Machiavelli
Page 4
A clue to Bernardo’s attitude toward his wayward cousin comes in Bartolomeo Scala’s De Legibus, where the author attributes to his friend the following bit of political wisdom, won presumably from hard personal experience: “For it often happens that men who are just and principled risk losing their good names and reputation because they are the innocent heirs or relatives of someone in disgrace.” But if Bernardo had actually vented these bitter feelings to his friend, he seems not to have heeded his own advice. In 1458, the same year that Girolamo spoke out against the government, Bernardo, then a mature man of thirty-three,x compounded his kinsman’s indiscretion by marrying Bartolomea, widow of the apothecary Niccolò Benizi. Other members of the Benizi family, though not Niccolò himself, had been implicated in Girolamo’s machinations against the government and had been among those exiled for sedition. It is unlikely that Bernardo intended by his choice of bride to make a political statement but the questionable association certainly did nothing to deter him. If this speaks well of Bernardo’s independence, it also confirms his impracticality.
Despite the association with a politically suspect family, Bernardo’s marriage was conventional in other respects. The Benizi were neighbors of the Machiavelli in the parish of Santa Felicità, and the young widow must have seemed like an eminently suitable match for the scholarly bachelor. “Above all else stick together with your neighbors and kinsmen,” wrote the Florentine patrician Gino Capponi, advice Bernardo apparently took to heart. In the fractious, violent world of Florence, such local alliances were often the best guarantee of family survival.
• • •
Niccolò was the third child of the union between Bernardo and Bartolomea. He had two older sisters: Primavera, born around 1465, and Margherita, born 1468. Niccolò, born the following year, was the oldest son, and in this patriarchal society his arrival was a momentous occasion since it all but guaranteed that the family name would endure and prosper.xi The birth of a son after two daughters was particularly welcome since the cash-strapped Bernardo was already having difficulty salting away sufficient funds to provide the older girls with adequate dowries. To young Niccolò would fall the honor and the burden of carrying on the family name, a task made increasingly difficult by Bernardo’s carelessness.
As for Bartolomea, her individuality, like that of most of her sex in this male-dominated society, has largely been lost to history. Niccolò himself almost never mentioned his mother, and never provided any insight that would have put flesh on the bare bones of her biography. Bernardo makes frequent reference to “la mia donna” or “la Bartolomea” in his diary, but he leaves no room for the expression of feeling in the dry recitation of facts that make up his entries. What we can glean from these pages is that Bartolomea was a practical woman, a frugal housekeeper and helpmate to her husband in managing their modest properties. Only in the scandal over the pregnant serving girl does Bartolomea play a significant role; here, where sexual mores were involved and discretion required, a woman’s delicacy was used to elicit the truth where a man’s blunter approach might have proved ineffective. When it came to confronting the offending party and negotiating the financial settlement, however, Bernardo once again took matters into his own hands.
The only glimmer we have that Bartolomea was anything more than the typical middle-class housewife is the family tradition that when Niccolò was young she composed some religious verses for her son, a rare achievement in a world where many girls, even from good families, were barely literate. Employing her talents for pious ends reflects a conventional cast of mind, but the fact that she took the time and effort to write original poetry suggests a woman of more than ordinary ambition and ability.
It is difficult to determine Bartolomea’s contribution to Niccolò’s development. Like most Florentine mothers, she no doubt tended to his day-to-day needs while his father saw to his moral and intellectual development. Her apparent piety, in any case, made little impression on her son, whose career was marked by a disdain for priests and a contempt for religious hypocrisy. Niccolò may well have inherited from her his literary flair, but it is safe to assume that the conventional Bartolomea would have been horrified had she known the use to which he would put his talents.
It is easier to trace his father’s influence—not only the shared love of books and of history, but also the impracticality when it came to money, intertwined traits that give to both father and son the air of absentminded scholars whose heads are too filled with grandiose schemes to pay attention to the mundane details of daily living. But in the most important decision of his life—to enter government service and dedicate his life to the state—Niccolò ran in the opposite direction. It is above all Niccolò’s passion for public service that distinguishes him from his father. While Bernardo rarely set foot in the Palazzo della Signoria, center of Florence’s political life, Niccolò never felt more at home than within its crowded chambers, bent over his desk, where he handled much of the government’s correspondence. It is plausible to assume that his dedication to public service stemmed from a subconscious need to erase the political and financial failure of his father. Often the most patriotic men are those who feel politically and economically marginalized, who compensate for their social insecurity by more fiercely attaching themselves to the state that spurned them. Clearly, Niccolò set out upon a much different path than the one traversed by his father, but there is a strange sort of symmetry to their journeys. Niccolò’s passionate attachment to politics suggests a deep psychological need, perhaps born out of a sense that his father was a somewhat pathetic figure in the eyes of his peers.
• • •
Given the copious documentation for his later life, much of it provided by Machiavelli himself, Niccolò’s early years remain frustratingly obscure. It is as if he walks onto the stage of history fully formed at the age of twenty-eight. What we know of his life before his memorable debut consists of a few dry facts indifferently recorded in Bernardo’s diary; one learns more from these pages about the two oxen he purchased to plow his fields than about his son. The copious correspondence, both personal and official, that opens an intimate window onto Machiavelli’s life begins only when he enters the public sphere. This is a pity, since Niccolò’s own voice—sardonic, insightful, and always fresh—would surely have vividly evoked the scenes of his childhood.
Even without the benefit of his unique perspective the view is fascinating enough. Machiavelli was a product of a remarkable city at the most remarkable period in its history. The small, independent Republic of Florence was something of an anachronism in an age of rising nation-states, a pygmy among giants, to paraphrase Machiavelli’s memorable description of his own family. Florence itself numbered no more than about fifty thousand souls—less than half its peak population reached in the mid-fourteenth century before the coming of the Black Death—while her Tuscan empire included merely a handful of small cities and rustic hamlets. The form of government that had evolved during the Middle Ages was republican; frequent elections and multiple, overlapping jurisdictions made for a lively, if inefficient, political system. The franchise was restricted to wealthy merchants and more modest artisans, but while the urban masses were excluded from any role in political life, Florence remained perhaps the most democratic state in Europe. At least in theory. In fact, the institutional weakness of the government invited its own subversion. Throughout the years of Machiavelli’s youth, real power was held by a single family—the fabulously rich Medici—and their cronies, a situation that elicited much grumbling and occasional violence from families who felt they had an equal claim to rule.
One way the Medici consoled their compatriots for the loss of any real say in their own government was by keeping the city prosperous and splendid. During his boyhood some of the greatest minds of the age were assembling in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s palace on the Via Larga, and many of history’s greatest works of art were taking shape in the studios about town: Sandro Botticelli, favored by the Medici family, wa
s conjuring a mood of pagan sensuality in his Primavera (1478) and Birth of Venus (1482); Andrea del Verrocchio, churning out masterpieces of painting and sculpture assembly-line style, had just taken into his busy studio a talented young apprentice, Leonardo da Vinci, who startled the city with precocious works that surpassed those of his master; while his chief competitor, the equally industrious Domenico Ghirlandaio and his students—among whom was the young Michelangelo—frescoed the walls of the city’s churches with narratives in which holy miracles unfolded on the familiar streets of the city while its leading citizens looked on.
Nor was creativity confined to the artists’ studios. Impeding traffic and filling the streets with dust and noise were the massive building projects that proclaimed the taste, wealth, and vanity of the richest citizens, including the imposing palaces of the Pitti family, a few blocks to the south of the Machiavelli compound, and of the Strozzi, just beginning to rise near the Old Market. But if the bankers and merchants of Florence had abandoned medieval prohibitions against extravagant display, they still felt sufficiently uneasy to expiate their sins by spending lavishly on the city’s great ecclesiastical institutions. The interior of every sacred structure, from the Duomo to the local parish church, gleamed with gilded altarpieces and jewel-encrusted reliquaries paid for out of the profits of the city’s thriving wool and silk trade; bankers and lawyers vied with each other in the generosity of their bequests to charitable institutions, while others served the public good by opening the world’s first public libraries.
It was, in short, an exciting time to be alive. In many ways the city of Florence seemed to be the center of the universe, but there is little evidence that Machiavelli was deeply affected by the unparalleled visual culture of the city. Of greater interest to a young man whose gifts were literary and interests political were the remarkable poets and philosophers who congregated at the home of Florence’s leading citizen, Lorenzo de’ Medici. Not only was Il Magnifico a fine poet in his own right, but he attracted the greatest writers and thinkers of the day to the city, including the philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, and the poet and scholar Angelo Poliziano. “This is an age of gold,” wrote Ficino in an understandable burst of pride, a verdict that history has largely confirmed.
Machiavelli grew to maturity in one of the most peaceful interludes in the turbulent history of Florence. Through the tireless diplomacy of Lorenzo de’ Medici the city became, in the words of Machiavelli’s friend and contemporary, Francesco Guicciardini, “the fulcrum of Italy”—the keystone in an elaborate system of alliances that prevented the rival states of Italy from destroying each other and that kept greedy foreigners from swooping in to pick up the pieces. In his History of Florence, Guicciardini summed up the mood of the city during the last decade of Lorenzo’s reign:
The city enjoyed perfect peace, the citizens were united and in harmony, and the government so powerful that no one dared oppose it. The people every day delighted in shows, revelries and other novelties; they were well fed, as the city was plentifully supplied with victuals, and all its activities flourished. Men of intellect and ability were contented, for all letters, all arts, all talents were welcomed and recognized. While the city within was universally enjoying the most perfect peace and quiet, without her glory and reputation were supreme because she had a government and a leader of the highest authority.
Fourteen years older than his friend, Machiavelli recalls that time with equal fondness, declaring that until Lorenzo’s death in 1492, “Florentines lived in very great prosperity . . . . For when the arms of Italy, which had been stayed by Lorenzo’s sense and authority, had been put down, he turned his mind to making himself and his city great.” Both men looked back on the years of their youth as an idyllic time that stood in stark contrast to the disorder that followed Lorenzo’s death when, in Machiavelli’s words, “discordant Italy opened into herself a passage for the Gauls and suffered barbarian peoples to trample her down.” Machiavelli’s pessimistic view of the human condition was forged when a peaceful childhood was violently shattered. The “ideal” ruler he conjures in The Prince is not made for times of peace but is a grim figure at home in troubled times.
It would be a mistake to exaggerate the peacefulness of Florence during Machiavelli’s childhood. Even under Lorenzo de’ Medici’s firm guiding hand, there was plenty of political discord and even an occasional outburst of civic violence. It was only compared to the disastrous period that followed, that Lorenzo’s reign appeared to embody political and social harmony. Crucial to the development of Machiavelli’s political thought were the institutions that made Florence a laboratory of republican government and that fostered a vibrant, if often contentious, political climate. However firmly the Medici remained in control of the government, a daily round of commotions and recriminations formed the backdrop of daily life. Every citizen was a politician; debate did not end at the doors of the Palazzo della Signoria but spilled out onto the streets and piazzas, enlivening every conversation and coloring every relationship. Even during Lorenzo’s reign there was sufficient turmoil to stimulate the imagination of the budding political scientist. In fact it is hard to imagine the systematic study of politics originating anywhere else but here in Florence, where the average citizen expected to share in his own government and young boys were schooled in Cicero, Aristotle, and Livy to prepare them for the debates they would later hold in the Palazzo della Signoria.
Niccolò was nine years old when the bloodiest upheaval of Il Magnifico’s reign occurred—the Pazzi Conspiracy in which Lorenzo and his brother were set upon in the Cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo’s brother, Giuliano, was killed in the attack, while he himself was wounded. The assassination set off weeks of reprisals more sanguinary than anything seen for centuries in the streets of Florence. The sight of bodies being torn apart by angry crowds, as well as the anxiety provoked by rumors of foreign armies approaching the city gate, must have left a mark on the psyche of the young man, reminding him of the savagery that lay just beneath the surface of even this most cultivated city. This spasm of violence, as well as the lively factional quarrels that were more typical of Florentine political life, provided Niccolò with a unique opportunity to study the passions that drove men to compete in the civic arena, the thirst for power and the love of liberty, the tug of ambition and the belief in community, whose opposing imperatives kept the city at a constant boil.
• • •
When it came to raising his children Bernardo shared the priorities of his compatriots. On May 6, 1476, Niccolò, who had just turned seven, began his formal education with “Maestro Matteo, master of grammar whose school is located at the foot of the Santa Trinità bridge, where he goes to learn to read his Donatello.”xii In 1480, the eleven-year-old Niccolò switched from studying Latin to studying “abacus,” that is, applied mathematics, an important subject in a town built on banking and trade. Niccolò’s education was typical of boys of his class, though it is clear that time spent delving into classical texts was more fruitful than time learning arithmetic. Like his father, Niccolò had no head for business, preferring to lose himself in a volume of poetry rather than pore through his own account books. Throughout his career and in his writings Machiavelli demonstrates a familiarity with the poetry, history, and philosophy of the ancient world, though there is little indication that, in addition to Latin, he mastered the newly fashionable but still esoteric Greek.xiii
For Florentine schoolboys of the Renaissance, being conversant with the major works of the classical past provided more than the basis of an elegant style or the dusty furnishings of the pedant’s mind. Dropping the names of Roman generals or quoting obscure Greek philosophers was essential to success as a public speaker, and success as a public speaker was essential to getting ahead in Florentine politics. The young read Scripture to prepare their souls for the world to come, but read Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato to learn how to tackle the responsibilities of civic life. The fact that Machiavelli largely
rejected traditional religious doctrine did not mean that he rejected any ethical framework. “For when a child of tender years begins to understand,” he wrote in The Discourses, “it makes a great difference that he should hear some things spoken of with approval and some things with disapproval, since this must needs make an impression on him, by which later on his own conduct will be regulated in all the walks of life.”
Educated Florentines like Machiavelli found their moral bearings not by emulating the lives of the saints but by studying the deeds and adopting the attitudes of the ancient Greeks and Romans. “We call these studies liberal,” wrote the fifteenth-century pedagogue Pier Paolo Vergerio, “which are worthy of a free man: they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things.” These studies were also called bonae litterae (good letters) or litterae humaniores (human letters) and the stories of great men and great achievements, as well as the salutary lessons to be learned from wicked men who received their comeuppance, provided a template against which to measure one’s own behavior. The constant back and forth between ancient history and current events that forms the structure of The Prince and the Discourses is not unique to Machiavelli, but is the product of an educational system that encouraged students to interpret the present in light of patterns set down long ago. Whenever he was in danger of succumbing to despair, Niccolò found solace in the great literature of the past. “Leaving the woods, I go to a spring,” he recalls in his famous letter to Francesco Vettori: “and then to one of the spots where I hang my bird nets. In my arm I carry a book: Dante, Petrarch, or one of those minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid. I read of their amorous passions and their loves and recall my own, and lose myself for a while in these happy thoughts.”