The location of the city house, as well as the various properties scattered about the countryside in the hills just south of the city, indicates that the Machiavelli originated in the Val di Pesa, in the wine-making region of Chianti. As the population of Florence swelled in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, largely through immigration from the contado, the rural area just outside the city limits, families tended to settle in districts closest to the gates through which they had first entered. The less densely populated Oltrarno was a popular destination for new immigrants, particularly those from the region south of the city. It is almost certain, then, though there are no documents prior to the thirteenth century to prove this, that Niccolò’s distant ancestors were among those nameless tillers of the soil who, since before the days of the Roman Empire, cultivated grape and olive on the sloping, rocky hillsides that lie between Florence and Siena.
The insecure respectability that marked Niccolò’s life and that fueled much of his creative fire was the result of fortunate decisions made by long-dead ancestors and unwise choices made more recently. If Niccolò burned with ambition, it was due at least in part to the gap he perceived between the prestige of the Machiavelli name and the precariousness of current circumstances. In his dedication to The Prince he refers to himself as “a man of low and poor station,” a perspective that encouraged him to break with convention and propose startlingly new solutions to old problems. Had he been richer or more careful of his dignity, it is unlikely he would have made his career in the civil service, a form of employment too close to real work to be suitable for a gentleman and one that provided vital insight into the cruel economy of power. Equally important, the nagging sense that his family was in decline left him with a fierce ambition to make his mark.
The Machiavelli first enter history during the thirteenth century as adherents of the Guelph party, the group allied with the papacy in their often bitter quarrel with the Ghibellines, followers of the Holy Roman Emperor. Though these factions, which existed in most of the cities of northern and central Italy, ostensibly owed their allegiance to one or the other of the great universal lords of Europe, abstract geopolitical considerations often were less significant than the fact that party solidarity provided an opportunity to settle purely local scores. In the streets of Florence, as in Milan, Pistoia, and Siena, Guelphs and Ghibellines organized themselves into armed factions and slew each other with abandon as first one and then the other gained momentary advantage, burning down the houses of their enemies and driving the survivors through the city gates. Time and again the same bloody drama played itself out. While the victors celebrated, the exiles made their way to the nearest friendly city, where they plotted revenge on their insufferable compatriots. The most famous iteration of this familiar story involves the great Florentine Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti who, after the triumph of the Guelphs in 1250, headed to Siena, where the Emperor’s men still clung to power. Demonstrating that loyalty to party and family meant more than loyalty to country, Farinata led the armies of Siena against his hometown, defeating them at the battle of Montaperti and briefly reasserting Ghibelline ascendance in Florence.iii
One of the earliest mentions of the Machiavelli family comes in the context of this Ghibelline triumph, when a contemporary chronicler listed them among the prominent Guelphs whose houses were plundered by their enemies. Fortunately for the Machiavelli and their allies, the quarrelsome and faction-ridden Ghibellines failed to consolidate their victory and by 1267 the Guelphs, the Machiavelli among them, had regained control. But the Guelphs proved equally belligerent, repeating the worst excesses of their ousted foes. This particular round of destruction was not entirely unproductive since the torching of the houses of the Ghibelline Uberti clan created much needed open space in the crowded heart of the city. The smoldering ruins of the Uberti towers were paved over and transformed into Florence’s main civic square, the Piazza della Signoria—a peculiar but effective bit of urban renewal.
The triumph of the Guelphs brought no peace to the city. The crumbs of the victory feast had barely been cleared when they themselves split into rival factions—the Blacks and the Whites—who now went about slaughtering each other with equal gusto.iv The Machiavelli, once again fortunate in their loyalties, joined the victorious Blacks, the faction that, under the lead of the Donati family, banished Florence’s most famous citizen, the poet Dante Alighieri, who had the bad luck to belong to the Whites. As a bitter, rootless exile, Dante took his revenge on the city that had betrayed him by providing eyewitness testimony that “through Hell [Florence’s] name is spread abroad!”
Niccolò’s ancestors joined in the street battles that were a feature of daily life in medieval Florence, ransacking the houses of their neighbors when they were on top and suffering the same fate themselves when Fortune reversed herself. If Niccolò would one day become the world’s most famous cynic, given his own family history and that of his native city, it is a view he came by honestly. While the Machiavelli were not among the leaders of the victorious Black Guelphs, by the mid-fourteenth century they were named as one of the “notable” citizen families of the Oltrarno neighborhood. Equally significant, contemporary accounts list the Machiavelli as popolani—that is among those prosperous merchants who were slowly pushing aside the old feudal aristocracy as the ruling class of the city.
The annals of medieval Florence chronicle a tragic cycle of murder and arson that was one generation’s legacy to the next, but viewed from a distance a more constructive picture emerges. In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli admits that “if in any other republic there were ever notable divisions, those of Florence are most notable . . . . From such divisions came as many dead, as many exiles, and as many families destroyed as ever occurred in any city in memory.” But he perceived that her greatest fault revealed her greatest virtue, for “in my judgment no other instance appears to me to show so well the power of our city as the one derived from these divisions, which would have had the force to annihilate any great and very powerful city. Nevertheless ours, it appeared, became ever greater from them.” However violently and spasmodically, Florence was wrenching itself free from ancient feudal bonds and asserting its autonomy in defiance of both Pope and Emperor. By the end of the thirteenth century, despite periodic orgies of bloodletting, Florence had transformed itself into a vital and independent state, dominated by merchants and bankers grown prosperous on the revived trade between East and West that was an unintended by-product of the Crusades.
In the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, Florence established a government that reflected the new order; the right to vote and to hold office would no longer be the privilege of the landed aristocracy but would be based on membership in one of the city’s merchant or professional guilds.v Flexing their newfound muscle, these merchants now sought to rein in the lawless magnates whose arrogance and violence had for so long disturbed the peace. Merchants and shopkeepers formed themselves into a citizen militia powerful enough to challenge the armored knights who were the source of the feudal aristocracy’s military power. First they tore down the towers in the city from which the great lords had waged war on each other, and then marched out into the countryside, smashing their castles and forcing them to swear allegiance to the commune. “[H]aving eliminated their nobility,” Machiavelli wrote in his Florentine Histories, “the republic was left in the hands of men nurtured in trade.”
The Machiavelli were among the families benefiting from the government established by the Ordinances of Justice, and from the end of the thirteenth century their name crops up regularly among the Three Majors, the chief elected offices of the land.vi The social transformation that brought families like the Machiavelli, the Medici, and the Pitti to the fore while marginalizing such feudal “magnates” as the Tornaquinci and the Pazzi, did not constitute a full-scale revolution in which one class seized power from another, but rather an evolution within a population in which such distinctions were already thoroughly confused. This
confusion can be seen in microcosm among Niccolò’s own ancestors. In 1393, two Machiavelli brothers, Buoninsegna and Lorenzo di Filippo (Buoninsegna was Niccolò’s great-great-grandfather) inherited the run-down castle of Montespertoli in the Val di Pesa, formerly the possession of the noble Castellani. Thus, while their descendants continued to earn a living in the city as merchants, bankers, and lawyers, their titles and property in the countryside provided both income and social standing.
By the mid-fourteenth century the Machiavelli were firmly ensconced in the Oltrarno. The property on the Via Romana was purchased by the family from the powerful Pitti clan in the late 1300s. By that time, they were also in possession of various properties in the Val di Pesa south of Florence, including Sant’ Andrea in Percussina, where Niccolò would retire to write The Prince. But while the Machiavelli prospered along with the commune, they did not stand out from dozens of their colleagues. In the tax rolls of 1427, for instance, no Machiavelli is listed among the top bracket of households assessed at more than 10,000 florins.vii Nor did they stand out in the political arena. The great struggle for supremacy between the Albizzi faction and the rising Medici clan that dominated the early decades of the fifteenth century saw the Machiavelli discreetly on the sidelines, poised to retain their modest standing whichever side ultimately prevailed. When, in 1434, Cosimo de’ Medici, following a year of exile, drove his opponents from the city and established himself and his allies as the dominant power in the land, none of the Machiavelli suffered in the wholesale changing of the guard.
Like most Florentine families, the Machiavelli identified closely with their own neighborhood, investing not only their financial but their spiritual capital in the local community. Opposite the Machiavelli compound was the parish church of Santa Felicità, where the family claimed patronage rights over the small chapel of San Gregorio. Here young Niccolò spent many a Sunday morning gazing up at Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco of Christ’s deposition from the cross, commissioned by his cousin Alessandro, an experience that seems to have done little to instill in him either piety or an aesthetic sense.
If the overall picture of the Machiavelli as the fifteenth century unfolded was one of comfortable prosperity, in the decades before Niccolò’s birth there were signs of future difficulty. The source of these troubles was largely Bernardo himself. Though Niccolò never seems to have reproached his father, for whom he showed a deep affection, it is clear that Bernardo had none of the characteristic Florentine aptitude for business. One can comb through his diary, which he kept for thirteen years of his adult life, and still have no idea what Bernardo did to earn a living. The pages are filled with various mundane transactions—the sale of wool or firewood from the farm at Sant’ Andrea in Percussina, a dispute with a butcher over payment for a delivery of spring lambs for Easter, endless haggling over the dowry for his daughter’s wedding—but he never seems to have contemplated the possibility of adding to his modest patrimony through investment or hard work. The frugality of the family budget is suggested by numerous transactions recorded with one Matteo, a dealer in secondhand clothes, justifying Niccolò’s claim that growing up he “learned to deny myself rather than to enjoy.” The impression left by Bernardo’s diary was that he was singularly lacking in ambition, particularly when compared with his compatriots, who were known throughout Italy as shrewd businessmen, greedy for gain, and ambitious as the devil.
Bernardo had been trained in the law, but there is little indication that he ever earned money by pursuing this potentially lucrative career. On his tax return of 1480, he wrote: “messer Bernardo . . . practices no gainful employment”—a statement that seems as much a boast as a plea for understanding. Whatever his financial circumstances, he was too much a gentleman to consider bolstering the family fortune through work. His circumstances and attitude are remarkably similar to that of Michelangelo’s father, a member of the minor nobility, who proudly told the ruler of the city: “I have never practiced any profession; but I have always up to now lived on my slender income, attending to those few possessions left to me by my forebears, seeking not only to maintain them but to increase them as much as possible by my diligence.”
The most tangible result of Bernardo’s education seems to have been the acquisition of debt he had difficulty repaying and that served as a handy excuse whenever he fell behind on his taxes. Like his son, he was both garrulous and gregarious and preferred to spend his time discussing the news of the day rather than earning a florin. He was a man in no particular hurry, content to rely on an inheritance sufficient to allow him the leisure in which to pursue his intellectual interests.
This fecklessness determined the trajectory of Niccolò’s life. The fact that Bernardo was in arrears with his taxes meant that he was officially listed as a specchio (literally on the board), that is, barred from holding office. This was both a political and a social impediment since election to political office was the medium through which Renaissance Florentines measured their status.viii Even during the height of the Medici regime, when real power was concentrated in a few hands, politics still played a central role in the Florentine citizen’s life. The traditional legislative bodies continued to meet and debate in the Palazzo della Signoria and, to a large extent, social standing was determined—and useful connections made—by success in elections that were hotly contested even when the offices to which they led had been reduced to futility.
Thus Bernardo fell short on the most significant measure of a Florentine citizen’s social standing. His friendship with Chancellor Bartolomeo Scala reveals that the debt preventing him from holding elective office did not exclude him from polite society, but it did mean that he was always a marginal, even eccentric figure. This was the way Bernardo preferred things. His daily itinerary shows him puttering about his estates, tending in desultory fashion to the meager economy of his household, reading his books in quiet and generally enjoying his life as a cultured gentleman of modest means. This impression is only reinforced by the most ambitious undertaking recorded in the pages of his diary: the compilation of an index for a new edition of Livy’s monumental history of Rome.ix The project, which required him to provide a list of “all the cities and mountains and rivers that are mentioned” in the text, involved a good deal of scholarly detective work, a task in which he was aided by the loan of a rare volume of Ptolemy’s world atlas. This was his true calling: to sift through ancient books in search of obscure facts—a pedant’s dream of paradise. It speaks to Bernardo’s priorities that the only payment he received for all his hard work was a copy of the precious volumes for his own library, a transaction that suggests the Florentine’s love of classical learning but an atypical disdain for hard cash.
While Bernardo’s diaries provide only the most grudging glimpses into his life, Niccolò’s own writing may shed some additional light. Niccolò’s satirical play Clizia includes a description of an elderly Florentine gentleman, one Nicomaco, who sounds a lot like his own father, a modest man of affairs and an amateur scholar: “He spent his time as a good man should,” recalls his wife, Sofronia.
He got up early in the morning, heard mass, bought the provisions for the day. Then, if he had business in the public square, in the market, with the magistrates, he attended to it; if he didn’t, he either joined with some citizen in serious conversation, or he went into his office at home, where he wrote up his ledger and straightened out his accounts. Then he dined pleasantly with his family, and after he had dined, he talked with his son, advised him, taught him to understand men, and by means of various examples, ancient and modern, showed him how to live. Then he went out. He spent the whole day either in business or in dignified and honorable pastimes. When it was evening, the Ave Maria always found him at home; he sat a little while with us by the fire, if it was winter, then went into his office to go over his affairs. At nine o’clock he had a cheerful supper. This ordering of his life was an example to all the others in the house, and everybody was ashamed not to imitate him.
Niccolò often complained about his own poverty, but he never blamed his father. In fact, father and son were cut from the same cloth. His admission that he knew nothing of “either the silk or the wool trade, or profits or losses,” could as easily have come from Bernardo’s mouth.
Father and son resembled each other in other ways, too. Both were sensitive about the family honor, which they guarded as a precious commodity even as they allowed more tangible assets to slip through their fingers. One incident stands out from the rather dry recitation of daily transactions that forms the bulk of Bernardo’s diary. It concerns the pregnancy of the serving girl Lorenza, who had been seduced, perhaps even raped, by one Niccolò d’Alessandro Machiavelli, a second cousin and neighbor in the Oltrarno, while she was living under Bernardo’s roof. Throughout the investigation of the incident and the bitter recriminations that followed, Bernardo seems motivated primarily by a desire to uphold his reputation. Typically for a man of his class, he is less concerned for the unfortunate girl than for his good name, which had been besmirched by the recklessness of a young relative.
The importance of the incident to Bernardo is reflected in the number of pages he devotes to it, but a more serious blow to the family’s reputation is passed over in silence. This concerned another relative, also a second cousin, by the name of Girolamo Machiavelli. Though a far more distinguished citizen—he was a professor of law at the University of Florence—Girolamo more seriously damaged the family name than the lecherous Niccolò d’Alessandro. In the summer of 1458, during one of the periodic struggles between the ruling clique and a faction seeking more democratic representation, Girolamo spoke out forcefully against the electoral controls imposed by Cosimo de’ Medici and his henchmen. This courageous act resulted in Girolamo’s arrest and, when he persisted in agitating against the regime, eventual imprisonment. This was a rare instance in the annals of the Machiavelli family when one of its members had stood apart from the anonymous crowd of respectable popolani, but the results of this bold act would not have encouraged his kinsmen to follow in his footsteps. Girolamo’s rashness only served to reinforce Bernardo’s aversion to politics.
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