Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  And if the enlisted men were less than enthusiastic partisans of Mars, the captains were even worse, even more addicted to bad faith and personal enrichment. “Il pesce puzza da capo—the fish stinks from the head down,” thought Niccolo.

  He stared at the four words he had written and drew a thick black circle around the key term in the equation:

  Niccolo recalled the motley appearance of the troops before Pisa. Each man had a different uniform in a different state of ragged disrepair. No identifiably human tongue was spoken among them. Animal grunts and shouts served to communicate most of their need and wants. Cursing was the only other lingua franca, and the curses rose in their belligerent throats in a half dozen different languages—Spanish and French and German—even Arabic. And every dialect of Italian was well represented, the most disreputable being the most frequently heard. What interest could these men possibly have in fighting for Florence? If the Pisans offered them more money—which often did happen—they were quick to change sides and do their gambling and grumbling and drinking on the other side of the lines of fire.

  As long as the men fighting for the Florentine cause were nothing more than a collection of outcasts and profiteers, nothing would be accomplished. In the past few years, Niccolo had been slowly putting together ideas for an alternative kind of army. For inspiration and examples, he first looked to the north, to the loosely confederated German states and to the Swiss. The small German states were independent and defended their own interests, Germans fought for themselves. They were well armed, and as a consequence, free. The Swiss were very well armed and very free. Even the Pisans, constrained by necessity, had taken up arms in their own defense which, Niccolo had to admit, explained to a great extent, their stubborn refusal to surrender.

  And then, of course, there were the Romans—I miei Romani, My Romans—as Niccolo had come to refer to them. They were stalwart models of everything that was good and honest and worthy of imitation in civic and military virtue. And in the Roman republic, only Romans fought in the army, Romans defending Rome and her interests, ordinary citizens, like Cinncinatus, leaving their farms in times of trouble to come to the defense of the republic. Why couldn’t the Florentines do as much? And Niccolo’s mind drifted into visions of disciplined Florentine troops, drawn up in smart and orderly formations, speaking, not Spanish or French, but the sweet Florentine dialect of Italian. He reached for his pen and began work on his proposal, writing slowly at first, but then with mounting speed and excitement. As his hand flew across the page, and as his ideas and arguments took shape, the Florentine militia was born.

  It was an odd match of talent and ability to the task at hand. Niccolo was a secretary in the chancery, a man of letters, and had never received any formal military training. On the other hand, he was shrewd, was an avid reader and student, was something of a visionary, and was a zealot who pursued his ideas with an ardor and passion to which few men in the republic of Florence could lay claim. It was Niccolo’s unique mix of qualifications and lack of experience that would lead to the subsequent triumphs and disasters of the Florentine militia.

  He had little trouble persuading Soderini to allow him to begin incorporating an army of native-born Florentines. He presented the idea to the gonfaloniere as a big, new “plan,” a novel approach to the ruinous and taxing problems of war and peace. For the next three years, Niccolo’s prodigious energies would be dedicated almost exclusively to the formation and training of his army of honest patriots.

  His work was divided primarily into two parts—working out the rules for the incorporation and governance of the militia, and actually recruiting and training the new citizen-soldiers. In this latter capacity, he was indefatigable, traveling tirelessly throughout Tuscany, enrolling infantry, distributing arms, studying camps and garrisons and fortifications, and supervising training exercises.

  It was at one of the these early training exercises, under the hot noonday sun outside the walls of Florence that Niccolo had his first opportunity to put his military science into practice. He began by making a short inspirational speech to the assembled recruits.

  “The infantry is the backbone of the army,” he said proudly. “Through discipline and drill you will learn to be an infantry such as no other since the times of the Roman republic. Using the enlightened strategies of these very Romans, you will become an invincible bulwark to your republic, a shield against her enemies and the defenders of her sacrosanct liberty.”

  Having said this, Niccolo gathered the heads of the various companies and battalions around him and, using charts and drawings that he had made himself from descriptions and designs found in the old Roman historians, explained the first order of battle to them. They were going to practice a simple maneuver in which an army marching forward closes ranks and turns to meet an enemy approaching from the left flank. He spoke clearly and concisely, using the drawings to great advantage so that the essence of the maneuver was immediately clear to his subalterns. They returned to their companies and relayed his instructions to the men.

  When the recruits were brought up in marching order, Niccolo gave the command to turn and close ranks. But instead of the x’s and o’s pivoting and drawing together in an orderly fashion into a solid block, and allowing the little v’s—the pikemen—to move from the head of the column to the left flank, chaos ensued.

  Niccolo called the commanders together for another conference, and the maneuver was repeated with similar results. For over two hours, he kept the company there under the blazing sun, repeating the same maneuver, but the stalwart, patriotic butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers recently turned militiamen could not seem to master the thing.

  Niccolo darted in and out of their ranks, explaining what the men were doing wrong and exhorting them to try harder, to try again. He emphasized the need for coordinated action, for precise timing, but still the men missed their cues and blundered into one another. When they had repeated the maneuver for perhaps the tenth time, it was clear that they had all finally mastered the difference between right and left and were moving in the desired direction, but their movements were anything but precise and coordinated. Beginning to feel the frustration and the heat, Niccolo nevertheless called upon the sweaty recruits to line up yet another time. He was determined to make a go of it. As he raised his arm in anticipation of giving the command, a loud peal of laughter rang out from behind him.

  “Generalissimo! Buon di’,” It was a lusty woman’s voice that called out to him, and, spinning around, Niccolo saw the countess, Caterina Sforza.

  “You don’t mind if we watch?” she said. With the statuesque blond was her oldest son, Giovanni.

  “You can watch, but I’m afraid there isn’t much to see. This is their first day. They’re a little inexperienced.”

  “They’re inexperienced?”

  As the bewildered troops milled about, awaiting the next order from their commander, Caterina came up alongside Niccolo. “Call it a day, Niccolo. It’s hot. Let the poor dears go. Come on, we’ll have lunch.”

  “I can’t,” he said stubbornly.

  “Very well,” she said. “You want to see them do it right? Giovanni, will you?”

  The boy looked at Niccolo, and, receiving a begrudging nod, leapt to execute his mother’s wish. He was a dashing black-clad lad of seventeen or eighteen years of age.

  Caterina watched as her first-born strode confidently over to the rag-tag ranks and began issuing orders. “He’s been in Milan with my first husband’s family,” she said. “Soldiering.”

  When Giovanni had the troops aligned to his satisfaction, he gave the signal and a great roar of drums exploded. As the drummers beat out their staccato rhythms, the young man barked his orders in time, and the men moved smartly. He put them through their paces, and with the thrill of drumbeats pounding in their hearts and limbs, they had no trouble marking time. When the maneuver was complete, the drums stopped and the men stood stiffly at attention. Giovanni beamed.

  “H
e takes after his mother,” acknowledged Niccolo.

  “Lunch?”

  The Florentine peasant has clumsy shoes and a delicate mind.

  —PROVERB

  On Niccolo’s recommendation, the Signoria instituted a search for a professional military commander who would be able to instill discipline and the other martial virtues in the neophyte militia. Although he relinquished his active role in the hands-on training of the men, the secretary was still very much involved in other aspects of the militia, in particular, recruiting. He excelled at speaking to groups of skeptical farmers in the countryside, lauding the virtues and advantages of Florentine freedom and independence. It was seldom that after one of these stump speeches Niccolo was not surrounded by crowds of men, eager to enroll in the new people’s army.

  On one such occasion, however, speaking in a small farming village a few miles south of Florence, Niccolo had not succeeded in adding any names to his militia’s roll. Frustrated and tired, he was wrapping up the heavy enrollment ledgers along with his writing materials and putting them into his saddlebags when he saw a man approaching him. He was a small, grizzled fellow whom Niccolo had remarked in the crowd, leaning against a barn, arms crossed defiantly on his chest. Niccolo was accustomed to these cynics—he saw them in every village—and paid him little mind.

  “You make a great speech, sir, but it didn’t do much good, did it?” said the man sarcastically.

  “I’m sure,” said Niccolo testily, stuffing the last of his belongings into the bags and pulling the straps tight. He was eager to be on his way and did not envision spending precious time arguing with a contentious bumpkin.

  “Won’t you stop for a drink to wash the dust out of your mouth? All those high-sounding words must have left you dry.”

  From the other side of his horse, Niccolo declined: “I have two more stops to make today, and it’s already late. If you have some business you’d like to take up with me, please be brief.”

  “Business indeed! Brief indeed! You must be a very important gentleman,” said the other, with exaggerated deference.

  Ignoring him, Niccolo mounted his horse, took the reins, and prepared to ride off, but the man was standing in his way, blocking his path. He was standing there just grinning like a pernicious elf. “You weren’t such an important gentleman the last time we met, Machiavelli,” he said.

  Niccolo took a long, hard look at his antagonist and, through the thick grey beard and hair and the wild, bushy eyebrows, he discerned the deep, crooked scar that cut across his forehead, through the blind eye and down his cheek like the number 7.

  “Madre di Dio!” exclaimed Niccolo, nearly falling off his horse. “The Archbishop of Outlaws!”

  Niccolo did accept the proffered drink after all, to renew his acquaintance with an old friend. After that fateful day many years ago, Niccolo had seen Michele several times, making the trip out into the countryside to enjoy his company. But his visits became less and less frequent as other interests and pursuits and friendships claimed more and more of his time. Finally, as two people living in different worlds are wont to do, they simply lost touch.

  Now, almost twenty-five years later, comfortably ensconced in the shade of a grape arbor at the rear of a rural tavern, the two men talked. Michele seemed pleased with the progress Niccolo had made in the world, shaking his head judiciously as the younger man recounted how he had come to be on his present errand.

  “And you, Michele?” said Niccolo. “Are you still the terror of the Tuscan countryside?”

  “No,” said the wizened little bandit, “too old for that kind of work. I keep to myself these days, tend my vines and my garden.”

  “And Cesca? Is she still the most lovely lady in the contado?”

  “Dead,” said Michele, staring into his wine cup. “It was a long time ago, almost ten years, in ’95, when the armies came. The soldiers killed her.”

  “The French?” asked Niccolo.

  “Maybe the French,” said Michele bitterly. “Or our own. Italy was full of armies in ’95, and soldiers are all the same.”

  Michele sighed. “I live with one of my sons now. I’m not much good for anything except telling stories of the old days to entertain my grandchildren.”

  “Nonsense,” said Niccolo in an attempt to cheer his gloomy friend. “I bet you can still use a bow with the best of them! Why not join my militia! We can always use a good archer to train the recruits.”

  “My son, my idiot son,” said Michele, shaking his head. “He’ll probably want to run off and join your militia when he hears about it, but not me. Never.”

  “Why not?” asked Niccolo. “We’ll enroll the two of you! Father and son!”

  “Why not, indeed! What’s there to fight for? What’s there to defend?”

  “Freedom!”

  “Whose freedom?”

  “Yours, mine, everyone’s! The freedom and independence of the republic, of the Florentine people!” Niccolo was unconsciously slipping into his recruiting speech.

  Michele noticed the escalation in rhetoric: “Save the oratory, Niccolo. I don’t need a lesson in Florentine liberty.”

  “Maybe you do.”

  “No, maybe you do, my young friend,” the outlaw fired back. “Maybe you can learn a thing or two from an old man.”

  “About what?” asked Niccolo suspiciously.

  “About freedom and liberty and your republic!” said Michele. “And about betrayal.”

  Niccolo consented to listen and sat back. He was more than a little miffed that his old friend presumed to lecture him on what was, after all, his area of expertise. But he would let him have his say. For old time’s sake.

  Michele was grinning like a man holding all the cards as he began: “It happened a long time ago. Nobody knows how it started. Was there a single incident that sparked things? Or was it thousands of incidents, in thousands of places happening to generations of us, year in and year out, decade after decade? Nobody knows, but one day it exploded.

  “It started with secret meetings, late at night. Speakers, not nearly as polished as you, but burning with anger, excited the crowds. Then one morning, the seething cauldron boiled over and sent a scalding torrent through the streets—the Ciompi. It was the beginning of the clothworkers’ revolt.

  “I know about the revolt of the Ciompi,” said Niccolo. “A popular uprising that happened over a hundred years ago.”

  “That’s right, a popular uprising!” said Michele. “Combers and carders, beaters, dyers, fullers, spinners, and menders. Out of the washhouses and stretching sheds they came and headed north across the river to the Signoria to demand their rights. Their ranks swelling as they went, they were joined by carters, boatmen, laborers, peddlers, and all the other wretched and dispossessed.

  “They called them Ciompi because of the heavy clogs they wore in the washhouses.” He eyed his young friend, “Have you ever worn a pair of clogs, or tried to walk in them?”

  “Not I,” said Niccolo, eyeing his smart, pointed, black boots.

  “Clogs aren’t made for moving around; they’re made for standing still, or for moving one step in this direction, then one step back. They wear them in the washing houses to keep their feet dry. Not that anything keeps dry for long in the washing houses. You stand there for fourteen, sixteen hours a day, from sunup till sundown. As long as there’s light to work. You stand in water up to your ankles, sometimes up to your knees. It’s not terribly bad in the summer, the water will keep you cool, but your feet hurt from standing for so long, and the water swells them and makes it worse. But the winter is a killer, because the water is freezing and it seeps into your bones and makes them ache beyond what a man can endure. The rough wood of the clogs chafes at your wet, frozen feet, so that walking home is so painful you can’t stand it and you’re lucky to have a few lumps of coal to throw in the brazier to bring a little warm blood back into your blue, lifeless feet at the end of the day.

  “Anyway, the Ciompi finally rose up. In their
battered clogs, they went marching, clomping through the streets, not on their way to another man’s war, but to their own. And do you know what standard they chose to march under, what banner they took as their own?

  Niccolo said he didn’t.

  “The gonfalone di giustizia.”

  “Under the standard of justice, they marched to the Signoria and surrounded it. The Signori, the rulers, were terrified. One at a time, in various disguises, the cowards slipped out of the besieged building and vanished. The next morning, the people stormed the palazzo. Lowborn, dirty workers poured into the hallowed marble halls to claim what was rightfully theirs—Florence, and justice!

  Michele paused and fixed his eye on Niccolo: ‘The reason I know these things, Niccolo, is because I’ve heard them told again and again ever since I was a child. I’ve heard them told by people who were there. I’ve heard them told by men and women with fierce tears streaming down their faces. These were the things my people remembered. I don’t think you’ll find them written down in books. So listen.

  “When the people took the palazzo, the standard of justice was in the rough hands of a common wool carder. That was my grandfather—Michele di Lando.”

  “Michele di Lando was your grandfather!” Niccolo was shocked. “The man who led the revolt of the Ciompi was your grandfather!”

  “None other. The old outlaw continued his tale, “There he was, waving the banner of justice for everybody to see. Barefoot and dressed in rags, but with the symbol of justice clamped in his hands! How cool the marble steps must have felt under his bare feet! How good that banner must have felt in his hands!”

  Michele, the grandson, stopped and was staring at his own hands. Not for the first time, he was imagining his grandfather holding the banner aloft on the steps of the Signoria. Justice for all within reach, its symbol in his hands.