No doubt Machiavelli was one of the first to duck inside the nearest doorway. He had a certain grudging respect for the discipline and ardor of the friar’s pious legions, but he objected to those grand spectacles of communal self-abnegation that were a feature of life in Savonarolan Florence. Chronically short of cash, he cringed at the sight of his wealthier compatriots casting their silks, jewels, and indecent objets d’art into the great “bonfires of the vanities” kindled in the Piazza della Signoria—extravagant gestures of repentance that only the rich could afford.
Machiavelli’s skepticism toward charismatic religious figures like Savonarola is apparent in a letter he wrote some years later recounting the sudden success of another preacher, “a friar of Saint Francis who is half hermit and who, to gain more repute as a preacher, claims to be a prophet.” Like his more famous predecessor, this cut-rate Jeremiah predicted that they would “suffer fire and sack,” that “there would be a great dying and great famine.” And just as they had a decade and a half earlier, Florentines flocked to hear this prophet of doom, demonstrating once again that nothing was more certain to fill the pews than forecasts of imminent apocalypse. While his friends shed tears of repentance and promised to mend their ways, Machiavelli saw no reason to change his habits. “I didn’t actually hear the preacher,” he admitted, “for I don’t usually get involved in such matters.” Still, he remarked sarcastically, the friar’s gloomy prophesies did manage to demoralize him sufficiently that for one night at least he canceled a planned rendezvous with his favorite courtesan.
This morning, pressed by the crush of fervent disciples who credited Savonarola with the gift of prophecy—“I believe Christ speaks through my mouth,” he proclaimed—Machiavelli listened with an attentive but skeptical ear. In fact it was his presumed immunity to the blandishments of the preacher that explained his presence in San Marco. He had gone at the request of Ricciardo Becchi, the Florentine ambassador to the Holy See, “to give you, as you wished,” Machiavelli reminded him, “a full account of what is going on here regarding the friar.” As far as we know it was his first political assignment, the moment when, after twenty-eight uneventful and unproductive years, Machiavelli walked onto the stage and took his place as an actor in the great political drama of the day. Admittedly, it is a small part—that of a witness standing in the wings and offering occasional asides while the star commands most of our attention. But it is a role that suited him well. Throughout his career as a diplomat, for which this assignment was something of an audition, Machiavelli proved himself a perceptive analyst of character. Attending this morning’s sermon offered him an opportunity to exercise his critical faculties on the most compelling and controversial figure of the age.
The report Machiavelli sent to Ricciardo Becchi reveals both the strength and weakness of his methods. His indifference to spiritual matters certainly caused him to underestimate the appeal of Savonarola’s message, but if he was blind to many of the friar’s virtues—without which his hold on the people of Florence would be inexplicable—this handicap allowed him to see all more clearly the rhetorical devices the friar employed to win the impressionable to his cause. “[H]e began with great terrors, with explanations that to those not examining them too closely were quite effective,” Machiavelli recorded. But while Machiavelli was inclined to view the great preacher as something of a fraud (“he follows the mood of the times and shades his lies to suit them,” he declared), he appreciated the friar’s courage in standing up to the most powerful lord of Europe: “[H]ad you heard with what audacity he began to preach,” he told Becchi, “and how he proceeded, it would have stirred no small amount of admiration.”
As always, Savonarola’s exegesis of Scripture carried a pointed political message. Taking as his subject the book of Exodus, Savonarola told the story of God’s chosen people persecuted by a cruel and corrupt potentate. “But the more they oppressed them, the more they multiplied and increased,” he read, gesturing toward the crowd to make explicit the link between the ancient Hebrews and his own followers. In a characteristic act of hubris, he then proceeded to cast himself in the role of Moses leading them out of bondage. But if Savonarola was Moses, who was to play the vengeful Pharaoh bent on defying God’s will? It was here that the Dominican preacher stepped onto dangerous ground, for he assigned the villain’s role to Rodrigo Borgia, the corrupt and sensual man who now occupied the Throne of Saint Peter as Pope Alexander VI. “[H]e seeks to set all of [the people] at odds with the Supreme Pontiff,” Machiavelli reported to Becchi, “and, turning toward him and his attacks, says of the pope what could be said of the wickedest person you might imagine.”
As Becchi read Machiavelli’s report he realized that Savonarola had no intention of backing down. The Florentine government was already in hot water with the Pontiff, and its continued inability or unwillingness to rein in the disobedient friar had strained the relationship past the breaking point. The mere fact that Savonarola had delivered the sermon was a brazen act of disobedience, since he was currently forbidden by the Pope to speak in public.ii “So,” the Pope had recently grumbled to the Florentine envoy, “you are allowing Friar Girolamo to preach again. I would never have believed that you would treat me this way.” Unless they dealt with the rebellious monk, he told them, he would place the entire city under interdict. Such a ban would jeopardize not only the souls of Florentines but, perhaps of more immediate concern, their worldly goods, since any merchant in a foreign land placed outside the protection of the Church risked having his possessions confiscated. Torn between their loyalty to the Friar and their own well-being, Florentines that morning vacillated between hope and fear, resignation and anger.
Savonarola’s address to the believers in San Marco was the climactic moment in a bitter contest of wills between the Dominican monk and the Pontiff. It also marked a critical juncture in the history of the republic after four years of upheaval during which the entire peninsula of Italy—from Naples in the south to Milan in the north, with Florence caught uncomfortably in between—descended into chaos. In 1504 Machiavelli wrote a poem looking back on this gloomy period when the land lay “filled with blood and dead men . . . when discordant Italy opened into herself a passage for the Gauls and suffered barbarian peoples to trample her down.” He treats the Dominican preacher with typical ambivalence:
But that which to many was far more distressing and brought
on disunion, was that sect under whose command your city lay.
I speak of that great Savonarola who, inspired with heavenly vigor,
kept you closely bound with his words.
But many feared to see their country ruined, little by little,
under his prophetic teaching.
That ambivalence was already present in his letter to Becchi of 1498, written with the words of Savonarola still ringing in his ears. This was, in effect, his first diplomatic dispatch, the first time he set pen to paper to offer his sober analysis of a highly fraught political situation. Future missions would take him to exotic courts and involve elaborate ceremony and official credentials, but few would rival the raw emotional intensity of this initial assignment. It would be another three months before Machiavelli took up his position in the government of Florence, but it was in San Marco, where he had gone as an emissary to an alien territory of the soul, that Machiavelli’s remarkable career really began.
• • •
The age that made Savonarola’s remarkable rise possible and precipitous fall inevitable, a chaotic time where frightened people turned to those who promised that present troubles were merely a prelude to certain redemption, had arrived four years earlier with the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII, Most Catholic King of France, at the helm of a massive army. The French invasion of Italy opened a psychic chasm, dividing time into a golden-hued “before” and an ash-gray “after.” “With them,” wrote Francesco Guicciardini of the marauding hordes, “a flame and a plague had entered Italy which not only overthrew states, but changed thei
r forms of government and the methods of warfare.
“Before,” he continued, providing a brief sketch of the world as he knew it in his youth, “Italy had been principally divided into five states: the Papacy, Naples, Venice, Milan and Florence, each seeking to preserve its own possessions, watchful lest any should usurp what belonged to another and grow so strong that the rest should fear him . . . . Now owing to this invasion of the French everything was turned upside down as if by a sudden storm; the unity of Italy was broken and shattered.”iii It was in this “broken and shattered” world that Machiavelli had his first professional success as a civil servant in the pay of the Florentine Republic and it was in contemplating the wreckage of his native land that his dismal view of the human condition was forged. It was a world of flame and ash, of chaos, ruin, and disease.iv It was a world that made possible not only the meteoric career of the Dominican preacher whose apocalyptic visions tapped into the troubled mood of the times, but also of the cruel tyrant Cesare Borgia, who dazzled all of Europe with his daring exploits before he too came to grief—a world presided over by capricious Fortuna, equally generous in her bestowal of sudden favor and sudden death. And it was a world that, ultimately, gave rise to Machiavelli’s most imaginative creation, the ruthless antihero who strides across the pages of The Prince.
In The Art of War, Machiavelli provides a vivid description of Italy on the eve of the French invasion. Corrupt and complacent, greedy for profit and incapable of finding common ground for the common good, its leaders were singularly ill-prepared for what was to come:
Our Italian princes, before experiencing the shocks of foreign wars, were accustomed to believe that it was sufficient for a prince to be able to devise a sharp answer in his writing office, to pen a fine epistle, show wit and readiness in his words and sayings, be able to lay schemes, deck himself with gold and gems, sleep and eat with greater luxury than other men, surround himself with many sensual delights, rule his subjects with avarice and haughtiness, become rotten with sloth, confer military promotion as a favor . . . nor did the poor wretches foresee that they were thus preparing themselves to fall a prey to the first enemy that should assail them. Hence, in the year 1494, came terrible alarms, sudden flights, and miraculous defeats, and thus three of the most powerful States of Italy have been repeatedly pillaged and laid waste.
It was late summer 1494 when Charles VIII, the twenty-eight-year-old king of France, crossed the Alps with an army of forty thousand well-trained and well-equipped men. This single impetuous and ill-conceived act put an end of the golden age of the Italian Renaissance, a time when the greatest artists, writers, and philosophers flourished under the indulgent regimes of the prosperous republics and minor principalities that divided the peninsula. These miniature polities, anachronistic survivors of the Middle Ages, were pathetically overmatched by the rising nation-states and their massive armies, as the King of France was in the process of demonstrating. Following the route of Hannibal’s legions, Charles’s battalions spilled row after row from the mountain passes and onto the fertile plains of Lombardy, heavy infantry—including the famed Swiss pike men, the most feared warriors of Europe—and armored cavalry carrying aloft banners bearing the fleur-de-lis of the royal house of France. Most terrifying of all were the bronze cannon hauled by teams of thickset horses, a gleaming array of firepower on a scale never before deployed on the battlefields of Italy.
One glimpse of this mighty host was sufficient to send shivers down the spines of the most battle-hardened condottiere.v The ragtag bands of hired mercenaries with which the petty states of “discordant Italy” had for centuries been accustomed to wage war upon each other would scatter like dry leaves in the wind before the coming onslaught. That is if they could even be persuaded to act together, a doubtful proposition given the age-old enmities that existed between the myriad states of the peninsula and the selfishness with which each prince pursued his own private advantage. Italians of the Renaissance occasionally acknowledged a common kinship, particularly when threatened by “barbarian” forces, but if they were a family it was of the most dysfunctional sort in which fraternal rivalries were more potent than brotherly love.
It was one of their own, Ludovico Sforza, lord of Milan,vi who had done the most to engineer the calamity. Known to history as Il Moro (the Moor) “because of his dark complexion and because of the reputation for cunning he had already begun to acquire”—it was rumored that he was in fact the bastard son of Duke Francesco Sforza and a slave girl—Ludovico had a streak of deviousness that in later centuries would undoubtedly have been described as Machiavellian. As it was, his contemporaries had no shortage of epithets to hurl at the man they blamed for their country’s travails.
The disaster began with a dynastic quarrel between Ludovico and the King of Naples, one that Sforza thought might most elegantly be resolved by encouraging the French King to reassert his ancestral claim to the Neapolitan throne. It seemed at first glance a clever idea: have the French do the fighting while he, Ludovico, stood on the sidelines and enjoyed the spectacle of his rival’s destruction. But the ruler of Milan, overly confident in his ability to control the forces he had unleashed, apparently lacked the imagination to picture the difficulties that would arise once the immediate objective was won. With a massive foreign army set loose upon Italian soil and with the other great monarchs of Europe itching to profit in some way, it was a strategy unlikely to accrue to the benefit of any Italian state.
For Florence, the arrival of the French army on Italian soil proved particularly challenging. At the time the republic was led by Piero de’ Medici, the twenty-six-year-old son and heir of Lorenzo the Magnificent, a man who shared little with his illustrious father besides the family name. In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli explains that the outcome might have been far different had Lorenzo, rather than his son, been at the helm: “for when Italy was left deprived of his advice, no mode was found for those who remained either to satisfy or to check the ambition of Ludovico Sforza . . . . Therefore, as soon as Lorenzo was dead, those bad seeds began to grow which, not long after, since the one who knew how to eliminate them was not alive, ruined and are still ruining Italy.” For every virtue Lorenzo possessed, Piero seems to have substituted a corresponding vice. “He was a haughty and cruel man,” wrote Guicciardini, “who preferred being feared rather than loved. Savage and bloodthirsty, he had on occasion attacked and wounded men by night and been present at the deaths of several. He lacked that gravity which was necessary to anyone in such a position, for amid these dangers to the city and to himself he was out every day in the streets publicly playing football.”
Piero’s first instinct was to resist the French invasion, but when it became clear that neither the other Italian states nor even his own people would follow him in such a rash undertaking, he beat a craven retreat. On the morning of October 26, 1494, with public opinion turning decisively against him, Piero, accompanied by a small retinue of loyal followers, secretly rode out of Florence and headed for Pisa, where Charles was encamped with the bulk of his army. Hoping to be welcomed as a friend and ally, he was instead treated as a defeated enemy. Charles and his ministers were determined to extract the maximum penalty for his initial disloyalty, and Piero, desperate for some way out of the predicament he now found himself in, was more than willing to sell out his city to save his skin. In return for handing over the Florentine fortresses of Sarzana and Pietrasanta to the French, without which the republic was left blind and defenseless on its northern border, Piero received a promise from Charles to support continued Medici rule in Florence. Even more disturbing to the citizens of Florence was the almost certain loss of Pisa, her ancient rival whom she had finally conquered in 1406. Behind the screen provided by the French army the Pisans were even now preparing to rise up against their overlords and proclaim themselves once again an independent republic. While Charles made vague promises to restore the rebellious city after he had settled matters down south, it was clear to most Florenti
nes that Piero’s treachery had stripped them of their most prized possession. To add insult to these almost unbearable injuries, Charles also demanded that Florence contribute 200,000 florins to the cause of subduing Naples.
To Florentines the loss of Pisa was not only a military and economic issue: it was a symbol of their current impotence brought about by Piero’s perfidy. Though no longer a vital international seaport—the silting up of the mouth of the Arno was slowly choking its once bustling harbor—its acquisition after centuries of bitter strife had elevated Florence in the minds of her citizens to the status of a great power. No sharper blow could be struck against her pride, and for much of Machiavelli’s career the reconquest of the wayward city was an undertaking—amounting almost to an obsession—that preoccupied the minds of those who toiled in the Palazzo della Signoria and upon which the majority of her blood and treasure was expended.
Piero returned to Florence on the afternoon of November 8 to face a population seething with anger. “[H]e threw out confetti [sweets], and gave a lot of wine to the people, to make himself popular,” wrote one contemporary, a desperate ploy that did little to instill confidence. When he and a few armed supporters tried to force their way into the government palace, those inside called out “Popolo e liberta!” (The People and Liberty), the ancient clarion call of revolution. The cry was quickly picked up by others gathered in the piazza, who drove Piero from the palace while the priors ordered the ringing of the great bell that from time immemorial had called the people of Florence to assemble in moments of greatest peril.
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