Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  “The one who got killed?”

  “No, the other one. He’s still alive.”

  “And may or may not be sleeping with his sister?”

  “Exactly, said Pagolo. “But it’s not just the sale of cardinals’ hats that’s bringing in the gold. The pope has really turned the Vatican into a money machine. He had a lot of practice when he was vice chancellor. He ran the chancery like a brokerage house for pardons, indulgences, absolutions, you name it. You could get remission for the death penalty for a couple thousand ducats. Everything was up for sale—offices—even the Vatican librarian had to pay up to hold on to his post, and that’s not the most lucrative job in town.”

  “Maybe not,” thought Niccolo, “but I bet he does alright.” He was thinking ruefully of the 25 florins in library fines he had disgorged that morning.

  “In the last analysis,” said Pagolo, pontificating, “the Roman nobility is distraught with Alexander, because he pays far too little time rendering unto God the things that are God’s and far too much of his energies superintending the things that are caesar’s. The fact that he’s a Spaniard and an outsider makes it all the more galling.”

  “He doesn’t have the bad taste to flaunt it, does he?” asked Niccolo.

  “Flaunt it? Does he flaunt it? Rome is seething with dark eyed, bearded Spaniards—Catalans, Aragonese, Moorish-looking ladies and gentlemen. They all flaunt it. Spanish pomp and Spanish circumstance. When Alexander was elected pope, he staged a procession like Rome had never seen before. All the attendants were dressed in Turkish regalia. Negroes and negresses carried garlands and sang. There were carts with living statues, naked boys and girls, gilded from head to foot. And where did this preposterous extravaganza wend its way? To Saint Peter’s? Of course, but not to the church to celebrate a mass and sing the Te Deum, as is customary. In the square, Alexander had arranged to stage a curious and typically Spanish form of entertainment—a bullfight!”

  “Bravo,” cheered Niccolo. “It sounds more exciting than a cockfight or a dogfight. More thunder! Bravo! Hail Caesar!”

  “It’s not like a dogfight or a cockfight,” explained Pagolo. “The bulls don’t fight each other, imbecile. Men fight with the bulls.”

  “Barehanded?”

  “No, they’re armed with little swords and some are on horseback. There are usually several men against one bull.”

  Niccolo looked disappointed. “Not very heroic,” he said. “No, I don’t see it catching on here in Florence. Besides the guilds would never stand for it. Nonmembers butchering beef in a public place. Never.”

  Although he considered the bullfight a doubtful extravagance, at best, Niccolo was nevertheless intrigued by the Spanish conception of entertainment. “What else do they do to amuse themselves, these Spaniards, I mean, besides bull-butchery and sexual adventurism with their progeny and siblings?”

  Pagolo thought for a minute. “Once they did stage a rather odd event in the Vatican courtyard. They filled it with horses—stallions and mares in heat. The pope and his family, along with his redoubtable mistress, the blond Vanozza, watched from a balcony cheering lustily at the—how shall I put this?—at the frenzy of equine coupling that was taking place below.”

  Niccolo collapsed in laughter, and, still sobbing, submitted that haughty Rome might finally have gotten the kind of pontiff she so richly deserved.

  “By the way, do you know what his arms are? It’s too apt—a red bull rampant on a field of gold!”

  “Viva il bue! Viva il Papa! Long live the Bull! Long live the Pope!” cried Niccolo, lifting his cup. Pagolo and many others joined him.

  After a round of refreshment, Niccolo said, “Pagolo, listen, we’ve heard here that the pope, and this might be nothing more than Florentine gossip, Florentine calumny, but we’ve heard that he killed a man, with his own hands.”

  The sagacious Pagolo considered a moment before answering. “Yes and no,” he said finally. “It’s not entirely true that the pope killed a man. That is to say, he didn’t kill anyone as Pope Alexander VI. However, there was an incident, back before his election.

  “Nobody holds it against him now—the heat of youth, the fiery Spanish temperament, all that. Besides, it’s said that the man he stabbed was of ‘inferior condition.’ In answer to your question, then, yes, I think he did kill someone back when he was still just a young man from Valencia, when he was still just Roderigo Borgia.”

  Once he had begun his scurrilous recitations, Pagolo could not be denied. A small crowd had gathered around the animated little priest, and they kept his cup filled. They were all eager to hear the latest news from the seat of Christendom and the throne of Saint Peter. Pagolo spoke with such ease and obvious authority, he larded his accounts with such scrupulous detail, that his veracity was never called into question. One of his auditors, more scandalized than amused at the reports of flagrant misbehavior in the Holy City, roundly denounced the perpetrators of such sin and evil as unchristian dogs.

  “Unchristian?” said Pagolo, indignantly. “Unchristian, you say? Quite the contrary! Never has the defense of Christianity been more stiff-necked and unrelenting than it is today in Rome. Only last week I saw a stunning display of Christianity, a heroic defense of Christian virtue.

  “A courtesan had been arrested—La Cursetta. She was a respectable courtesan, but had apparently fallen behind in her bribery payments. And she was arrested for living with a Moor, who in order to conceal his identity went about her house disguised as a woman.” Pagolo paused for breath.

  “Oh, the things you see in Rome these days! La Cursetta was led through the streets, along with her Moor in a stunning black velvet gown, his hands tied behind his back. His flowing skirts were pulled up to his navel, and, since he was shamelessly ungirdled, you could see his powerful Moorish organs.

  “When they had made a circuit of the entire city, La Cursetta, in proper Christian fashion, was released, absolved, and admonished to go and sin no more. The Moor, blackguard of a blackguard race, was not so lucky. He was dragged to the Campo de’ Fiori by an executioner riding an ass and holding aloft for all to see, on the end of his lance, the balls of a Jew who was said to have copulated with a Christian woman. The Moor was strangled and burned. The defenders of our faith triumphed. Believe me, a smashing blow was struck for Christianity!”

  Not sensing the irony in Pagolo’s pronouncement, most of his auditors shook their heads knowingly, grumbling their approval at the fate of the unfortunate Moor. Pagolo, by now exhausted, and not a little drunk from the ministrations of his grateful audience, had lapsed into a beaming, contented silence. He and Niccolo were alone when the shadow of a darker, more troubling thought crossed his placid face.

  Shifting his bulk and leaning over the table in the direction of his companion, Pagolo motioned for him to come nearer. “Niccolo,” he began hesitantly, “do you remember that day, that day in the country when we were hunting and we saw . . . the Jews and . . . what happened to them?”

  The sudden mention of “that day” went through Niccolo like a bolt. In all the years, since “that day,” in over seventeen years, he and Pagolo had never spoken of what they had seen. By tacit agreement, it was a subject that they never brought up in each other’s company, no matter how drunk, no matter how sober. Now Pagolo had inexplicably broken their silent agreement.

  The little priest continued, embarrassed, “You remember the girl? Well, I can’t be entirely certain. It’s been a long time. But, in Rome. I’m pretty sure. I think, I saw her. In Rome.”

  He stopped and stammered apologetically, almost under his breath, “In a brothel.”

  Niccolo did not set out immediately for Rome, although he was sorely tempted to do so, nor did he embark upon a life of wandering vagabondage as he had also considered doing. Two months, two turbulent months after his conversation with Pagolo, he found himself pushing through the cluttered streets and the smells of a sweltering July morning toward the Piazza della Signoria. He was clean-shaven, his h
air was cropped close to his skull, and he was immaculately attired. Gone were the tight hose and gay doublet of youth. In their place, he wore the lucco, the Florentine citizen’s gown, the very badge of sobriety, honesty, and respectability. That morning, he had dressed with exaggerated care, meticulously smoothing the long folds of the gown, caressing the soft, almost-diaphanous black wool until the garment hung just right. He had tied and retied the laces that closed it around his neck, making sure that his snow-white linen shirt was just barely visible above the line of the dark wool.

  Making his way across the piazza, toward the massive building that housed the governing bodies of Florence, Niccolo stopped, as he always did, before the statue. The polished bronze gleamed in the morning sun. The statue, by Donatello, had once been part of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s private collection, but when the Medici were driven from power and expelled, the people had dragged it here, to the very heart of the city, to serve as an example. It was a statue of the biblical Judith. In one upraised hand she brandished a curved sword, in the other, the severed head of the tyrant Holofernes. So that the meaning of the statue would not be lost on any who might, in the future, contemplate a return to the tyrannical ways of the past, the revolutionaries had added an inscription to the base, “Erected by the citizens as an exemplum of the public salvation, 1495.”

  Niccolo had always taken heart at the sight of the statue. It brought a smile to his lips to think how far it had come from the voluptuous surroundings of the Medici courtyard, how much its meaning had changed since it was commissioned by the tyrants themselves. They had never even dreamed of its implications, never for a minute seen themselves in Holofernes. Even in the blackest days of Savonarola’s mystical republic, Niccolo had seen the statue as a symbol of inevitable resurgence, of the indomitable, if sometimes grim, will of the people.

  But it also meant something much more to him—the Old Testament heroine, Judith—Giuditta! Giuditta, the girl who had come to assume such a strange and cryptic place in Niccolo’s imagination, if not his life. Over the years, he had begun to regard her as an alternative to the rather squalid series of affairs that constituted his relationships with women. She was distant, aloof, dark, mysterious, different from all the others and linked indissolubly to him by the sacredness of life and death itself—his great, mystical love! So he would dream before mercilessly dragging himself back to the reality of the situation—that the whole thing was based on a childish infatuation, that it was buried in the past, and that his longings were due almost entirely to his own restless dissatisfaction with the present. The mechanisms of fantasy and escape, he understood only too well. Still . . .

  Niccolo sighed. The statue of Judith regarded him with silent reproach. For all he knew, she was rotting away in a Roman whorehouse, prey to the appetites of fat cardinals and lean, lecherous northern bishops. . . . Again, his imagination was getting the better of him. With an effort, he shook the image from his mind. Duty called. He walked stiffly past the statue and up the stairs of the Signoria to assume his rightful place in the government of robbers and devils.

  He was doing it, he told himself, to keep a promise, to honor a commitment to a dying man. But he was also doing it because he knew in his heart that what Savonarola had told him was true—that he would not be able to do otherwise.

  Once Niccolo had made his decision, and he kept reminding himself that it was a provisional decision, he went to his father, who was elated that his lazy, overeducated son had finally decided on a career. Through Bernardo’s efforts and family connections, and through the good offices of his friend, Biagio Buonacorsi, Niccolo succeeded in having his name put forward for a position as secretary in the Second Chancery. He was then selected from a slate of candidates and eventually approved by the Signoria. Modest but appropriate sums of money changed hands.

  Niccolo Machiavelli was thirty years old the day he first mounted the steps of the Signoria to begin work there. His last thought—and it made him smile—as he disappeared into the stern, forbidding building was that Jesus Christ, too, had waited until after his thirtieth birthday to begin His work.

  The Second Chancery, where Niccolo worked, was the administrative arm of the Ten, who were charged primarily with the conduct of foreign affairs and the prosecution of war. The First Chancery, at the disposition of the Signoria itself, had broader powers, but in practice the two worked together, and the lines between their spheres of activity were often blurred. Niccolo’s initial duties consisted almost exclusively of writing letters. He wrote letters to ambassadors, commercial representatives, delegates, generals, merchants, and spies. He wrote in Latin, in Florentine, and, later, when he needed to, in cipher.

  The room where he worked was large and airy. Floor-to-ceiling windows flooded the interior with light, so that the small army of scribblers could go about their business with a minimum of eyestrain and lamp oil, which was expensive. On his first day, Niccolo was given several dispatches and told briefly how to answer each one. He was then left to his own devices. When he had penned his first official document, he signed it, with a flourish, in Latin:

  Nicholaus Maclavellus,

  Segretarius

  That made it sound more official.

  The Second Chancery was a hub of activity, for nearly all the business that the city of Florence transacted with the outside world passed through here. The pace was frantic, and Niccolo was soon caught up in it. He brought zeal and dedication to his work. Occasionally, pangs of conscience forced him to reflect on the nature of the government he was serving. He could not be altogether satisfied with it, but it was a republican government. There were no Medicis and no tyrants. And, he consoled himself, it would get better, things would improve, through his efforts and those of others like him. It was inevitable at this point that Niccolo, giving free reign to his powerful imagination, would conjure up visions in which he saw himself as the stalwart, incorruptible servant of the republic, a republic destined to repeat the glories of the ancient Roman republic! And so, inspired by these visions, he applied himself to his work with all the ardor of an ancient Roman republican. Yes, things were going well for Niccolo, and he would have been perfectly happy in the Second Chancery, had it not been for Marcello Virgilio Adriani.

  In addition to being head of the Second Chancery, Marcello Virgilio was a professor of letters. He boasted oratorical gifts. He was a self-declared member of the old school. Although the pompous Marcello Virgilio was only five years older than Niccolo, a gap of over a century separated them. Marcello Virgilio had no cause for concern over the quality of Niccolo’s work but was intent on impressing upon him, as he had impressed upon the others, his utter superiority in matters of learning and scholarship.

  “This is your work, Machiavelli, am I correct?” Absorbed in thought, Niccolo had not even seen him coming. Marcello Virgilio loomed over his writing table, a tall man, with a letter in his hand. Niccolo acknowledged authorship of the document in question, and asked, “Why, is there something wrong?”

  “No, not wrong,” said Marcello Virgilio, pursing his lips. “Not exactly wrong. Inelegant might be a better word for it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say clumsy, but inelegant.” The professor of rhetoric weighed his words carefully. Wrinkles appeared on his spacious forehead, indicating deep thought.

  “This line,” he said with all the petulance of a schoolmaster. “Read it out loud.” Niccolo did so. It was the initial line addressed to the most revered, most honorable, most etc., etc. There were two kinds of letters written in the chancery—important ones with specific instructions that were usually in Italian, and then there were the Latin letters. Written, as often as not, to flatter some head of state or prince of commerce, they were nearly entirely devoid of content and were mere exercises in stringing together euphonic, laudatory words and phrases. The letter that had attracted the notice of the meticulous Marcello Virgilio was of the latter variety.

  “Now what’s wrong with that sentence?” Niccolo waited for the master to answer
his own question, which he did presently with much furrowing of the brow. “It doesn’t move quickly enough, the phrases don’t trip off the end of your tongue. Do you get my meaning?”

  Niccolo said he did.

  “Here,” suggested the venerable chancellor, waxing enthusiastic, “try the same sentence in Greek. You’ll see what I mean. It doesn’t translate well into Greek at all, but by attempting the exercise, you’ll discover exactly where the weakness of your Latin lies.”

  “Now the bastard has what he wants,” thought Niccolo. “I’m sorry, Maestro, but I don’t have Greek.”

  Marcello Virgilio looked shocked, disgusted, and a little embarrassed—like someone whose dog has just vomited in the lap of an esteemed guest. “You have no Greek, Machiavelli? I never knew. No Greek, and to think, you’re one of our brightest boys, one of the most promising ones here. You should have studied at the academy, where I studied. You would have gotten your Greek there. By the way, where did you study?”

  “With Master Matteo.”

  “Matteo?” said the scholar, affecting to search the vast vaults of his memory for the name, “Matteo? Wasn’t he driven out of town? Blasphemy or something like that?” An almost-imperceptible shudder accompanied this observation. “No wonder you have no Greek, Machiavelli. Well, never mind.” And whisking the offending letter away, Marcello Virgilio sailed off with a look of infinite, puzzled sadness playing about his noble features. He had achieved his objective.

  “Stronzo,” grunted Niccolo under his breath. “Turd.”

  Notwithstanding his lack of preparation in Greek, in the months ahead Niccolo wrote literally thousands of letters, many of which dealt with the sempiternal waging of Florence’s half-hearted war with Pisa. When the city was not being threatened by the larger Italian states surrounding her—Rome or Milan or Venice, when the barbarians stayed on their own side of the Alps, and most important, when Florence was not at war with herself, then she inevitably directed all her bellicose energies and martial prowess against the neighboring city of Pisa.