Machiavelli reached maturity without having done anything to distinguish himself from his peers. Florentines had a term for such young men: they were called giovani (youths), men who were no longer children but had yet to take on the adult responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing. Given the fact that Florentine men typically married in their late twenties or early thirties, they represented a large and potentially explosive element in the social fabric. Much of the violence that had plagued the city in earlier centuries can be attributed to these lawless young men who roamed the streets in search of adventure. One Florentine patrician summed up the general attitude toward these good-for-nothings who did little but “threaten bar keepers, dismember [statues of] saints, and break pots and plates.”
The young Niccolò Machiavelli was no worse, though not much better, than most of his peers. The best one can say is that while he can boast no record of achievement for these years, neither did he appear on the rolls of the Otto (the Eight), the police who patrolled the streets and attempted to curb the worst excesses of the giovani. Though he was certainly not living in monkish denial, much of his time was spent in study, either formally through the Studio, Florence’s university, or by delving into the numerous learned volumes in his father’s library.
In appearance the young Niccolò was unremarkable. He was of average height and possessed a wiry frame that would serve him well on many a harrowing voyage in service to his country and during his weeks of imprisonment, ordeals that would have overwhelmed a less robust constitution. His nose was aquiline, his lips thin, features that gave him a sharp and somewhat birdlike aspect. But the impression of hardness was relieved in conversation when his face lit up and his eyes sparkled with mirth. Unfortunately, there are no contemporaneous portraits of him, but those painted shortly after his death and based on the memories of people who knew him well emphasize the sardonic smile and curious expression that suggest both his keen intelligence and the impudent sense of humor that won him as many enemies as friends. In the best of them, there is a hint of kindness behind the wry smile, of sympathy as well as cynicism. Given the absence of a likeness taken from life, one must content oneself with the few descriptions available. The most precious comes from his wife, Marietta, who, upon the birth of their child, reported to her absent husband: “For now the baby is well. He looks like you, white as snow, with his head a velvety black . . . . Since he looks like you he seems beautiful to me”—a clue, if only an oblique one, as to his true appearance.
For a bright young man from a family with little money and little influence, literary talent was one of the few means of gaining entrée into elite circles. Early on, Machiavelli took the first tentative steps on the route to success already traveled by the poets Luigi Pulci and Angelo Poliziano. These talented but impecunious youths managed to parlay their gifts into a coveted seat at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s table, and Machiavelli saw no reason why he might not duplicate this feat of upward mobility. As part of this effort he dedicated one of his earliest works, a carnival poem titled “Pastorale,” to Giuliano de’ Medici, youngest son of Il Magnifico. This minor work offers a tantalizing clue that Machiavelli wished to join that glittering circle of poets and artists who congregated at the palace on the Via Larga. The unoriginal verses, in which local shepherds mingle familiarly with Apollo, Diana, and Jupiter, followed the erudite formula perfected by Angelo Poliziano, Lorenzo’s closest friend, and seem calculated to appeal to the refined tastes of his teenage heir. Given his father’s friendship with Bartolomeo Scala, another Medici client, it is clear that the Machiavelli were members, if only marginal ones, of the city’s dominant faction. Thus, despite later complications, Niccolò’s connection to the Medici began early. When in 1513 Machiavelli wrote to Giuliano de’ Medici from his prison cell, he was not an anonymous supplicant but an old acquaintance hoping to remind the young lord of happier times.
Perhaps Machiavelli’s failure to secure a place for himself at the Medici court owed something to his prickly personality. Though he never lacked for friends, those close to him knew he could be his own worst enemy. A few years later, when he was just beginning his career in the civil service, his friend Biagio Buonaccorsi had to intervene to prevent him from alienating his colleagues. “Write to Niccolò Capponi,” Buonaccorsi pleaded, “who grumbles and complains that you have never written him, and tell that asshole Ser Battaglione to ease up . . . . I spoke to Fantone about what I wrote you yesterday: he told me that four other lawsuits had been brought against you.” Everyone seemed to recognize his intelligence, but throughout his life he was hampered by his inability to flatter his superiors—a defect exposed most glaringly when his gift of The Prince was spurned by those who preferred servility to brilliance.
Even as he made a halfhearted stab at launching a literary career, Niccolò indulged the many pleasures the city had to offer. He was a frequent visitor to both the brothels and the taverns that lined the streets near the markets and that catered both to dissatisfied husbands and young men who were expected to spend the years between boyhood and married life sowing their wild oats. Even as a married man with young children, Niccolò made no effort to hide his taste for whores and the raucous conviviality of the tavern, habits he picked up early on.
His taste for low pleasures, however, did not distract him from his true passion. When he wasn’t at the whorehouse—or perhaps even when he was—his head was often buried in a book, most likely a volume of Greek or Roman history or one of the great triumvirate of modern Tuscans—Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Like Callimaco, the hero of his play La Mandragola, Machiavelli might have described spending his own youth “partly in studies, partly in amusement, partly in business.” His writing, rich in learned allusion but also earthy and filled with the crude vernacular of his native city, demonstrates an education that took place both in the classroom and on the streets.
At the age of twenty-eight there was little to distinguish Niccolò from countless equally directionless young men. He seemed content to live off his modest properties and spend his free time—of which he had plenty—in conversation with friends, and his money—of which he had less—on whores and gambling. “Because life is short,” he later wrote in the introduction to Mandragola,
and many are the pains
that every man bears who lives and stints himself,
let us go on spending and wasting the years as we will,
for he who deprives himself of pleasure
only to live with labor and toil
does not understand the world’s deceits.
He had by this time a fair amount of experience in “spending and wasting.” Half his life was over and he had little to show for it.
But despite the rather aimless course his life had taken so far, he burned with ambition. This, too, was encouraged by the get-ahead mentality of Florence. As one influential educational text claimed, men are motivated primarily “by eagerness for praise and inflamed by love of glory,” words Machiavelli will paraphrase in The Prince. He wanted to make his mark, to achieve something that would cause his name to be remembered by future generations. Not particularly well connected or well heeled, he lacked only the opportunity to demonstrate the singular talents of an obscure young man of modest means.
* * *
i It is difficult to classify Florentine families like the Machiavelli using familiar terms, either those that come out of the traditional divisions of feudalism or those that come out of modern sociology. They had ties to the feudal aristocracy, but were deemed popolani, i.e., men of the people, or members of the prosperous merchant class. They were aristocrats in the sense that they belonged to the governing class, but they were distinguished from “magnates,” who were barred from holding office. The Florentine ruling class combined elements of bourgeois merchant values and aristocratic privilege.
ii In the fifteenth century the city was divided into four main quarters: San Giovanni, Santa Croce, Santa Maria Novella, and, across the river, Santo Spirito. These
quarters were each further subdivided into four gonfaloni, forming the sixteen traditional districts of the city. The gonfaloni, or banners, were the heraldic devices under which medieval Florentines marched into battle. Though by the time of Machiavelli’s birth the militia was a thing of the past, these ancient divisions still had political significance. The Sixteen gonfalonieri, or bannermen, were among the leading officials of the city. Florentines might also refer to their neighborhood by the name of the local church.
iii Farinata degli Uberti is one of the most memorable characters in Dante’s Inferno, where the poet places him among the heretics. When Dante, a prominent Guelph, describes his family, Uberti replies: “They were fierce enemies to me and to my forebears and to my party, so that twice over I scattered them” (Inferno, X). Apparently hatred between Guelph and Ghibelline was intense enough to be continued in the afterlife.
iv True to form, the Blacks also split into rival factions once they had driven their rivals from the city. The civil war led by the Cerchi and Donati families chronicled by Dino Compagni in the early fourteenth century was between two factions of the Black Guelphs.
v The original Ordinances included seven recognized major and nine minor guilds. The major guilds were comprised of mostly large-scale merchants and capitalists, while the nine minor guilds were mostly comprised of artisans, small tradesmen, and shopkeepers.
vi Between 1280 and 1530, the Machiavelli name turns up 130 times among the Three Majors. Compared to the record of powerful clans like the Medici, whose members served 196 times over the same period, this was a more than respectable showing (see Online Catasto of 1427).
vii The tax roll (Catasto) of 1427 is one of the best-studied documents of Renaissance Florence. Of the 9,780 households listed, including eleven bearing the Machiavelli name, only 137 (approximately one in 70) had an assessed worth exceeding 10,000 florins. Niccolò di Buoninsegna Machiavelli, Niccolò’s grandfather, had a declared net worth of 1,086 florins, all of it in the form of real estate. This placed him in the upper third in terms of total wealth, but far behind such plutocrats as Palla Strozzi (162,906) or Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici (91,089), grandfather of Lorenzo the Magnificent (see Online Catasto of 1427).
viii Bernardo’s tax problems may also have been the source of a curious incident in Niccolò’s career when his enemies tried to claim he was ineligible for government service (see chapter 8). Ironically, his debt may also have interfered with his ability to make a living since those declared a specchio were also barred from practicing as notaries, a profession for which his legal training qualified him (see Atkinson, Debts, Dowries, Donkeys, 43).
ix This project of Bernardo’s was particularly significant for Niccolò, since his most sustained work of political writing is his commentary on this work of ancient history, his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius.
x This was not an unusual age for a Florentine male to be married. While girls tended to marry in their late teens, boys were allowed a period of irresponsibility before settling down to raise a family.
xi It would be another six years before another child lived beyond infancy, Niccolò’s younger brother Totto. There was also a stepsister, Lionarda, born in 1457, Bartolomea’s only child with Niccolò Benizi. She did not grow up in the Machiavelli household and little is known of her.
xii This refers not to the famous Florentine sculptor but to Donatus, author of a Latin grammar that dates back to ancient times and was used as the initial primer for students of the Renaissance.
xiii Machiavelli often quotes Plato and Aristotle and was clearly familiar with their work and with the history of ancient Greece, but he always seems to have relied on Latin translations of their most important writings. Fluency in Latin would have been a normal acquisition for someone of his time and education, while knowledge of Greek continued to be reserved for true scholars. (See Villari, The Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli, I, 239ff for a fuller discussion.)
II
A SWORD UNSHEATHED
“O Italy! O Princes! O prelates of the Church! the wrath of God is upon ye, neither is there any hope for ye, unless ye be converted to the Lord. O Florence! O Italy! these adversities have befallen ye for your sins. Repent ye before the sword be unsheathed, while it be yet unstained with blood; otherwise neither wisdom, power, nor force will avail.”
—GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA
ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 3, 1498, MACHIAVELLI left his home near the Ponte Vecchio and set out for the monastery of San Marco on the northern outskirts of town. Here, far from his accustomed haunts—and in a departure from his usual routine—he attended a sermon delivered by Girolamo Savonarola, the charismatic monk whose messianic visions had alternately inspired and convulsed the city for six tumultuous years.i
Savonarola was not a prophet of peace but a preacher of fire and brimstone, and his apocalyptic sermons unhinged a populace already agitated by years of war and civil unrest. So intemperate were his jeremiads that the Pope himself had issued a decree forbidding the friar to speak in public, a policy meant in part to silence denunciations launched against the Holy Father and the Church he led. Throughout this Lenten season, and despite calls from cooler heads for the people of Florence to follow the example of Jesus, the city was torn apart by factions whose approach to settling political disagreements was to hurl abuse at their opponents or even to resort to the dagger and the club. Most numerous were the piagnoni (weepers or snivelers), pious followers of Savonarola who dominated the councils of government and policed the streets for signs of immorality. Arrayed against them were a variety of parties, like the arrabbiati (angry ones), or the aristocratic compagnacci (the rude companions), and the sinister bigi (grays), a secret society plotting to restore the disgraced Medici to power. The always bitter rivalries had recently turned even uglier, as angry words gave way to acts of vandalism and intimidation. Now all eyes turned toward the modest church where the friar was expected to issue his challenge to Pope Alexander VI, an act of defiance that could well plunge the city into civil war.
On this late-winter morning the paths of two of the truly remarkable figures of the Renaissance crossed, one ascending, the other headed even more precipitously in the opposite direction. For the obscure young man, an anonymous face in the crowd, it was a first tentative step on a rising ladder, while for the famous preacher—who from his current perch atop the pulpit stood a few steps closer to heaven—this was a final opportunity to pull back before his plunge toward a fiery death. Years later Machiavelli might well have had this moment in mind when he wrote of the “countless men who, that they might fall to earth with a heavier crash, with this goddess [Fortune] have climbed to excessive heights.”
There is no other place on earth where such an encounter could have occurred. Not only are Savonarola and Machiavelli both monumental figures in the history of Western thought, but one would be hard pressed to find two men who embodied such divergent and mutually uncomprehending philosophies: one a religious extremist, spiritual father of fundamentalism, the other an ardent secularist who dared to contemplate a world without God or morality. Nowhere but in this creative, contentious city could two such remarkable, and remarkably different, men have been thrown together by the hand of fate. It is not an exaggeration to say that on this chilly morning at the beginning of March, in the modest church a few blocks south of the Porta San Gallo, two worlds collided.
Unlike most of the crowd packed into San Marco that day, Machiavelli had not fallen under the spell of the charismatic Dominican friar. As Savonarola thundered from the pulpit, those in the audience wept and sighed, shouted their agreement or turned inward, gnawed by some secret guilt exhumed by the speaker. “O Italy!” he cried. “O Princes! O prelates of the Church! the wrath of God is upon ye, neither is there any hope for ye, unless ye be converted to the Lord. O Florence! O Italy! these adversities have befallen ye for your sins. Repent ye before the sword be unsheathed, while it be yet unstained with blood; otherwise neither wisdom, po
wer, nor force will avail.” These were dark times, he proclaimed, but it was the deepest gloom that preceded the first faint glimmer of a new dawn. If only the citizens would turn away from sin they might step confidently into the light of a blessed day.
Machiavelli was unmoved. He passed a clinical eye over the scene of near hysteria, scoffing at the notion that the speaker was divinely inspired and instead dissecting the speech as if it were a performance in order to discover the tricks Savonarola deployed to keep his audience in thrall. “The people of Florence do not think that they are ignorant or rude,” he wrote in The Prince, “yet Girolamo Savonarola convinced them he conversed with God . . . . [M]ultitudes believed him without ever having seen anything extraordinary to compel their believing it.”
Though Machiavelli was outwardly conventional in his religious life, the kind of mysticism that was his stock in trade left him cold. In fact, while Machiavelli did not belong to any of the factions that were battling for control of the republic, his sympathies clearly lay with the preacher’s opponents. He was an educated and sophisticated young man, steeped in the classical literature Savonarola deplored as a distraction from the Gospels and an avid consumer of those low pleasures for which Florence had once been famous. He had little use for the self-appointed guardians of public virtue who did their best to stamp out vice and corruption. From his point of view the friar and his “boys”—processions of youths dressed in white who patrolled the streets on the lookout for sins and sinners—were more than a minor nuisance since he was one of those whose morals were most in need of reform. Whenever one of these pious gangs came into view a cry went up, “Here come the boys of the friar!”—the signal for gamblers to pocket their dice, whores to scatter, and ladies of the better sort to hide their jewelry.
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