the nobles and the people. In all of these republics, he saw an essential psychological continuity in each group's political objectives.

“And without doubt, if one will look at the purpose of the nobles and of those who are not noble, there will be seen in the former great longing to rule, and in the latter merely longing not to be ruled.”* In 1.5 he illustrated in

detail the second (liberty) of the three outcomes of the tension between people and nobles identified in the ninth chapter of the Prince. (The third outcome, license, he only began to address in detail in the Florentine Histories.) He here made the famous assertion that the class conflict between nobles and people in Rome resulted not, as in other not-yet-identified cities, in exiles, violence, and assaults on the common good but in institutions and laws that promoted and protected liberty for all. To demonstrate the contemporary relevance of his two structural insights into nobles and people, Machiavelli deployed them to explain recent events in chapter 24 of the Prince, “Why Italian Princes Have Lost Their States.” All the deposed princes of Italy shared one common failing: their failure to build their power on the basis of the force of their own arms, relying instead on fickle and worthless mercenaries. But Machiavelli further explained that a deeper problem lay lurking beneath the obvious military issue: a collective failure to appreciate the proper relationship between princes,

nobility, and people. Some princes failed to satisfy the people and lost their states as a result; others, even those who managed to satisfy the people, failed to contain the ambition of their nobles and lost their states as a result: “And if we consider those rulers who in Italy have lost their positions in our times, as the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan, and others, we find on their

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part, first, a common failure in their armies. .. . Then we see that some of them either suffered hostility from the people or, if the people were friendly to them, did not know how to secure themselves against the rich.” Machiavelli's conviction about the differing innate desires of peoples and nobles accounted for the robustly antielite perspective in his early political writing. The noble thirst for power, whether in a monarchy or a republic, is a source of destabilizing conflict and violence. In republics, nobles promote factionalism and division. Poor examples of the Aristotelian definition of a citizen as one who alternately rules and is ruled, nobles’ immoderate desire to rule over others causes them to use their greater wealth and greater possessions to cause revolutions and foment discord.°®

In monarchies and princedoms, nobles are also eager to conspire and reluctant to serve. Princes whose rise to power relied on noble rather than popular support can maintain their position only with difficulty, since the prince “is surrounded by many who think themselves his equals, and for this reason he cannot command them or manage them at his will.’” Since the nobles wish to dominate, the prince can only satisfy their desires at the cost of great harm to the rest of the population. But reining them in alienates them and makes it likely that they will use their wealth, standing, and influence to conspire against him. Hence, all states with warrior aristocracies that wish to remain strong require a means to temper the turbulence that their way of life causes. As a contemporary example, Machiavelli pointed to the French parlements. In the Prince, he asserted that the function of the parlements “was to beat down the rich and favor the humble.”® He described the parlements similarly in the Discourses: “Of these laws and regulations the parliaments are the upholders, and especially that of Paris. They

are renewed by it every time it prosecutes a prince of that kingdom and rules against the king in its decisions. Up to now it has held its own because it has been a firm enforcer of law against the nobility. But if at any time it fails to punish the nobility, and such cases multiply, without doubt they will

have to be corrected with great disturbance, or that kingdom will fall to pieces.””

In some substantive respects, the Florentine Histories appear to bear out the uniformly critical view of nobles evident in the Prince and the Discourses. In the second book of the Histories Machiavelli examined the conflict between the nobles and the people that lasted from 1215 to 1343 and ultimately

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culminated in the destruction of the nobles. In almost all of the conflicts, Machiavelli’s narrative identified noble arrogance, lawlessness, and violence as the chief cause. Throughout book 2, the city’s leading families, like the more abstract nobles invoked in the Prince and the Discourses, generally view obedience to and respect for institutions of government and law as antithetical to their identity. They routinely express their class identity and solidar-

ity through capricious acts of violence against the people and representatives of the fledgling Florentine state. The Histories leave no doubt that Machiavelli sympathized with the people’s ultimate conclusion that they had to destroy the nobles once and for all. In books 1 and 2 of the Florentine Histories his earlier classifications largely—but not always—retained their interpretive and explanatory power. Those books analyzed Florentine history and politics during a period when Florence’s social divisions—between knights and the city’s middle classes—

were relatively clear-cut. For most of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a warrior aristocracy and an urban bourgeoisie lived side by side in a state of chronic tension and mutual mistrust. In those years, Florentine magnates such as Corso Donati were like traditional European aristocrats in the sense that their primary occupation was war. They constituted the clenched fist of Florence's not inconsiderable military might, and they fought as a way of life. When external enemies were not at hand, they fought among themselves. And when the city’s increasingly prosperous guild and banking

community began to challenge their political dominance, the aristocrats fought them also.” Book 2 opens with indictments of both the Ghibelline and Guelf nobles.

The first conflicts occurred during a period of Ghibelline domination. The Ghibelline nobles enter Machiavelli’s narrative already “hated by the people on account of their proud conduct.”" They ultimately provoke the people, “oppressed by every sort of injury,” to take arms against them and restore the exiled Guelfs, a shift in the balance of power that ultimately led to the exile of the Ghibellines.’* But once in power, the Guelf nobility, restored by the people as a counterweight to Ghibelline tyranny, conducted themselves in the same lawless manner. Machiavelli’s account of the establishment of the Ordinances of Justice began with a scathing indictment of the criminally violent irresponsibility of the Guelf nobility: “Florence was then in a very bad condition, because the Guelf nobility had become arrogant and

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did not fear the magistrates. Hence every day there were many homicides and other violent acts, without any punishment of those who committed them, since some noble or other aided them.” By the book’s end, in spite of a century of popular attempts to constrain the nobles, the city’s nobility stubbornly persisted in its disruptive behavior. Machiavelli specified that the nobles brought on themselves the civil war with the people in 1343 that resulted in their final destruction. The Florentines had reorganized the government in an attempt to distribute power more equitably and thereby remove causes for future dissension. Assessing the failure of that reorganization resolution of the conflicts, he concluded: “the city would have been quiet if the nobles had been content to live with the modesty demanded by life as citizens, but they did the opposite, because in private life they tolerated no equals, and in the magistracies they were determined to be lords, and every day there was some instance of their arrogance and pride.”” So far, Machiavelli’s account of the Florentine nobles and their culture of insufferable pride, entitlement, and violence bears out with remarkable consistency his earlier assessments of the political problems associated with elites in general. Unlike those earlier assessments, however, Machiavelli’s treatment of the Florentine nobility occasionally revealed grudging admiration for their martial culture and the related recognition—larger and more troubling— that their defeat and the city’s military servitude were structurally connected. After all, for most of its history, Florence was a republic dominated by merchants who relied exclusively on mercenaries for the city’s defense. Without any variation, Machiavelli insisted on the necessity of relying on one’s own arms and condemned fickle and self-serving mercenaries as the very worst choice of all the flawed alternatives to martial autonomy. He was evidently reluctant to elaborate at any length or in detail on virtues associated with Florentine noble culture—and given his account in book 2 of how the abominable conduct of the nobles had left the Florentine people with no alternative but the destruction of the old noble order, it is not difficult to understand why. Nevertheless, there is a consistent pattern in the Florentine Histories suggesting that Machiavelli has identified the destruction of the nobles, however justifiable, as a crucial factor in understanding the existential crisis that afflicted the city in his own day and in the recent past.

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He had already briefly alluded to this development in general terms in the Prince. In chapter 12's broad condemnation of mercenaries, he included a pan-Italian historical survey of the process by which the entire peninsula had come to rely on mercenary forces instead of indigenous arms. Without specifying Florence or commenting on the particularities of the Florentine experience, he explained that the many Italian cities had in relatively recent history eradicated their noble classes: “You must, then, understand that as soon as in modern times the Empire was driven out of Italy, and in temporal matters the pope got more power there, Italy became divided into numerous states, because many of the large cities took arms against their nobles

who, with the Emperor's aid, had earlier kept them in subjection; the Church also aided the cities in order to give herself influence in temporal affairs.” Machiavelli’s brief peninsular summary of the origins of the mercenary system in Italy anticipated precisely his more sustained account of that development in the Florentine Histories. It followed, therefore, that any sustained attempt to explicate Florentine

history would require Machiavelli to confront the implications of the destruction of the noble order. He first alerted his readers at the very outset of the Histories to an ambivalence about the triumph of merchant culture over noble martial culture. In the defense of the peculiar greatness of Florence that he inserted into the preface, he pointed out that the city had accomplished great things in spite of chronic internal conflict. One of those accomplishments was the city’s early reliance on its own formidable arms: “She

expelled such numbers of Ghibellines that they filled Tuscany and Lombardy. Yet the Guelfs and those who remained within her walls, when they fought against Arezzo, a year before the battle of Campaldino (1289), raised among the citizens of their party twelve hundred men-at-arms and twelve thousand infantry.”° He evidently esteemed Florence’s first armies, given his statement that if the city had devised “a form of government that would

have kept her united, I do not know what republic, modern or ancient, would have been superior to her—with such ability in arms... she would have abounded.”” He went on to identify Florentine wealth as another accomplishment but did so in a way that indirectly lamented the loss of the city’s own arms: “Later, in the war fought against Filippo Visconti Duke of Milan, when she had to put to the test her economic ability and not her own

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arms (which had by then disappeared), we see that in the five years while that war lasted the Florentines spent three million five hundred thousand florins.”’® Machiavelli’s specification of the exorbitant costs of the war against Filippo Visconti represented less admiration for the republic’s ability to generate wealth than an ironic denunciation of the costs of relying on mercenaries for one’s survival. For any readers who may have missed that irony, Machiavelli's narrative routinely contrasted the extraordinary costs of Florentine military campaigns with their modest and frequently inconsequential outcomes. He more pointedly revisited that ambivalence about the irreversible defeat of the Florentine nobility toward the end of book 1’s survey of the Italian powers. Situated immediately prior to the entry of Florence as the book’s major protagonist, the concluding survey thus served to highlight the principal themes in the narrative to follow. Chief among these—more than half of his survey—was the total absence of any state or ruler capable of military autonomy: “All these principal powers were, as to weapons of their own, unarmed.” Asa result, the conduct of war in Italy during the fifteenth century was the exclusive preserve of the peninsula’s lesser princes and various mercenaries, and that in turn created the circumstances of Italy’s servitude to foreign powers at the end of the century. “In the end these soldiers rendered war so abject that any average general in whom had been reborn some shadow of ancient efficiency would have put them to shame—to the astonishment of all Italy, who in her dearth of wisdom respected these mercenary generals. Of these slothful rulers and of these dastardly armies my history will be full.”*° In this one important and dismal respect, Florence was not exceptional but depressingly consistent with the other Italian states. And Machiavelli specifically identified the cause as the victory of the Floren-

tine merchants over the nobles. After considering the circumstances that prevented Naples, Venice, and Milan from cultivating their own arms, Machiavelli explained that the “Florentines were also subject to the same necessity, because by frequent dissensions that republic had destroyed her no-

bility and was in the hands of men brought up in trade; they therefore followed the methods and the Fortune of the others.””’

Machiavelli reiterates these early textual precedents lamenting the loss of Florentine military prowess in the final paragraphs of book 2, which fol-

low the triumph of the people over the nobility and set the stage for the

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internecine quarrels in the people that are the focus of book 3. Reflecting on the decisiveness of the people’s military victory, he concluded that the “ruin of the nobles was so great and so humbled their party that never afterward did they have courage to take arms against the people; on the contrary they steadily became more courteous and abject. Thus Florence was stripped not merely of arms but of all generosity.’** Given that the preceding thirty-eight chapters unflinchingly detail the relentlessly violent and abusive behavior

of the Florentine nobles, there are certainly grounds for concluding that Machiavelli meant to articulate that lament in an ironic voice. But in light of his earlier general comments about the decline of Florentine arms and in light of some subsequent specific instances of admirable noble conduct discussed below, it seems likely that his lament at the end of book 2 expressed a deeper and more structural tension. As a historian considering events from more than a century's distance, Machiavelli sympathized with the plight of the aggrieved people and recognized the necessity of their civil war against the nobles. But the same vantage point necessarily implied

reflection on the process by which foreign powers in the present had enslaved Florence and Italy, and Machiavelli’s lament suggests that the destruction of the Florentine nobility was an important part of that process. Interpreting his meaning in the passage above requires considering his use of the term generosita. The Histories provide only a few examples of no-

ble generosity or magnanimity—important ones, but certainly too few to watrant extrapolating “generous” noble conduct from a few isolated cases to the social group as a whole. Machiavelli used the term, however, in ways that suggest a martial connotation of boldness, for which he provided multiple and substantive exam-

ples, rather than liberality. He first used the term to describe Urban II’s mustering of the first crusade to the Holy Land: “And because he [Urban IT]

feared that on account of the discords in Italy he could not be secure, he turned to a generous undertaking, and... made a speech against the infidels. By this he so inflamed their spirits that they determined to make an expedition to Asia against the Saracens.” His second use of the term generosita occurs in 2.5, during his discussion of the valor of Florentine military institutions and culture in 1250, one of the

very few chapters in praise of Florentine practices. Crucially, in the commune’s early years, the city relied on its own arms, enrolling and arming

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the youth from both the city and countryside for the city’s defense. Machiavelli particularly marvelled that the city’s confidence in its militia was such that the Florentines rang a bell continuously for one month prior to taking the field to give their enemies time to prepare for war. Machiavelli used that custom to contrast the superiority of the earlier martial conception of generosita with the more corrupt current sense of the term: “So much vigor there was then in those men and with such great generosity of spirit they conducted themselves that today to attack the enemy unexpectedly is considered a generous and prudent action, then it was considered disgraceful and treacherous.”** Francesco Guicciardini used the term similarly when he observed that “it is not enough to fight a war with justice and generosity, if one does

not also use prudence.” In the introduction to book 3, the chapter immediately following the lament at the end of book 2 about the loss of noble arms and generosity, he again

linked the term to the martial skill of the Florentine nobility: “Hence the ability in arms and generosity of spirit possessed by the nobility were destroyed, and these qualities could not be rekindled in the people, where they did not exist, so that Florence grew always weaker and more abject.’*°

His fourth and final use of the term implied ambition and entitlement rather than martial inspiration. In 2.36, Machiavelli discussed the mistrust that the duke of Athens held toward the Florentine nobles in spite of their early alliance with him. Even though the nobles had concluded that “there was no other way to master the populace that had persecuted them than to put themselves under a prince who, realizing the merits of one party and the haughtiness of the other, would restrain the people and favor the nobles,” the duke was disinclined to count on their support for long.*” The duke mistrusted the nobility for precisely the reasons Machiavelli had earlier provided in the Prince and the Discourses: their imperious nature made them psychologically disinclined to submit to anyone’s rule other than their own: “He was suspicious of the nobility, though they had benefited him and he had restored many of them to their native city, because he could not believe that generous spirits, such as are likely to be found among the aristocracy, could under his sway feel contented.”** Although in this passage Machiavelli’s sense of “generous spirits” evokes the noble psychological pathology

identified as a major political problem in his earlier writings, it is nevertheless specifically linked to the noble order.

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After the nobles are destroyed at the end of book 2, Machiavelli ceases altogether to use the terms generoso and generosita, further reinforcing their noble and martial implications. Once he reaches the point in his narrative where the nobility, and Florentine arms by implication, disappear, he abandons the vocabulary he has used to describe them. Interpreted in this light, we see that Machiavelli's comment in 2.5 that after the defeat of the nobility Florence “was stripped of arms and generosity” lamented the loss of not only the warrior class itself but also the martial culture that had inspired watriors to particularly bold action. Consider, by contrast, Machiavelli's use of “liberal” and “liberality,” terms that appear to be closely connected to our sense of “generous” and “generosity.’ In the very few passages in which Machiavelli intended “liberality” to convey a sense of munificence or largesse, he used the term with sarcasm and scorn. For example, he blamed papal and imperial liberality as the reason why petty tyrants eventually converted their de facto seizure of papal

and imperial towns into outright legitimate rule: “The Emperor, seeing how liberally the Pontiff had given away the cities of the Empire and determining to be not less liberal than the Pope with other rulers’ property, gave the cities they were ruling to all the tyrants who were in possession of cities belonging to the Church, so that these tyrants could retain them with imperial authorization.” Throughout the Histories, Machiavelli routinely lamented the Florentines’ “liberal” instinct to give their liberty to others. In 2.29, during the city’s conflict with Castruccio Castracani, he observed that the city’s notable reputation for giving away its liberty caused the unreliability and ineffectiveness of their condottiere Ramondo di Cardona, who, “seeing that the Florentines in the past had been liberal with their liberty, and

had yielded it now to the King, now to the Legate, now to other men of lower rank, inferred that if he brought them into some necessity, it might easily happen that they would make him prince.” In the overwhelming majority of instances, Machiavelli used the term “liberality” to suggest financial largesse with corrupt implications. Whatever the sins of the Florentine nobles, however violent and destructive, they

were sins of generosity rather than liberality. We see this contrast most clearly in Machiavelli’s frequent discussion of Medici liberality. As David Quint has shown, he uses this term more than any other in his discussion of the Medici, whether describing individuals such as Cosimo, the way Medici

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power was perceived by its opponents, or the impact the family had on the city’s appetite for liberty.”’

Numerous Florentine writers had praised Cosimo in the fifteenth century as a generous Maecenas, a republican citizen whose greatness was in large part confirmed by the largesse he habitually displayed toward artists and the needy and the lavish building projects he amply supported.” On one hand Machiavelli incorporated the language of that tradition of Cosimean praise virtually intact, marvelling that Cosimo surpassed all Florentines not only in wealth but in his—what we might call—generosity in sharing that wealth.’”? On the other, however, he subverted its meaning entirely by consistently yoking Cosimo’s liberality to corruption. Machiavelli introduced Cosimo’s entry into Florentine politics by contrasting his aggressive political style—and particularly his liberality—with the civic modesty of his father, Giovanni: “Cosimo de’ Medici, after the death of Giovanni his father, conducted himself with greater spirit in public matters and with greater zeal and more liberality toward his friends than his father had done... he... gave his attention to doing good to everybody and, with his liberality, to making many citizens his partisans.”’* In the following chapter, Cosimo’s sharp-eyed rival Niccol6 da Uzzano explained to the leaders of his faction that Cosimo deployed his liberality to conceal his princely intentions from the less perspicacious majority.” After Cosimo’s death, his confidante Dietisalvi Neroni explained to Cosimo’s son Piero that “Cosimo, to gain partisans in Florence and friends outside, had been very liberal in sharing his property with everybody.’’° In his explanation for the failure of Jacopo de’ Pazzi’s attempt to rouse the Florentine people during the Pazzi family’s ill-fated conspiracy against Lorenzo, Machiavelli concluded

that “because by the fortune and liberality of the Medici the people had been made deaf and liberty was not known in Florence, he got no reply from anybody.”*”

We thus see that in the language of the Histories, Machiavelli uses “generosity” and “generous” in martial contexts, usually to indicate exceptional ferocity, and “liberality” and “munificence” in civic ones, usually to indicate irresponsibility and corruption. Considering the contrast in political problems posed by the Florentine nobles in book 2 and the rise of merchant princes like the Medici in books 4-8, we see that Cosimo, in Machiavelli’s lexicon, was liberal but not generous, which perhaps explains Machiavelli’s observa-

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tion that “Cosimo was the most talked of and renowned citizen, for an unarmed man.””®

The subsequent chapters that discuss the achievements of the government of the primo popolo that lasted from 1250-1260 amplify Machiavelli’s praise for the early commune’s military power. He related with pride that in that ten-year period Florence became one of the major powers in Italy and the de facto ruler of Tuscany. He explained that the city had accomplished this by adopting an aggressive military stance: “in that time they compelled the Pistoiese, the Aretines, and the Sienese to make alliances with them; and returning from Siena with their army, they took Volterra; they also destroyed some towns and brought the inhabitants to Florence.” After the return of the Guelfs, who had been defeated and exiled by Ghibelline forces in 1260 at the battle of Montaperti, the city continued to maintain its authority abroad by force of its own arms.*’ At the end of the thirteenth century, in spite of a half century of bitter conflict between the people and the nobles, Machiavelli recounted, again with evident pride, that Florentine military power had nonetheless managed to surpass that of the primo popolo:

“Nor was our city ever in a higher or more prosperous state than at that time, for she abounded in men, riches, and reputation. The citizens fit for arms amounted to thirty thousand, and the inhabitants fit for arms in the surrounding district to seventy thousand. All Tuscany, partly as subject, partly as ally, obeyed her.””

The city’s martial instincts were no less impressive roughly twenty years later when it faced aggression from the Lucchese tyrant Castruccio Castracani. In response to Castruccio’s assault on Prato, the Florentines— citizens, not soldiers—closed their shops and collectively marched in support of the besieged town. Once in Prato, they assembled an army of twenty thousand infantry, fifteen hundred cavalry, and numerous Guelf rebels who had been offered repatriation to Florence in return for support against Castruccio. The swiftness of the Florentine response and the size of the forces mustered alone were sufficient to lift Castruccio’s siege: “This army of such size, with such speed brought to Prato, so dismayed Castruccio that, without trying the fortune of battle, he retired toward Lucca.”* Machiavelli also included occasional examples of magnanimous noble conduct—not many, to be sure, but enough at least to suggest that close scrutiny of Florentine history had complicated his earlier negative view of

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noble culture. For example, he recounts with the same pride as his sources the patriotism and martial prowess of Farinata degli Uberti, the leader of the Florentine Ghibellines. In the wake of the defeat of Guelf forces in 1260, imperial forces had gathered at Empoli to discuss how to consolidate Ghibelline power in Tuscany. In Machiavelli’s account, Manfred’s vicar, Count Guido Novello, and all present but one agreed that Guelf power would never cease to threaten them unless Florence was destroyed once and for all. Farinata, although the sole voice of opposition, managed nevertheless to dissuade his Ghibelline allies. The effectiveness of his speech hinged on his willingness to fight and die for his city and thus also on the implicit conviction that loyalty to Florence trumped larger ideological questions about the proper extent of papal or imperial power: To so cruel a decision as this, given against so noble a city, no citizen or friend except Messer Farinata degli Uberti made opposition. He openly and without any hesitation defended her, saying that he had not with such hardship undergone so many dangers for any reason except his desire to live in his native city, and that he was not then ready to stop striving for what he always had sought or to refuse what Fortune had given him. On the contrary, he would not be less hostile to those who intended otherwise than he had been to the Guelfs; and anyone among them who was afraid of Farinata’s native city would try in vain to ruin her, because he himself, with vigor such as he had shown in driving out the Guelfs, expected to defend her. This Messer Farinata was a man of great courage, excellent in war.”

Farinata’s patriotism, of course, had been mythologized long before Machiavelli’s day, so his account was hardly new or original. But Machiavelli fre-

quently reinterpreted and even subverted his sources when it suited his purposes; his decision not to do so here thus merits consideration. Giano della Bella, the chief architect of the Ordinances of Justice against the city’s magnates, is another example of noble conduct that Machiavelli evidently admired. With “toil and danger to himself,” Giano freed Florence “from servitude to the powerful” in spite of his own distinguished noble status, twice observed by Machiavelli.** Machiavelli opened his account of

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the establishment of the Ordinances with observation that Giano was “of the noblest descent,” a fact that he had already demonstrated early in book 2 by his inclusion of the della Bella family as among the chief Guelf families prior to the primo popolo.” It is true that Machiavelli contrasted the virtue of Giano’s aims with his noble status—he was “of the noblest descent, but a lover of the city’s freedom,” implying in general that most Florentine nobles had scant regard for Florence’s freedom. But Machiavelli nevertheless recognized that at least some Florentine nobles were capable of acknowledging their own transgressions and working to end them. Machiavelli also wrote about even the most violent and divisive nobles

with an undercurrent of grudging recognition that the qualities that made them so ill suited for urban communal life were precisely the qualities that made the early commune a legitimate, even exceptional, military power. Consider his treatment of Corso Donati, a dominant figure in roughly a third of the second book. Given that the Donati-Cerchi feud constituted the city’s second major division—after the Buondelmonti-Uberti feud and before the Albizzi-Ricci one—Corso played a particularly significant role in the conceptual structure of Machiavelli's history. We can see Machiavelli’s ambivalence about Corso in the contrast between his largely accusatory account of Corso’s actions with his more complex retrospective summation of Corso’s significance in Florentine history. Machiavelli repeatedly blamed Corso and Corso alone for the persistence of the city’s internal feuds, portraying him as a chronic fomenter of discord. In spite of the unambiguous victory in 1302 of the Donati and the Blacks over the Cerchi and the Whites, “only Corso remained restless,” offended by the degree to which his social inferiors controlled the government. As a result,

moved by “a dishonorable cause,’ Corso began to slander the officials in charge of public funds, creating a conflict that ultimately led to civil war.*° A few years later, after another papal attempt to resolve Florentine quarrels, Machiavelli explained that the city “would have been quiet if Messer Corso’s restless spirit had not again upset the city.” Seeking to gain power and influence, he “was the leader in all quarrels and revolts, and to him resorted all those who wished to gain something unlawful.”” Yet in spite of Machiavelli’s sense of Corso’s toxic and destructive egotism, when reflecting on Corso's death, he concluded that “the city and the Black party should acknowledge obligation [to him] for many good things and many bad ones. And if he

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had had a quieter spirit, he would be more gratefully remembered. Nevertheless, he deserves to be named among our most rare citizens.”** What accounts for Machiavelli’s surprisingly positive estimation of Corso’s role in Florence’s history? Corrado Vivanti has argued that Machiavelli’s thoughts on Corso were a specific variation on the larger themes articulated in the Discourses 3.28, in which he reflected on the way republics simultaneously must depend on their exceptional citizens to function well but also must fear them as a potential source of tyranny.” As a consequence of that observation, Machiavelli reasoned that a well-organized republic ensured that one could only acquire reputation through public methods contributing to the common good rather than private methods benefiting individuals. In Vivanti’s interpretation, Machiavelli must have believed that Corso’s disruptiveness was less the fault of Corso himself, who like all capable individuals thirsted for reputation, and more the failure of the republic to channel the quest for reputation and fame in public ways. Corso was indisputably an example of the problems posed by ambitious and capable citizens, but Machiavelli’s account of his career is not always compatible with the discussion in Discourses 3.28. First, the Roman example Machiavelli considers and the chapter’s title both addressed the ways the foundations of tyranny are frequently concealed beneath a “work of mercy” or “works that seem good.”® Although Machiavelli does indicate that many people believed Corso’s lies about public officials because they believed that he “was acting through love for the city,” Machiavelli’s more frequent revelations that Corso was a magnet for all the city’s discontented and dishonorable agitators seem to preclude Corso as an example of someone whose nefarious purposes were hidden by piety. Second, in Discourses 3.28 and elsewhere, Machiavelli drew a sharp moral distinction between public and private methods of acquiring reputation. In the Florentine Histories, he provided abundant examples of Corso’s adoption of the latter methods but none of the former.

Given Machiavelli’s earlier and exceptionally rare praise of the early commune’s martial power, it seems more likely that he considered Corso an

example of the martial sense of noble generosity—a skilled warrior who sought reputation exclusively through combat. The Histories certainly devote considerable attention to Corso’s ferocity and fearlessness. For example, in 1300 “the Cerchi determined to attack the Donati, and with a great number of men assailed them. But through Messer Corso’s vigor the Cerchi

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were repulsed and many of them wounded.’ A few years later, in spite of having incurred the hatred of many influential citizens—including the open opposition of half of the Black party, formerly a bastion of Donati power in the city—he was nevertheless feared by all because of the authority with which he conducted himself.’* Machiavelli’s admiration of Corso emerges most clearly, however, in his narration of the events that led to his final downfall and death. In 1308, increasingly isolated and hated by his former allies and most of the people, Corso found himself accused of attempting to

establish a tyranny in Florence, condemned and pronounced a rebel, and awaiting attack by the government. “Messer Corso, on the other hand, not frightened by seeing many of his followers abandon him, not by the sentence that had been pronounced, not by the authority of the Signors, and not by the numbers of his enemies, fortified himself in his mansion, hoping to defend himself there.” In spite of the great number of his assailants, Corso and his few remaining partisans fought them off, “with death and wounds

on both sides.’ Recognizing that defeat was inevitable, Corso managed nevertheless to escape the city by fighting his way through his attackers, whose numerical superiority counted for less than Corso’s ferocity. Machiavelli similarly wrote about the Bardi family, acknowledging both that they shared the culture of entitlement typical of many noble families and that they displayed admirable ferocity and fearlessness. In 2.23, Machiavelli narrated the rebellion of the Bardi, Frescobaldi, and other noble fami-

lies, a conspiracy against the regime triggered by the desire to avenge punishments of the Bardi and Frescobaldi by Jacopo Gabriegli da Gubbio, the

captain of the guard, who was much hated as a foreigner and perceived creature of those in power. On realizing that their conspiracy had been betrayed from within, the Bardi and Frescobaldi “seized arms in order to conquer with glory or to die without shame.”’* Like Corso Donati, the Bardi and Frescobaldi found themselves cut off from support by their noble allies who held power in the countryside, opposed by the forces of the government and the people, and surrounded. Rather than surrender, they retreated to the street where the Bardi homes were concentrated “as stronger than any other; this they defended bravely.” The Bardi were even more fierce two years later in the final battle between the people and the nobility that closed book 2. The major noble families—Donati, Pazzi, Cavalcanti, Caviciulli, Rossi, Frescobaldi—fell one by one to the forces of the people, leaving

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at the end of the day only the undaunted and fierce Bardi: “There remained,

then, only the Bardi, whom neither the overthrow of the others, nor the union of the people against them, nor their slight hope of aid could terrify;

they preferred either to die in combat or to see their houses burned and sacked than of their own will to submit to the power of their enemies. They defended themselves, therefore, so well that the people tried many times in vain, both at the Ponte Vecchio and at the Ponte Rubaconte, to defeat them. And always with death and wounds for many they were driven back.””® There are few such examples of Florentine martial ferocity in the pages of the Histories that follow the destruction and cultural transformation of

the nobility. On the contrary, in books 3-8 Machiavelli often mocks and satirizes the aversion to violence of those in power and the futility of the city’s attempts to buy security. In the conflicts between the city’s merchant elite and the people that are the focus of book 3, the new elite, when faced with danger and defeat, always choose ignominious survival rather than the heroic instinct for violent confrontation typified by the Donati and the Bardi earlier in the century. For example, in the early stages of the conflicts that led to the Ciompi revolt in 1378, the heads of the Guelf faction recog-

nized that an angry mob of lower guildsmen were seeking them out to avenge themselves for injustices earlier inflicted by the arrogant Guelfs. Although the causes of conflict between the upper-middle-class families such as the Castiglionchio, Albizzi, and Strozzi and the laboring classes directly paralleled the earlier conflict between the injurious nobles and the aggrieved people, the new elite’s reaction to armed confrontation earned Machiavelli’s

scorn rather than respect: “Messer Lapo da Castiglionchio ... when he learned that the Signoria had made an effort opposed to the arrangements of the Guelfs, and saw the people in arms, having no other recourse than to hide or to run away, first hid in Santa Croce and then fled to the Casentino dressed as a friar.” His allies who remained in the city were hardly more brave: “Piero [degli Albizzi] and Carlo Strozzi hid at the beginning of the rioting, in the belief that when it was over, since they had many relatives and friends, they could safely remain in Florence.””’ As the conflict escalated to test the courage of the priors in much the same way it had tested the courage of the heads of the Guelf faction, the priors revealed themselves to be equally cowardly. After conceding to the demands of the woolworkers and thereby believing that they had removed

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causes for further protest, the priors were startled the following morning to see the piazza full of angry guildsmen shouting threats. Little by little, without any actual conflict, the priors abandoned the palazzo in fear. First, Guerriante Marignolli, “moved more by fear than by any other private feeling, went downstairs, with the excuse of guarding the lower door, and fled to his

house. ... Meanwhile, the Gonfalonier, choosing to end his term with shame rather than with danger, asked help from Messer Tommaso Strozzi, who took him from the palace and led him to his mansion. The other Siegnors in like fashion departed one after another.”’® Only two of the priors— Alamanno Acciaiuoli and Niccolo del Bene—had argued against fleeing their posts, declaring, as the Bardi had earlier done, that “they themselves did not intend to lay down their power, if they did not lose their lives with it,

before they were released on the proper date.” Heroic words, but also empty: “then Alamanno and Niccolo, in order not to be thought more brave than wise, seeing that they were alone, went away too.””” Two chapters later, Machiavelli idealized the Ciompo leader Michele di Lando in ways that specifically contrasted him with the cowardly priors and that invoked the martial heroism of the city’s first nobility. After initially designating Michele as their champion, the city’s plebs began to doubt his loyalty to their cause and subsequently turned against him. In spite of his modest origins, once in office Michele armed himself and conducted himself with the same martial impetuosity and haughtiness as the Donati and the Bardi had. Confronted by two representatives of the lower classes whose criticism of him culminated in threats, Michele, “remembering rather the office he held than his humble birth, determined in an extraordinary way to check an extraordinary insolence: drawing the sword with which he was girded, he first wounded them severely and then had them bound and imprisoned.’®° On learning of Michele’s actions, the angry plebs began to march

on the Signoria. In marked contrast to his predecessors in the priorate, Michele responded to the threat as the city’s earlier nobility had done: he “determined to act beforehand, thinking that it would be more glorious for him to make an attack than to wait for his enemy within walls and, like his predecessors, to have to run away with dishonor to the Palace and shame to himself?’*' Machiavelli’s concluding exaltation of Michele as “among the few who have benefited their native city” hinged precisely on that combination

of prudence and martial prowess that had become so rare in Florentine

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events: “His prudence enabled him to manage affairs in such a way that many of his party yielded to him; the others he overcame with arms.” ” Machiavelli concluded book 3 with accounts of two conspiracies in Florence that both highlighted the contrast between the martial instincts of the

Florentine nobles in book 2 and the merchant elite that replaced them in book 3. In 3.27 he related the attempt by families exiled by the Albizzi to retake in the city in 1397. Their plan was to enter the city by stealth; connect

with their relatives; rouse the people, whose hostility to the Albizzi they had confidently presumed; and then murder Maso degli Albizzi and retake the government. After having entered the city and exhorted the people to join them, they found the people unmoved and unsupportive and hence realized the extent of their own vulnerability. In contrast to families like the Bardi and Donati, who preferred to die with glory than live surrounded by their enemies, the first instinct of both parties in 1397 was fear and retreat: “Despairing of their undertaking, they retreated to the church of Santa Reparata, where, not to save their lives, but to put off their deaths, they shut themselves up. The Signors, frightened when the riot began, took arms and locked up the Palace.” Only after they learned that the conspirators were in vulnerable and desperate circumstances did they send armed men to arrest them, ending the affair with a whimper rather than a bang: “Without much trouble the doors of the church were forced, and part of the men were killed

when defending themselves and part captured.” The following chapter narrated another conspiracy three years later. This one was engineered by the duke of Milan, but the Florentine exiles were again intended to play a considerable role in it. The duke’s plan— straightforward enough—was to send exiles into the city to kill the leaders of the Albizzi regime and seize control of the government. The presumption of success hinged on the participation of the most skilled warriors in the exile community: “The plan was that on a certain day a great number of exiles skilful in arms were to leave places near Florence and enter the city by the Arno River.’®* As Machiavelli routinely observed in many writings about the inevitable outcome of conspiracies in many writings, this one too was betrayed from within and disclosed to the regime. The incident ended with little bloodshed and even less conflict because the “exiles [allegedly] skilful in arms,” learning of the arrest of one of their confederates, all “fled in terror.”® Civil strife occurred in book 3 with the same frequency as in

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book 2, but in the absence of any examples of martial ferocity, Machiavelli narrated these conflicts in a language of scornful sarcasm. The absence of martial ferocity in Florence was of course directly related to the practice—equal parts costly and ineffective—of purchasing security that Machiavelli identified in the preface of the Histories and routinely mocked in books 3-8. For example, the regime of the lesser guildsmen that ruled Florence between 1378 and 1382 perceived itself threatened by the campaign of the Angevin ruler Charles of Durazzo to claim Naples, since rumors circulated that his forces included many Florentine exiles. In addition to hiring the English mercenary John Hawkwood, the city gave Charles 40,000 ducats in exchange for his assurance that his territorial ambitions would not include Florence. Nevertheless, in spite of the considerable expenses incurred, between the bribe and Hawkwood’s costs, the Florentines’ ongoing feud with the Guelf elite meant that Charles’s victory in Naples “increased the terror of those controlling the government of Florence, be-

cause they could not believe that their money would be stronger in the king’s mind than the ancient friendship of his house with the Guelfs, whom with such great injustice they were persecuting.’®° Three chapters later, the Florentines purchased Arezzo from the soldiers of the recently deceased Louis of Anjou, prompting Machiavelli's scornful remark that after “gaining Arezzo, Florence indulged in celebrations as splendid as ever did any city for a real victory.”®’ In book 4, summarizing the peace treaty between the Florentines and Filippo Visconti, Machiavelli observed: “The Florentine

outlay on this war was three million, five hundred thousand ducats, by means of which they increased Venetian territory and might, and their own poverty and disunion.”®* Reflecting on the city’s victory over Giangaleazzo Visconti, which had been so providentially celebrated by Leonardo Bruni a century earlier, as well as over the Ladislas of Naples, Machiavelli observed that the sudden unanticipated deaths of those rulers rather than Florentine power or competence accounted for the city’s survival: “So death was always more friendly to the Florentines than any other friend, and stronger to save them than any ability of their own.”®’ What Bruni saw as God’s ideological hand working to privilege Florentine libertas Machiavelli identified as pure and meaningless luck. As Machiavelli concluded book 2 of the Histories and its account of

the process by which the Florentines destroyed their noble order, he had

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conflicting judgments about the significance of that process. On the one hand, he identified many aspects of Florentine noble culture as supporting evidence for his earlier indictments of the political problems associated with aristocrats in general. The Florentine nobles consistently refused to acknowl-

edge the legitimacy of any authority other than their own; they routinely and with impunity violated laws the commune had established to ensure a modicum of civic order in the city; and they inflicted violent and capricious abuse on the people. Without a doubt, Machiavelli’s interpretation of this period of Florentine history demonstrates his sympathy for the aggrieved people and their eventual decision to eliminate the nobles altogether. On the other hand, considering these events from a context of peninsulawide slavery to foreign powers, he also recognized that Italy’s deviation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from the feudal aristocratic system that prevailed elsewhere in Europe created a new political elite of merchants who lacked any experience or knowledge of arms and actively disdained the culture that made such experience and knowledge possible. He recognized that Florence’s urban merchant culture had necessitated the city’s reliance on mercenaries and therefore that the city’s pathetic martial conduct in the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was closely tied to the destruction of its nobles two centuries earlier. Whatever problems the nobility inevitably posed for a healthy political order they in part offset through their expertise in warfare and their preservation of the martial culture necessary for the long-term survival of that expertise. Machiavelli evidently believed that the Florentine people required stern measures to keep the nobles in check. But equally clearly, he thought that the thorough destruction of the nobles had given rise to existential dangers of greater magnitude than the problems associated with the nobility. Reaching that conclusion necessarily implied revisiting his view of the people. After all, the people eventually won a civil war against their own accomplished military elite, they won it decisively, and as their terms they insisted on nothing less than the eradication of noble culture itself. Such actions are hardly the result of the moderate attributes of the people that we see in the Prince and the Discourses, in which the people’s essential desire is to live unmolested.

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4 A New View of the People

Book 2 of the Florentine Histories studied the conflict between the nobles and people and ended with the destruction of the nobility. Given the generally abusive behavior of the nobles, we might expect that their destruction would have resolved Florence’s destabilizing internal conflicts. But Florentine political life continued to be plagued by dissension even after the triumph of the people. In books 3 and 4 of the Histories Machiavelli explained why, focusing his attention on the political problems associated with a regime dominated by the people. He declared the principal themes of his analysis in the conclusion to book 2 and the introductory chapters to books 3 and 4. The final sentence of book 2 warned that the absence of the nobility did nothing to cure Florence’s troubled politics: “No sooner was this [first Visconti] war ended than party strife within the city began, for though the nobility was destroyed, nonetheless Fortune did not lack ways for making new dissensions cause new woes.” The introductions to the subsequent two books revealed that “Fortune's ways’ consisted largely of problems caused by the people’s immoderate and inconstant nature. Book 3 began with the identification of the people’s desires as “harmful and unjust” and book 4 with the identification

A New View of the People

of the people as the “promoters of license.”* In one crucial respect, namely the willingness to live within the law, Machiavelli concluded that no meaningful distinction existed between nobles and people: “neither of these classes is willing to be subject to the laws or to men.” Machiavelli’s account of Florentine politics in those books amply defended these introductory themes. This chapter looks at Machiavelli’s treatment of the people in books 3 and 4 and makes several interrelated arguments. First and least surprising, given the destruction of the nobles that concluded book 2, the Histories abandoned the binary analysis of politics in terms of nobles and people evident in the Prince and the Discourses, insisting instead that Florence’s history could not be understood without the tripartite view we saw in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. Second, the Histories made that case by examining several major conflicts in the city’s history in which Machiavelli revealed that the social basis of the warring parties, in spite of their conceptualization at the time as “noble” and “popular,” defied such easy or clear categorization. Third and most important, in addition to questioning whether the terms noble and popular accurately corresponded to the social makeup of the city’s factions, the Histories offered a sustained revision of Machiavelli’s earlier interpretation of the political nature of the people. His narrative of Florentine history demonstrated that the positive characteristics evident in earlier writings existed only as a condition of unresolved conflict between the people and their adversaries; once triumphant, the people tended to adopt the belligerent stance of their vanquished foes, immoderately pursued their objectives, and regularly displayed fickleness and inconstancy. Before considering books 3 and 4 of the Histories, however, it is first worth revisiting Machiavelli’s view of the people in the Prince and the Discourses

and—to gauge just how different his later views were—the implications of that view. His sense of the moderate and reasonable demands of the people accounted for the corresponding populism of his early political writing.* According to that perspective the people, whether in a monarchy or a republic, are the most reliable bulwarks of safety, stability, and liberty. In the context of the civil princedom, the prince who rises to power on a wave of popular approval maintains his power with relative ease because, unlike a prince supported by nobles, the aspirations and needs of his supporters are more moderate and hence satiable. “Certainly he can satisfy the people, because the people’s object is more creditable than that of the rich: the latter wish to

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oppress and the former not to be oppressed.” Further, unlike nobles with their natural disinclination to obedience, the people have no such prejudices and hence make more useful and reliable subjects. In chapters 19 and 20 of the Prince Machiavelli went on to argue that the support of the people is a

ruler’s best safeguard against conspiracies and that such support renders the need for fortresses superfluous. All his subsequent examples vindicate the pithy conclusion of chapter 9 that “the people’s friendship is essential to a prince. Otherwise, in adverse times he has no resource.”° The moderate character of the people makes them similarly indispensable in republican contexts. Because they desire only the absence of domination, they have a greater zeal and commitment to living in freedom. For this reason, Machiavelli argued in Discourses 1.5 that republics should organize themselves so that communal liberty is protected by the people. They make

ideal guardians because they are disinclined by nature to usurp power to dominate others and in any case are hindered in practice by their lack of wealth and status. “Since they cannot seize it themselves, they will not allow others to seize it.” In Discourses 1.58, Machiavelli elaborated in detail on

the more abstract assertion from 1.5. Recalling the notion of vox populi, vox dei and foreshadowing Rousseau’s notion of the general will, Machiavelli explained that the “general opinion possesses marvelous power for prediction.”* The people make better choices than princes do in choosing magistrates, discerning the best advice, judging merit, and maintaining and pre-

serving existing institutions. The people are also more responsive to reason. Whereas an agitated people in a state of revolt can be persuaded through speech by a virtuous person to return to a state of peace, words and reason have little impact on wicked princes: “the only remedy is steel.””

Machiavelli provided relatively few Florentine examples of the psychological contrast between nobles and people. His principal sources were states with politically and legally defined distinctions between nobles and commoners—Rome with its senators and plebs, Sparta with its spartiates and perioeci, Venice with its permanently closed aristocracy, and the late medieval French monarchy with its noblesse d’épée. Florence, however, had no substantively binding definitions of noble and nonnoble status." Guild membership defined the political class but did so expansively enough that the political community was always derived from a relatively broad social spectrum. All Florentines of course could distinguish between ancient and

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powerful families like the Alberti and Strozzi, popolo families like the Compagni and Parenti, and relative newcomers, but the turbulent political landscape ensured that at any given moment a family’s class affiliations were to a significant extent shaped by subtleties of context.” As Machiavelli began in the 1520s to focus his gaze on Florence systematically, his previously clear-cut sense of popular and noble distinctions be-

gan to reflect the complexities of the Florentine context. Just as we have seen in the case of the nobles, it appears at first that we will see the assumptions of the Prince and the Discourses played out in a Florentine setting. In 2.12, during a discussion of the class tension that led to the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, we encounter the familiar statement: “There remained [in Florence] only those disagreements that naturally exist in all cities between the powerful and the people, because, since the people wish to live accord-

ing to the laws and the powerful to control the laws, it is not possible for them to agree.”’* We have already seen that in spite of Machiavelli’s acknow-

ledgment of their redeeming martial values, the nobles conducted themselves arrogantly and lawlessly, regularly inflicting violence on the people, and hence are good examples of people who do not wish to live according to the laws. On the whole, in books 1 and 2 the people are generally moderate and willing to compromise, even in victory. For example, in 2.14, Machiavelli discussed the nobles’ reaction to Giano della Bella’s attempts to enforce the Ordinances of Justice. The nobles were particularly incensed at a law that dispensed with the requirement of a witness for charges against them. While some of the people advocated open combat in support of harsh laws,

the majority of the people were content with the freedoms ensured by a moderate application of the law.” But, much as we saw in Machiavelli’s treatment of the nobility, his account of the people betrays tensions that conflict with his earlier views. Even in book 2 and the early chapters of book 3, where a relatively clear distinction between nobles and people still exists, Machiavelli begins to portray the Florentine people as fickle, ungrateful, and untrustworthy, to the city’s detriment.

The first hint in the Histories that Machiavelli had begun to nuance his view of the people, just as he had revised his view of the nobles, occurs in his account of Giano della Bella’s role in Florence following the implementation of the Ordinances of Justice. Shortly after Giano established the Ordinances,

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a member of the people was killed in a fight with several nobles, including Corso Donati. When the captain of the People acquitted Corso, in spite of the widespread perception of his guilt, the indignant people armed themselves and assembled at the home of their champion, Giano, to urge him to push for the strict imposition of the Ordinances against Corso. Machiavelli’s Giano sympathized with the people because he “wished Messer Corso

to be punished” and “did not make them lay down their arms, as many thought he should have done.” He advised them to march on the Signoria, present their grievance, and demand justice. Considering that he also advised them to retain their weapons, he advocated a policy that combined a show of force—a veiled threat—with a clearly articulated desire to work through the laws. The people, however, interpreted Giano’s position as a renunciation of their cause and ignored his advice even though they had requested it. Instead of appealing to the city to impose penalties on Corso, they marched on the palace of the captain of the People and sacked it, giving Giano’s enemies an opportunity to engineer his ruin. Even though Giano had advised the people to petition the Signoria rather than attack the captain of the People, Giano’s many noble opponents nonetheless saw an opportunity to retaliate against him to punish him for his role in creating the antinoble Ordinances. Giano’s enemies in the Signoria therefore declared to the captain of the People that he was the principal instigator of the people’s recent violence against the captain. In spite of their earlier anger at their perceived betrayal by Giano, the people nevertheless rallied around him and declared their willingness to protect him from the government and his enemies. But, Machiavelli makes clear, Giano had little regard for the people’s protestations of support—perhaps unsurprising, given their recent anger at him and unwillingness to follow his advice: “the people took arms and ran to his [Giano’s] mansion, offering him their protection against the Signors and his enemies. Giano was unwilling to test this popular aid or to commit his life to the magistrates, because he feared the malice of the second and the instability of the first.” Machiavelli explicitly ties Giano’s decision to leave the city to his mistrust of the depth of the people’s support. Given that Giano himself belonged to one of Florence's great noble families, we might conclude that his mistrust of the people’s willingness to support him with words as well as actions resulted simply from the traditional

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aristocratic prejudice about the inconstancy of the people. Machiavelli had in the Prince already disputed the truth of the proverb that he who builds on the people builds on mud. What he dismissively called a “proverb” was nothing less than a major axiomatic assumption of Western political thought, shared by his contemporaries, including Guicciardini, but dating back to Cicero and Polybius, who asserted that “the masses are always fickle, filled with lawless desires, unreasoning anger and violent passions.”’® Machiavelli's

inclusion of Giano’s doubts about the reliability of the people’s support might,

in other words, simply reflect a historian’s attempt to understand the psychology of an aristocratic actor rather than any normative support on Machiavelli’s part for Giano’s view.

But in several passages of the Histories Machiavelli directly or indirectly substantiated that view of the people’s inconstancy and ingratitude and hence implied that Giano’s reluctance to depend on the loyalty of the people’s support was evidence of political foresight rather than traditional class prejudice. Consider the peculiar relationship between Corso Donati and the people that unfolds a few chapters after Giano’s departure from the city. Irrespective of the fact that Corso’s involvement in the murder of one of the people drove the people to take up arms, a few chapters later we learn that he nevertheless managed to insinuate himself into the people’s good graces: “That man [Corso], in order to get himself reputation, always held a view contrary

to that of the most powerful, and wherever he saw the people inclining, in that direction he turned his influence, to make them better disposed toward himself.””” Corso’s enemies, including fellow Blacks, began to fear his exces-

sive power and seemingly infinite capacity for discontent. As the preliminary step in the destruction of Corso’s power, his enemies schemed to deprive

him of the people’s support, which they accomplished easily enough via a campaign of rumor: “in order to take away from him the people’s support— which by such means could easily be destroyed—his enemies spread a ru-

mor that he wished to seize absolute power.” In the following chapter Corso’s enemies take up arms against him, and the people do not come to his aid. The example of Corso Donati lends ballast to Giano della Bella’s unwillingness to test the measure of the people’s support for him. Consider also the political capriciousness of the plebs-dominated regime early in book 3 and its role in rejuvenating the haughtiness and power of the

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Guelf faction. Chapter 3 began with Uguccione de’ Ricci reviving the laws against the Ghibellines and the power of the captains of the Guelf party to deprive suspected Ghibellines of office. Although he had revived these laws in an attempt to exclude the Albizzi, originally a Ghibelline family, from office, his plan misfired, with the result that the Albizzi seized control of the Guelf party and deployed its newly expanded powers aggressively and arbitrarily. In the following chapter, Uguccione managed during a term as prior to alter the membership and procedures of the Guelf party to prevent the Albizzi from abusing its power. In spite of the effectiveness of his changes, the Albizzi and the Guelfs returned to a position of domineering influence in the city, owing to a series of events set off by the regime's capricious treatment of the city’s former nobility. As a reward for his exceptional military service during a war against Pisa, the city granted the noble warrior Benchi Buondelmonti status as a member of the popolo to exempt him from the antimagnate Ordinances of Justice and therefore allow him eligibility for the Signoria. However, when the time came that Benchi expected election to the city’s highest office, the regime issued a new law barring all former nobles from the priorate. As a consequence, the justly alienated Benchi used his influence with the city’s old nobility and his friendship with the Albizzi to join forces “to crush the people of the lower class and to remain alone in the government.” His and his allies’ success led shortly thereafter to the return of the Guelfs as a dominant, capricious force in Florentine politics. The people’s empty promises to Benchi and scant regard for the military services they had benefited from is a direct echo of Machiavelli's discussion in 2.26—2.27 of the ultimately empty promises to the city’s exiled nobles, whose services the government successfully sought to free the city from the looming danger posed by Castruccio Castracani. In response to Castruccio’s assault on neighboring Prato, the Florentines had assembled a popular army and marched on Prato. To encourage defections from Castruccio’s forces, who included a considerable number of exiled Florentine nobles fighting the regime that had expelled them, the Florentines issued a proclamation that they would reinstate the citizenship of any Florentine Guelf rebel who assisted them in lifting Castruccio’s siege of Prato. The Florentine army, some twenty thousand strong, gained an additional four thousand Guelf nobles as a result. Their combined forces were sufficiently intimidating that Castruccio retreated back to Lucca, giving up Prato without a battle.*°

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In the aftermath of their sudden victory, the Florentines became divided along class lines about how best to proceed. In a notable inversion of class stereotypes, the people adopted a bellicose stance, insisting that they should

pursue the retreating Castruccio, force him into battle, and destroy him. The nobles instead adopted a moderate stance, arguing that the Florentine government had already put Florence in danger once and had achieved its objective of liberating Prato and hence that the army should be content with

its victory and return to Florence. As the debate in the army became increasingly deadlocked, they submitted the decision to the Signoria, where, owing to an identical division of opinion between nobles and popolo in the councils, a similar stalemate occurred. The nobles’ position eventually and inadvertently won out—not through persuasion or consensus, however, but simply because the lengthy deliberations allowed Castruccio enough time to return to Lucca in safety.” In a recurring pattern in the Histories, even in victory the Florentines could not overcome their proclivity toward internal feuding. In this case, however, the people’s ingratitude instigated the troubles: “This miscarriage [Castruccio’s successful retreat to Lucca] made the people so angry with the nobles that the Signors resolved not to observe the pledge given, on their order and with their support, to the exiles.”** The fickleness of the priors

plunged the city into another round of civil strife. The exiles sent an embassy to the city “to remind the Signors of the pledge that had been given, and of the dangers they had undergone in reliance on it, hoping for the promised reward.’*’ Having given their word to the exiles, the nobles in the city

were now actively conspiring against the regime, for reasons with which Machiavelli evidently sympathized: “The nobles, believing they were committed to the obligation, since they had promised individually what the Signors had pledged, labored hard in the exiles’ behalf.”** Machiavelli concluded the episode by singling out the people’s immoderate intransigence: “Yet the anger felt by the people generally—who were not in the same termper as if they had been victorious in the campaign against Castruccio—kept the nobles from succeeding. This brought shame and dishonor on the city.””’ Machiavelli’s conflicted ambivalence about the role of the people in Florentine politics similarly informed his treatment of the Ciompi revolt. The Florentine historical tradition leading up to Machiavelli spoke with one voice in condemning this revolt. Machiavelli’s humanist predecessors in the Flo-

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rentine chancery, including Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, consistently portrayed the Ciompi as an irrational, anarchic, and destructive mob, susceptible to the worst manifestations of demagoguery in the city’s history. Recalling the chaos of the summer of 1378, Salutati wrote that the city “fell into the hands of sordid men, whose quality of mind and amount of discretion is represented by their frightful rule of forty days in which this [human] plague raged.”’° For Bruni, the political significance of the Ciompi revolt

was its timeless reminder “never to let political initiative and arms into the hands of the multitude for once they have had a taste, they cannot be restrained, and they think they can do as they please because there are so many of them... . There was no end, no limit to the unleashed appetites of the poor and the criminals who, once armed, lusted after the possessions of the rich and honorable men and thought of nothing except robbing, killing, and banishing citizens.”*” Nor was the contempt of Salutati and Bruni an intellectual conceit limited to humanist circles. It echoed, perhaps intentionally, the common hatred of Florentine elite families for populist regimes; for example, Rinaldo degli Albizzi was reputed to have railed against “the forty damned months” during which the Ciompi regime held the Florentines in servitude. ’**

Machiavelli, by contrast, sympathized with the justice of the Ciompi cause. The Histories famously offered a more sympathetic interpretation of the Ci-

ompi agenda than any other text in Florentine Renaissance historiography.*”? Machiavelli privileged the inherent rationality of the revolt by situat-

ing its origins in terms of the favoritism consistently displayed toward the major guilds and in the objectively unjust inequalities in the organization of the guild economy and its judicial structure.*” Among the many arrogant and obnoxious sins of the captains of the Guelf party, whose conduct prompted

so many of the conflicts in the early books of the Histories, Machiavelli added that they “favored the members of the Greater Guilds but maltreated those in the Lesser Guilds and their supporters. For that reason there were as many rebellions as we have described.”’' To the general context of the unfair treatment of the lesser guilds, Machiavelli specified further that many of the city’s poorest workers plied trades that lacked guild representation altogether but were nevertheless subject to necessarily partial justice:

“Hence when they were dissatisfied with their labors or in any way oppressed by their masters, they had nowhere to go for refuge except to the

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magistrate of the guild that ruled them; yet they believed that he did not furnish them proper justice.”’* Machiavelli's account, even at the outset of the revolt, recognizes the inherent rationality and legitimacy of the Ciompi’s indignation at the judicial and economic inequities of their workplace. But once Machiavelli shifted his focus from the merits of the Ciompi’s

demands to analysis of their actions and methods, his portrayal of the people became more pointed and hinted at immoderation and fickleness. In the first example, we see that the people have difficulty taking yes for an answer. In the wake of rioting, the priors decided to negotiate with protesters who had seized and occupied the palace of the podesta. Their demands were altogether moderate, consisting most significantly of a request for three new guilds to represent lower-class trades and a guarantee that two priors should always be drawn from those new guilds.*? The priors acquiesced to the demands. Because the ratification of the new laws required also the approval of the Council of the Commune, which could not meet on the same day as the Council of the People, an additional day was required before the

government could enact the laws. Even though “for the time being, the guilds were pleased and the lower class satisfied,’ by morning the crowd, “impatient and restless,” had returned under their banners to the main square and began to threaten the priors. At the very same moment that the Council of the Commune was approving the new law granting the people’s demands, the crowd outside began shouting that the priors “should abandon the Palace, and if they did not, the people would kill their children and burn their houses.”** One by one, the priors yielded the palace to the wrathful people, prompting Machiavelli’s scornful observation that the gonfalonier preferred to end his term with “shame rather than with danger.” Having won their desired concessions, the people continued to respond with threats of murder and arson. Machiavelli’s account of the subsequent rise and rule of Michele di Lando

and the people’s relationship to him echoed the variability of the people’s treatment of Giano della Bella and Corso Donati. On seizing the Palazzo della Signoria, the people proclaimed the wool-comber Michele di Lando— one of their own—their leader and decreed him standard-bearer of justice. Among his first actions were replacing all of the syndics of the guilds, dismissing sitting members of the major councils and the priors that the Eight of War had appointed in the wake of the previous priors’ abandoning their

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posts, and burning the electoral bags. In the government that he helped to create, the major guilds possessed a minority vote. The Signoria consisted of Michele, four members of the lowest class, two members of the minor guilds, and two from the major guilds. His new list of those eligible for office

was tripartite, granting one-third to the newly created guilds, another third to the minor guilds, and the final third to the major guilds. In addition, “he did many other favors to many other citizens who were friends to the people of low station, not so much to reward them for their actions as in order that at all times he might protect himself against envy.”” Given the distribution of power in Michele’s regime and the fact that the crowd had initially asked Michele “to rule them and the city as he wished,” one might expect that the only remaining malcontents would be the major guilds and upper ranks of the people. As told in the following chapter, however, the people revolted against Michele. In spite of possessing an equal number of priors as the minor and major guilds combined, the “lower classes believed that in reforming the government Michele had been too much a partisan of the highest classes among the people; they also believed that they did not have a share in the administration sufficient to maintain themselves in it and to defend themselves.”’® Much as they had done in the events

recounted two chapters earlier, the lower classes took arms and encamped in the main square demanding an audience with the priors. Unlike the earlier priors, however, who abandoned the palace, preferring shame to danger, Michele “denounced their manner in asking, advised them to lay down their arms, and said they would then receive concessions that the Signoria could not with dignity yield to force.”’’ In response, the unsatisfied mob decamped to Santa Maria Novella, where they set up an alternate government and drafted a new set of demands. Confronted by two representatives of the lower classes who intimated to Michele that “that they would have their new laws by force if they did not receive them by agreement,” he responded in the manner of the city’s old warrior nobility—he attacked them with his sword, gravely wounded them, and had them imprisoned: “unable to bear such arrogance and remembering rather the office he held than his humble birth, Michele determined in an extraordinary way to check extraordinary insolence.”’* Machiavelli’s final estimation of Michele's character left little doubt of his admiration for him: “In courage, in prudence and in goodness he surpassed every citizen of

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his time. He deserves to be numbered among the few who have benefited their native city.”’’ By the time we encounter the general statement a few chapters later that “by the slightest accident the favor of the multitude is lost and gained,” we have already seen the variability of the people’s favor at work in Machiavelli’s treatment of Giano della Bella, Corso Donati, and Michele di Lando.

In the years when Florence had a traditional warrior aristocracy living side by side with an increasingly prosperous urban mercantile elite, Machiavelli evidently discerned at least a few of troubling qualities of the people that his aristocratic friends, for example Francesco Guicciardini, routinely denounced. From book 3 on, however, Florence no longer had such clear social distinctions. The people’s triumph made the city’s political groupings more complex and introduced new political tensions. Whereas previously the city had reflected, like the city-states of antiquity and Venice, the binary opposition of nobles and people, the new political order consisted entirely of merchants with varying degrees of wealth, standing, and claims to primacy in the city.“ Although many nobles remained in the city, they had to renounce their magnate status and refashion themselves in the mold of the popolo. Because of the thoroughness of the people’s victory over the nobility, Florentine politics provided Machiavelli with a uniquely rich laboratory for studying the people. From Sparta, Rome, Venice, and France, he developed an understanding of the people’s nature when struggling against noble oppression. But only Florence provided him with the opportunity to study the

people triumphant, in a setting where they enjoyed exclusive control over the government. In post-1343 Florence, the more varied and subtle social gradations of the people became Machiavelli’s the primary categories with which to interpret Florentine politics." Unlike the Prince and the Discourses with their emphases on binary oppositions, Machiavelli’s writing in the 1520s began to ana-

lyze politics in terms of the three social clusters that made up the popolo broadly conceived: “the powerful, the average, and the lowly.’** We see immediate evidence of this development in the increasing complexity of his vocabulary. Whereas in the Prince and the Discourses he tended to discuss social groups using two terms—popolo and grandi—in the Florentine Histories he deployed a considerably greater range of terms to position people on

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the social and political ladder. At times he used the conventional categories of nobles, people, and lower classes, but more often we find him using hybrid compound terms such as “highest classes among the people,” “aristocrats of popular origin,” “princes of the republic,” “princes of the guilds,” “the ancient nobility,” “the influential men among the people,” “the men of the people who had now become aristocrats,’ “princes in the city,” “a republic of aristocrats,” “aristocratic citizens,” or simply “powerful citizens.”” Machiavelli was of course neither the first nor the only observer of Florentine politics to acknowledge the city’s social construction of nobility. In an illuminating study of Machiavelli’s understanding of nobility, Alfredo Bonadeo has explained the social and legal circumstances that led to the

juxtaposition of such terms and demonstrated a pattern of flexibility in the Florentine vocabulary describing the city’s elite. The original nobility, whose power was based on land over which they claimed, at least in principle, sole political and economic power, were identified as alternately nobili, grandi, or magnati.** For example, Giovanni Villani wrote about “nobili legnaggi e

case, che a’ detti tempi erano in Firenze grandi e di podere,” “nobili detti erandi e possenti,’ and “grandi gentiluomini.”*” But Florentine economic prosperity subsequently raised many merchant families up to noble status in spite of their mercantile origins. Dino Compagni, for example, wrote about “potenti cittadini, i quali non tutti erano nobili di sangue, ma per altri accidenti erano detti grandi.”*° Historians such as Enrico Fiumi and Gene Brucker have shown that by the fourteenth century noble status in Florence had ceased to be exclusively a function of antiquity or blood but was rather based on social context—“the behaviour pattern of the family, its reputation for violence and disorder,” in Brucker’s words.” At times in the Florentine Histories Machiavelli's use of hybrid compound

terms was similar in intent to that of chroniclers such as Villani and Com-

pagni, reflecting a common desire to provide an accurate account of the city’s familial and factional alliances. But at other times Machiavelli's hybrid vocabulary implied ideas that went far beyond simple acknowledgment of Florence’s shifting legal and social settings. His narrative, unlike those of his predecessors, engaged in a sustained psychological and philosophical meditation on the mutability of noble and popular categories that transcended the more technical boundaries in other discussions. This chapter now turns

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to both instances of Machiavelli’s terminology in the Florentine Histories, first the one similar to his contemporary historians’ usage, and second the one that went beyond it. Machiavelli employed a hybrid compound vocabulary to identify factions for the simple reason that no faction was composed entirely of a single social class, the result of the final defeat of the Florentine nobility in 1343 and the social class complexity of the triumphant popolo. For most of the Histories he was content to imply this point indirectly or briefly, through vocabulary or through social dissection of various factions. For example, in 3.19 he discussed the conflict between the fledgling Ciompi regime led by Michele di Lando and the recently exiled Guelfs who were plotting their return with the support of Charles of Durazzo and his general Giannozzo of Salerno. Inspired chiefly by fear, the government empowered a council with wideranging powers to fortify the regime. Among the strategies employed, the council attempted to arrest the growing social tension between the elite and the people by forcibly mixing them. They revoked the magnate status of some noble families and conferred noble status on certain popolo families, further fusing the social basis of the two originally distinct groups. “All these things went on to the injury of those who were suspected by the ruling faction. In its fear it chose forty-six men, who, together with the Signors, were to purge the city of all who were suspected by the government. These admonished thirty-nine citizens and classified many of the people as nobles and many of the nobles as people.”*®

But in 4.27 Machiavelli attributed to Niccolo da Uzzano a speech that explained in detail why the city’s allegedly noble and popular factions, contrary to the implication of their names, did not reflect any such social division. The later chapters of book 4 deal with the rivalry between the Albizzean and Medicean factions. In Machiavelli’s narrative, Florentines identified Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Cosimo de’ Medici as the heads, respectively, of the noble and popular parties, but Machiavelli’s larger narrative had earlier revealed that the Albizzi and the Medici had both been among the wealthy members of the people and that the Medici had in particular played an influential role in the crushing defeat of the Florentine warrior nobility recounted at the end of book 2.” After their victory, the social and economic gap between the upper and lower echelons of the people led the upper ranks to style themselves as the city’s new nobility. But Machiavelli’s discussion of

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the complex, contradictory alliances within the two factions in the 1420s pointed out that their sense of nobility was little more than a style and far from a durable corporate structure. Fearing Cosimo’s growing power, Niccolo da Uzzano was urged by Niccolo Barbadoro, a hawkish and influential member of the Albizzi oligarchy, to support plans to destroy Cosimo. Barbadoro’s arguments were framed in class terms, identifying his own faction as noble and Cosimo’s as plebeian. Niccolo da Uzzano countered with two objections. The first accepted the interpretation of the factions but doubted a favorable outcome: “This party of ours you have baptized as the party of the Nobles, and the opposite that of the Plebeians. If the truth corresponded with the names, the victory would be doubtful in every event and we would need to fear rather than to hope, moved by the example of the ancient noble families of this city, which the Plebeians destroyed.”’? Uzzano’s second and more detailed objection exposed the essential social artificiality, hence weakness, of his own faction. Some key members of this group had yet to declare any formal allegiance to the Albizzi rather than the Medici. Worse still, many of the city’s new noble families were divided between the two groups. Luca degli Albizzi’s envy of his brother Rinaldo led him to join the plebeian party; Piero Guicciardini’s hostility to Giovanni Guicciardini led him to do the same; Tommaso and Niccol6 Soderini’s hatred of their uncle Francesco catalyzed their open opposition to the Albizzeans. Niccolo concluded: “Hence if you consider well of what sort they are and of what sort we are, I do not know why ours more deserves to be called the Noble Party than theirs.””* His analysis of the com-

position of the so-called noble party deduced that the one sense in which they could meaningfully be called noble was the cause of their greatest weakness: they, unlike Cosimo, were opposed by all the lower classes. Four chapters later, discussing events in 1434, Machiavelli vindicated Niccold’s speech on the weakness and lack of solidarity in the allegedly “noble” party. We find Rinaldo degli Albizzi taking up arms against the Signoria in

spite of the earlier warnings against a martial approach. Rinaldo’s attempt to crush Cosimo’s power failed in ways that were entirely predicted by Niccold, who had already identified division in their group, particularly concerning Neri di Gino Capponi and Nerone di Nigi Dietisalvi Neroni, who “have never declared themselves in such a way that one can say they are more our friends than theirs.”’* Rinaldo assembled in Piazza Sant’Apollinare

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with Ridolfo Peruzzi, Niccolé Barbadoro, and a large crowd of armed retainers. But Palla Strozzi, a key figure in their party who possessed considerable forces, refused to mobilize or commit to the venture, eventually retreating into his palace. Machiavelli identified Giovanni Guicciardini as an example

of a family member torn between two factions. Much like Palla Strozzi, Giovanni declined to support Rinaldo with his own forces. When criticized by Rinaldo for his hesitation, Giovanni replied: “he made war enough on the hostile party [Cosimo de’ Medici] if, by remaining in his house, he kept Piero his brother from coming out to rescue the Palace [in which a proMedicean Signoria sat].””’

In addition to the absence of social distinctions between the ostensible “noble” and “popular” parties, books 3-8 collapse many of Machiavelli's initial conceptual distinctions between nobles and people. Reflecting on Florentine history revealed to him that the qualities he had previously exclusively identified with nobles were in fact universal aspects of human nature. He

inverted his earlier notion of the people as a clearly defined social group whose modest political aspirations were crucial building blocks for strong states. On the contrary, at critical moments in Florentine history when the city stood in dire need of those qualities, the people were active opponents of liberty. On some occasions they sought license at the expense of liberty; on others they displayed the same destabilizing desire for total political domination as their erstwhile aristocratic opponents had, they reasoned according to logic identical to that of the nobles, and they had a similar recourse to violence. Few scholars have considered the larger significance of the late Machiavelli’s cynical view of the people. Among the few who have, Humfrey But-

ters has recently pointed to Machiavelli's harsh portrait of the Florentine popolo as evidence of “his increasingly aristocratic perspective” in his later writings, equally evident in the privileged role he gives to aristocrats in his Discourse on Florentine Affairs.’* While Butters is right to stress that Machiavelli distanced himself from his earlier praise of the people, to characterize Machiavelli’s perspective as “aristocratic” is still somewhat misleading. Unlike Guicciardini and the ottimati who wished to anchor Florentine politics,

whether republican or Medicean, around a senate composed of the city’s inner circle of old, wealthy families, Machiavelli always retained his skeptical and often outright critical attitude toward the Florentine elite, even in

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the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, which featured provosts drawn from the people empowered to veto decisions made in the noble-dominated executive. His new-found perspective on the people was less a condemnation of popular politics in favor of aristocratic or oligarchic politics and more a recognition that the ease with which members of the popolo could adopt the nobles’ tyrannical aristocratic psychology as their own meant that any longterm solution to the problem of Florentine factionalism would have to constrain and satisfy the people just as much as the nobility. In book 3, Machiavelli began to analyze the transformation of political conflict from a struggle between nobles and people into a struggle within the people between its upper and lower ranks. He introduced the book with

a sustained contrast between the nature of the Roman and Florentine people that referred readers to his earlier argument about the people from the Discourses.’ But he invoked the Discourses only to level a blunt and polemical challenge to its class certainties. In the Discourses we were told that “in every republic there are two opposed factions, that of the people and that of the rich, and that all the laws made in favor of liberty result from their discord.””® In the Florentine Histories Machiavelli instead asserted: “The

serious and natural enmities between the people and the nobles, caused by the latter’s wish to rule and the former’s not to be enthralled, bring about

all the evils that spring up in cities; by this opposition of parties all the other things that disturb republics are nourished.”’’ Machiavelli thus announced at the outset of book 3 his radically altered view of the alleged merits of class conflict.

Class conflict does not necessarily result in “laws that favor liberty” because the nature of the people is not universal, as implied in the Prince and Discourses, but variable. Machiavelli's comparison between Rome and Florence explained this point in detail. The Roman people’s political ambitions were moderate: although they desired to acquire the highest offices in the republic and were prepared to fight in pursuit of that goal, they fully expected,

even when triumphant, to share those offices with their noble rivals. Because of that willingness to acknowledge the ambition and needs of others, the nobles preferred negotiation and compromise to civil war. As a result, good laws were established that satisfied the people without excessively depriving the nobles of their privileged role in the republic. But in Florence, the people’s political ambitions were altogether immoderate: they too desired

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to acquire the highest offices in the government and were prepared to fight in pursuit of that goal but, unlike the Romans, they did not acknowledge the political rights of their noble rivals. The Florentine people fought for exclusive and monopolistic control of the state. As a result, Machiavelli acknowledged, the nobility had little choice but to engage in bitter warfare to preserve their position: “On the other hand, the Florentine people’s desire was harmful and unjust, so that the nobility with greater forces prepared to defend themselves, and therefore the result was blood and the exile of citizens.’”®

Machiavelli now identified the Florentine people’s “harmful and unjust” ambitions as the root cause of the city’s myriad political problems. Because

the nobles knew to expect no quarter, they spared no effort in defending themselves by force. If the people had been inclined to compromise, as the Romans had, Florence might have established a culture of political debate, legal resolutions to political conflicts, and robust military power. Because they were not so inclined, Florence produced a culture of chronic civil discord, exiles, executions, and the destruction of the city’s military might. The Roman people, since they served in public office alongside the nobles, came to acquire the same skill and experience in public affairs that the nobility had long enjoyed, and as a consequence Rome could draw widely on men of talent from all ranks. In Florence, because the nobles were entirely driven from power, the people had no experienced veteran statesmen to emulate. Many chapters of the Florentine Histories reflected and expanded on the way the Florentine people, once victorious, immediately began to emulate the vanquished nobility and appropriate the nobles’ psychology as their own. Machiavelli first alluded to this phenomenon in his discussion of the ori-

gins of the priorate. The guilds established the government of the priors against a backdrop in the late 1270s of largely unpunished noble arrogance and violence against the people. Although the new governing magistracy was open to nobles as well as to the middle classes, Machiavelli explained that its creation was nonetheless the beginning of the end for the nobility. The nobles allowed themselves to be excluded from the priorate—indeed even consented to it—owing to their penchant for internal rivalry, their mutual suspicion, and their fatal underestimation of the people’s ambition. In the following chapter, Machiavelli addressed the creation of the office of standard-bearer of justice, whose primary task was to punish noble aggression,

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and the standard-bearer’s first dramatic action of razing the houses of the Galletti. “It was easy for the guilds to make this law, since serious enmities were rife among the nobles, who paid no attention to the provision made against them until they saw the harshness of that act of enforcement.”” Although for the immediate future the nobles remained set in their lawless ways, Machiavelli stressed the long-term significance of the people’s control of the city’s chief magistracy. Having gained this exclusive control, the people were disinclined to share the office and instead used its power to destroy their opponents: “This magistracy, as in time appeared, caused the ruin of the nobles, who for various reasons were excluded from it by the people, and later without any consideration were crushed.” Early in book 3, Machiavelli inserted a withering condemnation of Florentine factionalism that echoed the book’s larger critique of the people. A group of patriotic citizens had assembled to address the city’s escalating factional battles between the Albizzi and the Ricci. The group went to the Signoria, and the most influential citizen among them delivered to the priors an inspiring speech on the importance of union and justice. The speech deconstructed the alleged class-specific motives of the aristocratic and popular parties, showing that they shared the same illegitimate thirst for political dominance: “Still more harmful it is that the movers and originators of these parties with a pious word make their plan and purpose seem honorable; because always, since they are all enemies to liberty, they crush her under the pretense of defending a state of aristocrats or a popular government because the reward they desire from victory is not the glory of having freed the city, but the satisfaction of having conquered the others and usurped their dominion.’® Nobles and people alike shared an innate satisfaction in dominating others. The anonymous orator then went on to reflect on the damage caused to the city by the people’s appropriation of the values of the nobility, an unexpected development that surprised everyone and dashed all hopes of internal peace. “We fought until our ancient nobility was overcome and surrendered itself to the decision of the people. And many people believed that never again would any cause for division or parties appear in Florence, since a bridle had been put on those who through their pride and unbearable ambition seemed to have caused the trouble.”°* But with the benefit of hindsight, it

had become clear to the anonymous narrator that attributing the root cause

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of Florentine factionalism specifically to the nobles was a naive and unsustainable diagnosis. “But now it can be seen from experience how deceptive the opinion of men is and how false their judgment, for the pride and ambition of our nobles were not destroyed but were taken away from them by our people, who now, according to the habit of ambitious men, strive to gain first rank in the republic.”®? The people, in short, had become what

they beheld. Unsurprisingly, then, the city continued to suffer from the same political problems it had earlier when the fractious quarrels between the Donati and Buondelmonti plagued its public life. The anonymous orator’s speech elaborated at length on Machiavelli's earlier observation in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs that changes to the structure of the Florentine government tended to reflect factional and party

priorities rather than benefits to the common good. But whereas the Discourse on Florentine Affairs merely identified the problem, the speech in the Florentine Histories established the cause: the similarly irrational and immoderate desires of the nobles and the people alike. Because the goal of both had

more to do with the intrinsic delight taken in the destruction of an opponent than with political renovation, those in power, whether of the people or the aristocrats, would not refrain from any nefarious act, no matter how unjust, cruel, or avaricious. “Hence they make laws and statutes not for the public benefit but for their own; hence wars, truces, and alliances are decided not for the common glory but for the pleasure of a few.’ And whereas the Discourse on Florentine Affairs associated the problem of

laws made according to factional priorities with the regimes beginning with

the Albizzi in the early fifteenth century and ending with the Soderinian republic of 1502-1512, the anonymous orator’s speech demonstrated the presence of the same affliction during the city’s early history. “If other cities are filled with these abuses, our is more soiled with them than any other, for the laws, the statutes, the methods of government here always have been managed and now are managed not as required by a free government but as re-

quired by the ambition of the party on top... . That this is true, our city’s ancient and recent divisions show. Everybody believed, when the Ghibellines were destroyed, that the Guelfs would then long live in happiness and honor; nevertheless, after a short time they were divided into Whites and Blacks. After the Whites were overcome, the city was never without parties;

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we were always fighting, now to aid the exiles, now because of the hostilities between the people and the nobles. In order to give to someone else what we would not or could not keep by agreement among ourselves, we subjected our liberty now to King Robert, now to his brother, now to his son, and finally to the Duke of Athens.”® In a pair of chapters dealing with the early phases of the Ciompi revolt, Machiavelli demonstrated that the people employed the same logic, tactics, and strategy as those above them in the social hierarchy and in pursuit of the same goals. In 3.8 Machiavelli related an attempt in 1378 by the leading Guelf families to seize control of the government. The power of the Guelfs had been steadily growing, such that it rivalled the authority of the communal government itself: “And to such arrogance the captains of the party climbed

that they were more feared than the Signors, and men went to the latter with less respect than to the former, and the palace of the party was more respected than theirs, so that no ambassador came to Florence without a message for the captains.”°° The Signoria and the Guelfs viewed each other with sufficient mutual suspicion that the city expected imminent civil war: “Yet it was believed that necessarily the Florentines would come to blows, to see which of the two seats of power would win.”°’ The Guelfs represented the noble or wealthy faction, since their party was composed of “all the ancient nobles, with the greater part of the more influential of the people,” and their opponents were the popular faction, made up of “all the less important people. ... The rest of the multitude, as almost always happens, supported the discontented party [the latter group].”°° However mighty its private army, the Guelf party and its leaders nonetheless feared as greater still the power of their adversaries, who controlled the government, its public forces, and the laws. As a result, the Guelf elite assembled to discuss their best strategy for survival in a context of escalating tension. They acknowledged at the outset that they had largely brought the troubles on themselves by their excessive use of admonishment, a major source of Guelf power according to which the captains could deprive any Ghibelline family of the right to hold communal office. In the years leading

up to the Ciompi revolt, the Guelfs had deployed that power excessively and indiscriminately, excluding their opponents irrespective of whether they had any current or historic ties to Ghibellinism. As a result of the

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Guelfs’ high-handed treatment of their enemies, “the admonished, having increased to such a large number, had brought them such great blame that all the city had become hostile to them.”®’

Entirely in keeping with the portrayal of nobles in the Prince and the Discourses as a group who lusted immoderately for political domination, the Guelf chieftains did not consider signalling willingness to compromise or to repair their bad image by ceasing to misuse the power of admonishment. Instead they reasoned that having done a little wrong, the only way to remain secure in the city was to transgress on a grander scale, stage a coup d’état, and drive their opponents out of the city altogether. “They saw no way to deal with this except that, since they had taken from their opponents all their offices they should take from them the city too, occupying by force

the Palazzo della Signoria and bringing the entire government under the control of their faction, in imitation of the ancient Guelfs, who lived in secu-

rity in the city for no other reason than that they had driven out all their adversaries.””” Given what we learned about nobles in Machiavelli’s earlier writings, his analysis of their tactics and goals is relatively unsurprising here. But five chapters later, during an account of the first stage of the Ciompi uprising, Machiavelli revealed that the people use precisely the same logic the Guelf nobles had. In 1378, the sottoposti—disenfranchised woolworkers who were excluded from the guild hierarchy and hence constituted the bottom rung of the economic ladder—and others had revolted, plundering and burning the houses of the Guelf elite. The “poorest of the people” then met to discuss tactics and strategy for a context of imminent conflict similar to

the one analyzed five chapters earlier. Some among them, particularly the impoverished and disenfranchised woolworkers, were eager to establish the right to guild representation of their own, while others were merely concerned to avoid punishment for their earlier disturbances. Machiavelli attributes to an anonymous woolworker—‘one of the most fiery and of greatest experience’—a lengthy and complex speech that directly echoed the earlier chapter dissecting the tactics of the Guelf elite.” The woolworker argues that, having incontrovertibly already done a little wrong, the group’s only route to safety lay in doubling and redoubling their transgressions, while expanding their ranks as aggressively as possible: “We must, therefore, as it seems to me, if we expect to be pardoned for our old transgressions, commit

new ones, doubling our offenses and multiplying our arson and robbery,

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and must strive to have many companions in this, because where many err, nobody is punished; little faults are punished, great and serious ones are rewarded. ... To multiply offenses, then, will cause us to find pardon more easily and will open to us the way for getting those things that, for our lib-

erty, we wish to get.’ The Ciompi and the Guelfs may have differed in wealth, power, and social standing, but they shared a similar understanding of the relationship between crime, political ambition, and punishment. The anonymous woolworker at first seems consistent with Machiavelli’s earlier positive view of the people. He begins his speech by condemning the economic tyranny of the group’s guild superiors and the political tyranny of the wealthy elite, while asserting as one of the group’s major objectives “to live with more liberty and more satisfaction to ourselves than in the past.””’ By the end of the speech, however, Machiavelli has shown that the woolworker possesses the same desire for political domination as his social betters and hence is a specific example of the introductory thesis to book 3: that the immoderate desire of the people fuelled the city’s chronic political conflicts. The woolworker, having proposed a muscular expansion of the group's protest, goes on to reason: “For my part, I hold that we shall go to sure gain, because those who might hinder us are disunited and rich. Their disunion, therefore, will give us the victory, and their riches, when they become ours, will support us. ... We ought to use force when we get a chance.... Hence before they unite and confirm their courage, they can easily be defeated, and as a result we shall either be completely rulers of the city, or shall have such a share of her that not merely our past errors will be forgiven us, but we shall have so much power that we can threaten her with new damage... . You see the preparations of our adversaries; let us get ahead of their plans; for whichever of us first takes arms will without doubt be the winner, with the ruin of his enemy and his own exaltation. Thus many of us will gain honor and all will gain security.” We are far removed from the world of the Prince and the Discourses when we encounter a martial laboring class fighting for honor, that most prized of aristocratic possessions, and preparing to inflict considerable damage to intimidate their opponents, usurp their wealth, and gain complete mastery of the city. The ciompo’s speech does not just provide a precise example of Machiavelli’s earlier general observation about the people, however. It also provides a systematic, psychological rejection of the variability of human nature, a

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crucial precondition for Machiavelli’s earlier contrast between nobles and people. Through the ciompo, Machiavelli sociologically and historically deconstructed the concept of nobility. The ciompo feared that the apparent audacity of a revolt by the lowly against the elite of the powerful wool guild would discourage the Ciompi from following their initial disorganized protest with a concerted attempt to seize the government itself. To fortify their courage, he first reminded his audience of the fundamental equality of all people: “And do not be frightened by their antiquity of blood which they shame us with, for all men, since they had one and the same beginning, are equally ancient; by nature, they are all made in one way.’” He then redefined the concept of nobility as little more than success in audacious and violent enterprises, hence as a quality eminently attainable by all, irrespective of position on the social ladder at birth. In practice, nobility consists of little more than a precocious aptitude for criminality and violence: “If you will observe the way in which men act, you will see that all those who attain great riches and great power have attained them by means of either fraud or force; those things, then, that they have snatched with trickery or with violence, in order to conceal the ugliness of their acquisition, under the false title of profit they make honorable ... none come out of servitude except the unfaithful and the bold, and out of poverty except the rapacious and fraudulent.”” Once people are in possession of greater wealth, the woolworker went on to argue, only the social trappings of convention sustain the illusory myth that something tangible distinguishes nobles from plebeians: “Strip us all naked; you will see us all alike; dress us then in their clothes and they in ours;

without doubt we shall seem noble and they ignoble, for only poverty and riches make us unequal.”’” Machiavelli has not only affirmed in this chapter the essential similarity between nobles and people but also explained at a universal level why both groups instinctively gravitate toward a domineering style of politics. Seven chapters later, Machiavelli's account of the execution of Giorgio Scali in 1382 implicitly confirmed the correctness of the woolworker’s speech. By 1382, the city was divided by a struggle between what Machiavelli called the popular party—largely consisting of the old Guelf nobility, whose haughty and violent opposition to the Eight Saints formed the initial backdrop to the Ciompi revolt—and the plebeian party, largely consisting of the now domi-

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nant lesser guilds, who had abandoned the lower classes in exchange for a preponderant political role in the post-Ciompi settlement.’* Once dominant, the plebeian party, led by Giorgio Scali and Tommaso Strozzi, tyrannized the city with the same violent and arrogant conduct the Guelf nobles had visited on the city prior to the Ciompi revolt. Because of the plebeian party's support, Scali and Strozzi wielded power more substantive than that exercised by the city’s magistrates and wielded it capriciously and harshly, leading Machiavelli to conclude: “not merely to the good but to the seditious that government seemed tyrannical and violent.””” After a minor political skirmish led Scali to sack the palace of the captain of the People and force him into hiding, thereby inspiring universal disapproval, it seemed to a group of the priors that an ideal moment had arrived to destroy Scali and thereby break the power of the plebeian party. This group determined that to succeed in their undertaking without causing the plebeian party to rise up against them they would need the blessing of Benedetto Alberti, an influential and early supporter of the plebeian party, one of the few heroes in the Histories and praised in this chapter as “a very rich man, merciful, stern, a lover of the liberty of his city, and much opposed to tyrannical measures.”*° Machiavelli's analysis of Benedetto’s motives for consenting to the government’s plan and abandoning the plebeian party focused exclusively on the way the plebeians had adopted the same tyrannical outlook and methods they had initially resented in the popolo’s leadership, who in turn had resented those qualities in the ancient nobility. Benedetto reflected that he “had earlier been an enemy to those of the people who had become aristocrats and to the Guelf faction; he had been a friend to the plebeian party because of the haughtiness and tyrannical ways of the Guelfs. But when he saw that the heads of the plebeian party had become like the others, he detached himself from them... . Thus the causes that made him earlier take the side of the plebeian party were the same as made him then leave it.” Machiavelli’s Benedetto provided a perspective from within the plebeian party on its adoption of conduct every bit as violent, immoderate, and arrogant as the conduct of the older nobility whom the plebeians had so justifiably resented and fought against. In the early chapters of book 4, Machiavelli used Niccolé da Uzzano to confirm the same point from the perspective of the plebeians opponents. The same tension between the popular and plebeian parties that closed book 3 persists in the conflict between Albizzi

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and Medici that opens book 4. In 4.9, the Albizzi leadership assembled to discuss various tactics for reestablishing tight control over the government.** Rinaldo proposed as a solution to the problem of plebeian influence

that they “give the government to the nobles and... take away the power of the lesser guilds. ... This would give the lowest class less power in the councils ... and more power would be given to the nobles, who on account of their old hostility would not support the masses.”*’ Rinaldo appreciated the historical irony of allying with the city’s ancient nobility, since the leadership of the Albizzean faction was composed primarily of the very same families who had fought that nobility so fiercely in the thirteenth century. In an invocation of prudential virtue reminiscent of the Prince, Rinaldo explained to his followers why turning to the city’s ancient nobility was less a betrayal than an extension of their ancestors’ legacy: “He declared that prudence makes use of men according to the times; hence, if their fathers made use of the masses to destroy the haughtiness of the nobles, now that the nobility had become humble and the masses haughty, the haughtiness of the lowest classes could well be checked with the aid of the nobles.’** Plebs,

people, and nobles alike each take successive turns attempting to dominate the others. In the following chapter Machiavelli attributed to Giovanni de’ Medici a speech that stresses the complete inversion of the characteristics of nobles and people that are repeatedly asserted in the Prince and the Discourses. Niccolo da Uzzano had persuaded Rinaldo that Rinaldo’s plan to reempower the nobility would of necessity crucially hinge on the tacit consent of Giovanni de’ Medici, one of the leaders of the plebeian faction. Accordingly, Rinaldo approached Giovanni to attempt to persuade him of the merits of the plan. Giovanni rejected it on the grounds that Rinaldo had failed to appreciate the thoroughness with which the old nobility had been tamed and the intransigent pugnacity that had been awakened in the people. Giovanni’s analysis of the nobles and people, particularly in their attitudes toward political office, directly inverted the definitions from the Prince and the Discourses of the people as content merely to live unmolested and the nobility as content only when directly ruling over others. “He [Giovanni] believed that this policy of theirs [allying with the old nobility to defeat the people] would have two very harmful results. First, it would give the city offices to those who, never having held them, value them lower and have less cause, not holding them,

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to complain [about their exclusion from office].”*” By the early fifteenth cen-

tury, the old nobility—in Giovanni’s estimation anyway—had so thoroughly adopted the earlier mentality of the people that they had lost not only the desire for office but also even the expectation of holding it. “Second, if the offices were taken from those who had been accustomed to holding them, such men would never be quiet until their positions were given back to them. Thus the result would be much greater injury to one party than benefit to the other, so that he who caused it would get himself few friends and numerous enemies; and the enemies would be more violent in injuring him than the friends in defending him.”*° The people on the other hand insisted on their right to hold office and were prepared to inflict considerable violence to any who challenged that right.

For the most part, Machiavelli demonstrates his revised view of the people implicitly, through analysis of specific conflicts and moments in Florentine history. But in the introduction to book 4, just as in the introduction to book 3, he briefly pauses his narrative to reflect on the universal lessons implied by the dismal particularities of Florentine political culture. Both introductions announce radically revised and somewhat contradictory interpretations of the people. We saw Machiavelli in book 3 declaring unequivocally that the Florentine people’s desires were unjust and immoderate, particularly their zeal to exclude the nobles entirely from government. In book 4 Machiavelli distanced himself somewhat from his earlier rejection of significant distinctions between nobles and people. Whereas in the Prince and the Discourses the people's political instincts constituted the solution to the problem of an overambitious nobility, book 4 portrays people and nobles as equal threats. “Those cities, especially such as are not well organized, that are administered under the semblance of republican government, often vary their rulers and their constitutions not between liberty and slavery, as many believe, but between slavery and license. The promoters of license, who are the people, and the promoters of slavery, who are the nobles, praise the mere name of liberty, for neither of these classes is willing to be subject to the laws or to men.”*”

Although many ancient republics found healthy institutional solutions to these threats to liberty, Florence was among “all those which have often

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varied their governments and are at present varying them from the tyrannical form to the licentious, and from that back to the other.”®® Florence’s instability, Machiavelli suggested, resulted directly from the way the desires of its people and its nobility, once realized, automatically triggered predictable problems. When nobles were triumphant, a “tyrannical” form of

government prevailed that failed to satisfy the virtuous because it did “evil with ease.”*’ When the people were triumphant, a “licentious” form of government prevailed that alienated wise citizens because it made it difficult to pursue virtuous policies. “In one, too much power is given to arrogant men; in the other, too much to stupid men.””’ In both cases, weak republics tend to have few correctives to this problem other than optimistically hoping for the presence of an exceptional individual to carry out what should have been done through laws and institutions. It seems possible that given book 4’s primary focus on Cosimo de’ Medici’s early battles with and ultimate victory over the Albizzi oligarchy, Machiavelli might have been suggesting that the Medici family’s success in Florence derived at least in part from Cosimo’s ability to contain the ambitions of the people as much as those of the elite. If so, the transition from the third to the fourth books served to reinforce Machiavelli’s overall critique of the

people and to remind Pope Clement that his family prospered in Florence by playing close attention to the demands and expectations of the Florentine people. Butters has characterized this critique as part of an increasingly aristocratic turn in Machiavelli's thought, the result being a tactical retreat from his earlier hard-nosed populism, likely inspired by his growing rapprochement with the Medici and their circle.”* But we should be cautious about in-

terpreting his new view of the people in such terms and particularly cautious about interpreting his later thought in terms of similarity with the aristocratic outlook of his Medicean contemporaries such as Francesco Guic-

ciardini, Paolo Vettori, and others. To be sure, Machiavelli’s reflection on the Florentine popolo’s immoderate desires and propensity for violence and their destabilizing effect on Florentine politics caused him to reconsider the fundamental nature of the popolo. But at no point does he abandon or even temper his usual withering scorn for the politics of Florence’s elite families. His critique of the Florentine popolo was less the result of an aristocratic turn than the realization that because the people have the same inherent

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ambitions as “nobles,” they cannot play the role ascribed to them in the Prince and the Discourses of anchors or guardians of collective liberty. The people pose the same threat to order and stability as do the grandi if they cannot realize their political ambitions—exactly as described in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs.

Whereas the traditional aristocratic view of the people as immoderate and inconstant helped the aristocracy to rationalize regimes that excluded the people, Machiavelli’s view of the Florentine people as in equal parts ambitious and dangerous was part of his argument that any regime that hoped for a measure of stability had to include them.

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D

The Albizzi Regime in the Florentine Histories

This chapter is the first of three that examine the way the Florentine Histories and the Discourse on Florentine Affairs made tactically sim-

ilar arguments about Florentine politics and history. Machiavelli defended his radical republican proposal in the Discourse on historical and practical grounds: Florentine history furnished recurring and detailed proof that the rival constitutional models currently circulating in Medici circles were doomed

to fail. Recall that before outlining his solution to the problem of Medici power in Florence, he first elaborated a critique of the practical shortcomings of earlier regimes, hence discrediting arguments for their revival and paving the way for his innovative approach. Given that his constitutional proposal proceeded in the first instance from recognition of the failures of past regimes, the coherence and plausibility of his proposal crucially depended on persuading his readers that his historical vision was correct. This chapter argues that whatever else Machiavelli may have wished to accomplish in the Histories, he certainly intended to support and amplify the specific historical critiques in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs.

This chapter focuses in particular on one of the two primary models of government frequently considered in the 1520s, the Albizzean system of

The Albizzi Regime

narrow, elite-dominated oligarchy.’ It demonstrates detailed and sustained overlap between Machiavelli’s itemization in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs of the defects of the Albizzi regime and his larger analysis of those years in the Histories. We will see that the question of the people and their relationship to the ruling party dominated Machiavelli’s analysis. Although the Albizzi regime suffered from several flaws, Machiavelli attributed its elitism and constant exclusion of the people from the government as its greatest source of vulnerability. This analysis of the final demise of the Albizzi and the transition to the ascent of Cosimo de’ Medici hinged most critically on the contrasting degrees of popular support the two factions commanded. The challenges faced by the oligarchs of the late fourteenth and early fif-

teenth centuries thus spoke directly to the challenges faced by Clement VII to navigate between calls for increasingly aristocratic government by influential followers and widespread popular agitation for a more inclusive regime.

In the Discourse on Florentine Affair’s analysis of the defects in previous Florentine hybrid governments, Machiavelli devoted the most attention to the aristocratic Albizzean oligarchy. After the turbulent popular republican ex-

periment dominated by Savonarola and Soderini, many aristocrats looked back with nostalgia and praise on that regime as one of the most durable episodes of elite oligarchy, hence as a potential source of examples on which to build consensus in the 1520s.* Writing around 1500, Luca della Robbia praised the Albizzi regime’s leadership as equal that of the famous and wise Romans of antiquity.’ In a similar vein, Niccold Soderini asserted that only those who governed before 1433 knew how to govern properly.* But the regime’s most famous and influential apologist without equal was Francesco Guicciardini, who wrote: “In this period, our city did indeed show how strong it could be when it was united... Florence was successful both at home and abroad; at home, because it remained free, united, and governed by well-to-do, good, and capable men; abroad, because it defended itself against powerful enemies and greatly expanded its dominion. Florentine successes

were so great that this government is deservedly said to be the wisest, the most glorious, and the happiest that our city had had for a long time.”

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Against the aristocratic consensus, however, Machiavelli argued that the Albizzi oligarchy’s longevity and apparent unity was more accidental than a product of genuinely strong institutional arrangements or wisdom in the Albizzean ruling circle. Although by Florentine standards that regime was relatively stable—dominating politics roughly from the 1380s to 1434—Machiavelli concluded that its durability was less the product of any

substantive unity or institutional stability than a fortunate and temporary byproduct of the city’s wars against Visconti Milan.°

The state of crisis occasioned by external wars masked the regime's key defects, summarized by Machiavelli in five main points.’ First, the regime mishandled in two ways the city’s electoral process. They prepared the lists of citizens eligible to hold office far in advance of actual vacancies. Thus it often happened that undeserving or untrustworthy people were nominated. And even if a virtuous candidate happened to be approved for the electoral lists, so much time passed between the composition of the list and the actual appointment to office that there was always the possibility that a formerly “good” candidate might have been corrupted or alienated by the time his name ticket was drawn from the pouches.*

The second major defect of the regime was its inability to cause fear in the city’s leading citizens. Without fear of prompt, vigilant, and draconian punishment of the nobles’ excesses, there was little incentive for discontented citizens not to form factions and actively conspire with exiles against the regime. Third, the chief executive council of the government, the Signoria, suffered from two defects. It lacked respect because men of low social standing could be and were elected to it, the two-month term of office for the priors was too brief to allow resolution of weighty and complex political issues, and young men could and did serve. In spite of the relative lack of prestige associated with the Signoria, however, it was at the same time too powerful because priors had the authority to summon the city to a parlamento, always

a crucial first step for regime change or consolidation, and had authority without appeal over the life and property of citizens. As a result the Signoria was less often a safeguard for the regime than an exploitable tool for members who were discontented or overambitious.

Fourth, the regime allowed private citizens to deliberate on public affairs. However useful it may have been for the Albizzi to rely on advice from

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trusted allies independent of whether they were actually sitting officeholders, Machiavelli explained, the practice detracted from the overall authority of the government by diminishing the power and reputation of active magistrates and by confusing public and private interests. Fifth, the regime excluded the people from a significant political voice. Because it was too exclusively organized as an aristocratic oligarchy, the regime ensured that its enemies would always have a powerful and powerfully discontented populace to help buttress their opposition—a weakness, Machiavelli subsequently elaborated, Cosimo de’ Medici effectively exploited. Machiavelli explored and further elaborated on each of these defects in the Florentine Histories. He showed how the Viscontean wars, in spite of their costs, tended to help sustain the Albizzi regime. He thrice repeated the general unifying effect of these wars. In 4.11, an account of the escalating divide between the Albizzi and the Medici, Rinaldo degli Albizzi schemes to have Ser Martino, a chancellor and Medici client, removed from office. His plan backfires, however, resulting in the dismissal of Ser Pagolo, also a chancellor but, more important, a client of Rinaldo’s powerful ally Niccolo da Uzzano. The preceding books of the Florentine Histories abound in examples of such petty squabbles inexorably and inevitably igniting factional wars that engulfed the city in violence for decades. In this case, however, Machiavelli concluded: “This affair would at once have produced bad effects if war had not been hanging over the city, which was terrified by the defeat suffered at Zagonara.”’ In 4.15, Machiavelli discussed the peace treaty that ended the wars with Duke Filippo Visconti and the unresolved domestic conflict surrounding the controversial catasto, causally connecting the former to the latter: “With the coming of peace outside the walls, war inside began again.” And in 4.28, Machiavelli attributed the cessation of hostilities with neighboring Lucca as the catalyst causing the escalation of the Albizzi-Medici rivalry that led to Cosimo’s arrest and exile: “things were quiet as long as the war over Lucca lasted; but when peace came, and with it the death of Niccolo da Uzzano, the city was left without war and without check. As a result, dangerous factions increased without restraint." Machiavelli's analysis of the role of the Visconti wars in Albizzean politics was more pointed in the Histories than in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. In the latter text, he merely observed that the city’s de facto state of

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ongoing war with Milan mitigated the damage caused by the regime’s defects. In the more expansive context provided by the Histories, he added to his discussion of the war's effects occasional accusations that the Albizzi promoted and sustained the wars for factional advantage. Certainly the Floren-

tine people, in Machiavelli’s narrative, have little doubt that the wars they are made to pay for tend to enrich the regime's leaders and render the oligarchs’ political domination of the city more complete. In 4.4, Machiavelli recounted the regime’s decision to renew hostilities against Milan, in spite of considerable dissent from those outside the regime’s inner circle. To fund the war, the regime's leaders imposed new taxes on the city’s middle ranks. Machiavelli concluded the chapter with the general reaction: “These [new taxes], because they weighed more heavily on the lesser than on the greater citizens, filled the city with laments; everybody condemned the ambition and avarice of the powerful and charged them (for the sake of sating their appetites and crushing the people, so as to rule them) of bringing about an unnecessary war.” After Duke Filippo’s forces destroyed the Florentine army, the people again criticized the regime for its recurring policy of heavy taxation in pursuit of dubious wars: “See how their [the regime’s hawkish nobles] plans are revealed, and the end they are going toward—not to protect liberty, which is their enemy, but to increase their own power, which God has justly decreased. Nor with this undertaking alone have they burdened the city but with many, because like this one was that against King Ladislas.”””

Machiavelli’s analysis of the Florentine war with Lucca similarly undermined the factional and self-interested motivations of Rinaldo degli Albizzi. The chief spokesman for the Lucca expedition, Albizzi argued for the war on several grounds. It would be profitable for the Florentines and hence would profit rather than impoverish them—already financially strained by the Visconti wars. The war was also strategically necessary because Paolo Guinigi, if left in control of Lucca, would pose a dire threat if Milan or the papacy renewed hostilities against Florence. To the arguments of profit and selfdefense, Albizzi added an ideological dimension, observing that the Lucchese had been enslaved by a tyrant and had as a result the city had “lost her ancient zeal for defending her liberty.”* In short, he concluded, the Florentines “had never undertaken an enterprise that was easier, more profitable,

or more just.”

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Rinaldo’s long-standing ally Niccol6 da Uzzano argued against him on this occasion, providing a detailed refutation of each of his key points.’° Given

that throughout the Histories Niccolo da Uzzano’s foresight and political perspicacity consistently bordered on the prophetic and that Machiavelli devoted almost the entirety of this chapter to his pacific reasoning, it seems probable that Machiavelli intended to critique Rinaldo’s position. The government sided with Rinaldo, however, and in 1430 duly appointed him one of two commissioners, along with the irresponsible and bloodthirsty Astorre Gianni, to oversee the war. Shortly thereafter the government dismissed Astorre as commissioner and admonished him in response to gratuitous atrocities he inflicted on the people of Seravezza.’” Matters fared only slightly better with Rinaldo, who “was reviled as having carried on the war not for the profit of the Florentine people but for his own. It was said that when he became commissioner he forgot his eagerness to take Lucca, because it was enough for him to sack the country regions and fill his pastures with cattle and his houses with spoil, and that he was not content with the booty his dependents took for his personal profit but that he bought that of the soldiers, so that from a commissioner he turned into a merchant.’® Machiavelli moderated somewhat the impact of those rumors on his readers by giving Rinaldo a stirring speech in his own defense on the dangers of serving an “undisciplined people and a divided city” and by suggesting, four

chapters later, that Averardo de’ Medici and Puccio Pucci had engineered the rumors to gain factional advantage.” But unlike the stoic resignation in

the face of an ungrateful Florentine political culture, evident in earlier speeches such as that of Benedetto Alberti after his exile and the admonishment of his family, Rinaldo concluded his defense with menace, hinting at retaliation: “The Ten [the war council that Machiavelli implies were at the center of the rumors] should remember that they too were citizens of that city, and at any time charges might be brought against them, which would

force them to understand how indignant honest men are made by false censures.”*°

Machiavelli twice suggested that he himself agreed with the popular perception that the Albizzi had cynically manipulated the war for factional advantage. In 4.14, he recounted the debates surrounding the implementation of the catasto.*' Because the catasto stipulated that tax burdens should be proportionate to wealth—that “the law and not men would assign the taxes,”

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as he drily put it—the city’s wealthy citizens opposed it and strategized in several ways to impede its approval. Speaking in his own voice as narrator, Machiavelli reflected: “if this method of taxation had been devised before, there never would have been war with King Ladislas, nor would there now be war with Duke Filippo, for these wars were undertaken to enrich the citizens, and not from necessity.”** Having made clear the private benefits of the city’s wars for the hawks in the Albizzean oligarchy, Machiavelli pithily

and contemptuously underscored the wars’ public costs: “The Florentine outlay on this war was 3,500,000 ducats, by means of which they increased Venetian territory and might, and their own poverty and disunion.””’ Several passages from the Histories contextualize and further elaborate Machiavelli’s commentary in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs on the elec-

toral defects of the Albizzi regime.** It emerges in 2.28 that the electoral system Machiavelli criticized as a blunt and ineffective tool predated the Albizzi by some seventy years, created in 1323 as a response to an attempt by exiles to regain the city. Machiavelli explains that, traditionally, the government screened candidates (the scrutiny) for potential election to the Signoria at the exact moment that the existing priors left office. Critics of the traditional system argued that it promoted frequent disturbances and unhealthy

competition between hopefuls on too regular a basis (every two months). To remedy that problem, the Signoria and the colleges instituted a new system whereby a single scrutiny determined the names of all citizens deemed eligible for the Signoria for the following forty months. Thus, for a period of three years and four months, or twenty successive restaffings of the Signoria, the pool of eligible citizens was constant. The chapter’s conclusion darkly intimated that the new system’s small advantages were greatly outweighed by its hidden problems: “Since the Florentines did not know how otherwise

to get rid of such troubles [political strife caused by frequent scrutinies], they took this way, not realizing the harm concealed under this slight convenience.” If not the authors of that faulty system, the Albizzi were nevertheless, Machiavelli’s subsequent narrative made clear, among its victims. In 4.9, he attributed awareness of the electoral defects, if not an ability to circumvent them, to Rinaldo degli Albizzi, the formidable chief statesman of the oligarchic regime. In a context of escalating class conflict between the oligarchs and the people, Rinaldo delivered a speech to the captains of his party ex-

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horting them to retake the government by force. They had to act swiftly because their class enemies—“new men of humble family’—dominated the Signoria (another problem identified in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs).*° The overconfident regime had become insufficiently suspicious during the scrutinies, thereby allowing their enemies to seize the palace. Machiavelli further intimated that they had done so in spite of Rinaldo’s repeated warn-

ings: “the present boldness of the crowd resulted from the free choice of candidates that had come about through the inattention of his [Rinaldo] listeners.”*” The imprecision with which the Albizzi managed the city’s electoral politics comes to a head in 4.30: an entirely pro-Medicean Signoria was elected, irrefutable proof of considerable holes in the Albizzean management of the scrutiny process. And again, Rinaldo was the only oligarch fully to appreciate the neces-

sity of swift and immediate action in response to the election of August 1434.°° To protect themselves against the Mediceans, Rinaldo argued, his faction must exploit the three-day delay between the election and the actual assumption of office by the incoming priors. The sitting standard-bearer of justice, Donato Velluti, must summon the people to a parlamento, establish a new balia, reject the incoming Signoria, directly appoint pro-Albizzean priors, and burn the bags and refill them after conducting the careful scrutiny they had failed to do earlier. But a majority of Rinaldo’s supporters rejected the plan as too provocative, ambitious, and dangerous.” The Albizzi thus lost control of the government, and Rinaldo—who plays a recurring Cassandra role in the Histories—became prophet-like in the accuracy of his prediction of their certain destruction as a result of allowing that pro-Medicean election to stand, all because the regime failed to conduct its scrutinies with more caution.

The analysis of the rise and fall of the Albizzean oligarchy in the Histories revisits several times the importance, outlined in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, of mechanisms to frighten powerful citizens from forming fac-

tions. As in the case of the electoral scrutinies, the Albizzi were not the principal creators of a political culture incapable of intimidating dissenters into compliance but inheritors of a system they failed to change. Before they successfully established their dominance over the government, the Albizzi themselves were precisely the “great men,’ the promoters of faction, of whom the Discourse on Florentine Affairs warns.’? Machiavelli discussed the early

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origins of the Albizzi in the Histories (3.3) in the course of his explanation of the admonishment process, whereby the captains of the Guelf party had the right to deprive any suspected Ghibellines of the right to hold office.”* The Albizzi rose to a dominant role in the city’s politics by hijacking control of the Guelf party, no small accomplishment given their Ghibelline origins, hence gaining the power of admonishment, which they then wielded purely in the pursuit of factional advantage: “as with time their boldness increased, [they] admonished without any hesitation not merely those who deserved it

but whomsoever they pleased, when moved by any sort of avaricious or ambitious reason.””*

During the War of the Eight Saints, the government led by the Ricci faction, the Albizzi’s chief rivals, had no ability to check the obvious factional schemes of the Albizzi and other leaders of the Guelf party. Machiavelli described this process in the corresponding terms of fear and boldness. “And

to such arrogance the captains of the party climbed that they were more feared than the Signors.”’? The inability of the Ricci, then in power, to defend themselves from steady harassment by the Guelf party heightened and encouraged its ambition and arrogance. In their increasingly audacious attempts to expel the Ricci and gain control over the government, the Albizzi thus became, somewhat ironically, part of the reason why the Signoria, as Machiavelli explained in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, suffered from in-

sufficient prestige: “men went to the latter [the Signoria] with less respect than to the former [the Guelf party], and the palace of the party was more respected than theirs [the priors’], so that no ambassador came to Florence without a message for the captains.’’* The Florentines, seeing the general absence of any public, institutional mechanism for subduing the Guelfs, understood that the only substantive resolution to the conflict would have to be destructive and destabilizing armed conflict, which followed shortly thereafter in the Ciompi revolt.

Once in power themselves, however, the Albizzi were no better than the Ricci at discouraging powerful discontented citizens from conspiring against them. In 3.26, Machiavelli surveyed Maso degli Albizzi’s aggressive measures to stabilize his regime after popular protests against its perceived tyrannical tendencies.” The first sustained opposition came in 1393 from Donato di Jacopo Acciauoli, “an important man in the city and rather superior than equal to Messer Maso degli Albizzi.”’® The chapter then elaborated in

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detail on Donato’s stubborn efforts to restore to power all those who had recently been banished. He spoke freely about his plans: “He kept sowing his opinion in the ears of this and that citizens.”’” He then approached the Signoria directly, asking his relative Michele Acciaiuoli and friend Niccolo Ricoveri, both sitting priors, to propose a law that would permit the return of the regime's exiles. Not only did Donato persist in opposition even after the priors rejected his proposal, he escalated to outright threats: “Donato ...in anger gave them to understand that since they would not allow the city to be organized according to the plans that were ready, she would be organized by force of arms.””®

Throughout the Histories, the Albizzean oligarchy was consistently insufficiently lax in inspiring terror in its opponents. In response to Donato’s threats of armed insurrection, the regime responded by banishing Donato, along with Alamanno and Antonio de’ Medici. Of course, as all Machiavelli’s readers knew, Cosimo de’ Medici was also banished, only to return in triumph and glory and ultimately be hailed as a pater patriae.”” The inclusion of the Medici with Donato’s fate thus reminds readers of the ineffectuality of banishment as a means of punishing and disciplining opponents. Two years later, the Albizzi regime uncovered a conspiracy against the city that was backed by the Duke of Milan and Florentine exiles and “of which many within the city were aware.”*° In response, the regime again relied on banishment and admonishment. The regime appointed a balia of six citizens to ferret out the guilty. The balia declared as rebels members of the Ricci, Alberti, Medici, Scali, Strozzi, Altoviti, and Adimari families and admonished for ten years most of the remaining members of the Alberti, Ricci, and the Medici.

When Machiavelli began in 4.26 to discuss the rise of Cosimo de’ Medici, we see that the circumstances that permitted the rise of the Albizzi, namely the inability of the Ricci to intimidate them into obedience, were the very same circumstances that enabled Cosimo to outmaneuver Rinaldo degli Albizzi. The collapse and overthrow of the Albizzean oligarchy, Machiavelli twice asserted, was the result of their arrogance and, related to that arrogance, their disinclination always to maintain a watchful eye on the activities of their opponents.” The inability of the regime to strike fear into the hearts and minds of their opponents thus directly paved the way for the ascent of the Medici. Chapter 4.3 opens with precisely that assertion:

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“Renewing every day the multitude’s hatred by their obnoxious ways, and not watching things that might injure their party because they did not fear

injuries, and even encouraging them through their envy of one another, these aristocrats who were ruling Florence caused the Medici family to re-

gain power.” Once in power, Cosimo de’ Medici, unlike his predecessor, Rinaldo degli Albizzi, built a more stable foundation for his regime by ensuring that its enemies had good reason to fear his power. In the Histories 5.4, Machiavelli recounted the measures Cosimo adopted after his triumphant return from exile. His ascent was accompanied by the execution of five citizens, two of whom had been shipped to Cosimo as prisoners by the Venetian republic,

where they had fled in hope of safety. “This gave great reputation to the [Medicean] party,’ Machiavelli added, “and caused very great terror to its enemies, when they observed that so powerful a republic would sell its liberty to the Florentines.”* They aggressively manipulated the electoral process: emptying the bags of names, making new lists of friendly citizens, and then restaffing the various offices of government. But whereas the Albizzi had stopped there, Cosimo went further: “warned by the ruin of [his] adversaries, since they [Cosimo’s allies] judged that the selected lists of eligible names would not be enough to keep their govern-

ment firm, they determined that the magistrates having authority to shed blood should always be chosen from the leaders of their faction.”** Having expanded the powers of the accoppiatori, they then granted the Otto di Guardia the authority to impose capital punishment, forbade any form of

communication with the newly exiled, and severely punished “every word, every gesture, every habit that in any way displeased those who ruled.”” These are the kinds of concrete details that Machiavelli only vaguely alluded to in Discourses 3.1 when he explained that without renewing every

five years the terror with which they had initially assumed power and the fear thereby created, the Medici would have been unable to maintain their rule for sixty years.*°

The final defect of the Albizzean regime identified in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs was its consistent exclusion of the people. Machiavelli highlighted the regime’s stubborn elitism as its worst, most shortsighted quality, a failure equal in weight to all of the other defects combined.*” The corresponding pages of the Histories that trace the rise and fall of the Albizzi

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as dominant forces in Florentine history explored in detail the argument in the Discourse about the role of the people in the demise of the Albizzean regime. The Albizzi play virtually no role in the Histories until the third book,

which charts the growing tension between the city’s prosperous middle classes and the plebs, the Ciompi revolt, and the final destruction of the populist regime it created at the hands of the Albizzi and others.** In the larger narrative of the Histories, the Albizzi emerge as second-generation, de facto aristocrats. Originally members of the popolo, they fought together with the Medici and others to destroy Florence’s ancient nobility and to establish a government that would preserve their victory over the vanquished warrior aristocracy.*’ As book 3 commences its study of the process of division in the victorious popolo between its wealthy members and the plebs, the Albizzi, the richest and most powerful family from the upper ranks of the popolo, emerge as a new elite—“aristocrats of popular origin,’ as Machiavelli calls them.” From the outset of their arrival as major players on the Florentine political stage until their destruction by the Medici, the three generations of Albizzi leaders—Piero, Maso, and Rinaldo—were consistent forces for elite

oligarchy and were ultimately destroyed as a direct consequence. Piero degli Albizzi established his family’s power by outmaneuvering their initial chief rivals, the Ricci, and gaining control of the Guelf party. His rise began in the late 1350s, after Uguccione de’ Ricci pushed for the renewal of the law prohibiting descendants of Ghibelline families from holding public office.”’ Because the Albizzi’s historical origins were Ghibelline, Uguccione had hoped in doing so to cut off his rival’s access to communal government. Piero learned of the proposal and avoided becoming its victim by himself vocally championing the law. As a result, Piero increased his standing and reputation in the city, shortly thereafter winning leadership of the emerging new Guelf party. The regime was unwilling to enter into the murky process of determining Ghibelline descendants and asa result granted to the Guelf party, now led by Piero, the power to make that determination and to admonish those found guilty. Between 1357-1366, the Guelf faction led by Piero, Lapo da Castiglionchio, and Carlo Strozzi showed little interest in any actual distinctions between Guelf and Ghibelline families, instead arbitrarily wielding their newly won and not inconsiderable power as a factional weapon. In the process, they compelled short-term respect for the

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Guelf party and its leaders, but also a long-term silent undercurrent of hostility and resentment.” In spite of efforts to unseat him by rivals and by the government, Piero maintained his control over the Guelf party, which remained the center of gravity for the city’s old and new elites. Frustrated in his initial attempt to reduce Piero’s influence, Uguccione then turned, successfully but briefly, to moderate the Guelfs’ power that he had inadvertently helped to create. He did so during a term as prior by diluting the concentration of elites in the Guelf party and its captains, imposing on the party three new members, two of which had to be selected from the lesser guilds, and by requiring that all verdicts of Ghibellinism be confirmed by a council of twenty-four citizens. In 1371, sensing a rising tide of threats from the lower classes, Piero allied with Benchi Buondelmonti, thereby fusing the power of Piero’s influence with “the influential men among the people” and Benchi’s influence with “the ancient nobility.” The two managed successfully to circumvent Uguccione’s institutional revisions, arranging “things [such] that they managed the captains and the Twenty-four Citizens as they pleased.” Having reestablished the operational freedom of the Guelf party, Piero and Benchi were “determined with admonishment to crush the people of the lower class and to remain alone in government.’ They did so with so little restraint and so little obstruction that by 1378 the heads of the Guelf party themselves acknowledged that their excessive use of admonishment “had brought them such great blame that all the city had become hostile to them.””* The government subsequently attempted to curb the damaging effects of the growing hostility between the Albizzi and Ricci by excluding Piero and Uguccione, and others from each family, from holding office. But the government neglected to ban Piero from his primary source of power, the Guelf party, leaving him even more eager and no less able to punish his enemies with admonishment.”’ The power of the Guelfs was such that even during the War of the Eight Saints, those conducting the war, in spite of widespread approval of their conduct, could not protect themselves against harassment and injury by the Guelfs. Throughout, the social divisions remained consistent. The Guelfs were led by Piero degli Albizzi, Carlo Strozzi, and Lapo da Castiglionchio, supported by all “the ancient nobles” and “the greater part of the more influential of the people.” Their adversaries were “all the less important people,’ led by the Eight Saints, Giorgio Scali, and Tommaso

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Strozzi, and supported by the Ricci, Medici, Alberti, and “the rest of the multitude.””°

Piero’s fortunes finally turned in the aftermath of the Ciompi revolt. Wresting control of the government from the radical Ciompi and dissolving the guild representing those of the “lowest rank” had required the oligarchy to concede political dominance of the government to the lesser guilds, whose support was crucial to isolating the revolutionary party. The popular regime thereby created was principally under the control of the adversaries of the Guelfs listed above.’’ The leaders of the new regime, fixated on revenge against their erstwhile Guelf oppressors, capitalized on a moment of widespread fear caused by rumors of a coup by Florentine exiles that named Piero degli Albizzi and other oligarchs as internal accomplices. Although Piero and his allies were declared innocent after investigation by the captain of the People, the resentment generated by their earlier capricious use of admonishment ensured their vulnerability: “their enemies so stirred up the populace and with such fury excited it against them that by force they were condemned to death.”®

Maso degli Albizzi, on being elected standard-bearer of justice in 1393, engaged in the same class politics and exclusionary techniques that Piero had pursued earlier. Particularly eager to revenge himself on the Alberti family because of Benedetto’s role in Piero’s death, Maso engineered a show of force and an accompanying parlamento, which duly empowered the regime with the powers of balia. Not content with the banishment of most of the Alberti family, Maso ambitiously began to restore the pre-Ciompi elite hegemony, admonishing and executing “many working men.””’ The draco-

nian excess of the Signoria’s attempt to restore a narrow government provoked an armed revolt by the guilds and the lowest class, “since they saw their honor and their life were taken from them.”®’ After duplicitously persuading the crowd to disarm in exchange for the enactment of their reforms, the Signoria fortified the Piazza della Signoria, summoned troops, and punished the leaders of the popular revolt: “Having made these preparations, they banished and executed many working men who had shown themselves more vigorous than the others in the disorders.”®' Maso then led another reorganization of the regime that featured several innovations that Machiavelli indicates were hateful not only to the targets of the new laws but also

to the moderates in the oligarchic party itself, polemically adding: “Not

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merely those of the Alberti who remained in the city and the Medici... but many others felt such violence to be obnoxious.”® In the wake of an illconsidered threat of armed protest by Donato di Jacopo Acciaiuoli, the regime ushered in yet another round of penalties: “Alamanno and Antonio de’ Medici were also banished, along with all those of that family who were descended from Messer Alamanno, together with many nonaristocratic guildsmen who were esteemed by the lower class of people.” ”’ Although Machiavelli structures the account of the conflict between two

relatively formal parties, the popular and the plebeian, and frequently discusses the rivalry in terms of its chief families (Albizzi, Strozzi, Alberti, Medici), he nevertheless makes clear that the vast majority of Florentines affected by the conflicts supported the opponents of the Albizzi. He declares this when introducing the regime headed by Maso degli Albizzi. The chapter contrasts the regime's nearly total control over the city’s formal political institutions with the regime’s deep-rooted, fundamental weakness caused by hidden but nearly universal hostility to its political values. He explains that in spite of the brevity of the regime dominated by the lesser guilds (13781381), NO amount of persecution could eradicate its “party principles” since

the “mass of the inhabitants” and “the greater portion of the city” desired them. Maso’s regime called numerous parlamenti and systematically harassed the former leaders of that regime (Alberti, Medici, and Ricci), barring some from public office, exiling others, and appropriating their wealth— their party was “reduced . . . almost to nothing.”® In spite of the nearly complete destruction of the plebeian party, “nevertheless, many men continued to recollect the injuries they had received and hoped to revenge them. This hope, finding no support anywhere, lay hidden in their breasts.”°° Under Maso’s son Rinaldo, the social divisions in the mid-1420s became increasingly extreme, and the undercurrent of resentment hidden during Maso’s tenure became open and public. In 4.7, Machiavelli discusses the political isolation of the regime following the military defeat at Zagonara to Filippo Visconti. Although beneficial in the short term, the faltering war that they themselves had actively promoted eventually left the regime without soldiers and weapons, gave their enemies obvious grounds for criticism, and further alienated the people, on whose backs the financial burdens of war largely fell.” As a result the regime’s grip on the government loosened,

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the first clear evidence of which was its promulgation of new tax laws targeted directly at the city’s powerful, aristocratic citizens.*° In consequence, the Albizzean leaders, with the collusion of two sitting priors, assembled at the church of Santo Stefano to discuss various tactics for renewing their control over the government. Rinaldo then delivered a speech warning of the escalating power of the people, reminding his audience that the popular regime that had been destroyed by their fathers had killed relatives of those present. The recent tax law indicated without ambiguity the renewed ambition of the masses, and hence it followed that if the oligarchs permitted them to realize their political ambition, the oligarchic regime that they had been slowly but consistently building since 1381 would be undone. He then outlined a solution that involved allying exclusively with the old nobility whom their own ancestors had humbled in the previous century and curbing the power of the lesser guilds by reducing their number by half. Rinaldo’s speech is delivered in Machiavellian lexicon: “[Rinaldo| declared that prudence makes use of men according to the times; hence, if their fathers made use of the masses to destroy the haughtiness of the nobles, now that the nobility had become humble and the masses haughty, the haughtiness of the lowest classes could well be checked with the aid of the

nobles.” The contrast between the social bases of the rival parties becomes starker still in the 1430s after the Medici supersede the Alberti as the primary opponents of the Albizzi. After Giovanni di Bicci’s death, Cosimo de’ Medici

began to build a broadly based political party, the product of his wealth, liberality, and cunning.”” Recognizing that Cosimo’s power is on the rise and that, in Rinaldo’s words, the lower classes worship Cosimo, Rinaldo engineers his arrest and has him cited but fails to persuade his party to execute him.” With Cosimo merely exiled, little has been accomplished to allay Rinaldo’s fears about the power of the Albizzi’s opponents. As a result he makes a speech to his supporters in 1433 that reiterates nearly verbatim the

principal arguments and themes from Machiavelli’s presentations of the same man’s earlier speech at the church of Santo Stefano in the mid-1420s. The social basis of the party alignments is unchanged: “His [Rinaldo] party’s resource was that which long before he had presented to them: namely to regain the support of the nobles by turning over and conceding all the

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offices of the city, and to make themselves strong with that party, since their adversaries had made themselves strong with the lower class.””

The chapters of the Histories that analyze the Albizzean era of the city’s history systematically defended Machiavelli’s earlier analysis in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs of the regime’s major weaknesses, thereby supporting its argument that in spite of the regime’s longevity its survival was more accidental than structural. Without the unifying effect of the Visconti wars,

the regime would have swiftly collapsed owing to its mismanagement of the electoral process, its inability to frighten the powerful, the excessive power and scant prestige of its Signoria, its undermining of public institutions by consulting private citizens, and—most crucial of all—its elitism. For anyone skeptical of those convictions, particularly the Medici or those close to them, the pages of the Histories provide ample and detailed evidence, a tightly focused deconstruction of the Albizzean regime’s major fault lines and its ultimate demise in the midst of an angry and embittered populace.

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6 The Virtues and Vices of Medici Power in the Florentine Histories

This chapter is the second of three that examine the way the Florentine Histories and the Discourse on Florentine Affairs made tactically

similar arguments about Florentine politics and history. Machiavelli’s account of the Albizzi regime in the Histories substantiated and amplified the Discourse’s rejection of elite oligarchy as a viable constitutional model for Florence in the present and future. In the Discourse he assessed the prospects that the fifteenth-century Medicean model held for the present and future as equally dim. Whereas he considered implementing an Albizzean-style oligarchic model ill advised but nevertheless feasible, he considered the Medicean model

impractical as well as ill advised. In his view, the Florentine and Italian political context in the 1520s had changed in too many ways from that of Cosimo’s era for the fifteenth-century model to work. From a diplomatic point of view, Cosimo’s era was simpler: the Italian city-states were relatively autonomous, and in that system Florence’s prosperity ensured the city an independent role. In the present, all Italian powers, and particularly Florence, were compelled to ally themselves with either France or Spain and hence risk radically destabilizing consequences if their ally failed to prevail. In the

The Virtues and Vices of Medici Power

fifteenth century and presumably in earlier eras as well, Florentines paid taxes regularly and took the necessity of taxation for granted. But in the present context of military crisis and political instability, delicately implied in Machiavelli’s speculation “either through inability or change in custom,”

most citizens no longer paid taxes, such that imposing them anew would necessarily create controversy and danger.’ Finally, however powerful they may have been in Florence, the Medici of the fifteenth century remained local powers. They were raised and educated among other Florentines and enjoyed a familiarity that earned them political favor. But their sixteenthcentury status as powerful Roman ecclesiastics transcended the Florentine context and now precluded such familiarity and the favor that came with it. As a result, Machiavelli concluded: “Hence, considering this unlikeness in times and in men, there cannot be a greater deception than to believe that upon such differently shaped matter one can stamp the same form.” Machiavelli’s critique went deeper, however, than doubts about the receptiveness of the present Florentine political climate. Even before he specifically addressed the Medici regime, the opening sentence of the Discourse on Florentine Affairs announced the central operating assumption that “we cannot call that republic well-established in which things are done according to the will of one man yet are decided with the approval of many.” Ir-

respective of the problematic contrasts between fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury political and cultural contexts, in other words, Machiavelli condemned

the regimes of Cosimo and Lorenzo as poor models to emulate, even by fifteenth-century standards and at the height of their power. He went on to explain that the Medicean system of the fifteenth century contained structural internal contradictions that repeatedly gave the Medici’s foes opportu-

nities to contest their primacy. The regime was a monarchy in terms of decision-making and policy but required republican councils and the constant forging and preservation of consensus in the Medici party to put those decisions into action. The importance of that consensus and its fragility were both revealed in the numerous challenges the Medici faced—Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo—from within their own party throughout the fifteenth century. Machiavelli concluded that both the Albizzean and the Medici regimes from the previous century had managed to survive for as long as they had in spite of their constitutional arrangements, not because of them. The Medici regime owed its survival less to any wisdom in its design than to the

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exceptional individual skills of Cosimo and Lorenzo and the fact that Cosimo’s regime enjoyed considerable popular support. Just as has been shown for the Albizzi, this chapter will demonstrate similarly detailed and sustained overlap between Machiavelli’s assessment of the fifteenth-century Medici in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs and his larger analysis of those years in the Histories. Unlike his analysis of the Albizzi, however, which focused entirely on the regime's institutional flaws and strategic shortcomings, his interpretation of Medici power in Florence identified strengths as well as weaknesses. The first strength was largely accidental: the family was fortunate to have two members, Cosimo and Lorenzo, who were particularly charismatic, shrewd, and talented, possessing a level of capability unequalled by the leaders of earlier and rival factions. To understand Florentine history in the fifteenth century, one had to appreciate the individual accomplishments of Cosimo and Lorenzo, but that understanding, given its historical contingency, contributed little of significance to the problem of establishing Medici power in the present. The second strength, however, of the fifteenth-century regime, namely

the support of the people, spoke directly to the problems the sixteenthcentury Medici faced. Machiavelli revisited the significance of popular support more than any other issue in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. First he declared that the exclusion of the people by the Albizzi was an error equal

to all their other mistakes combined. The analysis of Albizzi failure thus adds considerable significance to his assertion three sentences later that Cosimo’s regime was established with the people’s approval. Machiavelli returns to the issue of popular approval in his contrast between the challenges faced by the present and historic Medici: “the times are different from what they were then... . In the first place, Cosimo’s government had the approval of the people generally, and the present one has their disapproval. The citizens of Cosimo’s time had never experienced in Florence a government that gave greater power to the people.”’* Thus, when Machiavelli declares to Leo X several pages later that “the whole general body of citizens . . . will never be satisfied . . . if their power is not restored or if they do not have a promise that it will be restored,” he implicitly suggested that should Leo have any doubts about Machiavelli’s authority on this question, Leo could also rely

on the judgment of his illustrious forebear Cosimo, who also recognized the importance of popular approval and benefited accordingly.’

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When we pay special attention to the relationship between the Medici and the people in the Florentine Histories, we see that the Histories rearticulated and identified the origins of those central claims from the Discourse about popular approval of the family. Although Machiavelli had indicted the harsh, repressive, and occasionally outright tyrannical qualities of the regimes of Piero di Cosimo and Lorenzo, his treatment of Cosimo’s predecessors offered a considerable contrast. Every time there were major conflicts between elite and people, the fourteenth-century Medici—Salvestro, Veri, and Giovanni—were present, usually playing a central moderating role in the conflict. They displayed moderate political ambitions, always favored the people, on whom the family’s political influence rested, and always fought their battles publicly and through existing institutions. In short, Machiavelli offered his readers and his Medici patrons two historical visions of the role of the Medici family in Florentine history, each with implications for the political choices facing Florentines and the Medici in the 1520s. The fifteenth-century Medici may not have been a model to emulate in the present, but in the previous century the family displayed a tradition of wise, modest, and most important, popular politics.

Before turning to Machiavelli’s sense of the particular strengths of Medici power in the Histories, particularly the critical importance of popular support, we need first to consider the ways the Histories confirmed and elaborated on his brief sketch of the structural flaws inherent in the fifteenthcentury Medici regime. The Discourse condemned the degree to which the regime was dependent on the participation of many people to carry out its policies, such that discontented members of the party had too many opportunities to obstruct Medici designs during moments of vulnerability. The proof of this structural flaw was evident in the frequent and harsh emergency councils the regime was compelled to summon to preserve its power. We will see that the Histories amply confirmed both points. It is worth

stressing at the outset the degree to which Machiavelli's analysis of the fifteenth-century Medici overwhelmingly focused on challenges to their rule. Books 5-8, the books that treat 1434-1494, the period of Medici ascendancy, contain 144 chapters. Only thirty-three of those, however, deal with Floren-

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tine internal politics, owing to the expansion of Machiavelli’s post-1434 narrative to include foreign affairs. These chapters almost exclusively deal with various challenges and threats to Medici power. The Medici face plots by angry exiles and the machinations of foreign princes, much as many of the

regimes that preceded them did, but more than any other issue, they face challenges to their power from within their own party. In fact, twenty-three of those thirty-three chapters, or 70 percent, deal with internal dissent, the problems associated with depending on consensus in their ranks, and the degree to which that consensus could only be generated through fear and violence. Taken collectively, the chapters dealing with the regimes of Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo amply confirm the truth of Machiavelli's overarching thesis in the Histories that in the absence of external enemies, poorly constituted regimes inevitably fracture from within. Machiavelli first discussed the fragility of consensus in Cosimo’s party in 7.2 in his contrast between the nature of the power of Cosimo and Neri Capponi. The contrast was an elaboration of the preceding chapter's contrast between public and private methods for gaining power and influence. Public methods, primarily consisting of successful diplomatic and martial service to the state, created positive divisions and ultimately benefited the republic, since competitive rivalry implied a multiplicity of actors engaged in similarly productive service. Private methods, however, primarily consisting of the distribution of favors, patronage, and public spectacles, created

a type of reputation and power that was inherently harmful to the state, since it led directly to the formation of factions and partisans. Having thus defined the relative virtue and vice of the two approaches, Machiavelli went on to laud Neri Capponi for having gained his reputation in purely public ways, chronicled in detail in chapters 5.21, 5.31, 5.35, such that Neri had “many friends and few partisans.” Cosimo on the other hand, who had gained influ-

ence through public and private methods, had “friends and partisans in numbers.”® Needless to say, given Machiavelli’s employment by a Medici pope, this was a particularly provocative way for him to make his point that Cosimo’s regime was a flawed model. Neri’s death in 1455 caused the first major destabilizing rift in the loyalty and reliability of Cosimo’s ranks. So long as Neri lived and enjoyed a powerful following of his own, Cosimo’s supporters remained united. But without a capable rival at the head of an organized party, Cosimo’s followers ceased

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to fear for themselves and immediately began, as a direct consequence, plotting ways to diminish Cosimo’s authority. And significantly, their dissent manifested itself through the one political process they controlled, the various councils on which Cosimo’s authority depended: “the men controlling the government, in the councils where there was public debate on the conduct of public matters, advised that the power of the balia not be taken up again, and that the bags be locked and the magistrates, on account of the advantages in the earlier list of names, be chosen by lot.”’ Cosimo survived this challenge and ultimately outmaneuvered his opponents but only owing to that exceptional prudence flagged in the Discourse as a sine qua non of the regime. The fickle and ultimately dangerous support from alleged Medici partisans that Cosimo received continued unchanged under Piero and Lorenzo.*® Unsurprisingly, given the actions of Cosimo’s supporters once they no longer feared Neri Capponi, Cosimo’s death in 1464 inspired disgruntled members of the family’s following to contest Piero’s power. Dietisalvi Neroni was the first to conspire against Piero. Neroni was a particularly trusted and intimate confidante of Cosimo, such that from his deathbed Cosimo coun-

seled Piero to follow Neroni’s advice on all matters regarding Piero’s property and status. In 1466, having been duly consulted by Piero on the state of the Medici finances, Neroni, “to take away Piero’s reputation and deprive him of the position his father had left him as though it were hereditary,” urged Piero to collect on the extraordinary number of loans that Cosimo had extended, both in and outside the city, deliberately ruinous advice that created an immediate backlash and slander against Piero as a ereedy ingrate.’ Piero’s consequent vulnerability led to a conspiracy against him in which three of the four principal conspirators came from within the party: Luca Pitti, who in 7.4 of the Histories received a knighthood from Cosimo’s regime and lavish presents from Cosimo himself; Agnolo Acciaiuoli, who in 4.30 worked with Cosimo to reverse Cosimo’s exile; and Dietisalvi Neroni.’° The

failed conspiracy unfolded in ways entirely consistent with Machiavelli's other writings on the subject. The conspirators were betrayed by their secretary, Ser Niccolo Fedini, who presented Piero with a list of the conspira-

tors and their supporters. In response, Piero charged his most trusted friends to compile a list of friends on whom they could rely in the looming

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confrontation. Machiavelli's entire critique of the fifteenth-century Medicean system—the unreliability of the following on whom the family relied, the perpetual risk of failure, and the consequent necessity of fear—can be inferred from the fact that the lists of friends and enemies contained many of the same names.” In the following generation, Lorenzo de’ Medici also faced a conspiracy from disgruntled former partisans. Machiavelli presented the Pazzi conspiracy, as Najemy has explained, as “a product of feuds, rivalries, and jealousies in the Medici party” and hence as a byproduct of a flawed system that required a level of consensus that its constituency was habitually disinclined to provide.’* Lorenzo’s speech to the priors and the core of his party in the aftermath of the conspiracy stressed precisely the degree to which their system relied on precarious loyalties. On the one hand, Lorenzo asserted, “our house never rose to any level of greatness to which it was not impelled by this Palace and by your united consent. ... My house could not have ruled and cannot rule this republic unless you together with us had ruled and now rule the state.”” In spite of that, however, “ill fortune . . . brought our family to such a situation that among friends, among relatives, in the Church,

we are not safe. They who fear death are accustomed to resort to their friends for aid; they are accustomed to resort to their relatives. We found ours armed for our destruction.” In Discourses 3.7, Machiavelli assessed the fate of the fifteenth-century Medici in similar terms. He used them to illustrate why only some changes of regime from free government to tyranny require bloodshed. “But if that government was established by the common consent of a large group that has made it great, there is no reason, if then that government falls, for injuring anyone else than its leader. .. . And of this kind was the government... of the Medici in Florence, for at their fall in 1494 none other than they was injured.”” In this passage, Machiavelli seems to suggest that the Medicean oligarchy who propped up Cosimo and Lorenzo enjoyed the benefits of the system while only individual Medici leaders were exposed to its dangers. Machiavelli had explained in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs that the regime's structural flaw discussed above underlay the frequent emergency measures and exiles that took place between 1434 and 1494. His discussion of this issue in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs omitted his more blunt earlier assessment of Medici tactics from the Discourses on Livy. In the constitutional

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proposal, he merely observed that the regime “every ten years was in danger of losing control” and hence required frequent use of exile and parlamenti.'® But that statement invoked his discussion of the same issue in Discourses 3.1, in which he specified the ugly particulars: “those who managed the government of Florence from 1434 to 1494 commonly said that every five years they needed to revise the government. Otherwise they could hardly

maintain it. By revising the government they meant inspiring such terror and such fear in the people as they had inspired on first taking charge... . When the memory of such punishment disappears, men take courage to attempt innovations and to speak evil.” Here as elsewhere, for readers of the Discourse on Florentine Affairs inter-

ested in a detailed demonstration of its claims, the Florentine Histories amply provided one. The preceding chapter has already considered Machiavelli’s view of the violence with which Cosimo’s regime was established in 1434. But given that Machiavelli identified the regime’s frequent parlamenti, exiles, fear, and terror as attempts to revisit the regime's first foundations, the circumstances by which Cosimo first gained control, it is worth revising the key details of that process. Cosimo’s return, as Machiavelli describes it, re-

sulted not only in the banishment of the leaders of the rival party, such as Rinaldo degli Albizzi, Ridolfo Peruzzi, Palla Strozzi, and Niccol6 Barbadoro,

but with a massive forced exodus: “[Cosimo’s new regime] banished .. . many other citizens in such numbers that few cities were left in Italy to which they were not sent in exile, and many outside Italy were full of them.” A subsequent Signoria exiled many additional citizens as well as prolonging and altering the terms of banishment for those already exiled. Five Florentines were executed, and the property of the exiled was confiscated and redistributed to Medici party members, who expanded their control over the

electoral process and the magistracies with the authority to impose the death penalty.” As one would expect, given the Discourse’s assertion that the Medici risked

losing power every ten years, when we arrive at 1444 in the Histories, ten years after Cosimo’s return from Venice, we encounter signs of political dissent and a consequent return to the harsh measures that ushered in the regime at its outset. The preceding three years witnessed the steady rise in power and influence of Neri Capponi, whose authority benefited from his friendship with the popular and capable warrior Baldaccio di Anghiari. Rec-

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ognizing a growing threat to their primacy, the leaders of the Medici regime engineered the assassination of Baldaccio, successfully reducing Cap-

poni’s power and the number of his allies in the city. But in spite of the murder of Baldaccio in 1444, the regime nevertheless found its grasp on power

weakening, owing to the end of the balia, the extraconstitutional emergency committee through which the regime had ruled since 1434. As soon as they lost the power of the balia, opponents of the regime found new courage in word and deed to speak and act against the Medici. Asa result, the leaders of the Medici party determined once again to assert exclusive control over the government, reempowering friends and al-

lies and destroying their would-be rivals. The pattern they followed was identical to that of 1434: “they set up a new balia. This reorganized the offices; it gave to a few men power to choose the Signoria; it renewed the Chancellery of the Reformations, depriving Ser Filippo Peruzzi of it, and putting in charge one who could conduct himself according to the will of the powerful; it lengthened the period of banishment for those who were banished; it imprisoned Giovanni di Simone Vespucci; it deprived of their offices the couplers of the hostile party, and with them the sons of Piero Baroncelli, all the Serragli, Bartolommeo Fortini, Messer Francesco Castellani, and many others. And in these ways they restored their own authority and influence and deprived enemies and suspects of pride.””®

Later in the Histories, Machiavelli revealed that the Medici relied on this practice more habitually than he suggested in either the Discourses on Livy or the Discourse on Florentine Affairs—every three and half years rather

than every five or ten. He concluded the opening chapter to book 7 with the observation: “Thus from 1434 to 1455, which is twenty-one years, Cosim0o’s party six times, usually through the Councils, took up again the power of the balia.”*"

Nor did tactics change under Cosimo’s son Piero, who in the wake of the challenge to his rule following Cosimo’s death similarly relied on the balia, terror, and fear to anchor his authority. In 1466, after militarily outmaneuvering his opponents, Piero reestablished tight control over the government through his client Roberto Lioni, recently appointed standard-bearer of justice. They established a new balia, composed entirely to those loyal to Piero,

that dispensed banishment, arrests, torture, and executions—the fear and terror through which the regime had first anchored its power in 1434: “all

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the family of the Neroni was scattered. ... Many other citizens, who speedily departed, were banished to various places. Nor was this enough, for Pieros supporters prepared a procession to thank God for the government’s preservation and the city’s reunion. During the solemnities of this some citi-

zens were arrested and tortured, and then part of them put to death and part sent into exile.”* We have seen that Machiavelli, whatever ideological or moral objections he may have privately held about the system of Medici shadow government in the fifteenth century, certainly felt that from a purely dispassionate and instrumental evaluation the regime should be judged a failed experiment—

not just by disenchanted republicans but also by the sixteenth-century Medici looking for stable methods to anchor their power. For Medici authority to become an institutional and legal reality in the Florentine political community, the consent and unity of ottimati within their party was indispensable. But as Machiavelli had suggested as early as 1512 in the Memo-

randum to the Mediceans, the ambitious nature of such people precluded any easy or predictable loyalty on their part. As the Histories showed in detail, they were prepared to support the family so long as Medici authority served various specific and hence conditional ends or so long as they feared challenges to their position. Whenever such ends were met or such fear was absent, however, they would use their privileged position in all of the govern-

ment’s major councils to undermine the family whose exceptional status they resented. Worse, because of that structural flaw, the family was obliged

routinely to resort to the rough tactics of fear and terror to enforce discipline, thereby ensuring that the undercurrent of resentment in their ranks would and could by definition never disappear or be harmoniously resolved. This in turn implied further acts of terror and intimidation. But what of the regime’s merits? Given its serious flaws, what enabled it to survive for longer than any other regime analyzed in either the Discourse on Florentine Affairs or the Florentine Histories?

One important source of the regime’s durability was the exceptional skill, talent, and charisma of Cosimo and Lorenzo, without whom Medici power would have likely been no more or less remarkable than that possessed ear-

lier by Maso and Rinaldo degli Albizzi or by Corso Donati before them. Even while condemning the general nature of their regimes, Machiavelli in the Histories frequently praised the talent, instincts, and political style of

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those two illustrious fifteenth-century Medici.*” As Najemy has shown, Machiavelli’s rhetorical praise of the Medici was not false but part of a sincere

and substantive distinction he made between the positive merits and accomplishments of individual Medici and the overall negative impact of their regime on Florentine history.** As Machiavelli himself put it, in spite of his description of “the probity of Giovanni, the wisdom of Cosimo, the humanity of Piero, and the magnificence and prudence of Lorenzo,” his narrative was nevertheless “far from all flattery.”” The analysis of the Medici regime offered above explains precisely why Machiavelli’s positive estimation of Cosimo and Lorenzo was indeed a logical and conceptually integrated component of a larger critique of their political system: given the structural breaches in the stability of the Medicean political ship, the fact that it had remained seaworthy for as long as it did demanded that people of exceptional talent had operated at the helm. Machiavelli effectively said as much in his character sketch of Cosimo early in

book 7 of the Histories: “No other in his time equaled him for his understanding of the conditions of princes and commonwealths. This was the reason why in such great variety of fortune and in a city so variable and among a body of citizens so fickle, he maintained one government for thirty-one years.”*° In short, one had to recognize the regime’s flaws in order to appreciate the precise nature of Cosimo and Lorenzo’s greatness. But with respect to the pressing question for popes Leo and Clement in the 1520s of how best to institutionalize Medici power, however, the virtues of Cosimo and Lorenzo were of purely antiquarian interest. Even the most openly partisan adherent of the family would have acknowledged that none of the current Medici were particularly well suited to or capable of managing affairs as Cosimo and Lorenzo had done. But the second source of the longevity of Cosimo’s regime—the support of the people—was another matter altogether. In the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, Machiavelli twice asserted the presence of widespread popular approval for Cosimo’s regime and argued twice that devising a system that satisfied the broad ranks of Florentine citizenry was a crucial necessity in present. The Discourse thus identified the support of the people as the one constructive issue connecting the regime of the historical Medici with the Medici regime in the present. The Histories substantiated the assertions of popular approval from the Discourse. Machiavelli repeated such claims in general at various moments

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in the Histories, but also provided specific examples throughout Cosimo’s years of ways popular support enabled him to maintain his hold on the state. But further still, the Histories’ account of the Medici prior to Cosimo explained

why the people had gravitated toward his party in the first place. Machiavelli repeatedly portrayed Cosimo’s ancestors Salvestro, Veri, and Giovanni as political actors who worked on behalf of the people and defended popular in-

terests, a family to whom the people regularly turned for support when faced with elite hostility. Thus, by the time readers arrived at the chapters dealing with Cosimo’s defeat of the Albizzi and increasing monopolization of the government, a clear pattern was already in place suggesting that Cosimo had benefited from a tradition three generations old of popular support for the family. We have already encountered indirect evidence of this pattern in the previous chapter’s assessment of Machiavelli’s account of how the Albizzi fatally undermined themselves by excluding the people, whose consequent support of Cosimo was a key factor in his victory. But given the degree to

which Machiavelli flagged popular support as crucial for both past and present Medici in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, it is worth briefly revisiting some of the details previously discussed about Cosimo and consider-

ing some additional supporting details before turning to an analysis of Cosimo’s predecessors. When Machiavelli first began to connect Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine people, he attributes the connection not as much to any policy or action on Cosimo’s part that was particularly pleasing to the people as to the general toxicity of the Albizzi regime. Given that the Albizzi were enemies of the people and Cosimo was the enemy of the Albizzi, the people’s politics naturally coincided with Cosimo’s factional battles. As Machiavelli explained

in 4.26, the effectiveness of the Medici party’s campaign of slandering their rivals management of the campaign against Lucca lay in part in the people’s hostility to the Albizzi: “In this party, hatred originated all the

complaints brought against magistrates and commissioners: the genuine, Cosimo’s party made greater; those not true they made up; and the genuine and the not-true were believed by the people, who generally hated Cosimo’s opponents.”””

Prior to the formal establishment of Cosimo’s regime in 1434, the principal witnesses to popular support for Cosimo tended to come from the Albi-

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zzi party—from people making frank assessments of the relative power of the two factions. We saw earlier how the speech of Niccolo da Uzzano in 4.27 urging caution divested of any meaning the designation of their faction as “the party of the nobles,” given the degree to which each of their chief families had members among the ranks of the opposing party. But the designation of their rivals—namely, the party of Cosimo de’ Medici—as the plebeian party revealed an important social reality: “they are supported by all the lower classes.”** Although Rinaldo degli Albizzi did not share Niccold da Uzzano’s estimation of the gravity of popular support for Cosimo, Rinaldo’s statement in the following chapter that “the lower classes worshipped

Cosimo” certainly revealed no disagreement about the perception of the existence of that popular support, nor did Rinaldo’s reminder in 1433, just prior to Cosimo’s exile, that the Albizzi party’s “adversaries had made themselves strong with the lower class.””’ Once in power, Cosimo generally benefited from and outright exploited popular approval in ways that confirm the accuracy of the Albizzean oligarchs’ analysis of the social base of his party. For example, Machiavelli related that in 1440 the “Florentines . . . before everything else gave attention

to keeping their government stable; for that they needed to fear little, on account of Cosimo’s popularity with the people.”’® In the first chapter of book 7, Machiavelli explained that in the years following 1434 Cosimo’s fol-

lowing, owing to a combination of fear, discipline, and unity, ruled with a degree of restraint such that they did not provoke or alienate the people. This was a crucial precondition for Cosimo’s successful exploitation of the balia system: “Hence as often as Cosimo’s government had need of the people in order to get a new grip on its authority, it found them always inclined to grant its leaders such power and dominion as were asked.’ Cosimo also used the people as a stick with which to enforce discipline among the upper ranks of his following. In 1455, after the minor coup against Cosimo’s authority following the death of Neri Capponi, Cosimo’s erstwhile allies quickly found that without his preponderant authority, their position in Florence had declined rather than risen, evident in the observation “that they had become equal to those whom they were accustomed to hold far inferior.” Cosimo then shrewdly exploited this class reversal to compel the renegade members of his party to beseech him once again to assume tight control over the state: “Cosimo pretended ignorance of this state of things [decline of his

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now independent followers], and when there came up any decision that would please the people, he was the first to favor it.””?

In deploying this strategy, Cosimo was following directly in the footsteps of his father, Giovanni, who similarly favored the people and in particular played a key role in the first adoption of the catasto in 1427. But Giovanni

himself was also following the example demonstrated in the Histories of his predecessors Salvestro and Veri. The Histories thus not only substantiated the Discourse’s attribution of popular support for Cosimo, but more ambitiously portrayed Cosimo as the inheritor of a consistent fourteenth-century Medici tradition of association with popular politics.

Machiavelli connected the Medici to the city’s popular and laboring classes in the family’s first appearance in the Histories in the later chapters of book 2. He introduced the family in the context of the arrival of the duke of

Athens and growing discontent with his rule. The duke had been sent by the king of Naples to assist Florence in its campaign against Lucca. Although the duke was initially serving the city in a military capacity, a cabal of no-

bles conspired to expand his powers in an attempt to restore their own authority at the expense of the people. One of the duke’s first acts was to execute three citizens who had played prominent roles in the failed Luccan enterprise, one of whom was Giovanni di Bernardo de’ Medici. The executions, Machiavelli explained, “greatly frightened the middle-class citizens . . . [and] pleased the nobles . . . because they saw themselves revenged for the many injuries they had received from the people.”’* Although Machiavelli added that the executions were also pleasing to the lower class, the identification of the Medici two chapters later as among the leaders of a lower-class

conspiracy against the duke suggests that Giovanni's death had little to do with whatever pleasure the plebeians took in the executions. The duke’s financial rapacity and bloody politics inspired universal hatred throughout the city. Ina rare moment of class unity, three conspiracies— one by the nobles, another by those of middling wealth, and the third by the city’s proletariat—were simultaneously set in motion in 1343. The Medici were among the leaders of the third conspiracy, consisting largely of the city’s “working men,’ and went on to play a key role in the expulsion of the duke.” The chaotic aftermath of his departure led directly to a state of civil war between the nobility and the people, caused by the stubborn unwillingness of the nobles to restrain their abusive and arrogant conduct. In this

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conflict, too, the Medici were among the leaders of the popular faction and were the first family to attack the nobles.’”° After fierce and sustained fighting, the people decisively defeated the nobles, leading Machiavelli, from the vantage point of the 1520s, to conclude that “the ruin of the nobles was so great and so humbled their party that never afterward did they have courage to take arms against the people; on the contrary, they steadily became more courteous and abject.””” The Medici are thus introduced in book 2 as a family from the ranks of the people with some degree of standing among the lower guilds and laborers in 1343. He continued to connect the family to the city’s lower class when they returned to his narrative thirty-five years later. Setting the stage for the Ciompi uprising, Machiavelli described the city’s increasing fragmentation into two rival factions in 1378, caused by rising hostility to the arrogant conduct of the Guelf elite. The Guelf party included the city’s ancient nobility and the wealthy ranks of the people, while their rivals consisted of “all the less important people ... and the rest of the multitude.” The Medici were among the leaders of the latter party, along with the Scali, Strozzi, Ricci, and Alberti.”®

Machiavelli’s account of the Ciompi revolt and the regime that followed it revealed that the Medici, Salvestro in particular, not only were members of the faction backed by the city’s plebeians but in fact held a position of considerable standing in the people’s eyes. Machiavelli begins in 3.9 with the election of Salvestro as standard-bearer of justice in 1378 and his role in triggering the conflicts that led to the Ciompi revolt. Salvestro was the first to take action against the noble-dominated faction whose power derived from

their nearly exclusive control over the Guelf party and the penalty of admonishment. Machiavelli describes Salvestro’s indignation in populist terms, attributes the people’s support of Salvestro as the chief source of his inspira-

tion to take action, and identifies the city’s old and new nobility: “He... could not endure that the people should be oppressed by a few who were powerful. And having decided to put an end to this arrogance, since the people supported him and he had many noble companions among the middle class, he imparted his plans to Benedetto Alberti, Tommaso Strozzi, and Messer Giorgio Scali, who promised him every aid. They secretly, therefore, determined on a law that renewed the Ordinances of Justice against the no-

bles, lessened the authority of the [Guelf] party captains, and gave the

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admonished a way of being called back to their offices.””” Although Salves-

tro failed to pass the law, he nevertheless set in motion the conditions of conflict between the Guelfs and the people that led ultimately to exile of the Guelfs and the Ciompi seizure of power. At several moments in Machiavelli’s narrative of the Ciompi uprising and its aftermath, he reveals that Salvestro and his principal allies had close connections to the insurrectionary woolworkers and the city’s plebeian ranks. For example, after seizing the Banner of Justice from the city’s executioner, the angry mob proceeded to burn the houses of many citizens, sometimes to punish public transgressions but just as often to get revenge for private quarrels and personal vendettas. To give a constructive veneer to their rampage, the rioters then conferred knighthood on sixty-four citizens, starting with Salvestro de’ Medici and including Benedetto Alberti, Tommaso Strozzi, and “similar men who were in their confidence.’’*° And later, because of

his connections among the city’s plebeians, Salvestro prospered under the revolutionary administration of Michele di Lando, who rewarded him with the income from stores on the Ponte Vecchio and “did many other favors to many other citizens who were friends to the people of low station.”* Salvestro’s enemies certainly perceived him to have assisted the Ciompi. The oligarchic regime established in 1381 banished him on precisely that charge.” A speech Machiavelli attributed to Benedetto Alberti, looking back on those years from the vantage point of 1387, reaffirmed the virtue of Salvestro’s politics in 1378. Sustained fighting in 1381 led to the restoration of the power of the major guilds and the Guelf party and a new regime that viewed Benedetto Alberti with increasing suspicion.” Six years later the regime turned on him, exiling him and admonishing most of his family.** Benedetto, presented by Machiavelli throughout as a virtuous citizen, delivered a speech to his family defending his name and warning them of future dangers awaiting those who remained in Florence. Benedetto explained that love for his city had inspired him to join Salvestro de’ Medici, the early leader of the popular party who rightly struggled to restrain the insolent Guelfs. Once victorious, Benedetto explained, power in the popular party shifted from Salvestro to Giorgio Scali, whose tactics quickly came to resemble those of their erstwhile enemies, causing Benedetto to renounce the popular party.”

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Just as he had intimated about Cosimo’s use of the people in 7.2 and 7.3, Machiavelli suggested that Salvestro’s populism was less a rigidly held matter of ideological conviction than a the result of shrewd recognition of the tactical advantages conferred by possession of the people’s support. After triggering the events that led to the Ciompi uprising and receiving benefits from the insurrectionaries, Salvestro nevertheless went on to assist Michele di Lando in wresting control of the government from the city’s lowest classes and engineering the primacy of the lesser guilds. The leadership of the lesser guilds, consisting of Salvestro, Giorgio Scali, Benedetto Alberti, and Tommaso Strozzi, effectively used the specter of plebeian radicalism, and the leadership’s potential willingness to support it, to extort the support and voluntary subjection of the major guilds. In the end, Salvestro and the lesser guilds became “almost princes in the city” by trading their support of the plebs for

the compliance of the major guilds. Salvestro’s standing and reputation among the people was a crucial precondition for the subordination of the major to the minor guilds in much the same way that Cosimo’s standing with the people was a necessary precondition for the subordination of rebellious members of his party. Whatever speculations Machiavelli may have entertained about Salvestro’s motives, his subsequent narrative leaves no doubt that the city’s laboring classes continued to look to the Medici family as a major source of their

leadership and protection. Six years after the Ciompi revolt, Maso degli Albizzi had established firm and relatively uncontested control over the government. After summoning troops into the city, his regime called a parlamento and empowered themselves with a balia that, among other agendas, meted out harsh and vindictive punishment to the city’s plebs, admonishing and executing “many working men.” After robust and consistent provocation, the “guilds and the lowest class” rose up in armed revolt. While one group marched to the Piazza della Signoria to confront the priors, another group marched directly to the house of Veri de’ Medici, who had succeeded Salvestro after his death as head of the family. Although Machiavelli does not explain why the angry crowd sought him out, in light of the Salvestro’s role in early stages of the Ciompi revolt, the

fact that the aggrieved laborers first instinct was to seek out the Medici for a protector and champion suggests that the family had an established

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reputation as outright friends of the people or—a variation thereof— enemies of the people’s enemies. Machiavelli specifically introduced Veri

and the principal theme of his moment in Florentine history in terms of his standing with the injured guilds and those sympathetic to them: “All who have left any record of those times agree that if Messer Veri had been more ambitious than he was good, he could without any hindrance have made himself prince of the city, because the serious damage that, rightly or wrongly, had been done to the guilds and to their friends had so fired their spirits to revenge that, to satisfy their appetites, they needed only a head to lead them.”*°

Najemy has discussed the episode of Veri and the guilds in detail, arguing that Machiavelli was obliquely criticizing Veri for failing to cast his lot with the guilds.” In Najemy’s analysis, Machiavelli’s account of Veri’s politics revealed him to have privileged his standing with the regime over the justice of the guilds’ cause, thereby failing to recognize the considerable historical potential of the role that the guilds had invited him to play. Najemy infers a key insight into Machiavelli’s intentions from the way Machiavelli altered the moral stakes of the conflict from those presented in his principal source, Anonimo’s chronicle. Whereas his source interpreted the conflict as one between the city’s “good citizens” and the guild community, Machiavelli linked the “good citizens” with the guilds by identifying them both as victims of a regime consisting of “men whom he called ‘destroyers of good citizens and of the common good.’”** In spite of the deliberate moral contrast between a tyrannical regime and justly angry laborers at his door, Veri “did not, of course, accept their offer and was in fact instrumental in calming the aroused and frightened guildsmen, for which he was duly praised and honored by the Signoria.”* Najemy concludes that Machiavelli in effect condemned Veri for turning down the guilds’ offer in exchange for praise and honor from the regime, wasting an evident opportunity to “heal Florence’s wounded ordini” and thereby join the ranks of the “few who have benefited their country.””° While certainly agreeing with Najemy about the importance of this episode to Machiavelli's larger narrative purpose in the Histories, the interpretation advanced here differs considerably. The first point concerns the nature of Veri’s refusal. Najemy’s interpretation hinges on the fact that Veri refused the people’s offer. But there is a distinction in Machiavelli’s narra-

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tive between Veri’s willingness to support the guilds and his refusal to seize the government.”’ As Machiavelli's summation of Veri’s character indicated, Veri did not refuse to support the guilds but refused to make himself a prince—if he “had been more ambitious than we was good, he could

without any hindrance have made himself prince of the city.”* There is good reason to doubt, for a considerable variety of reasons outside the text of the Histories, that Machiavelli ever wished to see a Medici prince in Florence. It is therefore difficult to see why Machiavelli would have considered Veri’s refusal in anything less than a positive light. But Machiavelli’s language in the text merits such doubt as well. However legitimate their grievances, the guilds spoke to Veri about satisfying their appetites for revenge—hardly the language of a movement likely to “heal Florence’s wounded ordini.” Further, the guilds were not alone in arguing that Veri should establish himself as a prince. In what was a recurring pattern in Machiavelli’s treatment of the fourteenth-century Medici, a moderate republican—in this case Veri but later Giovanni—was urged by another family member, in this case Antonio de’ Medici but later Alamanno, to embrace the politics of factionalism. Just as the guilds had done, Antonio urged Veri to “seize the rule of the republic.”’ Antonio, however, “cherished for a long time special enmity against” Veri and hence must have offered such advice because he believed it would lead to Veri’s ruin. Veri’s response to Antonio interprets the advice thus: “Your threats when you were my enemy never caused me fear, and now that you are my friend your advice will not harm me.”* The fact that the duplicitous Antonio echoes the urging of the guildsmen does not lend ballast to the merits of their plan. Machiavelli twice indicated that Veri did not, in fact, refuse leadership of the aggrieved guild community. Rather, he insisted on doing so on his terms rather than theirs: “Turning to the crowd, Messer Veri exhorted them to be of good courage, because he was willing to be their defender, if only they would take his advice.’ When he approached the priors he certainly distanced himself from the atmosphere of charged martial protest in the crowd: “he said in the presence of the Signors that he could not at all lament that he had lived in such a way that the people of Florence loved him, but he did lament that they had formed an opinion of him not justified by his past life; since he had never made himself an example of scandal or ambition.””® But he also urged the regime not to punish the people for having protested.

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“He urged them [the priors] indeed to use their fortune humbly and to be satisfied to enjoy a half victory with the safety of the city than, by attempting a complete triumph, to ruin her’—in short, to acknowledge the people’s grievances rather than invite civil war.’’ After meeting with the priors, he returned to the guilds and assured them that “the people would not lack their rank and security if they let him direct them.” It is true that Veri urged the people to lay down their arms and return to their homes—unwisely, given the ill faith of the regime and subsequent harsh treatment of the disarmed crowd—but he did so only after the regime had promised him “that they would not fail to do what he and the other citizens had advised.””® Veri’s argument to the guilds invokes the larger themes of the chapter in ways that suggest that Veri’s motives, if not outcomes, were similar to those of the “few who have benefited their country.” Veri did not disapprove of the goal of the guilds, namely the defense of their rank and standing in the city in face of aggression, but of their methods, namely armed confrontation: “he begged them to lay down their arms and obey the Signors, assuring them that courtesy more than pride, petitions more than threats were likely to move them [the priors].”’’ Given that the regime—in spite of assurances to the contrary—swiftly retaliated with punitive measures as soon as the people had disarmed, one might infer that Veri, hoping to gain the regime’s favor, had urged courtesy and petitions solely to induce the people to disarm themselves and not out of any substantive conviction about the necessity of lawful methods. But consider how his advice echoes other important preceding passages that confirm the virtue of his advice. Machiavelli opened book 3 by contrasting Roman virtues with Florentine vices. Whereas conflict in Rome between nobles and people had a beneficial effect because it was resolved via debates and the establishment of new laws, in Florence conflict had pernicious effects

because it could not be resolved by means other than violence, exile, and death. Veri’s confidence that the Albizzi regime would respect petitions rather than arms was unfounded, but his desire to resolve the city’s conflict through debate rather than violence nevertheless linked him to the superior methods of the Romans with which Machiavelli opened book 3. Nor was Machiavelli’s praise of Veri’s methods an isolated incident; rather, it was part of a pattern of praise in book 3 between the introductory chapter and the arrival of Veri. Machiavelli attributed a speech to Luigi Guic-

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ciardini that also invoked the book’s opening chapter. To quell the disturbances that Salvestro de’ Medici had triggered in 1378, the regime had en-

acted a number of policies favored by the guilds. But in spite of their concessions, a new round of armed protests by the guild community was already under way. Having summoned the leaders of the guilds before him, Guicciardini, then standard-bearer of justice, delivered a lengthy speech admonishing the guilds for their excessive demands and the harshness of their methods: “when you do wish something new, be so good as to ask it lawfully and not with uprisings and arms.” Machiavelli evidently agreed with Guicciardini and approved of his words. He concluded Guicciardini’s speech with the observation that: “These words, because they were true, greatly moved the spirits of those citizens, and they graciously thanked the gonfalonier for performing to them the duty of a good Signor and to the city that of a good citizen.”°”

Shortly thereafter, the leader of the Ciompi regime, Michele di Lando, confronted a similar situation and spoke in a similar way. After initially supporting Michele, the lowest classes began to suspect that his loyalties had shifted to the city’s affluent middle ranks and consequently took up arms against him. He responded with the same language employed earlier by Luigi Guicciardini and later by Veri de’ Medici: “Michele, seeing their presumption, in order not to let them show further contempt, without at all attending to what they wanted, denounced their manner in asking, advised them to lay down their arms, and said they then would receive concessions which the Signoria could not with dignity yield to force.”® It is hard to see how Machiavelli could have disapproved of Michele’s counsel, given his conclusion that in “courage, in prudence and in goodness [Michele] surpassed every citizen of his time. He deserves to be numbered among the few who have benefited their native city.”°* Clearly, one of the major problems investigated in book 3 is the Florentine inclination to resolve all conflicts with violence. Luigi Guicciardini, Michele di Lando, and Veri de’ Medici were evidently unable to alter that political culture, but Machiavelli praised each of them for having urged more civil methods. In Najemy’s interpretation of this episode, Veri’s principal contribution was persuading the crowd to lay down its weapons and disband, an act “for which he was duly praised and honored by the Signoria.”®’ Although Machia-

velli mentions in passing that the “Signors praised Messer Veri,” his analysis

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of the episode’s aftermath and the Medici family’s subsequent relationship with the Albizzean oligarchy indicates that the Medici family, far from prospering or improving their standing with the regime, no less than the guilds were persecuted by the oligarchy.” In the years following the balia of 1393, Machiavelli consistently connected

punishment of the Medici family with punishment of the city’s working classes, suggesting not that Veri de’ Medici threw in his lot with the regime but the opposite. Machiavelli specified in 3.26 that the Medici particularly resented the regime’s bad faith in 1395 in punishing the leaders of the guild uprising of 1393: “Not merely those of the Alberti who remained in the city and the Medici, who felt that the Signors had deceived the people, but many others felt so much violence to be obnoxious.”® Shortly thereafter, the oligarchs banished Alamanno and Antonio de’ Medici, “along with all those of

that family who were descended from Messer Alamanno, together with many nonaristocratic guildsmen who were esteemed by the lowest class of people.”®° In 1400, two conspiracies against the Albizzi—one of which included Antonio de’ Medici—led to a balia that punished “two ofthe Medici. . . and many humble men.”’® Looking back on those years, the period between 1381 and the rise of Giovanni de’ Medici in 1421, Machiavelli concluded that the plebeian party of the lesser guilds that had briefly ruled from the outbreak of the Ciompi revolt until 1381 was “most favored by the mass of the inhabitants” and that its “party principles were those of the greater portion of the city.... The chief families harassed as its leaders were the AIberti, the Ricci, and the Medici, who were many times stripped of men and

of wealth.” Machiavelli continued to identify a connection—now in its third generation—between the Medici and popular politics in his analysis of Giovanni de’ Medici. Giovanni entered as a major figure in Machiavelli’s narrative on his election in 1421 as standard-bearer of justice. Giovanni's election was greeted with acclaim by the “masses of the city . . . since the crowd believed it had gained a defender.”® Alone among the oligarchs, Niccolo da

Uzzano had warned against the elevation of Giovanni as standard-bearer. Given Giovanni's high standing with the people, Niccolé correctly anticipated a renewal of the conflicts between the middle classes and plebs that the oligarchs had fought so hard to repress in the 1380s. But his ostensible allies rejected his sage advice because they envied his elevated standing in

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their oligarchy and wished to diminish his perceived authority, no matter the larger consequences.”” Three years later, the renewed ambitions of the people about which Nic-

colo da Uzzano had warned began to materialize. In the wake of military defeats to Duke Filippo Visconti, the city appointed a commission of twenty citizens to raise military funds through new taxation. The committee assigned the greatest tax burden to the city’s powerful aristocracy, whose divisive attempts at obstruction almost brought the rival parties to war: “From this [controversial taxation] resulted many unhappy incidents, with death and wounds for citizens, through which it seemed that the parties would come to blood, and every prudent man feared some future ill, since the nobles, who were used to being respected, could not endure to have hands laid on them, and the rest wished that all should be equally taxed.”” Eventually, realizing that “the regime's inactivity had made men bold in censuring public actions and had given new courage to those accustomed to lead the crowd,” a group of leading citizens met to discuss tactics for reclaiming control of the government. Machiavelli concluded the chapter by hinting at the future class conflict to come. In spite of the relatively large assembly of more than seventy citizens, whose gathering was permitted by two sitting priors, Machiavelli pointedly observed that Giovanni de’ Medici did not attend, “either because he was not invited, as a suspect, or because, being opposed to their view, he was not willing to take part.”” Giovanni’s absence swiftly became a critical issue for the oligarchs. Rinaldo degli Albizzi urged his party to join forces with the city’s ancient nobility and repress the lesser guilds by force of arms. Although Niccolo da Uzzano approved of Rinaldo’s objectives, he argued that the plan’s success hinged critically on the support of Giovanni de’ Medici, who enjoyed considerable standing with the people. If they somehow managed to persuade Giovanni to join their cause, the oligarchs would have deprived the people of their leader and chief source of power, hence would have made it possible to carry out their coup without resorting to violence. If Giovanni remained opposed, force would be necessary, and the ultimate outcome, even given oligarchic control over the Ten of War, would be uncertain at best, owing to the simple fact of the people’s strength in numbers and Giovanni's political experience and influence. As a result of Niccolo’s argument, Rinaldo proceeded to attempt to win Giovanni to their cause. Much like Veri, however,

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Giovanni, when approached by the people to take up arms against the regime, rejected Rinaldo’s overtures, declared himself in favor of the city’s existing organization, and urged him to emulate his father, who had tried to win popular approval through such measures as lowering the price of salt and providing that people with a tax rate of less than 1/2 florin could choose not to pay.” For readers following Machiavelli’s portrayal of Rinaldo, the explanation that Machiavelli attributed to Giovanni for his rejection of Rinaldo’s plan is initially cryptic and puzzling. Giovanni explained to Rinaldo that he should desist from his plan because “those who advise it will with your forces

first take power from the people, and then will take it from you with the people’s aid, since this injury will make the people your enemies. It will happen to you as to Messer Benedetto Alberti, who was persuaded by men who did not love him to consent to the ruin of Messer Giorgio Scali and Messer Tommaso Strozzi, and a little later, by the very persons who had persuaded

him, he was sent into exile.’’* Here Giovanni appeared to be making an improbable parallel between Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Benedetto Alberti. After all, the people, contrary to Giovanni’s implication, were already implacable enemies of the Albizzi, as the preceding chapters of the Histories abundantly demonstrate. The permanent enmity of the people toward the Albizzi makes it rather difficult to see how the oligarchs’ plan to take the government could possibly turn the people from an existing state of friendship to enmity. Further, Giovanni faulted Benedetto for failing to appreciate

the degree to which the unity of his party was central to his own safety. Benedetto, formerly a leader of the plebeian party, was persuaded by nobles to renounce his erstwhile allies Giorgio Scali and Tommaso Strozzi, leaving

him entirely at the mercy of people who had always mistrusted and resented Benedetto’s politics. There is no parallel whatsoever between Rinaldo and Benedetto’s contexts. Rinaldo fought consistently against the popular party, was in the midst of doing just that, and at no point was poised to switch his class affiliations.

Prior to elaborating his counterargument, Giovanni intimated his awareness of Rinaldo’s ruse by urging Rinaldo to remember “what has happened and with what deceptions we proceed in this city.”” There are considerable and important parallels, however, between Benedetto and Giovanni. Benedetto, as we learned from his exile speech, was an

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early and proud ally of Salvestro de’ Medici, with whom he is almost always linked in Machiavelli’s narrative and with whom he consistently fought to humble the Albizzi-led Guelfs. Benedetto, a leader of the plebeian party, was approached by nobles who asked him to renounce its other leaders. Giovanni, now himself a leader of the popular party, was also approached by nobles

urging him to renounce his former party. Hence, in contrast to Rinaldo, whose politics were perfectly consistent, both Benedetto and Giovanni were asked to switch their primary class affiliations. And just as Benedetto’s popularity with the people rendered him permanently suspicious to the Albizzean oligarchy, Giovanni's reputation with the people rendered the prospects for a real alliance with the oligarchs improbable at best. By clarifying that

Benedetto’s political destruction was the result of his distancing himself from the people, Giovanni appeared to be offering Rinaldo the real, more blunt, reasons for his rejection of their plan: he could plainly see that the Albizzi intended to deal with him in exactly the same manner they had dealt with Benedetto: separating him from his power base, repressing the people’s role in government, and then completing their ascendancy by destroying him as well. Giovanni’s implicit tactics for survival here were precisely those outlined by Machiavelli in the Memorandum to the Mediceans: re-

main permanently suspicious of elite overtures at alliance and instead preserve the family’s popular standing and historical source of power.”° Much like Veri before him, Giovanni also represented and championed the moderate wing in the Medici family. Giovanni’s rejection of Rinaldo and his support for the existing government earned him yet greater standing with the people, whose hostility to his rivals increased commensurately. Just as Veri, in a context of escalating factional tension, was urged by Antonio to seize the government by force, Giovanni was urged in a similar context by his son Cosimo and by Alamanno de’ Medici to adopt a more muscular, pointed, and aggressive political style: “many who adhered to his party were discontented, because they would have liked him to show himself more active in affairs. Among these was Alamanno de’ Medici, who, being by nature violent, did not cease to incite him to persecute his enemies and to aid

his friends. ... His son Cosimo also urged him in the same way.”’” But Giovanni remained firm in the face of such proposals, declaring that he was “not in favor of encouraging factions but of getting rid of them, and so far as he was concerned, he sought for nothing else than the union of the city.””

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Machiavelli opened and closed 4.14, his chapter on the establishment of the catasto, with the decisive influence of Giovanni de’ Medici, who repeated, almost verbatim, Veri’s praise of restraint and compromise. Financially exhausted by three years of war with Milan, the city imposed the catasto, a tax favored by the people because of its potential to raise money from the city’s wealthy elite. The catasto proposal passed into law despite concerted opposition from the rich only because Giovanni de’ Medici openly supported it, according to Machiavelli the sole voice in favor of it from the wealthy ranks of the city. Just as Veri had earlier used his standing with the people to broker a truce between the Albizzi oligarchy and the armed protest of the lesser guilds, Giovanni attempted to temper the controversies created by the catasto. Emboldened by having won, with Giovanni's assistance, equality of taxation in the present, the people further demanded a retroactive review of past assessments to determine how much the city’s elites had failed to pay in the past. Once again, Giovanni played a crucial role in protecting the catasto, this time by persuading the people to abandon their belligerent retroactive interpretation of the law. He explained to them that “if the exactions in the past had been unjust, Florentines should thank God that they had found a way for making them just, and should hope that this plan for taxation would serve to reunite, not to divide the city, as would investigation of past taxes and an attempt to equalize them with the present ones.” Then, repeating almost verbatim the words Veri had used before the priors, he concluded: “he who is content with half a victory will always come out better for it, because those who try to do more than win often lose.”” Just as in the case of the failures of the Albizzi regime, the Florentine Histories substantiated in detail Machiavelli’s brief assessment in the Discourse’s

assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the fifteenth-century Medici regime led by Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo. However successful the regime may have appeared to some of Machiavelli’s more nostalgically inclined contemporaries in the Medicean camp, Machiavelli countered that the regime was structurally flawed. The Histories demonstrated this by showing not only that the Medici faced internal dissent every time they were perceived as vulnerable but also that their dependence on broad consensus and the cooperation of multiple committees to enact their policies provided dissent-

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ing members of their faction with a powerful forum with which to challenge the family. The fact that the regime managed to maintain itself for sixty years was the result in part of the exceptional talents of Cosimo and Lorenzo but more

crucially of broad popular support for the family. On this point about the Medici regime more than any other, the Histories substantiated and constructively elaborated on the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. The Discourse re-

peatedly stressed the importance of recognizing the political ambition of the people, not only for understanding the demise of the Albizzi and hence the historical origins of the rise of the Medici but also for understanding the best solution to the city’s current political dilemmas, particularly as faced by the Medici. Machiavelli declared in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs that without “satisfying the generality of the citizens, to set up a stable government is always impossible,” reminding Clement that “the present citizens have experienced [a government] that they think more just and that pleases them better.”*® The Discourse argued in brief and the Histories showed in detail that the people played a crucial, perhaps decisive, role in the collapse of the Albizzi regime at the hands of Cosimo I] Vecchio. But just as Machiavelli’s analysis of the Albizzi in the Histories looked further back than Maso’s regime in 1393, the moment at which the Discourse’s analysis begins, the Histories also considered the early, pre-Cosimean Medici and the benefits of their relationship with the people. The Histories then went on to offer a complex history of the early Medici family’s connections to the city’s guild and labor-

ing communities that revealed that the people’s support for the Medici, however beneficial to Cosimo, was more of an inheritance than a product of

his own creation. In the pages of the Histories, the fourteenth-century Medici—particularly Salvestro, Veri, and Cosimo’s father Giovanni—were consistently linked to the Florentine people.”

The foregoing analysis of Machiavelli’s account of the Medici suggests that in the 1520s he had not yet definitively determined how to interpret their long-term historical impact on the history and future of Florence. He hinted

at this in a lengthy speech midway through the Histories that elliptically

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raised the same question. In 3.5, a group of anonymous citizens, “moved by love for their country,’ assembled before the priors to urge them to repress the escalating conflict between the Albizzi and the Ricci. Toward the end of a speech on the grave and imminent peril faced by the city, an anonymous orator warned that Florentine problems were compounded by a providen-

tial certainty that “in all republics, there are fatal families, born for their ruin.”** Whereas many republics have one or only a few such fatal families, the orator explained that Florence was cursed with an abundance of them, invoking the struggles between the Buondelmonti and Uberti, the Donati and the Cerchi, and the Ricci and the Albizzi. Reasoning that no Florentine could fail to think of the Medici in that passage, John Najemy has argued that Machiavelli’s discussion of fatal families “looks ahead . . . to the tragedies of the future” with which the Medici were associated.*’

There can be no doubt that the Medici are implied in the passage on fatal families. Leaving aside the princely tendencies that Machiavelli identified with the Medici from Cosimo onward, the pairings of fatal families mirror perfectly the structure of the Histories itself. By book 4, any reader of the Histories, no matter how unfamiliar with Florentine history, will plainly see that the Albizzi, having vanquished the Ricci, become paired with the Medici, under whom Florentine political culture became further corrupted. But Machiavelli may have been intending to signal a more complex message than the relatively straightforward disapproval of the Medici that Najemy identified. When this account is read in connection with the Discourse,

it appears possible that Machiavelli intended not so much to condemn the Medici as a fatal family as to suggest that it was not yet clear whether they should be included in that dismal list. After all, as he was writing the Histories, the Medici were considering various proposals to reform the Florentine constitution and had indicated a willingness to enlarge the regime, and Machiavelli, having finally gained the ear of the ruling family, had advocated a broad-based republican regime. Considering that the Discourse called for the structurally central inclusion of the broad ranks of Florentine people and the Histories demonstrated that the Medici had at several moments in their past significantly benefited from the perception of widespread popular support, Machiavelli's omission of the Medici from his list of “fatal families”

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may have been a reminder to Clement that republican solutions to the question of the family’s role in Florence remained viable.

The speech on factions and fatal families certainly evoked the Discourse, encouraging readers familiar with it to reflect on its similarities to the Histories’ oration. The anonymous orator reiterated several major arguments from the Discourse, often with strikingly similar vocabulary. Consider the orator’s discussion of the subordination of the law to factional interests: “the laws, the statutes, the methods of government here always have

been managed and are now managed not as required by free government but as required by the ambition of the party on top. The result is that when one party has been defeated and one division has been got rid of, another appears, because if a city tries to sustain herself by means of factions rather than of laws, when one of her factions is left without opposition, of necessity

that city becomes divided, because those private methods that she earlier adopted for her security cannot defend her.’** This was an almost verbatim repetition of the Discourse’s main critique of Florentine politics between the regimes established by Maso degli Albizzi in 1393 and by Piero Soderini in 1502. And the orator concluded, as Machiavelli also did in the Discourse, by stressing that the times were particularly auspicious for the adoption of laws

“suitable for a truly free and law-abiding government.”*” Given these echoes, the rhetorical device of omitting the Medici from the list of fatal families thus reinforced the stirring concluding exhortation to the Medici in the Discourse to join the ranks of divinely favored republican founder figures.

By stressing the virtues of the fourteenth-century Medici and by demonstrating their adherence to basic principles espoused by the Discourse— discouraging factions by establishing good laws and strong institutions, stabilizing the regime by recognizing the ambition of the people, settling for the real gains of a half victory rather than perilously pursuing total domination—Machiavelli furnished the Medici with an internal family example to emulate. His discussion of the fourteenth-century Medici implicitly argued that by adopting the program outlined in the Discourse, the Medici

could anchor their power in ways that restored an original family tradition and that would definitively preclude their identification as a “fatal family, born for the republic’s ruin.”

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Machiavelli had a precise understanding of how to build a regime around such principles. His understanding was also relatively radical, given that it

had no Florentine historical precedent. Members of the Medicean circle such as Alessandro Pazzi criticized it precisely because it was foreign and hence apparently extravagant.*° To persuade the Medici to embrace an innovative solution, Machiavelli first had to convince them that almost all past and existing Florentine political institutions were faulty and therefore poor building blocks for any future solution.

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This chapter focuses on Machiavelli’s scathing analysis of the deep structural flaws that afflicted all Florentine political institutions, concentrating on a striking, sustained, and elaborate pattern of convergences between the Florentine Histories and the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. This chapter argues that Machiavelli intended his synthetic vision of institutional failure in the Histories to justify and elaborate on the specific institutional proposals in his constitutional treatise. He acknowledged in that treatise the radical nature of his solution to the problem of stable Medici power in Florence, in particular his exhortation to abolish almost every existing institution and to rebuild from an architectural tabula rasa. He provided a brief rationale: that all existing institutions had been at the moment of their origin conceptualized in terms of factional partisan advantage rather than for collective and public benefits. In the Histories, he provided a detailed exposition of the essential historical truth of that insight. Recognizing these particular interconnections between the two texts dramatically affects the larger interpretation of the Florentine Histories. It is often described as Machiavelli’s most pessimistic writing and evidence of his profound despair for Florence and Italy in the 1520s, precisely because of

The Failure of Florentine Institutions

his keen awareness of the deep corruption pervading Florentine political life. But if we read the Histories in tandem with the Discourse, we can begin

to see from a new perspective a sense of urgent hope and renewal in the Histories, something Felix Gilbert some time ago suggested was evident in it. At least one major purpose of the Histories was to frame and define a political problem for which the Discourse provided a solution. The Histories certainly mitigate the apparent novelty of Machiavelli’s proposal by showing in detail the degree to which Florentines had been abolishing, reviving, and

reinventing their political institutions since the moment of their freedom from the emperor. Further still, by demonstrating that all earlier regimes inadvertently laid the foundations for their own demise by manipulating public institutions to suit their private interests, Machiavelli ultimately reiterated and revisited the larger and more positive argument that concludes the Discourse: “institutions . . . will always stand firm when everybody has a hand in them, and when everybody knows what he needs to do and in whom he can trust, and no class of citizen, either through fear for itself or through ambition, will need to desire revolution.”

Machiavelli’s Discourse on Florentine Affairs on the proper restructuring of Florentine government polemically and bluntly challenged the three principal and competing arguments in the Medicean ruling group. Some palleschi argued that the Medici should establish a narrow aristocratic regime similar to that of the Albizzean oligarchy of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries; others argued that the regime should revert back to the system of rule favored in the fifteenth century by Cosimo and Lorenzo; others argued for the rejection of any and all variations on republican power-sharing ar-

rangements, proposing instead the establishment of a formal, centralized princely state.* Machiavelli’s criticisms in the Discourse were specific to the Albizzean and fifteenth-century Medici regimes, and his Florentine Histories furnished an elaborate historical justification of those criticisms. But to the particular failings of specific previous regimes he added a universal criticism of all earlier Florentine governments. All political innovations and alterations made

by the Albizzean, Medicean, and Soderinian regimes were not conceived

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with the general welfare of the city in mind but were designed to fortify the ruling party and help consolidate its authority. The desired security and stability, however, always remained illusory because these regimes failed to appreciate a simple—even elemental—historical truth: that partisan institu-

tions, however beneficial in the short run to those with authority over them, always and of necessity expanded the ranks of the resentful, embittered, and discontented, thereby providing powerful leverage and allies for any ambitious opponent of the regime. “The reason why all these governments have been defective is that the alterations in them have been made not for the fulfillment of the common good, but for the strengthening and security of the party. Such security has not yet been attained, because there has always been in the city a party that was discontented, which has been a very powerful tool for anybody who wished to make a change.” Although Machiavelli explored this failing with explicit reference to only

the three immediately preceding regimes, his subsequent argument in the Discourse for the abolition of almost every major magistracy and council reveals that shortsighted, ineffective reliance on partisan institutions was in fact a tradition in Florentine political culture with far more ancient historical roots than the early fifteenth century. He warned his Medici readers early in the Discourse not to be dismayed by the radical institutional proposals to follow: “And likewise I beg you not to be disturbed by some changes in the magistrates, because when things are not well organized, the less there is left of the old, the less there is left of the bad.” He then proposed the abolition of magistracies and councils, many of which substantially predated even the Albizzean oligarchy: “abolish the Signoria, the Eight of Pratica, the Twelve Good Men.”* Following the abolition of these largely executive councils, he proposed the abolition of the city’s chief legislative councils of the Seventy, Hundred, the People, and the Commune.’ He argued, in effect, that in spite of his desire to see a republican government established in Florence, there were no republican institutions, except for the Great Council and the Sixteen Standard-Bearers, that merited preservation. His reasons for retaining the Great Council and the role he thought it should play in the politics of 1520s Florence have been examined here. But on what grounds did he make the interconnected claims that all major institutional innovations of the preceding regimes—indeed, virtually every significant major magistracy and council from the early thirteenth

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century onward—were mechanisms for factional advantage rather than institutions designed for genuine conflict resolution? If we again turn to the Florentine Histories, we find both a restatement of

the universal argument—all institutional innovations reflect factional priorities—and a richly detailed, methodical, and systematic historical explo-

ration of that universal argument. Machiavelli reiterated the institutional critique from the Discourse in a speech that opens the third book of the Histories. A representative of a group of concerned citizens, “moved by love for their country,” delivered an august speech to the Signoria, urging it to undertake political reforms that would suppress the city’s factional tensions.° Of the city’s political traditions, he lamented: “Hence they make laws and statutes not for the public benefit but for their own; hence wars, truces, alliances are decided not for the common glory but for the pleasure of a few. If other cities are filled with these abuses, ours is more soiled with them than

any other, for the laws, [the] statutes, the methods of government here always have been managed and now are managed not as required by free government but as required by the ambition of the party on top.”” Regarding the historical specifics confirming that criticism, book 1 contributes relatively little on the topic because it focuses principally on the early history of the Italian peninsula following the collapse of the Roman Empire.* As an imperial subject rather than autonomous state, Florence generally operated through inherited rather than indigenous political institutions. But book 2 opens with a triumphant Florence casting off the yoke of imperial submission. From that moment on, Machiavelli begins in earnest his examination of the process by which the Florentine republic acquired its government and chief institutions. His analysis begins, however, with an interesting and unique exception to his otherwise universal conviction that all major institutional innovations reflect partisan agendas of victorious factions. Chapters 4-6 of book 2 examine Florence’s first attempts to create the structures of self-rule. The city’s first government was not in fact designed to help a victorious faction keep the losing one in subjection but was the product of a rare moment of compromise in which the city’s middle classes brokered a peace between the warring Guelfs and Ghibellines, who were led, respectively, by the Buondelmonti and the Uberti. Exploiting the temporary collapse of imperial authority following the death of Frederick I] and inspired by the apparent unity

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between the Buondelmonti and Uberti, the city’s middle ranks “believed it time to form a free state and make arrangements for defending themselves, before the new emperor gained power.”” Machiavelli admired and respected the Florentines’ first political attempts at representative government and military autonomy."® The city was governed by twelve citizens—the Elders—whose composition reflected the division of the city into six neighborhoods. The Elders were composed of two citizens from each neighborhood, and their tenure of power was relatively brief: they rotated in and out of office each year.” Although the government of the Elders did not last, it established two judicial magistracies that did: the captain of the People and the podesta, staffed by [non-Florentine] judges and empowered to adjudicate civil and criminal conflicts. More important still, the government of the Elders conformed to one of Machiavelli’s most cherished convictions—that any well-ordered state should rely on its own arms. To that end, the government created a militia in which all young men were enrolled, organized around twenty urban banners and seventy-six rural banners.’* Machiavelli esteemed their early military structure: “So much vigor there was then in those men and with such great nobility of mind they conducted themselves that, whereas today to attack the enemy unexpectedly is considered a noble action and prudent, then it was considered diseraceful and treacherous.””’ Owing to the virtue and martial strength of the government of the Elders, Florence emerged as the chief city of Tuscany and one of the principal powers in Italy.” However effective it may have been, Florence’s first government was relatively short-lived, owing to the city’s complicated and compromised origins as a fief of the empire. Benefiting from the support of the people, who had not forgotten the arrogance of the Ghibellines during the period of Frederick II's ascendancy, the Guelf party increasingly dominated policy. As a result, the resentful and restive Ghibellines challenged the government, triggering armed conflict against an alliance of the people and the Guelf nobility. Outmatched in Florence and consequently pushed out of the city, the Ghibellines invited Manfred, the freshly crowned king of Naples, to reassert his claims to Florence. Allied with the emperor, the Ghibellines then decisively crushed the Guelfs. The victorious king sent his lieutenant, Count Giordano, to destroy Florence’s fledgling autonomy and reassert imperial authority: “This man, after the victory, went with the Ghibellines to Florence,

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and brought that city entirely under Manfred’s control, abolishing the magistrates and every custom that showed any image of her liberty.”” Given that Machiavelli had concluded his discussion of the structure of the Elders’

government by asserting that “with these institutions, military and civil, the Florentines laid a foundation for their liberty,” it seems clear that the customs undone by Giordano were precisely those admirable innovations of the Elders."

From the destruction of the first government onward, Machiavelli’s reconstruction of the origins and development of Florence’s chief councils and magistracies consistently condemned each innovation as a mechanism for factional advantage. The following two chapters show how the conflict and rivalry between Guelfs and Ghibellines led to the establishment of the city’s guild system that became the fundamental architecture of the communal government. Although initially decimated by the combined forces of Manfred and the Ghibellines, the now exiled Florentine Guelfs grew swiftly in number and strength. A potent fighting force, they prospered in exile by offering their support to beleaguered neighboring Guelfs, first in Bologna, then in Parma, and finally in Naples, where they provided crucial assistance to Charles of Anjou’s successful campaign to unseat and kill Manfred. In each case, the Florentine Guelfs enriched themselves by appropriating the considerable wealth and property of their vanquished foes.” The rising Guelf tide abroad caused anxiety for the Florentine Ghibellines, who ruled the city in partnership with the imperial vicar Count Guido Novello.” Effectively acknowledging the arrogant and abusive nature of their rule, they concluded that their greatest weakness was the embittered and disaffected popolo, who now constituted an obvious asset to the Guelf attempt to regain the city. The guild system grew out of their attempt to “get the friendship and partisan support of the people.””” They established a committee, dominated by men of the people, empowered to reform the government of the city. The committee then divided all the city into guilds, empowered each guild with judicial power over its own members, and distributed to each a banner with which to muster a guild-specific militia, all institutional features that endured throughout the communal and republican eras. In addition, the committee established a number of political, social, and legal changes to the guild system that generated consistent and occasionally ex-

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plosive conflict in the fourteenth century.*° We see thus that the Ghibelline understanding of the common good had more to do with depriving their Guelf foes of internal support than with accommodating all of the city’s social groups. Events unfolded in ways that substantiate the core argument of the Discourse that one cannot obtain security by excluding or suppressing rival parties. The transparently partisan motives of the Ghibellines, particularly the connection between the timing of their concessions and the imminence of the Guelf threat, had the effect of undermining popular support rather than

strengthening it. As a result, the newly established guild government subdued the Ghibellines, evicted the imperial vicar, and restored the exiled Guelfs to the city. The ensuing hostile atmosphere of barely contained violence to the Ghibellines led to their voluntary exile and the near permanent establishment of Florence as a bastion of Guelf power. Chapters 10o-12 make it immediately clear that the Guelfs did not possess

a vision for the government of the city that was more inclusive than or superior to the vision the defeated Ghibellines had. It in fact suffered from the very same self-serving limitations. Following the collapse of Ghibelline power, the triumphant Guelfs reorganized the city’s constitution and laws to render their domination of the city complete. They then created a chief executive council of twelve citizens, the Good Men, who rotated in and out of-

fice every two months. The Good Men ruled in collaboration with two councils, a small steering council of eighty citizens and a larger popular council of 180 men of the people, with thirty citizens drawn from each of the city’s six districts. Most crucially of all, and most problematically for the city’s

subsequent political development, they created the captains of the Guelf party, a magistracy with broad discretionary powers to suppress any manifestation of Ghibellinism, culminating in the fourteenth century in the right arbitrarily to banish from the government anyone or any family suspected of Ghibelline sympathies.” Thus constituted, the regime’s first unsurprising order of business was the root-and-branch eradication of any vestiges of Ghibelline influence. “Having established this government, they made the Guelf party strong with magistracies and other arrangements, so that with greater power they could de-

fend themselves from the Ghibellines. They divided the property of the latter into three parts; of these they turned over one to the public treasury,

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assigned the second to the magistracy of the Guelf party, called the captains, and gave a third to the Guelfs, as recompense for the damage they had received.”** Although Machiavelli rather modestly asserted that the Guelfs intended these measures “to defend themselves” from the Ghibellines, his

subsequent description of the political style of the new Guelf regime makes bluntly clear the degree to which their institutions facilitated political domination. “Florence was then in a very bad condition, because the Guelf nobility had become arrogant and did not fear the magistrates. Hence every day there were many homicides and other violent acts, without any punishment of those who committed them, since some noble or other aided them.’”’ For a brief period, the fortune of the Florentine Ghibellines improved.

In a blunt demonstration of the ideological emptiness of the GuelfGhibelline conflict, Pope Nicholas IN had begun to collude with the Holy Roman Empire to diminish the power of the pope’s now excessively mighty vassal, Charles of Anjou. Together, they wrested the control of Tuscany from his hands, isolated Florence from his protection, and sent a papal agent, Latino, to act as the imperial legate. Latino succeeded in restoring the exiled Ghibellines to Florence, assisted in part by popular frustration in Florence with the lawless conduct of the Guelf nobility.** For the following two years, Florence was ruled by the legate and a committee of fourteen Florentines, seven Guelf and seven Ghibelline. But the succession of Martin V to the papal throne ended this brief power-sharing arrangement. A French pope, Martin restored Charles of Anjou to Naples and encouraged the Florentines to resist the rule of their imperial legate.” Later in the chapter, Machiavelli discusses the Guelf reaction, a process that leads directly to the creation in 1282 of the Priorate, a clearly partisan institution, given Machiavelli's statement that its purpose was “to wrest the government from the Ghibellines.”*° The guild corporations replaced the Guelf-Ghibelline council of fourteen with three citizens, henceforth known as Priors, who had to be guild members or merchants and whose tenure of power was two months. The government subsequently increased the number of priors from three to six to reflect the city’s six administrative neighborhoods. The six priors subsequently grew to eight after the 1342 reorganization of the city into four principal districts, with two priors drawn from each quarter. The priors eventually acquired their own palace, military force, secretaries, and the honorific title Signori. The newly reconstituted Guelf

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regime then began military campaigns against Ghibelline Arezzo, culminating successfully in the battle of Campaldino.*” Machiavelli’s explanation of the origins of the chief executive council of the Florentine republic thus demonstrates the truth of the Discourse’s charge that its structure was flawed at the outset by a partisan agenda and hence justifies his recommendation for its abolition.

The institution of the priorate continued to function along party lines even after the de facto triumph of the Guelfs rendered the papal-imperial conflict obsolete. With fear of a Ghibelline revival receding, the political tension in the city redistributed itself along noble and popular lines. The popular party dominated the city’s formal political institutions and used the government to protect itself against noble aggression. Observing that the combined forces of the priors and the captain of the People were frequently inadequate against the private forces of the quasi-feudal and habitually violent nobility, the city’s guild leaders added the final lasting institutional feature of the Signoria, the standard-bearer of justice. Each incoming Signoria created a standard-bearer, always drawn from the people, who had a thousand armed men under his command and whose sole responsibility was to punish noble aggression.*® Shortly thereafter, the office of the standard-bearer of justice played a

crucial role in the next major institutional innovation, the Ordinances of Justice.”’ In spite of the standard-bearer’s relatively wide powers and armed retinue, the office initially had a relatively modest impact on noble insolence because of the provision stipulating that any accuser required an additional supporting witness to the offense. This stipulation, Machiavelli explained, effectively disarmed the standard-bearer: “nevertheless they soon after re-

turned to their arrogance . . . since the accuser needed a witness when he suffered any offense, nobody was willing to act as witness against the nobles, so that in a short time Florence returned to the same lawlessness, and the people received from the rich the same injuries.”’° His observation thus provided a specific historical example of his statements in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs that “a few citizens do not have the courage to punish important men” and in the Discourses on Livy that it “is essential that the judges be many, because a few always act in the normal method of a few.””' Confronted by this procedural failure, the guild leaders and Giano della Bella established the Ordinances of Justice. A complete program of noble

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containment, the Ordinances decreed that the standard-bearer of justice should reside with the priors and should have an increased armed retinue of four thousand men. More crucially still, the guild leaders nullified the witness requirement, substituting it with generally acknowledged public consensus. In addition, in Machiavelli’s account, all nobles were deprived of the right to sit as priors, and all relatives of a specific transgressor were held liable for the same penalty.** In 1298, after narrowly avoiding civil war instigated by the nobles’ armed protest against the Ordinances, the people further strengthened the state by building a new fortified palace for the priors, public prisons, and a large piazza on the site of the recently razed Uberti housing complex, thereby establishing the enduring symbolic political center of the city.” The institutional innovations of the following six years steadily increased the people’s exclusion of the nobility from the government, even though, as Machiavelli observed, other equally debilitating, chaotic, and intersecting conflicts raged between Guelfs and Ghibellines and Whites and Blacks.” The people’s consolidation of the state during these years began with an attempt by the papal legate Messer Niccolao da Prato to pacify the city. To do so, he desired to restore the Ghibelline exiles to the city, but he concluded that he could not do so without the support of the people. To win over their support, he revived the militia companies of the people: “This arrangement greatly increased their [the people’s] power and lessened that of the nobles.”” The legate’s means—expanding the institutional power of one party at the expense of the other—did not, however, produce the desired end: the restoration of the exiled party. The legate departed for Rome in sullen and brooding resentment, having “left Florence greatly disturbed, and interdicted.””®

In 1304, in the aftermath of an attempt by the exiles to force their way into the city, the people again modified the city’s government. They renewed the companies of the people, gave them the banners under which the guild militias had earlier assembled, and formally identified their leaders as the Standard-Bearers and the Colleges of the Priors. In addition to their usual role of providing armed might against the nobles, they were now empowered to act as an advisory body to the priors during times of peace. The people also expanded their control of the judicial arm of government, adding to the podesta and the captain of the People a new office, the executor of

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the Ordinances of Justice, “who was to act with the Gonfaloniers against the lawlessness of the nobility.”’’”

Machiavelli related an incident that took place during this reorganization that revealed the degree to which partisan loyalties permeated the early origin of Florentine judicial institutions. The people wished to punish the Cavalcanti, an ancient noble family. “And to take away the power of the Cavalcanti family, the people took from them by force le Stinche, a walled town in the valley of the Greve, which had from early times belonged to that family. And because those who were captured there were the first to be put in the prisons just built, those prisons, after the town whence the prisoners came, were then called and still are called le Stinche.”?® Machiavelli’s

account of the process by which the Florentine prisons were named is yet another variation on the Discourse’s indictment of Florentine institutions: the name of the public prison derives from a private rather than public source and evoked a specific factional conflict, and hence associated law, justice, and punishment with partisan strife. Chapters 26—29 of book 2 discuss the creation of the Council of the Twelve Good Men and the origins of the flawed scrutiny system condemned in the Discourse. The catalyst for these changes was yet another apparent revival of

Ghibellinism in Tuscany and the associated fear that the exiled Florentine Ghibellines might conquer the city. The Florentine exiles had benefited from the rising power of Castruccio Castracani, the tyrant of Lucca who established himself as the center of power for Tuscan Ghibellinism. The Florentine priors, so that they might make “decisions on better advice, and carry them out with greater authority . . . chose twelve citizens, whom they named the

Good Men, without whose advice and agreement the Signors were to do nothing important.” The reconstituted regime managed to outmaneuver Castruccio, but in spite of their victory, the city barely managed to repulse an attempt by an exile army, with the collusion of members of the noble party in the city, to storm the city’s gates and retake the government. The narrow victory led to another round of institutional innovation. The battle at the city’s gates had revealed to the regime’s leaders that “for the Companies of the People one head alone was not enough. Therefore it was decreed that for the future each Company should have three or four heads; hence to each gonfalonier they added two or three officers whom they called pennon-bearers, so that in emergencies in which all the Company did

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not need to come together, a part of it could act under a head.”*° The regime also modified the city’s electoral laws to sustain their influence, creating the scrutiny system that became the cause of considerable controversy and that Machiavelli condemned in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs.” In place of the earlier system in which the composition of those eligible for the Signoria frequently varied, the “Signors and the members of the College then in of-

fice, because they had great power, took authority to choose the Signors who were to sit for the next forty months. ... From this beginning came the method of putting in a bag for a long time the names of all who were to be magistrates, both in the city and outside. ... These baggings were later called squittini . . . they [the regime’s leaders] took this way, not realizing the harm concealed under this slight convenience.” *

Not long after, the simultaneous deaths of Castruccio and the duke of Calabria, to whom the Florentines had given lordship over their city in exchange for military support against Castruccio, left the city entirely free from external dangers. In the absence of foreign crisis, the quarrels between the nobility and the people resumed. The remaining chapters of book 2 discuss the institutional changes that accompanied that conflict and the ultimate triumph of the people. Once free, the city abolished all the changes that had occurred owing to pressure from the Florentine exiles and Castruccio: “they then reorganized their city and annulled the entire system of the old councils.”*’ In their place were created the councils of the People and the

Commune, institutions that endured until the end of the fifteenth century. The Council of the People was composed of three hundred citizens drawn from the popular party. The Council of the Commune was composed of 250 citizens drawn from the high and middle ranks.** The arrogance and partisanship of the governing elite in the popular party led ultimately led to the tyranny of the duke of Athens and the restructuring of the city’s constitution in favor of the nobles. The process began with resentment over the way the regime maintained its power by exploiting the electoral and judicial processes in its favor. “At that time the powerful citizens had two ways for increasing and keeping their power: first, they restricted the baggings of the magistrates to make the offices always come to them or to their friends; second, they were leaders in the choice of the rectors [podesta, captain of the People, and executor of the Ordinances of Justice] in order afterward to obtain favorable judgments from them.””

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So effective was the latter method that the regime would periodically create

a third rector, known as the captain of the Guard, who targeted citizens, usually noble, at the essentially indiscriminate will of the ruling party. The injured noble party capitalized on widespread discontent with the ruling party, particularly among the plebs, owing to the regime’s incompetent prosecution of a war to capture Lucca. The noble party managed to transfer lordship over the city successfully to Walter, duke of Athens, who had been sent by the king of Naples to assist in that war. Recognizing that the principal opposition to his rule stemmed from the popular party that he had superseded, Walter abolished almost all the chief institutional features of popular ascendancy. He “forbade the Signors to hold their meetings in the Palace, and assigned them a private house. He took away the ensigns from the gonfaloniers of the Companies of the People; he abolished the Ordinances of Justice made against the nobles; he freed the prisoners from the jails; he had the Bardi and Frescobaldi return from exile. He forbade everybody to carry arms. And to be better able to defend himself from those inside Florence, he made friends of those outside.’’*®

In the conclusion to book 2 Machiavelli revealed that the constitutional reforms ushered in by the duke of Athens were short-lived. The savage cru-

elty and financial depredations of his rule swiftly alienated his erstwhile supporters among the nobility and the plebs. On his expulsion the city descended into a sustained and brutal civil war that culminated in the formal destruction of the nobles as a significant political force. With the noble party in disarray and their houses and fortified palaces razed to the ground, the people divided the state among themselves and renewed the laws proscribing the nobility: “When the nobility was conquered, the people reorganized the government, and because there were three sorts of people, the powerful, the average, and the lowly, they arranged that the powerful should have two Signors, the average three, and the lowly three; the gonfalonier was to

be now of one, now of the other class. Besides this, all the Ordinances of Justice were reenacted against the nobles, and (further weakening them) many nobles were mingled with the general multitude.”” Book 3 introduced new variations in Florentine civil conflicts, the rivalry and conflict between the popular and plebeian parties and the Albizzi and Ricci factions. Although the destruction of the nobility created new social

divisions and new social groups in the city’s politics, Machiavelli made

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clear at the outset of the third book that the institutional innovations that followed remained consistent with his argument from the Discourse. Recall that in that text he wrote that the “reason why all these governments have been defective is that the alterations in them have been made not for

the fulfillment of the common good, but for the strengthening and security of the party.”** The introduction to book 3 asserts that “the laws then made were planned not for the common profit but altogether in favor of the conqueror.”*’

Machiavelli opens book 3 with discussion of the expansion of the powers of the captains of the Guelf party; the brazen transformation of that magis-

tracy into the principal agent of the Albizzi faction’s supremacy; and the way their expanded powers lay at the root of the political conflict that ultimately led to the Ciompi revolt. The decline of Ghibellinism in Tuscany over the preceding decades had resulted in a corresponding decline in the authority of the Guelf party and

general indifference in the city to the fact that many descendants of formerly Ghibelline families occupied influential government posts. In 1357, however, Uguccione de’ Ricci proposed a law to renew the laws against Ghibellines and restore the earlier authority exercised by the captains of the Guelf party, hoping by it to strike a blow against the rival—originally Ghibelline— Albizzi family. Anticipating Uguccione’s plot, Piero degli Albizzi outmaneu-

vered him by favoring the law himself. After “having made himself the chief of this new party, he continually got new authority, since this new sect of Guelfs favored him more than any other.””” Piero then successfully engineered a dramatic expansion of the Guelf’s

partys powers. Henceforth, the captains of the Guelf party had effectively arbitrary power to declare people Ghibelline, thereby forbidding them from holding political office. Given the moribund status of imperial power in Tuscany, Piero and the other party captains—particularly Lapo da Castiglionchio and Carlo Strozzi—increasingly used the magistracy

according to the political needs of their party: “The captains, then, as with time their boldness increased, admonished without any hesitation not merely those who deserved it but whomsoever they pleased, when moved by any sort of avaricious or ambitious reason. And from 1357, when this plan was begun, to 1366, more than two hundred citizens had already

been admonished.’

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Uguccione subsequently managed to temper somewhat—f only for five years, from 1366 to 1371—the undue power that he had unwittingly helped create for the captains of the Guelf party. Having been elected as one of the city’s priors, he successfully proposed a law that expanded the number of captains from six to nine, but with the stipulation that two of the three new posts be drawn from the lesser guilds, whom he evidently considered to be largely made up of people disinclined to do Piero’s bidding. In addition, his law insisted that anyone declared a Ghibelline by the nine captains had to be confirmed as such by a committee of twenty-four citizens. By dispersing authority in the Guelf party, he managed to diminish the frequency of the admonishments.

The controversial power of admonishment returned, however, to the center of Florentine politics after Piero degli Albizzi and Benchi Buondelmonti “determined with admonishment to crush the people of the lower

class and to remain alone in the government. Through the favor that Messer Benchi had with the ancient nobility, and through that which Piero

had with the greater part of the influential men among the people, they caused the Guelf faction to regain its power, and by means of new reorganizations in the party, they so arranged things that they managed the captains and the Twenty-Four Citizens as they pleased. Then they went back to admonishing with more boldness than before, and the Albizzi house, as head of that faction, always grew more powerful.” Chapters 6—9 elaborate on the way the institutional modifications to the Guelf party discussed in the book’s opening persisted in preventing any resolution of the city’s factional tensions. Indeed, precisely as articulated in the Discourse, the party captains’ elusive quest for security only added ever greater

numbers to the ranks of the discontented, such that major armed conflict appeared increasingly certain to all. The government had hoped to quell the rivalry between the Albizzi and the Ricci by equally excluding their leaders from the government for three years. But in practice their solution had the

unintended consequence of punishing Uguccione while heightening the tactical advantage of the Albizzi. Although both Piero and Uguccione were banned from the palace of the priors, Piero retained his position in the Guelf Party and his considerable influence with its leadership.’ Shortly thereafter, Florence began the War of the Eight Saints against Gregory XI, which rendered security for the Guelf leadership more elusive

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still.** In addition to the obviously thorny context for the Guelf captains— leaders of the papal party in a city currently at war with the pope—the Ricci in particular prospered, because they had long supported Florence’s chief ally, Bernabo Visconti, and because those who staffed the Eight of War happened to be long-standing opponents of the Albizzean circle.” Asa result, the party radicalism of the Guelf leaders—Piero degli Albizzi, Lapo da Castglionchio, and Carlo Strozzi—increased such that they escalated their factional war against their rivals, some of whom were among the Eight of War, while the city was prosecuting its campaign against the papacy. The audacity and transparency with which the Guelfs used their magistracy for party purposes became unsustainable, even by Florentine standards. As the Eight of War and its followers prepared for war, Albizzi and the other Guelfs began to appreciate the degree to which the source of their strength, the power of admonishment, had ultimately worked against them.’° By vastly increasing the number of their enemies in the city, they had in effect, as the Discourse on Florentine Affairs explained, “created a very powerful tool for anybody who wished to make a change.””’ Change eventually came in the turbulent upheaval of the Ciompi revolt.’® The process began with Salvestro de’ Medici’s failed attempt to strike the laws enacted twenty-one years earlier that transformed the Guelf party into a vehicle for factional supremacy. Supported by Benedetto Alberti, Tommaso Strozzi, and Giorgio Scali, he proposed a law that would reinvigorate the Ordinances of Justice, reduce the powers of the party captains, and would permit the admonished to regain their political rights. The targets of his law, however, successfully obstructed its passage through the Collegi and hence ensured that it was not approved. As a consequence, Salvestro resigned from his position in the priorate, but not before delivering an incendiary speech to the councils that inspired the first of a series of tumults culminating in the revolutionary reordering of the city by the Ciompi.”’ Machiavelli’s narrative portrayed the successive regimes ushered in by the Ciompi Revolt as entirely consistent with preceding ones: they all modified the government’s institutions and proposed new laws with little regard for anything larger than factional advantage and security.” The Ciompi revolt transformed the conflict between the Albizzi and the Ricci into a larger conflict between parties that Machiavelli classified as popular and plebeian.” In the struggle to wrest control of the government

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from the plebeians, the city’s lesser guildsmen finally overcame the political dominance of the old Guelf elite, whose terror at the prospect of a plebeian government had compelled them to relinquish their power. After the new regime executed, without just cause, Piero degli Albizzi, Carlo Strozzi, and other citizens influential in the Guelf party, the lesser guildsmen began the traditionally partisan process of political reform.” But, for reasons doubtless by now familiar, instead of creating security they created enemies, and hence generated fear, which in turn escalated their factional extremism: “but the more injurious effects resulted from the fear of those who governed, because even the slightest happening made them do

the Party more harm, either condemning or admonishing or exiling their fellow citizens. To this were added numbers of new laws and new regulations made to strengthen the government. All these things went on to the injury of those who were suspected by the ruling faction. In its fear it chose forty-six men, who, together with the Signors, were to purge the city of all who were suspected by the government.”*’ The regime thereby established suffered from a state of nearly chronic civil war between the city’s ancient nobles, who had no status and hence nothing to lose by conflict; the new “popular nobles,’ whose power had formerly resided in the Guelf party, and the guild elite, who resented sharing power with the plebs and lesser guilds; and the plebs and minor guildsmen, who feared losing what they had so recently gained.” In 1382, the battle for the city was finally decided in favor of the popular nobles, who busily set about rebuilding the principal institutional features of their former dominance. First and foremost, they reasserted the power of

the Guelf party and restored all the citizens banished by the plebeian regime established in 1378. Then they deprived of office all those who had been promoted by that regime, abolished the newest guilds, reasserting the judicial supremacy of the old major guilds, abolished the regular access of the minor guilds to the office of the standard-bearer of justice, and diminished their presence in the chief executive councils.” Thus reconfigured, Florence’s constitution and laws remained relatively stable for the following twelve years. In 1393 Maso degli Albizzi, exploiting a state of crisis caused by war with Visconti Milan, used his influence as standardbearer of justice to foment an artificial state of civil discord that ultimately

enabled his faction to lay the foundations of the Albizzean oligarchy that

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ruled until 1434. This regime, too, Machiavelli made clear, undertook constitutional and legal reforms for the purposes of factional supremacy. Regarding Maso’s reforms, Machiavelli omitted the original constitutional details but nonetheless left no doubt about the partisan extremism: “Having made these preparations, they banished and executed many working men who had shown themselves more vigorous than the others in the disorders; and so that the gonfalonier of justice would have more dignity and reputation, they decreed that in order to hold that office it would be necessary to be forty-five years of age. To strengthen the government, they also made

many rules that could not be endured by those against whom they were made and were hateful to the good citizens of their own party, who did not think a government good and secure that needed to protect itself with such violence.”®° In spite of its controversial origins, however, the regime established by Maso underwent few significant constitutional changes until its defeat by Cosimo de’ Medici in 1434.

Its durability, however, was in no way the result of its having configured the laws and political institutions for the benefit of the common good. As already discussed, Machiavelli argued that the Visconti wars caused the regime’s longevity. In chapters 8 and 9 of book 4, he discussed an apparent crisis in the second-generation Albizzean leadership that demonstrated that

they continued to view alterations to the state in purely factional terms. Their political crisis arose out of the continuing failure of their war against Lucca, which had caused widespread discontent and resentment of their authority. Eager to placate an angry population, the priors established a committee charged with levying a special wartime tax that exclusively targeted the members of the Albizzean oligarchy deemed responsible for the war's mismanagement.

Rinaldo degli Albizzi “and many of the first citizens” interpreted the mere fact of the implementation of a new tax that they themselves had opposed as an urgent argument for the need to take back the state.°” He then elaborated his plans for a political coup to restore their exclusive control over the government. His plan consisted of allying with the city’s long-excluded

ancient nobility to reduce the power of the lesser guilds. By restoring the ancient nobility to influential positions in the government and in the leadership of the major guilds, he reasoned that his faction would then be able to

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reduce the number of lesser guilds from fourteen to seven. The plebs would thus be doubly curtailed: the reduction in the number of their guilds would effect a corresponding reduction in their presence in the city’s chief councils, while those who remained would face constant opposition from the city’s recently restored old nobility. He further reasoned that the government could be subverted to assist in its own undoing: “To accomplish these things either trickery or force was available; the latter they could employ easily, since some of them belonged to the magistracy of the Ten [of War, the magistracy prosecuting the Luccan campaign] and could secretly bring soldiers into the city. Messer Rinaldo was praised and his advice was approved by everybody.”°° The final three books, 5—8, discuss considerably fewer instances of constitutional change than the previous ones. In part, this reflects the expansion of Machiavelli’s analysis from internal affairs to a combination of internal and external events, but it also derives from the particular subject of his internal analysis: the origins and establishment of the Medicean hegemony of the fifteenth century. The effectiveness of the political controls established by Cosimo and Lorenzo sharply diminished the frequency and intensity of demands to reconfigure the city’s constitution. Owing to the substantial historiography on Cosimean and Laurentian politics, it hardly requires demonstration here that the Medici regime was no less, if not more, of a party instrument than any of the regimes that preceded it.°’ It is worth stressing, however, that Machiavelli even in his treatment of the Medici did not waver from his assertion that all preceding modifications of the city’s constitution served essentially factional purposes. In his discussion of the changes that accompanied Cosimo’s return from exile, Machiavelli made that argument in its most bold, blunt, and unqualified version. “After his return, those who had him brought back and a large number of injured citizens set out, without any scruples, to secure themselves in power. Moreover the Signoria that held office in November and December, not content with what its predecessors had done in favor of their party, prolonged and changed the banishments of many, and banished many others for the first time. Moreover not party feeling alone brought suffering upon

various citizens, but also wealth, relatives and private grudges harmed them. If this proscription had been accompanied with blood, it would have

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shown likeness to those of Octavian and Sulla. Yet to some extent it was dyed with blood, because Antonio di Bernardo Guadagni was beheaded, and four other citizens were dishonorably put to death.””” After that intimidating show of force, the new regime began to fortify themselves by revising the city’s constitution and laws. Some developments were entirely traditional: the regime brought in new men; restored earlier exiles; appropriated the property of its vanquished enemies; and purged the electoral purses of suspect names, replacing them with the party’s loyal rank and file. Other developments were more ambitious: they ensured that party members held all magistracies empowered to shed blood; they revised the electoral process for the Signoria, allowing the sitting priors considerable influence over the selection of incoming priors; expanded the punitive pow-

ers of the Otto di Guardia, the magistracy with jurisdiction over political crimes; made more difficult the process by which those they had exiled might return; and enacted laws that forbade any form of communication with them.” “So in a short time, having driven out and impoverished all the hostile party, they felt secure in their position.””* Although Cosimo’s regime, and subsequently those of Piero and Lorenzo, ruled with varying degrees of harshness throughout the fifteenth century, according to the Florentine Histories they undertook no major further constitutional changes, except for the creation of the Council of Seventy following the Pazzi conspiracy.”

To some readers, Machiavelli’s sustained and demoralizing deconstruction of the self-serving partisan structure of Florence’s entire political history might appear to disprove one of this book’s central arguments: that his historical and political thought in the 1520s reveals engaged, optimistic, and radically republican convictions. But as Felix Gilbert has already observed, “it would seem strange if alone the Istorie fiorentine would have been inspired by a pessimistic mood.” He read the text in terms of Machiavelli’s cyclical view of history in which rebirth and revival necessarily followed the nadir of any state’s political life, the condition to which Florence had been brought by the end of his narrative.” In addition to Gilbert’s largely textual argument, there are some compelling contextual factors. First and foremost, after eight years of nearly constant effort, Machiavelli finally had estab-

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lished a meaningful relationship with the city’s ruling family: he was back in Florence, he had integrated himself into the city’s leading political circles, and at long last the Medici had commissioned political and intellectual work from him.

From a purely contextual point of view, it would make more sense to characterize the Prince, the text that Sasso sees concluding with a perspective approaching millenarian optimism, as informed by an overarching sense of pessimism and hopelessness. In the year of its composition, Machia-

velli’s circumstances were dire: he was imprisoned, tortured, and exiled. His prospects for returning to a life of politics in Florence were worse in 1513

than in any other year of his life. His friends were disinclined to help him present the Prince to the Medici, and it certainly failed to win their favor. During the composition of the Florentine Histories on the other hand he had already returned to the city, had received a formal commission from the Medici, and was carrying out diplomatic missions on their behalf. In 1520 Cardinal Giulio commissioned Machiavelli to go to Lucca to represent the Florentine creditors of Michele Guinigi, whose bankruptcy threatened the loans they had made to him.” The following year Cardinal Giulio again reached out to Machiavelli, sending him to the chapter general of the Franciscan order in Carpi to attempt to establish Florentine administrative oversight of all the Franciscan convents in Florentine territory. Compared to Machiavelli’s earlier diplomatic work for the republic, these were modest and minor missions to be sure. But they were political work nonetheless, and more important, they signified a new measure of trust on the part of the ruling family.” Most important of all, the Medici had solicited Machiavelli's opinion on the constitutional configuration of Florence. Their solicitation of his input on the likely imminent reordering of the city that was the center of Machiavelli’s mental universe must have loomed larger than any other moment of interaction with that family following his fall and disgrace in 1512. In his 1513 letter to Francesco Vettori, he wrote of his “desire that these Medici princes

should begin to engage my services, even if they should start out by having me roll along a stone.””’ It had taken seven years, but the Medici princes had finally engaged his services and in pursuit of a project of substantially greater significance than he had imagined possible in 1513. In such a context, should we not expect him to display considerably greater urgency and political

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hope than he had while writing the Prince at the farmhouse at Sant'Andrea in Percussina?

And—to return to his bleak account of the genesis of major Florentine political institutions and laws—here, as before, the Discourse provides a potentially illuminating interpretive template for understanding the structure and content of the Florentine Histories. Machiavelli’s critique of Florentine institutions in the Histories, read in tandem with the Discourse—particularly the Discourse’s advocacy of a republican solution and argument in favor of new institutions—might reflect less a sense of despair over the possibility of serious political reform than a desire to demonstrate to his Medici readers the historical proof for the political vision offered in the Discourse. By demonstrating the depth of the corruption of existing Florentine political institutions, laws, and traditions, the Histories implicitly support and encourage Machiavelli’s radical republican solution to the 1520s reform of the city. Such an interpretation would help explain his reminder in the Histories that the context necessary for an ambitious, bold, and successful reordering

of the city periodically recurred in the city’s political life. But the context had to be recognized as a crucial opportunity and seized with conviction. In the Discourse, Machiavelli introduced his constitutional plan by asserting that the Medici faced just such an opportunity: “To be sure, the duke’s death has

brought things to a point where new types of government must be considered.””* Machiavelli then presented himself as the wise, far-seeing lawgiver capable of exploiting the opportunities at hand: “Since I believe I have discovered one [a harmonious fusion of Medici interests with a republican constitu-

tion], I hope Your Highness will give attention to my discovery .. . in this republic of mine your power is not only preserved but is increased, your friends continue to be honored and safe, and the whole body of citizens has evident reasons to be satisfied.”” The Histories help support the Discourse’s sense of pregnant opportunity by showing that such moments have periodically materialized in the past but have—crucially—lacked a far-seeing and wise lawgiver to seize them. The first chapter of book 3 contrasts the differing outcomes of Roman and Florentine social conflicts, concluding that the Florentine conflicts produced a “striking equality.”*° In the chapter’s conclusion, Machiavelli explained that

point more precisely, demonstrating a mid-fourteenth-century precedent for major political reform: “Whereas Rome, when that excellence of her citi-

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zens was turned into pride, was brought to such a pass that she could not keep going without a prince, Florence has come to such a condition that easily a wise lawgiver could reorganize her with almost any form of government. These things can be clearly recognized on reading the preced-

ing book.” In chapter 5, Machiavelli had an anonymous citizen reaffirm and elaborate on the third book’s opening argument and one of the chief axioms of the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. As the tensions between the Albizzi and Ricci threatened to erupt into yet another civil war, a group of patriotic citizens assembled to discuss the growing crisis. Their spokesman exhorted the Signoria to abolish the city’s corrupted political institutions and establish new ones capable of subduing and transcending the city’s factional alignments, arguing that the context is particularly propitious for just such enterprise: “But now that the empire has no power over us, the pope is not feared, and all Italy and this city are brought to such equality that by herself she can govern herself, the difficulty is not great. This republic of ours, indeed, notwithstanding the ancient instances on the other side, is especially adapted not merely to union but to reformation by means of good procedures and lawful methods. . . . Fortune’s malice can be overcome with prudence . . . if you annul the law that breeds factions, and adopt those suitable for a truly free and law-abiding government.”*” The Histories made it clear that the Florentines had in the past squandered their rare ideal moments for enduring political reforms; the Discourse on Florentine Affairs suggested that such a moment had arrived again and urged the Medici to exploit their opportunity to the fullest. To do so, the Discourse argued as a point of departure that the Medici must abandon any and all thoughts of establishing a principate in Florence. On this topic, too, the Histories further elaborated and reinforced the Discourse. Machiavelli ostensibly saw little need in the Discourse for a systematic or detailed refutation of the princely variation. “Now as for the princedom,” he wrote, “I shall not discuss it in detail, both because of the difficulty of establishing one here and because the means [Lorenzo] are lacking.”*’ However,

in spite of his opening gambit, he nevertheless went on to sketch out the chief structural obstacles to a Florentine principate. As he saw it, creating a formally autocratic state in Florence was the most procedurally difficult of the various proposals. The difficulty lay in the sudden creation of formal

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inequality in a context long accustomed to equality, the principal development defining the major themes of the third book of the Histories.** Institutionalizing inequality would require the creation of a formal nobility with walled towns, all costly endeavors that would necessarily suffocate Florence and Tuscany. To these practical and procedural objections, Machiavelli added a moral observation: “to form a princedom where a republic would go well is a difficult thing and, through being difficult, inhumane and unworthy of whoever hopes to be considered merciful and good.” A major set-piece speech in book 2 of the Histories revisited and reaffirmed Machiavelli’s argument from the Discourse on Florentine Affairs. He inserted the speech in his account of the growing tyrannical ambitions of Walter of Brienne, the duke of Athens, to whom the regime had granted temporary lordship of the city in exchange for the reacquisition of Lucca.*° In one of the Histories’ rare moments when the city’s leadership exercises vision and courage, the priors stubbornly resisted the duke’s violent machinations to establish permanent lordship over Florence: “He wished, therefore, since all the city agreed to it, that they should also agree. All the Si-

gnors, though they had much earlier foreseen their city’s ruin, were alarmed by this request. Nevertheless, though they knew their danger, in order not to fail their city, courageously they refused.”*’

Given the universal loathing of the duke of Athens in the Florentine historical tradition, the brutal portrayal of his attempt to crush the city’s tradition of freedom combined with the heroic resistance of the priors serves as a form of argument by reminder.** However, in addition to the general reminder to the Medici that an attempt to form a principate will squarely place them in the historical company of reviled tyrants from the city’s most shameful past moments, the subsequent speech of the priors makes the republican argument more explicit. The protesting argument that Machiavelli attributed to the Signori implicitly anticipates the political dilemmas faced by the Medici in the 1520s, thereby evoking several aspects of the Discourse’s argument against a principate. In the Discourse, Machiavelli wrote that “a prince alone, lacking a nobility, cannot support the weight of a princedom,” hence the need for the arti-

ficial creation of a nobility that would necessarily “stifle the city and the whole province.”*’ In their speech to the duke, the priors explain that their intention is not “to oppose your designs with force, but only to show you

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how heavy will be the weight that you are taking upon yourself, and how dangerous the decision that you are making.”*® To support that weight, the duke would require the kinds of martial lords described in the Discourse, “with their arms and followers.” The priors continue: “So to find a violent government joined with a good prince is impossible, because of necessity either they become alike or one by the other is quickly destroyed. You must then believe either that you can hold this city with the utmost violence (something for which citadels, garrisons, friends from outside are many times not enough) or must be content with what authority we have given you.””! As already discussed, Machiavelli reminded his readers in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs of the enduring political symbolism of the Great Coun-

cil and expressed a heightened sense of the instability of the Medicean regime of the 1520s and an awareness of circles of Savonarolan activism against the regime. The speech of the priors to the duke helped to explain the pro-

cess by which the Medici arrived at that context. The priors cautioned the duke about the enduring political power of the memory of freedom: “That there is not time enough for destroying our desire for liberty is most certain, because in a city one often sees it taken up again by men who have never experienced it, but merely because of the tradition that their fathers have left them they continue to love it; therefore, when it has been regained, with the utmost stubbornness and peril they preserve it.””* Surely Machiavelli anticipated this passage to recall the 1494 expulsion of Piero de’ Medici, undertaken after sixty years of the family’s primacy in the city.”’? Machiavelli further reasoned that the memory of freedom will persist even if people for whatever reason decline to recall it, since “the public buildings, the offices of the magistrates, the insignia of the free organizations recall it.’’* Machiavelli thus reminded Clement that the problems ulti-

mately avoided by the duke of Athens were the very problems that accounted for the collapse of Medici power in 1494 and the stubborn resistance to the family’s informal rule in the 1520s. In a final concluding plea to recognize that a republican restoration would best realize the security of the Medici family, Machiavelli made several in-

terconnecting arguments that all manifestations of stable enduring rule were always based on authority freely given by the ruled. In making this point, Machiavelli implicitly presented himself as “following in the footsteps’ of Giovanni de’ Medici, the modest and wise patrician who attempted

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in the pages of the Histories to transcend the factional divisions of his day. In the Histories, Giovanni delivered a deathbed speech to Cosimo, the heir ap-

parent, explaining how to maintain honor, wealth, and security: “In the government, if you wish to live in security, take as much part as is given you by the laws and by men. This will not bring on you either envy or danger, because what a man takes for himself, not what is given to him, makes him

hated. ...So if you follow my footsteps, you will keep and increase yours [reputation]. But if you do otherwise, believe that your end cannot be more fortunate than that of Florentines who within your memory have ruined themselves and destroyed their houses.””? Machiavelli asserted toward the end of the Discourse: “I believe the greatest honor possible for men to have is

that willingly given them by their native cities.”*° The heroic priors who opposed the machinations of the duke also saw true political security and glory in similar terms: “You... must be content with what authority we have given you. To this we encourage you by reminding you that only authority freely given is durable.””’ As a final concluding speculation, it seems worth considering that interpreting the Florentine Histories as this book has done—as a detailed exploration of particular problems for which Machiavelli's Discourse on Florentine Affairs offered a solution—might help explain one last textual paradox. In a text so thoroughly and relentlessly critical of Florentine traditions—a world without hope or future, in Sasso’s words—Machiavelli nevertheless opened

the work by reflecting on the city’s unbounded and unrivaled potential for greatness. He explained in the preface that the true potential and power of the city can only be understood by examining its vicious civil wars and petty party squabbles: “Certainly, according to my judgment, nothing shows so well the vigor of our city as does the quality of these dissensions, which had might enough to destroy the greatest and most powerful of cities. Nevertheless ours seemed always to grow stronger.”’* Hence, from the outset, Machiavelli was alerting his readers to the possibility that his study of Florentine divisions was simultaneously a study of the city’s hidden but substantial reserves of strength. He went on to speculate that if Florence had been capable at any point in its history of tapping those hidden reserves it would have surpassed all other republics, living and dead, in terms of glory and power. And—most crucially of all—he explained that those reserves remained hidden and inaccessible to Florentines because they had failed to

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devise a government capable of transcending and hence subduing the city’s factional disputes. “And beyond doubt if Florence had had the good fortune, when she freed herself from the Empire, to take a form of government that would have kept her united, I do not know what republic, modern or ancient, would have been superior to her—with such ability in arms and in peaceful arts she would have abounded.””’ Such a grand claim was no doubt partly a rhetorical lure to draw his readers into a particularly dense and analytical text. But Machiavelli’s claim might also have been a subtle exhortation to his Medici readers in particular to reflect on the profundity of the accomplishments that lay within their reach, if only they recognized that Machiavelli had, in fact, realized a form of government to keep Florence united.

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Conclusion Machiavelli’s Republican Realism

During Machiavelli's lifetime and several decades beyond it, Italy witnessed the most intense, widespread, and searching inquiry into republican political theory in Western history. Although Machiavelli’s voice dominated that inquiry, he had many interlocutors who were all formidable thinkers and historians in their own right. He drew on themes and arguments first articulated before him by Savonarola. In his own day he productively sparred with his friend Francesco Guicciardini, himself a brilliant historian and Florence’s most eloquent advocate of aristocratic republicanism. And in the years that followed Machiavelli’s death the best minds in Italy grappled with his legacy and kept alive the republican question, whether Donato Giannotti in Florence or Gasparo Contarini and Paolo Sarpi in Venice.’ With the sole exception of Venice, however, the period corresponding to these thinkers also witnessed the final demolition of experiments in collective self-government in favor of the centralized model that prevailed elsewhere in Italy—including Naples, the papacy, and Milan—and was clearly a harbinger of things to come for all Europeans of the early modern era. With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to view that stunning efflorescence of republican thinking as a great historical irony, an inspired defense of a cause

Conclusion

that, if not lost already, was soon to be crushed by Spanish power and the nearly universal acclamation of absolutism that accompanied it. The interpretation of Machiavelli’s later writings on Florence advanced here—engaged, activist, and stridently republican—has perhaps been obscured by the larger absolutist outcome that appears only in retrospect to have been inevitable and clearly apparent. In his study of the Florentine Histories, for example, Sasso portrayed the Machiavelli of the Discourse on Florentine Affairs as a thinker trapped by a paradox: a republican at heart in a monarchical world. Sasso’s interpretation of the Discourse rested on precisely that sense of paradoxical impossibility.* Witnessing the final collapse of his fragile, weak, and fatally flawed republic, Machiavelli was nevertheless un-

willing entirely to abandon the republican constitutional project to which his professional career and Discourses on Livy had been devoted. Thus, according to Sasso, when approached by the Medici to devise a constitutional treatise to stabilize the family’s rule, his solution was a paradoxical impossibility: a republican monarchy that elaborately, artificially, and unpersuasively attempted to harmonize his inner desires with an outer context with which he was clearly at intellectual and moral odds. The respective fates of Florentine republicanism and Medici power, however, were far from clear between 1512 and 1527.’ When interpreting the po-

litical texts of those years, we should be careful not to read into them the ineluctability of the Medici principate. During those years, the Medici shuffled one family member after another through Florence in the ultimately vain hope that one of them would prove successful at stabilizing Medici power in the city. As a cardinal, the reigning patriarch Giovanni de’ Medici had larger and more pressing responsibilities in Rome and Bologna. The city’s leading families had little confidence in Giuliano, particularly the Medicean elite, who believed they were threatened by his accommodation of powerful Savonarolan leaders. Giovanni, as Pope Leo X, subsequently sent Lorenzo di Piero to represent the family’s interests in the city but did so with little confidence. Raised by his Orsini mother in Rome and other courtly environments, Lorenzo had little understanding of the traditions of Florentine civic culture and as a result required written suggestions and strategies from Giuliano as to how to proceed without alienating the city’s leading families.* Lorenzo, disinclined

toward the moderate style of compromise advocated by Giovanni and

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Giuliano, governed Florence in an increasingly autocratic style much resented by the city’s elite. Leo’s fear of a Florentine landscape devoid of reli-

able friends and allies led him to appoint Giuliano and Lorenzo military captains of de facto private armies, in spite of the private reservations revealed by his comment: “I have named two captains who have no experience at all and hold offices held by trained and expert men. I don’t know how they'll do if they actually have to exercise their offices.’ Giuliano’s and Lorenzo’s deaths in 1516 and 1519, respectively, left the family only two eccle-

siastics with no legitimate theirs, triggering widespread doubts about the future of the Medici family in Florence.°®

The arrival in 1519 of Leo’s cousin, cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, neither clarified the fundamental ambiguities about the nature of Medici power nor stabilized their rule. At first he appeared to favor compromise and negotiation considerably more than his controversial predecessor Lorenzo. His first steps toward expanding and liberalizing the regime included formally readmitting Machiavelli back into Florentine political life and raising the city’s constitutional question that led, among other directions, to the Discourse on Florentine Affairs.’ But the family’s fundamental weakness—mistrust between them and the city’s elite and outright hostility from the broad middle ranks—persisted evident in Giulio’s decision to exclude Florence’s old and powerful families from major positions in his government. In their place he appointed Medici clients from the countryside, all people with no historic ties or claims to the city’s governing circles.* Although these measures unsurprisingly heightened Florentine discontent with the regime, the Medici must have felt such a strategy was the lesser of several evils, given the paucity of trustworthy influential allies. Thus, by the 1520s, when Machiavelli was composing the Discourse on Florentine Affairs and the Florentine Histories, the basic question of whether Florence would assume the form of a popular republic, closed aristocratic oligarchy, or some kind of Medicean principate remained fundamentally unresolved.’

Furthermore, the lessons of the immediate past suggested that the Florentine ottimati, rather than the Medici, would play the decisive role in determining the outcome. In an attempt to establish an aristocratic regime, they had expelled the Medici in 1494 only to find that containing the popular forces thereby unleashed proved more daunting than asserting their inde-

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pendence from the Medici. Although they could not maintain their hold over the republican government, the ottimati demonstrated that if and when the regime became intolerably inclusive and popular, as it had under Piero Soderini, they could ally with the Medici and combine forces to destroy the popular republic. Few could discern in the 1520s which of these possibilities or outcomes would ultimately prevail. In many respects, the Medici princi-

pate seemed the most distant possibility, particularly when, a few years down the road, the Medici lost the city yet again and were replaced by the Savonarolan-inspired republic of 1527-1530.

This was the context Machiavelli faced as he set himself the task of devising an ideal constitution for the city and writing its history. His Discourse on Florentine Affairs, with its combination of short-term monarchical elements but long-term autonomous republicanism that struck Sasso as rooted in a hopeless paradox, may well have been based instead on legitimate skepticism that the Medici fortunes in Florence were capable of surviving the eventual deaths of Leo and Clement and by extension the family’s Roman power base. If such skepticism was indeed his point of intellectual departure, Machiavelli was hardly alone. Both Francesco and his nephew Niccold Guicciardini feared that the Medici relied heavily—dangerously so—on the temporary ballast provided by Rome. In the Discorso di Logrogno of 1512, Francesco

argued that no matter how powerful the Medici might be while princes of the church, they could not maintain their presence in Florence without internal support. On the inevitable death of the Roman ecclesiastics the absence of internal support would become an insurmountable obstacle. Hence Guicciardini advocated building alliances with the city’s traditional ruling elite.” Seven years later, his nephew similarly argued for the necessity of establishing substantive alliances with the city’s elite. Acknowledging that the Medici had ruled provocatively and arbitrarily following Giovanni’s assumption of the papal throne, in spite of Florentine expectations to the contrary, Niccolo feared that without such alliances the death of the pope would unleash a powerful and violent popular uprising.” In spite of a context in which, in Najemy’s words, it was “imprudent . . . to advocate openly republican solutions,’ Machiavelli nevertheless did so unapologetically and with morally charged vocabulary: “to form a princedom where a republic would go well is a difficult thing and, through being

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difficult, inhumane and unworthy of whoever hopes to be considered mer-

ciful and good.” Machiavelli’s contemporaries such as Francesco and Niccolo Guicciardini may have shared his doubts about the long-term viability of Medici power in Florence, but no one shared Machiavelli’s willingness to tell the Medici to plan for a Florentine future that did not include them.” In defense of his constitutional arrangement, he observed to Leo: “the duke’s death has brought things to a point where new types of government must be considered,” concluding: “you [Pope Leo X and Cardinal Giulio] must cease to be, and you

wish to leave behind a perfect republic made strong with all needed parts, which everybody will see and realize needs to be just as it is.” Machiavelli rooted his principal argument in the Discourse around the fragility of the Medici regime’s current hold on the state and the sudden power vacuum that the waning of Medici power in Rome would likely cause:

But to return to the dangers you run if affairs remain as they are, I wish to make a prediction. I say that ifan emergency comes

when the city is not at all reorganized, one of two things will be done, or both of them at once: either in riot and haste a head will

be set up who with arms and violence will defend the government; or one party will run to open the Hall of the Council and plunder the other party. And whichever of these two things comes about (which God forbid), Your Holiness can imagine how many deaths, how many exiles, how many acts of extortion will result, enough to make the cruelest man—much more Your Holiness, who is most merciful—die of sorrow.”

His frightening vision of the consequent anarchic and violent strife served as a major argument to establish a properly configured republic while the Medici still remained powerful in Rome. If the Medici had any difficulty imagining the deaths, exiles, and extortion to which the Discourse alluded, they had only to wait until 1525 to read in the pages of Machiavelli's Florentine Histories how previous flawed Floren-

tine regimes that were not properly organized, including the fifteenthcentury regime of Cosimo and Lorenzo, all culminated in violent strife, as well as danger and death for those who had stood at their helms. What has

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struck so many readers of the Histories as its relentlessly bleak and pessimistic analysis of Florentine history was—among other things, to be sure—a detailed demonstration that the constitutional theory of the Discourse was organically rooted in and capable of addressing the practical subtleties and political necessities of the Florentine context. Read this way, the Florentine Histories emerges not as a work borne of either utopian abstract hope or pessimistic despair but as a study in applied history, an attempt to deploy the particulars of Florentine history on behalf of Machiavelli’s republican vision for Florence and the Medici. Once we recognize the republican contextual agenda inherent in the Histories, some missing pieces in the question of Machiavelli's relationship to the republican tradition begin to fall into place. Chief among these is the puzzle of Hans Baron’s problematic “third” Machiavelli. Baron’s work on Machiavelli persuasively demonstrated that the Prince preceded the Discourses on Livy, contrary to the then scholarly consensus asserting the opposite. He thereby showed that Machiavelli’s mature political thought was principally preoccupied with the architecture of republican self-government rather than hope for a lone prince-redeemer whose authority was rooted in force rather than law. Baron's republican rehabilitation of Machiavelli went a long way toward Baron’s ultimate goal of situating the Florentine titan as a sympathetic inheritor and loyal defender of the republican civic humanism of Leonardo Bruni. A long way but not all the way: Baron’s interpretation suffered from a nagging conceptual flaw that he himself was the first to recognize.” His republican interpretation could not accommodate the Florentine Histories and its crushing portrayal of the vicious, self-serving corruption that lurked beneath the city’s communal and republican rhetoric. As a result, Baron divided Machiavelli’s corpus into three discrete and essentially disconnected stages: a first stage characterized by youthful optimism for a prince-redeemer, a second stage characterized by confidence in republican self-government as the surest route to political redemption, and a third stage characterized by intellectual defeat: “Machiavelli [never] became a steadfast republican with regard to the practical problems of Florence’s future and his own. . . . During the 1520s, in his Florentine History, a third Machiavelli appeared—the first Florentine writer to view Florence’s development in the melancholy light in which it was to appear as the sixteenth century advanced, and to judge that

the energy generated by freedom had gradually been consumed in the

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course of Florentine history, until finally all partisan passions were extinguished and a stable order was established under the Medici. From the viewpoint of Florentine republicanism, therefore, Machiavelli was certainly not a good and faithful citizen.”” Machiavelli's apparently melancholic view was certainly problematic for Baron. Worse still, however, given Baron’s cherished conviction about the dynamic interaction of intellectual and political life in Florence, was the implication inherent in the Histories that the republicanism of the Discourses on Livy remained abstract and disconnected from the realities of Florentine political life. The Histories implied, in short, that the Discourses on Livy were an awkward example at best of the active and civic intellectual tradition that mattered so much to Baron and that formed the backbone of the republican tradition. The interpretation of Machiavelli offered in this book has suggested, however, that Baron’s third Machiavelli differed from the second only in ways that made Machiavelli a better fit with and better exemplar of an active, en-

gaged republicanism that centrally grappled with immediate problems of political context.’* Machiavelli’s republicanism evident in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs and the Florentine Histories confronted the particular dilemmas and tensions of Florentine politics and history considerably more directly than the Discourses on Livy did. To Baron, the Histories were an unmitigated condemnation and rejection of Florence’s republican history. But reading the Histories in tandem with the Discourse on Florentine Affairs reveals the Histories’ otherwise obscured active, pedagogical, and exhortatory dimension. This reading might also explain why the prose style of Machiavelli’s Histories showcases his most powerful and vivid writing. In his narrative of Florence’s troubled history, Machiavelli underscored the constant upheaval and dangers to rulers and ruled alike that are invariably caused by regimes built for factional purposes. The Histories demon-

strated that no previous Florentine regime—whether a popular or aristocratic republic, some combination of the two, or even the autocratic interlude of the duke of Athens—had ever enjoyed substantive peace, security, and

stability. Owing to their origins as mechanisms for factional advantage rather than the equitable dispersal of political power, all earlier regimes were stalked and ultimately destroyed by suspicion and fear. This was the over-

arching crucial observation Machiavelli offered to the Medici as they at-

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tempted to resolve the ongoing question of the city’s constitution. He offered the same message earlier and more pithily in the conclusion to the Discourse on Florentine Affairs: “[institutions] will always stand firm when everybody has a hand in them, and when everybody knows what he needs to do and in whom he can trust, and no class of citizen, either through fear for itself or through ambition, will need to desire revolution.” Machiavelli believed not only that he knew how to build such institutions but also that the city was capable of receiving and responding positively to them. Of all the necessary particulars invoked in the Florentine Histories, none was more important than the historic tension between the rival aristocratic and popular republicanisms. For the Florentine state to weather the death of the Medici ecclesiastics, Machiavelli’s Discourse reasoned, it was

essential to build a regime that harmonized the interests of the city’s elite and its broad middle ranks, the two rival parties whose unresolved quarrels fueled the city’s toxic, unpredictable relationship with the Medici. Departing from his earlier negative vision of noble psychology and conduct in the Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli now acknowledged that the city’s elite needed to be satisfied on its own terms, however entitled those terms might be: “To men of this sort it is not possible to give satisfaction unless dignity is

given to the highest offices in the republic—which dignity is to be maintained in their persons.”*® And departing from his earlier vision of the people as content merely to live unmolested, he now acknowledged a hunger for political action in the people not so different from the ambition of their social betters: “the whole general body of citizens . . . will never be satisfied (and he who believes differently is not wise) if their power is not restored.””"

The republicanism of this text, far from idealist or nostalgic, squarely addressed the effectual truth of Florence’s political dilemmas. No writer from the Renaissance was more aware than Machiavelli of Florence's defects, failures, and missed opportunities. Yet despite the wretch-

edness of his city’s history and the considerable suffering and tribulation Machiavelli himself endured as a result of his dedicated service to it, he never

lost hope in the promise of better things. In particular, he remained stubbornly optimistic that the Florentines could set aside their differences and create an enduring and free republic. When given the opportunity to help make that happen, he attempted to transform that promise into reality. In spite of the suspicion with which an outright republican argument would

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almost certainly be met by the Medici and their Florentine lieutenants, he bluntly and provocatively leveled a republican challenge at them. In making such an argument, Machiavelli took more risks than any other thinker in the Florentine republican tradition. Most famously, his chancery predecessor, Leonardo Bruni, had articulated in the early fifteenth century a republican ideology that condemned as tyrannical any regime not based on collective self-rule. But Bruni and the civic humanists of the fifteenth century had championed a style of republicanism that was favored by and that supported those already in power.” Machiavelli offered a republican ideology that was deeply suspect to those

already in power. As a result, instead of arguing as Bruni did that republicanism was first and foremost a moral necessity, Machiavelli presented the republican cause in terms of the self-interest and advantages it offered to his audience. Although his Discourse on Florentine Affairs did assert that establishing a republic was morally praiseworthy while establishing a principate was inhumane, his combination of the Discourse and the Histories made the larger, morally neutral, and historically grounded argument that any regime other than a true republic was doomed to failure. Machiavelli’s vision of Florentine history demonstrated over and over again the fundamental correctness of that insight. Those in power did not listen to Machiavelli, but to understand his Florentine writings and their political significance, we should. In the wretchedness of his city’s many failures, Machiavelli perceived a compelling and detailed argument about Florence’s potential to transcend the politics of factionalism and become, for the first time in its history, a great republic with good laws and institutions.

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NOTES REFERENCES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX

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Notes

Introduction 1. On the intellectual tradition of praise of Florence that Machiavelli so dramatically departed from, see Bruni’s Laudatio in Baron, 1968, pp. 217-263; English translation in Witt and Kohl, 1978, pp. 135-178; Rubinstein, 1967; Fubini, 1980. 2. Machiavelli, 1988, p. 79; “Grande veramente e misera citta.” Machiavelli, 2005, p. 393.

3. On these aspects of the Discourses, see in particular Cadoni, 1978; Procacci, 1969. 4. Chabod, 1964, pp. 26-27; Sasso, 1958, pp. 494-495. Sasso subsequently reconsidered his position, emphasizing the political richness of the Histories, Sasso, 1993, p. 52. Sasso’s 1953 reading largely parallels Vittorio de Caprariis’s similar argu-

ment about Francesco Guicciardini, de Caprariis, 1950. On cultural continuity during the transformation from republic to principate, see Baker, 2013. 5. Sasso is a notable exception, arguing that the Histories is a major work of political theory that engages the Prince and the Discourses but shifts the analytical focus to the crisis of history. Sasso, 1993, pp. 52, 200-208. In addition, Najemy, 1982b, showed that Machiavelli’s political analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the fifteenth-century Medici regime in the Histories was more complex and contextually rooted than his earlier writings. 6. Eric Cochrane, Roberto Ridolfi, Luigi Rossi, and J. H. Whitfield all tend to view the political theory of the Histories as essentially consistent with the Prince and the Discourses. Cochrane, 1981, pp. 267—270; Ridolfi, 1963, pp. 195-206; Rossi, 1949,

p. 59-61; Whitfield, 1947, pp. 159-164.

7. On this text, its Medici commission, and political context, see Guidi, 1969.

Notes to Pages 6—10

8. On social gradations in the popolo, see Najemy, 2006, pp. 35-45. 9. Salvemini, 1899. 10. Ottokar, 1926. Ir. Jones, 1997; Najemy, 2006. On the latter, see Black, 2009. 12. On the circumstances of the commission and the end of Machiavelli’s exclusion by the Medici, see Sasso, 1993, pp. 8-14; Sasso, 1988, pp. 239-245.

13. The book thus supports and elaborates on Gennaro Sasso’s argument that Machiavelli’s portrayal of Medicean Florence in the Histories was politically dangerous. Sasso, 1993, pp. 42-45. 14. Sasso, 1958, p. 450; Sasso, 1980, p. 610; Sasso, 1993, pp. 203-206. 15. Butters, 2010, p. 75.

16. Rather than interpreting it in terms of its relationship to the Prince and Discourses, John Najemy instead views Discourse on Florentine Affairs as a turning point in Machiavelli’s historical focus from Rome to Florence. Najemy, 1982b, p. 558.

17. Machiavelli himself intimated that the two texts were interrelated and subsequent scholars, such as Nicolai Rubinstein, Gennaro Sasso, Marina Marietti, and Gisela Bock, have fruitfully compared the two texts. For the passages in the Histories that invoke the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, see my discussion in chapter seven. See also Sasso, 1993, p. 169; Rubinstein, 1967, p. 958; Marietti, 1974, p. 109; Bock, 1990, pp. 189-192.

18. The only exception is the Soderinian republic that was established in 1502, ten years after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent that concludes the Histories. However, a certain parallel remains since Machiavelli’s discussion in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs provides no details. He elided that regime with the comment that its strengths and weaknesses did not require explanation because “it is a recent affair and everybody knows it.” Machiavelli, 1989, I:103; “Restaci ora a discorrere quale sia lo stato dal 12 a questo tempo, e quali debolezze o gagliardie sieno state le sue: ma per esser cosa fresca e saperlo ciascuno, non ne parlero.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 735. On the politics of the Soderinian republic, see Butters, 1985. 19. Sasso, 1958, pp. 494; Sasso, 1993, pp. 206—208.

20. Sasso, 1958, p. 495 (translation mine). In the second volume, Sasso attributed greater significance to the Histories than he had earlier indicated, declaring the text a major work of political thought and arguing that its analysis of the relationship between social and political conflict in a republican setting links the work to the major themes of the Prince and the Discourses. Sasso, 1993, p. 52. In spite of that declaration, his 1993 study focuses more on Machiavelli’s relationship to Florentine historiography than on thematic analysis of the political theory in the Histories. Like Najemy, 1982b, p. 555, I do not engage the question of Machiavelli’s relationship to his sources and his accuracy as a historian but fo-

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Notes to Pages 10-15

cus on his narrative strategies and political language. The key contributions to the historiographical approach are Matucci, 1991; Richardson, 1971; Phillips, 1984; Sasso, 1993; Cabrini, 1985, in particular for Machiavelli’s use of his humanist predecessors Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini; Cabrini, 1990; Cabrini, 2010; Dionisotti, 1980; Martelli, 1992; Garosci, 1973; Anselmi, 1979.

21. Najemy, 1982b, p. 575; on Machiavelli’s debt to Polybius, see also Sasso, 1987, pp. 67-118; Garin, 1993, pp. 3-28. 22. Najemy, 1982b, pp. 575-576.

23. De Maria, 1992, pp. 267-268. 24. Quint, 2003, p. 48. 25. On this theme in Machiavelli’s early writing, see Najemy, 1993. 26. Najemy, 2006, p. 440. 27. Machiavelli, 1989, I:115.

28. Najemy, 1982b, p. 574. Machiavelli’s treatment of Michele di Lando, the leader of the Ciompi revolt, as founder figure is a notable exception. See Najemy, 1978, I:179-180; Suchowlansky, 2011.

29. For an excellent survey of the main contours of this issue, see Berlin, 1972; Kahn, 2010; Barthas, 2010.

30. For a detailed historical overview of those institutions, see Guidi, 1983.

31. Key studies, among many others, of Renaissance politics in terms of the rationality and utility of patronage politics are D. Kent, 2009; D. Kent, 2000; D. Kent, 1978; Rubinstein, 1997; Clarke, 1991; F. W. Kent, 2004. 32. Black, 2010, p. 44.

33. Najemy, 2006, p. 414; on this period in general, see Najemy, 2006, pp. 414-445; Stephens, 1983.

34. Najemy, 2006, p. 414; see the full text of Vettori’s memorandum in Kraye, 1997, Pp. 239-242; Vettori’s position represented a widespread consensus in the younger ranks of the Medici camp, leading Felix Gilbert to label them the “prophets of force.” Gilbert, 1965, p. 129. 35. On Giuliano’s relationship with Machiavelli and the campaign of slander directed at him by leading aristocratic families, see Jungic, in prep. 36. Najemy, 2006, pp. 414-430.

37. Fu costante opinione comunemente di ognuno che la nostra citta sotto il reggimento de’ Medici non fusse mai governata con maggiore apparenza di civilta ... che al tempo che essa fu governata da Giulio cardinale de’ Medici.” Nardi, 1858, IT:64.

38. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 336; “perché in questo voglio essere caparbio come nelle altre oppinioni mie.” Machiavelli, 1999, p. 372. 39. On Machiavelli’s stubborn political contrariness, see Najemy, 2o10b; Najemy, 1990; Black, 2010.

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Notes to Pages 17-21

1. The Savonarolan Lens 1. No study of the impact of Savonarola and Savonarolism on Machiavelli has considered all of Machiavelli's various comments on the friar and his following, in spite of Gennaro Sasso’s apt suggestion in 1958 that the whole range should be considered. 2. See Niccoli, 1990.

3. On Savonarola’s impact on politics, see Fachard, 2002; Polizzotto, 1994, pp. I-53; Jurdjevic, 2008, pp. 19-45. 4. Sasso, 1980, pp. 13-26. 5. Weinstein, 1972, p. 253. 6. Colish, 1999, p. 611.

7. Ridolfi, 1963, pp. 9-10. 8. Martelli, 1999, pp. 140-147.

9. Najemy, 1999b, pp. 679-681.

10. Martelli, 1999, is a rare exception. 11. Skinner, 2002b, pp. 90-144.

12. On sincerity and rhetoric in Florentine political thought, see Hankins, 1996; Baron, 1967; Seigel, 1966.

13. On November 17, 1490, Lorenzo wrote to Pier Filippo Pandolfini and Niccolo Michelozzi: “che prestino ogni favore a messer Ricciardo Bechi, procuratore di S. Caterina.” Ghisalberti, 1960, p. 494. 14. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 4.

15. Ghisalberti, 1960, p. 495; “ma che nell’altre cose vostre s ingegnerebbe disporre la Santita di N.S.; et che io confortassi horamai le S.V. a pensare a’ facti vostri et non lasciare piu scorrere le cose.” Gherardi, 1887, p. 135. 16. “A dire la verita—e potete immaginare se oggi, giovedi santo, io voglia dirvi una bugia—qui ognuno ride dei Fiorentini che si fanno governare da un frate.” Ghisalberti, 1960, p. 465. 17. “Questa solo per advisare V.S. della mente et animo della Santita di N.S. et di questi Reverendissimi, et quel si dice publice di cotesta cipta per la cosa di fra

Jeronimo, che in verita nshavete gram caricho; et non é sanza infamia et disonore della cipta, et pare non sia sanza pericolo, dare a lui et a’ fanciulli et al popolo tanta licentia et ardire per le cose si c intendano. Le quali, essendo scripte di costa per molti et non di pocha auctorita, et referite qui da’ nostri, e al Papa, a’ Cardinali et a tutta questa Corte, é difficile volerle contradire et scusare: che a ogni hora ne sono alle mani con questi signori Cardinali, che assai si dolgono non di Fra Ieronimo, ma della cipta che gli permecte et concede . . . et dubitano questa cosa di fra Ieronimo et di questi fanciulli non abbia a essere principio et causa di qualche scandalo et ruina della cipta .. . Crediatemi che el Papa é mal

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Notes to Pages 21-26

disposto contro alla cipta, potissimum per questa causa che per altro capo.” Gherardi, 1887, pp. 141-142.

18. Piero Parenti described Braccesi as someone who had “operato in favore de’ frateschi.” See Rubinstein, 1956, pp. 80-81; Savonarola confessed that “in corte di Roma vi havevo pochi amici, e vi tenevo poche pratiche, e di quelle vi tenevo me ne riposavo di piu sopra a ser Alexandro Bracci.” Villari, 1887-88, pp. clxxix; Savonarola’s lieutenant Fra Silvestro confessed that “veniva spesso a parlare a Fra Girolamo con lectare di ser Alexandro Braccesi.” Villari, 1887-88, p. cxciv; on Machiavelli and Braccesi see Machiavelli, 1996, pp. 59, 72; on Savonarola, San Marco, and the Tuscan-Roman congregation, see Gherardi, 1887, pp. 144-153. 19. Rubinstein, 1956, p. 72. 20. Ridolfi, 1963, p. 15; Rubinstein, 1956, p. 82; Bertelli, 1972, p. 6. In his studies of

Machiavelli’s chancery career, Robert Black concurred that Machiavelli’s apparent disapproval of Savonarola likely facilitated his appointment. Black argues, however, that the Savonarolan question was less important than that of Machiavelli’s studied neutrality in Florentine internal political controversies. Black, 1990, pp. 84-85; Black, 1985, pp. I-16. 21. Weinstein, 1972, p. 253.

22. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 9; “dobbiamo con somma prudenzia et osservanzia de’ tempi servare lo onore di quello; e quando el tempo richiede esporre la vita per lui, esporla; e quando é tempo che l’uomo s’asconda, ascondersi . . . e cosi, soggiunse, dobbiamo fare, et abbiamo fatto, perd che, quando fu tempo di farsi incontra al furore, ci siamo fatti, come fu el di della Ascensione, perché cosi lo onore di Dio et el tempo richiedeva.” Machiavelli, 1999, p. 6. 23. Brown, 1988.

24. “Niccolo makes it perfectly clear that he considers the friar a demagogue anda liar who, to compensate for his political impotence, makes false innuendoes about his enemies and changes his tune to suit the occasion.” Weinstein, 1972, p. 253; “Machiavelli clearly regards Savonarola as a fraud, a hypocrite, and a demagogue.” Colish, 1999, p. 611. 25. Martelli, 1999, p. 147; Najemy, 1999b, pp. 679-681.

26. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 9; “e prima che venissi alla dichiarazione di queste parole, mostro per qual cagione egli sera ritirato indreto, e disse: ‘prudentia est recta cognitio agibilium.’” Machiavelli, 1999, p. 6. 27. Brown, 1988.

28. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 8; “Trovatosi adunche il nostro frate in casa sua, ora avere udito con quale audacia e’ cominciassi le sua prediche, e con quale egli le seguiti, non sarebbe di poca ammirazione.” Machiavelli, 1999, p. 6. 29. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 10; “e cosi, secondo el mio iudicio, viene secondando e tempi e le sue bugie colorendo.” Machiavelli, 1999, p. 8.

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Notes to Pages 26-32

30. Machiavelli, 1989, I:223-224; “Il quale, trovando uno popolo ferocissimo e volendolo ridurre nelle obedienze civili con le arti della pace, si volse alla religione come cosa al tutto necessaria a volere mantenere una civilta.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 229.

31. Machiavelli, 1989, I:224; “perché, dove é religione, facilmente si possono introdurre l’armi e dove sono l’armi e non religione, con difficulta si puo introdurre quella.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 230. 32. Machiavelli, 1980, I:223.

33. Ibid., I:226; “Al popolo di Firenze non pare essere né ignorante né rozzo: nondi-

meno da frate Girolamo Savonarola fu persuaso che parlava con Dio. Io non voglio giudicare segli era vero o no, perché d’uno tanto uomo se ne debbe parlare con riverenza.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 231. 34. Machiavelli, 1989, I:226; “ma io dico bene che infiniti lo credevono sanza avere

visto cosa nessuna straordinaria da farlo credere; perché la vita sua, la dottrina e il suggetto che prese erano sufficienti a fargli prestare fede.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 231.

35. Machiavelli, 1989, I:225; “E veramente mai fu alcuno ordinatore di legge straor-

dinarie in uno popolo che non ricorresse a Dio; perché altrimente non sarebbero accettate: perché sono molti i beni conosciuti da uno prudente, i quali non hanno in sé ragioni evidenti da poterli persuadere a altrui. Pero gli uomini savi, che vogliono térre questa difficulta, ricorrono a Dio.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 230. 36. Machiavelli, 1989, I:225; “Ben é vero che l’essere quelli tempi pieni di religione, e quegli uomini, con i quali egli aveva a travagliare, grossi, gli dettono facilita

grande a conseguire i disegni suoi, potendo imprimere in loro facilmente qualunque nuova forma.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 230.

37. Machiavelli, 1989, I:225; “ed uno scultore trarra piu facilmente una bella statua d’un marmo rozzo, che d’uno male abbozzato da altrui.’ Machiavelli, 1997, P. 230.

38. Machiavelli’s estimation of the interpretive acumen of the Florentines is from the Florentine Histories. Machiavelli, 1989, III:1410; “sottile inteprete di tutte le cose.” Machiavelli, 2005, p. 707.

39. Machiavelli, 1989, I:236; “Non sia pertanto nessuno che si sbigottisca di non potere conseguire quel che é stato conseguito da altri.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 231. 40. Weinstein, 1972, pp. 260—26I. Al. Ibid., p. 262.

42. Machiavelli, 1989, 1:26; “di qui nacque che tutti e’ profeti armati vinsono ed e’ disarmati ruinorno.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 132. 43. Machiavelli, 1989, I:225; “E veramente, mai fu alcuno ordinatore di legge straordinarie in uno popolo che non ricorresse a Dio; perché altrimente non sarebbero accettate.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 230.

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Notes to Pages 33-36

44. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 267; “E’ si trova in questa nostra citta, calamita di tutti i ciurmatori del mondo.” Machiavelli, 1999, p. 299. 45. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 267; “La predica io non la udi’, perché io non uso simili pratiche.” Machiavelli, 1999, pp. 299-300. 46. “These activities demoralized me so much yesterday that I was supposed to go this morning to see La Riccia, but I did not go.” Machiavelli, 1996, p. 267; “Queste cose mi sbigottirono ieri in modo, che io aveva andare questa mattina a starmi con la Riccia, et non vi andai.” Machiavelli, 1999, p. 299. 47. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 278; “Di qua non ci é che dirvi, se non prophezie et annunzii di malanni: che Iddio, se dicono le bugie, gli facci annullare; se dicono il vero, gli converta in bene.” Machiavelli, 1999, p. 310. 48. Machiavelli, 1989, I:225.

49. Ibid., I:226. For Italian text, see note 31.

50. Ibid., I:311; “Donde ei si nasca io non so, ma ei si vede per gli antichi e per gli moderni esempli che mai non venne alcuno grave accidente in una citta o in una provincia che non sia stato, o da indovini 0 da rivelazioni 0 da prodigi o da altri segni celesti, predetto. E per non mi discostare da casa nel provare questo, sa ciascuno quanto da frate Girolamo Savonerola fosse predetta innanzi la venuta del re Carlo VIII di Francia in Italia.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 313. 51. Machiavelli, 1989, III:1448; “io dico di quel gran Savonerola, el qual, afflato da virtu divina, vi tenne involti con la sua parola.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 97. 52. Machiavelli, 1989, I:226. For Italian text, see notes 30 and 31. 53. (Translation altered.) Machiavelli, 1989, I:288—289; “Essendo Firenze, dopo al 94, Stata riordinata nello stato suo con lo aiuto di frate Girolamo Savonerola, gli scritti del quale mostrono la dottrina, la prudenza e la virtu dello animo suo; ed avendo, intra le altre costituzioni per assicurare i cittadini, fatto fare una legge, che si potesse appellare al popolo dalle sentenzie che, per casi di stato, gli otto e la signoria dessono.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 292. 54. (Translation altered.) Machiavelli, 1989, I[:1448; “E quel condusse in su le vostre mura el vostro gran rebel; onde ne nacque di cinque cittadin la sepultura. Ma quel ch’a molti molto pit: non piacque e vi fe’ disunir, fu quella scuola sotto ‘] cui segno vostra citta iacque: i’ dico di quel gran Savonerola, el qual, afflato da virtu divina, vi tenne involti con la sua parola; ma perché molti temén la ruina veder de la lor patria a poco a poco sotto la sua profetica dottrina, non si trovava a riunirvi loco, se non cresceva o se non era spento el suo lume divin con maggior fuoco.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 97. 55. (Translation altered.) Machiavelli, 1989, I:288—289; “(la quale legge persuase pit tempo, e con difficulta grandissima ottenne), occorse che poco dopo la confermazione d’essa furono condannati a morte dalla signoria, per conto di stato,

cinque cittadini, e volendo quegli appellare, non furono lasciati, e non fu

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Notes to Pages 37-39

osservata la legge. I che tolse pit riputazione a quel frate, che alcuno altro accidente. ... E tanto pit fu notato questo accidente, quanto che il frate, in tante predicazioni che fece poi che fu rotta questa legge, non mai o danno chi l’aveva rotta o lo scusd, come quello che dannare non la voleva, come cosa che gli tornava a proposito, e scusare non la poteva. Il che avendo scoperto l’animo suo ambizioso e partigiano, gli tolse riputazione, e dettegli assai carico.” Machiavelli, 1997, Pp. 292.

56. Machiavelli, 1989, 1:64—65; “Sendo dunque necessitato uno principe sapere bene usare la bestia, debbe di quelle pigliare la golpe e il lione; perché el lione non si defende da’ lacci, la golpe non si defende da’ lupi; bisogna adunque essere golpe a conoscere e’ lacci, e lione a sbigottire e’ lupi.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 165. 57. Machiavelli, 1989, I:496. “E chi legge la Bibbia sensatamente, vedra Moise essere stato forzato, a volere che le sue leggi e che i suoi ordini andassero innanzi,

ad ammazzare infiniti uomini, i quali, non mossi da altro che dalla invidia, si opponevano a disegni suoi.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 492. See commentary on this passage by Geerken, 1999.

58. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 336; “e tutto ero volto a figurarmi un predicatore a mio modo pera Firenze . . . eglino vorrieno un predicatore che insegnasse loro la via del paradiso, et io vorrei trovarne uno che insegnassi loro la via di andare a casa il diavolo; vorrebbono appresso che fosse uomo prudente, intero, reale, et io ne vorrei trovare uno pit pazzo che il Ponzo, pit versuto che fra Girolamo, pit ippocritico che frate Alberto . . . perché io credo che questo sarebbe il vero modo ad andare in paradiso: imparare la via dello inferno per fuggirla.” Machiavelli, 1999, P. 372.

59. Machiavelli, 1996, p. 257; “In modo che, considerato queste qualita con le cose che di presente corrono, io credo al frate che diceva “Pax, pax, et non erit pax.” Machiavelli, 1999, p. 287.

60. Brown, 1988, pp. 57-72.

61. Cited in Brown, 1988, p. 57. “Io sono frate, e non vidi mai arme, e, se mi fussi lecito, ti monstrerrei punti, che tu non hai da dubitare tanto.” Savonarola, 1962, 1:436.

62. Cited in Brown, 1988, p. 62; “tu dirai che quello di Macometto sia stabile. Sa’ tu perché? Perché la si difende colla spada.” Savonarola, 1955-56, II:156. 63. Cited in Brown, 1988, pp. 62; “Oh, tu se’ crudele, frate—Crudele sei tu che per uno tristo vuoi pericolare una citta.” Savonarola, 1969, II:147. 64. Geerken infers Machiavelli’s interpretation of Savonarola from his larger cri-

tique of Christianity and hence gets it wrong: “Savonarola sought humility, contemplation, suffering, and patience. Not just Savonarola but the entire institutional church had replaced the ancient values of vigor and ferocity with those of mildness and meekness.” Geerken, 1999, p. 592.

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Notes to Pages 40-42

65. Savonarola frequently compared himself to Moses. See Savonarola, 1846, p. 276; Savonarola, 1955-56, I:143; Cordero, 1986, II:97, III:vii, 80, 475, 4:330. 66. Machiavelli, 1989, I:190, 2:740-744. 67. Ibid., III:1166; “E per cominciare quello imperio con giustizia, il quale egli aveva

con grazia acquistato, fece publicamente che niuno ardesse o rubasse alcuna cosa comandare; e per spaventare ciascuno, rizzo le forche in piazza . . . quanto perché d’ogni tempo contro alla invidia lo difendessero.” Machiavelli, 2005, Pp. 450-451; see also Suchowlansky, 2011. 68. Machiavelli, 1989, I:497; “Questa necessita conosceva benissimo frate Girolamo

Savonerola. ... Luno non potette vincerla per non avere autorita a poterlo fare (che fu il frate), e per non essere inteso bene da coloro che lo seguitavano, che ne arebbero avuto autorita. Nonpertanto per lui non rimase, e le sue prediche sono piene di accuse de’ savi del mondo e d’invettive contro a loro: perché chiamava cosi questi invidi e quegli che si opponevano agli ordini suoi.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 493.

69. “E dissiti che sono dua eserciti: uno di Dio e uno del diavolo. . .. Combattono ancora questi eserciti con nuovi modi: l’esercito di Dio combatte con fede, orazioni e pazienza. Laltro combatte con ira, con odio e con invidia.” Savonarola, 1955-56, I:149.

70. “Io ti dico che non hanno fede; e se non gli fussi la pena del fuoco, tu li vedresti saltar fuora al negare la fede. Dileggiavano ancora quegli Egizii e’ figliuoli di Israel, come dice qui il testo, affliggendoli per invidia: Et affligebant illudentes et invidentes eis. Cosi fanno oggi li nostri avversarii.” Savonarola, 1955-56, [:58. 71. ‘El primo peccato che entro nell’uomo, dilettissimi in Cristo Iest, quando el fu

creato, fu la superbia; el secondo fu la invidia. ... Questi dua furono li primi peccati che entrassino nel mondo, cioé, la invidia e la superbia; e da questi dua sono poi venuti tutti e’ mali.” Savonarola, 1955-56, I:176-77. 72. ‘La morte di Cristo venne per la invidia e superbia delli Scribi e Farisei. Leggesi

ancora di Abel, el quale fu morto dal fratello per invidia del suo sacrificio. E questa invidia é stata quasi sempre per appetito dello onore delle cose divine. Va’, leggi al tempo delli Profeti: tu troverrai che per invidia furono perseguitati e morti. Cosi al tempo de’ martiri e al tempo delli eretici, tutte le persecuzioni vennono da’ sacerdoti delliidolie da’ sacerdoti eretici per invidia che avevano. .. . E pero non vi dovete maravigliare se noi abbiamo ogni di maggiori persecuzioni da’ sacerdoti cattivi, perché loro sono stati li persecutori sempre del bene.” Savonarola, 1955-56, 1:177.

73. Weinstein, 1972, pp. 255-256.

74. Machiavelli, 1989, I:385, 27; “E perché gli eccellenti uomini nelle repubbliche corrotte, nei tempi quieti massime, e per invidia e per altre ambiziose cagioni,

sono inimicati’; “Ma superati che gli hanno, e che cominciano a essere in

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Notes to Pages 43-48

venerazione, avendo spenti quegli che di sua qualita gli avevano invidia, rimangono potenti, sicuri, onorati e felici.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 385, p. 133. 75. On Soderini, see Bertelli, 1975; Bertelli, 1969; Bertelli, 1971; Pesman Cooper, 1978.

76. “Ma nota che é differenzia grande tra la prudenzia de’ filosofi e sapienti del mondo e quella dello uomo cristiano, perché la prudenzia de’ savi del mondo risguarda e’ fini umani, ma quella del cristiano guarda prima lo onore di Dio, poi la salute delle anime, e poi el bene comune, e poi il proprio.” Savonarola, 1955-56, [:146.

77. On Machiavelli's ties to this group, see Jurdjevic, 2008, pp. 63-94. 78. Machiavelli, 1989, 1:27; “il quale [Savonarola] ruino ne’ sua ordini nuovi, come la moltitudine comincio a non credergli.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 133. 79. Whitfield, 1949, p. 45. 80. Guidi, 1988. 81. Polizzotto, 1994, pp. 240, 332, 378.

82. Rubinstein, 1960, p. 155; Savonarola referred to the Council as the “governo da me introdocto.” Savonarola, 1933, p. 95; “Io ho persuaso il Consiglio grande... Questo governo adunque adunque é da Dio.” Savonarola, 1889, p. 423; “Io ti dico che il Salvatore ha fatto questo governo lui.” Savonarola, 1889, p. 313. 83. Quoted in Najemy, 2006, p. 400. 84. Polizzotto, 1994, p. 241. 85. Quoted in Trexler, 1980, p. 52; original text in Nardi, 1858. 86. On the durability of the Great Council in spite of Medici attempts to erase its significance, see Silvano, 1990, pp. 52-54. 87. Polizzotto, 1994, p. 315.

88. Ibid., pp. 315-316. On Niccolo Valori’s republicanism and Savonarolism see Jurdjevic, 2008, pp. 46-62, 96-123. 89. Polizzotto, 1994, pp. 315-316. 90. Ibid., 1994, pp. 318-319. 91. Guasti, 1859.

92. Ridolfi, 1963, pp. 202-203.

93. Polizzotto, 1994, p. 320.

94. Machiavelli, 1989, I:114; “Consideri dunque Vostra Santita in prima come, nel tenere la citta di Firenze in questi presenti termini, vi si corre, venendo accidenti, mille pericoli; e avanti che venghino, la Vostra Santita ha da sopportare mille fastidii insopportabili a qualunque uomo: dei quali fastidii vi fara fede la reverendissima signoria del cardinale, sendo stato questi mesi passati in Firenze.” Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 744-745.

95. Machiavelli, 1989, I:104; “La prima cosa, quello stato [di Cosimo] aveva per amico

Puniversale e questo l’ha inimico. Quelli cittadini non avevano mai trovato in Firenze stato che paressi pit universale di quello, e questi ne hanno trovato

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Notes to Pages 48-50

uno che pare loro pit civile e dove e’ si contentano piu.” Machiavelli, 1997, PP. 735-736.

96. Machiavelli, 1989, I:106; “E quanto al confutare lo stato di Cosimo, e questo, che

nessuno stato si puo ordinare che sia stabile, se non € 0 vero principato o vera repubblica, perché tutti i governi posti in tra questi dua sono defettivi.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 737.

97. Machiavelli, 1989, I:106-107; “E quanto al principato, io non lo discorrero particularmente, si per le difficulta che ci sarebbono a farlo, si per esser mancato lo instrumento . . . in tutte le citta dove é grande equalita di cittadini, non vi si

puo ordinare principato se non con massima difficulta ...e farvi assai nobili di castella e ville, i quali, insieme con el principe, tenessino con l’armi e con l’aderenzie loro suffocata la citta e tutta la provincia.” Machiavelli, 1997, PP. 737-738.

98. Machiavelli, 1989, I:107; “un ordine dove l’autorita sua rimanesse in Firenze grande e gli amici vi vivessino securi.’ Machiavelli, 1997, p. 738. 99. Machiavelli, 1989, I:110—-111; “E pero giudico che sia necessario di riaprire la sala del consiglio de’ mille. . . . Senza satisfare all’‘universale, non si fece mai alcuna repubblica stabile. Non si satisfera mai all’universale dei cittadini fiorentini, se non si riapre la sala.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 741. 100. Machiavelli, 1989, I:111; “e sappia Vostra Santita che qualunque pensera di torle lo stato, pensera innanzi ad ogni altra cosa di riaprirla. E pero é partito migliore che quella l’apra con termini e modi sicuri, e che la tolga questa occasione a chi fussi suo nemico di riaprirla con dispiacere suo, e destruzione e rovina de’ suoi amici.’ Machiavelli, 1997, p. 741. tor. Machiavelli, 1989, I:108; “Annullare la signoria, gli otto della pratica e i dodici Buoni uomini.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 739. 102. (Translation altered.) Machiavelli, 1989, I:107—109; “e similmente la prego che

non la sbigottisca qualche alterazione di magistrati : perché, dove le cose non sono bene ordinate, quanto meno vi resta del vecchio, tanto meno vi resta del cattivo. ...Perd, credo sia bene levare una confusione di Consigli, che sono stati un tempo nella vostra citta...annullare i settanta, il cento e il consiglio del popolo e del comune.” Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 738-740. 103. (Translation altered.) Machiavelli, 1989, I:27. For Italian text, see note 72. 104. See Albertini, 1955; Whitfield, 1949; Weinstein, 1972.

105. bisogna provedere che niuno cittadino abbia autorita, per modo alcuno, di potere dare li beneficii e officii e dignita della citta, perché questa é proprio la radice che fa nelle citta uno tiranno, amando molto li cittadini l’onore e volendo esser reputati. E pero, quando vedeno che altrimenti non possono avere li beneficii e onori della citta, si sottomettono a chi loro credono che li possa dare. ... Enecessario dunque instituire, che l’autorita di distribuire li officii e li

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Notes to Pages 50-54

onori sia in tutto el popolo.” Savonarola, 1999, pp. 67-68. Machiavelli’s Discourse on Florentine Affairs has a similar electoral strategy. Machiavelli, 1989, I:110—111. 106. Machiavelli, 1989, I:107—108; “nondimeno sono in quella alcuni che sono di animo

elevato e pare loro meritare di precedere agli altri, a’ quali é necessario nell’ordinare la repubblica satisfare.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 738-739. 107. (Translation altered.) Machiavelli, 1989, I:109; “Il quale ordine, se si considerera

bene, si conoscera per esso essersi renduto la maesta e la reputazione al capo dello stato; e si vedra come gli uomini gravi e d’autorita sempre sederebbono nei primi gradi.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 739.

108. “Terzio, bisogna provedere ch’el non sia troppo aggravato, cioé che per ogni minima cosa sabbia a ragunare tanti cittadini: onde etiam li signori attendono alle cose importante e alli sudditi commettano le minori, conservandosi pero sempre l’autorita di distribuire li officii e beneficii.” Savonarola, 1999, p. 70. 109. Ibid., pp. 71-73. 110. Ibid., pp. 71-74.

2. Roman Doubts 1. Using different categories of analysis, Francesco Bausi made a similar argument

about the internal doubts and contradictions in the Discourses on Livy. See Bausi, 2005, pp. 163-169.

2. Machiavelli frequently took great delight in paradox, expressing characteristic tensions and ambiguities in the form of apparent contradictions. It is perhaps not surprising that many scholars tend to share the conviction that, just as the contradictions are the primary problem of Machiavelli scholarship, the paradoxes are likewise the primary solution to understanding the Florentine thinker, and have consequently paid particular attention to their investigation, explanation, and occasional reconciliation and resolution. The most famous example is the debate around Machiavelli as counselor to republics and tyrants, on which see Strauss, 1958; Baron, 1961, pp. 217-253, revised and reprinted in Baron, 1988, II:t0I-151; more recent examples in political theory and history include Dietz, 1986, pp. 777-799; Langton and Dietz, 1987, pp. 1277-1288; Colish, 1998, pp. 11511168; de Maria, 1992, pp. 248-270.

3. Thus, from a textually internal rather than comparative perspective, this chapter agrees with the sharp break argument of Rahe, 2000, pp. 270-308; for a survey of

historiography on the question of Machiavelli’s humanism and a persuasive rebuttal of the positive connection, see Hulliung, 1983. 4. Najemy, 1982b, pp. 551-576, makes the same argument about Machiavelli’s con-

ception and understanding of princely and Medicean power. This chapter is indebted to Najemy’s reading of the Florentine Histories.

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Notes to Pages 57-59

5. For the dedication to Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, see Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 195-196. On the dedication, see McCormick, 2005. 6. Machiavelli, 1989, I:201; “Come dimostrano tutti coloro che ragionano del vivere civile, e come ne é piena di esempli ogni istoria, é necessario a chi dispone una republica ed ordina leggi in quella presupporre tutti gli uomini rei, e che li abbiano sempre a usare la malignita dello animo loro, qualunque volta ne abbiano libera occasione.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 207. 7. Machiavelli, 1989, I:201; “La quale cosa fa testimonianza a quello che di sopra ho detto, che gli uomini non operono mai nulla bene, se non per necessita, ma, dove la elezione abonda, e che vi si puo usare licenza, si riempie subito ogni cosa di confusione e di disordine.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 208. 8. Machiavelli, 1989, I:57—-58; “Perché gli é tanto discosto da come si vive a come

si doverrebbe vivere, che colui che lascia quello che si fa, per quello che si doverrebbe fare, impara piu presto la ruina che la preservazione sua.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 159.

9. Machiavelli, 1989, I:62; “Perché degli uomini si puo dire questo, generalmente, che sieno ingrati, volubili, simulatori e dissimulatori, fuggitori de’ pericoli, cu-

pidi del guadagno ... perché lo amore é tenuto da uno vinculo di obligo, il quale, per essere gl’uomini tristi, da ogni occasione di propria utilita é rotto, ma il timore é tenuto da una paura di pena che non ti abbandona mai.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 163.

10. Sacks, 1981; Garin, 1993.

11. Machiavelli, 1989, I:201; “e che ai nobili fu la paura fuggita, cominciarono a sputare contro alla plebe quel veleno che si avevano tenuto nel petto, ed in tutti i modi che potevano la offendevano.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 208. 12. Machiavelli, 1989, I:200; Machiavelli, 1997, p. 207.

13. Machiavelli, 1989, I:420; “Delle quali esecuzioni...furono notabili la morte de’ figliuoli di Bruto, la morte de’ dieci cittadini, quella di Melio frumentario; dopo la presa di Roma, fu la morte di Manlio Capitolino, la morte del figliuolo di Manlio Torquato, la esecuzione di Papirio Cursore contro a Fabio suo Maestro de’ cavalieri, l’accusa degli Scipioni.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 196. 14. Machiavelli, 1989, I:42; “Ma come di quella battitura la memoria si spegne, gli

uomini prendono ardire di tentare cose nuove, e di dire male.” Machiavelli, 1997, Pp. 418.

15. Najemy, 1982b, p. 562.

16. See Grafton, 1991, pp. 9-29; Aristotle, 1962, pp. 451-476; and on the reception of Aristotle in the Renaissance, see Lines, 2002.

17. Machiavelli, 1989, I:201; “perché li buoni esempli nascano dalla buona educazione, la buona educazione dalle buone leggi, e le buone leggi da quelli tumulti che molti inconsideratamente dannano.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 209.

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Notes to Pages 60-65

18. Machiavelli, 1989, I:57; “non essere tenuto prosuntuoso, partendomi massime, nel disputare questa materia, da li ordini degli altri.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 280. 19. Machiavelli, 1989, HI:1030—1033; Machiavelli, 2005, pp. 308-311; Gilbert, 1972, pp. 83-95; Najemy, 1996, pp. 119-129; Najemy, 1978, I:161-191; Cabrini, 1985.

20. (Translation altered.) Machiavelli, 1989, III:1232; “Perché avendo le buone e or-

dinate armi partorito vittorie, e le vittorie quiete, non si puo la fortezza degli armati animi con il pit onesto ozio che con quello delle lettere corrompere, né puo l’ozio con il maggiore e piu pericoloso inganno che con questo nelle citta bene institute entrare.” Machiavelli, 2005, p. 519. 21. Machiavelli, 1989, I:321-322; Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 324-326.

22. Putnam, 1993, pp. 86-91; Skinner, 1978, pp. 44-45. 23. Machiavelli, 1989, I:202-204; Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 208-210. 24. Machiavelli, 1989, I:201; “Pero si dice che la fame e la poverta fa gli uomini industriosi, e le leggi gli fanno buoni.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 208.

25. Machiavelli, 1989, I:193; “e perché si vede quivi essere maggior virtt dove le elezione ha meno autorita.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 200. 26. Machiavelli, 1989, I:194; “E quanto a quell’ozio che le arrecasse il sito, si debbe ordinare che a quelle necessita le leggi la costringhino, che il sito non la costrienesse.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 201. On this subject, see Mansfield, 1996, pp. 57-78. 27. Machiavelli, 1989, I:211-214; Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 217-220. 28. Machiavelli, 1989, I:214-217; Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 220-222. 29. Machiavelli, 1989, I:223-226; Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 228-231. 30. Machiavelli, 1989, I:229-230; “di che nacque che la plebe, sbigottita da questa religione, creo i tribuni tutti nobili.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 235. 31. Machiavelli, 1989, I:230; “e trii primi rimedi che vi uso la nobilita fu la religione, della quale si servirono in due modi. Nel primo, fecero vedere i libri sibillini, e

rispondere come alla citta, mediante la civile sedizione, soprastavano quello anno pericolo di non perdere la liberta: la quale cose, ancora che fusse scoperta da’ tribuni, nondimeno messe tanto terrore ne’ petti della plebe che la raffreddo nel seguirli.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 235.

32. Machiavelli, 1989, I:214; “qualunque volta si vede che le forze strane siano chiamate da una parte di uomini che vivono in una citta, si pud credere nasca da’ cattivi ordini di quella, per non essere, dentro a quel cerchio, ordine da potere, sanza modi istraordinari, sfogare i maligni omori che nascono negli uomini.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 219.

33. Machiavelli, 1989, I:251; “nessuna republica bene ordinata non mai cancello i demeriti con gli meriti de’ suoi cittadini.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 255. 34. Machiavelli, 1989, I:251; “se a un cittadino che abbia fatto qualche egregia opera per la citta, si aggiugne, oltre alla riputazione che quella cosa gli arreca, una audacia e confidenza di poter, senza temere pena, fare qualche opera non bu-

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Notes to Pages 65-68

ona, diventera in brieve tempo tanto insolente che si risolvera ogni civilita.” Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 255-256.

35. Machiavelli, 1989, I:240-243; Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 245-248.

36. Machiavelli, 1989, I:242-243; “quasi impossibile. Perché a volergli rinnovare a poco a poco, conviene che ne sia cagione uno prudente, che vegga questo inconveniente assai discosto, e quando e’ nasce. Di questi tali é facilissima cosa che

in una citta non ne surga mai nessuno, e quando pure ve ne surgessi, non potrebbe persuadere mai a altrui quello che egli proprio intendesse; perché gli uomini, usi a vivere in un modo, non lo vogliono variare; e tanto piu non veggendo il male in viso, ma avendo a essere loro mostro per coniettura.” Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 2.47.

37. Machiavelli, 1989, I:243; “E perché il riordinare una citta al vivere politico pre-

suppone uno uomo buono, e il diventare per violenza principe di una repubblica presuppone uno uomo cattivo, per questo si troverra che radissime volte accaggia che uno buono, per vie cattive, ancora che il fine suo fusse buono, voglia diventare principe, e che uno reo, divenuto principe, voglia operare bene,

e che gli caggia mai nello animo usare quella autorita bene che gli ha male acquistata. Machiavelli, 1997, p. 248. 38. Machiavelli, 1989, I:240; “e volendola ridurre equale, é necessario usare grandissimi straordinari, i quali pochi sanno o vogliono usare; come in altro luogo pit particularmente si dira.” Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 245.

39. Burckhardt did not attribute this conviction to Machiavelli but he certainly shared it. Burckhardt’s “state as a work of art” was the product of precocious individuality necessarily expressed through despotism. Burckhardt, 1954, pp. 3-44. 40. Livy, 1998, pp. Io—II.

Al. Cicero, 1991, p. 115; see Nicgorski, 1991, pp. 230-251. 42. Machiavelli, 1989, I:217—220; Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 223-225.

43. Machiavelli, 1989, I:197; “Talmente che, se uno ordinatore di republica ordina in

una citta uno di quelli tre stati, ve lo ordina per poco tempo; perché nessuno rimedio puo farvi, a fare che non sdruccioli nel suo contrario, per la similitudine che ha in questo caso la virtute ed il vizio.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 204. 44. Machiavelli, 1989, I:266; “Dico, adunque, che poi che gli é difficile conoscere questi mali quando ei surgano, causata questa difficulta da uno inganno che ti fanno le cose in principio, é pit savio partito il temporeggiarle poi che le si conoscono, che loppugnarle.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 270. 45. Skinner, 2000, p. 75. 46. Machiavelli, 1989, I:265; “dove molte volte o e’ si lascia pigliare ad uno cittadino

piu forze che non é ragionevole, o e’ si comincia a corrompere una legge, la quale é il nervo e la vita del vivere libero; e lasciasi trascorrere questo errore in tanto, che gli é piu dannoso partito il volere rimediare che lasciarlo seguire.

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Notes to Pages 69-72

E tanto é pit difficile il conoscere questi inconvenienti quando e’ nascono,

quanto e pare pit naturale agli uomini favorire sempre i principii delle cose....Perché se in una republica si vede surgere uno giovane nobile, quale abbia in sé virtu istraordinaria, tutti gli occhi de’ cittadini si cominciono a voltare verso lui e concorrere sanza alcuno rispetto a onorarlo, in modo che, se in quello é punto d’ambizione, accozzati i favori che gli da la natura e questo accidente, viene subito in luogo che, quando i cittadini si avyveggono dello errore loro, hanno pochi rimedi ad ovviarvi, e volendo quegli tanti ch’egli hanno, operarli, non fanno altro che accelerare la potenza sua.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 115. 47. Machiavelli, 1989, HI:1220; “perché la cagione che ci muove é tutta fondata in su il sospetto che non si faccia principe di questa citta. Se questo sospetto noi lo abbiamo, non lo hanno gli altri... . Lopere di Cosimo che ce lo fanno sospetto sono: perché gli serve de’ suoi danari ciascuno, e non solamente i privati, ma il

publico, e non solo i fiorentini, ma i condottieri; perché favorisce quello e quell’altro cittadino che ha bisogno de’ magistrati; perché e’ tira con la benivolenzia che gli ha nello universale questo e quell’altro suo amico a maggiori gradi e onori. Adunque converrebbe addurre le cagioni del cacciarlo, perché gli é piatoso, officioso, liberale e amato da ciascuno. E benché sieno modi tutti che tirono gli uomini volando al principato, nondimeno e’ non sono creduti cosi.” Machiavelli, 2005, pp. 507-508. 48. Machiavelli, 1989, I:213; Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 218-219. 49. Machiavelli, 1989, III:1438; Machiavelli, 2005, pp. 255-256. On Machiavelli's contrasting portraits of Valori, see Jurdjevic, 2002.

50. These two texts were not merely written during the same period. They were both commissioned by the Medici and are conceptually and textually linked. The Florentine Histories contain a reference to the Discourse on Florentine Affairs that indicates Machiavelli’s expectation that the two texts should be read as interconnected. See Rubinstein, 1967, p. 958; Marietti, 1974, I:109; Bock, 1990, p. 190.

51. On Machiavelli’s acquisition of Medici patronage, see Gilbert, 1972, pp. 83-95; on his earlier connections to the Medici, see Martelli, 1971, pp. 377-405; and also Fubini, 1997, pp. 127-141.

52. On Machiavelli at the Rucellai gardens, see Gilbert, 1949, pp. 1o1—131. 53. Najemy, 1982b, p. 574.

54. Najemy, 19992, pp. I-8.

55. Najemy, 1982b, pp. 574-475. One could push Najemy’s argument further and explicitly state what he seemed to imply: Machiavelli’s discussion in the Florentine Histories of the problem of faction and the phenomenon of Medici power threatens to collapse the distinctions between many manifestations of princely and republican power. Machiavelli emphasizes the degree to which the sub-

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Notes to Pages 72-74

stance of both regimes’ politics consists of factions, fragile consensus, and leaders constrained by their followings. In the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, Machiavelli observes that a prince without a nobility “cannot support the weight of a princedom.” Machiavelli, 1989, I:107; “un principe solo, spogliato di nobilta, non puo sostenere il pondo del principato.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 738. 56. Sasso recognized the sudden departure of this text from Machiavelli’s earlier writings, characterizing it as “bizzarria” and “di ingegnosa stravaganza. ” Sasso, 1980, Pp. 450-453.

57. Skinner, 2000, p. 59.

58. Machiavelli, 1989, I:103; “Vero é che, essendo venuta la cosa in termine, come 6,

per la morte del duca, che si ha da ragionare di nuovi modi di governi.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 735.

59. Machiavelli, 1989, I:108—111; Machiavelli, 1997, pp. 738-742. Machiavelli builds

into all of these institutions a temporary mechanism for the direct Medici con-

trol of appointees, though he points out that because it is structurally wellordered Leo need only keep “half an eye turned on it” (alla Santita Vostra basti tenervi la meta di un occhio volto). Because the Medici control the appointment process, the government can be considered a monarchy while Giulio and Giovanni still live. After their demise, however, the system reverts to a pure, well-ordered, and self-sustaining republic. Though Machiavelli acknowledges earlier in the the Discourse on Florentine Affairs that Florence cannot continue without a leader (capo), the treatise as a whole deconstructs and demolishes that statement, concluding with a vision of government entirely devoid of individual leadership. See commentary by Sasso, 1993, pp. 203-205. 60. Viroli, 1990, pp. 154-155.

61. Bock, 1990, p. 189. Far from the earlier connection made in the Discourses on Livy

between strict equality and republicanism, by the later writings equality has become a republican problem, not a solution. Bock in particular should recognize the argument against strict equality in the Discourse on Florentine Affairs, since the essay from which her quote above derives is primarily an analysis of the revolution in Machiavelli’s handling of equality and discord between the Discourses and the Florentine Histories, and she knows that the Discourse on Flo-

rentine Affairs was composed in connection with the Florentine Histories. As she points out in her otherwise fine analysis, Machiavelli has entirely reversed his earlier position: in Rome, equality and discord were sources of Roman greatness, but in Florence, equality and discord are the causes of Florentine weakness. See also Mansfield, 1996, pp. 137-175. 62. Viroli, 1990, p. 154.

63. Machiavelli, 1989, III:107-108; “E benché in Firenze sia quella equalita che di sopra si dice, nondimeno sono in quella alcuni che sono di animo elevato e pare

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Notes to Pages 75-78

loro meritare di precedere agli altri, a’ quali é necessario nell’ordinare la repubblica satisfare.” Machiavelli, 1997, p. 738-739. 64. Skinner, 1983, pp. 3-15; revised and republished in Skinner, 2002