Soon the Medici and their partisans were being hounded from government buildings and accosted on the streets. When Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, Piero’s younger brother, tried to enter the square, he, too, was assaulted. Riding toward the family palace he called to his brother, “We’re finished!” Later that day, the apothecary Luca Landucci caught a glimpse of the young cardinal through an open window of the family palace “kneeling with joined hands, praying Heaven to have mercy.” By nightfall, both brothers, along with their closest allies, had fled the city, taking only as much of the fabled Medici treasure as they could shove into their saddlebags.
Thus ended, ignominiously, Medici rule in Florence, almost exactly sixty years since Cosimo, Piero’s great-grandfather, had returned in triumph following his exile by the Albizzi family. It had been an almost bloodless revolution, carried out with a swiftness and ease that made those who led it ask themselves why they had not sooner thrown off a yoke that was so lightly fixed.
Eight days later Charles entered the city accompanied by seven thousand Swiss infantrymen. He rode in full armor, a baldaquin raised high above his head to signify his role as a conqueror. Met at the San Frediano gate by the Signoria in full ceremonial robes and escorted by a contingent of forty well-born youths, the King and his army paraded through the streets, passing within a block of Machiavelli’s house. Machiavelli himself was undoubtedly among the citizens who lined the streets to watch as their city was occupied by foreigners. A few dutiful shouts of “Viva Francia!” could not disguise the general mood of despondency. The climactic moment came when the King dismounted between a double row of torches and ascended the steps to the Cathedral, though, “when he was seen on foot,” wrote Landucci, “he seemed to the people somewhat less imposing, for he was in fact a very small man.” As Guicciardini observed laconically, the ceremony was “a sight in itself very beautiful but scarcely appreciated, as all men were full of terror and alarm.” The entrance of a foreign army was humiliating for a city that for centuries had jealously guarded its freedom, and though the citizens might console themselves with the thought that the occupation was accomplished without bloodshed or destruction of property, there was no getting around the fact that a once great power had been brought to its knees. Many of the top generals were housed in the palaces of the Florentine nobility that had been marked for the purpose beforehand by French officials, leading Machiavelli to observe sarcastically that “King Charles of France was allowed to conquer Italy with chalk.”
If Florence had suffered a humiliating blow, the situation was not so bleak for the prior of San Marco, who had long foretold such trials and tribulation. Fra Girolamo Savonarola, a native of Ferrara, had come to Florence eight years earlier and had risen to fame by unleashing jeremiads against the corruption of his adopted city. His genuine concern for the plight of the wretched workers and his rage against those who exploited their labor won him a passionate following among the poor, but many wealthier citizens were also attracted to his message of salvation through mortification. His hair-raising sermons, often delivered before thousands packed into the Cathedral, had foretold the coming of another Cyrus to scourge Italy for her sins, and when Charles arrived at the head of a conquering army it took no great stretch of the imagination to convince the traumatized Florentines that his prophesies had been fulfilled. “[Y]our coming has lightened our hearts,” Savonarola told the King after his arrival in the city, so “pass on securely and triumphantly, inasmuch as He sends you.”
Passing on was something Charles was eager to do in any case since his real business was further south in Naples. Having secured his supply lines and replenished his bank account, Charles and his army left the city on November 28, heading for their confrontation with the overmatched armies of Alfonso, King of Naples.vii
With the departure of Charles and his army, Florentines could set about the vital task of rebuilding their political institutions corroded by sixty years of domination by the Medici family. But as soon as they slammed the gates shut behind the departing Swiss pike men, the normal divisions that beset the ruling class of Florence began to reassert themselves. As Machiavelli recalled: “After 1494 when those who had been princes in Florence were expelled from the city . . . there was no proper government, but rather a state in which anarchy and ambition were commingled and public business was going from bad to worse.” It was a quarrelsomeness that, time and again in Florentine history, was resolved only by the strong hand of the tyrant. If that were to be avoided under present circumstances, the leading citizens must show a greater devotion to country and less devotion to personal interest than was usually the case.
The first months following the departure of the French were dominated by a struggle for power between the ottimati (optimates), who wished to retain the oligarchic nature of the Medici regime in which real power was shared only by a handful of rich and powerful families, and the popolani (populists), who believed that the only way to preserve their hard-won liberties was to enfranchise a wider and more representative cross-section of the citizenry. On December 14, under pressure from both sides to provide guidance, Savonarola made the fateful decision to jump, body and soul, into the political arena. “[T]he will of God is that the city of Florence be ruled by the people and not by tyrants,” he proclaimed from the pulpit, throwing his immense prestige behind the popular party, which, with his backing, was able to drive their more conservative colleagues from the palace.
The most important feature of the new government was the Great Council, modeled loosely on that of their sister republic Venice, a representative body that would serve as a legislature and the pool from which the various executive officers were chosen. Unlike the Venetian model, however, in which membership was the privilege of a narrow aristocracy, the Florentine Great Council would be open to a wide spectrum of Florentine citizens, from wealthy bankers and merchants to small shopkeepers and artisans. In his “Treatise on the Constitution and Government of Florence,” Savonarola set down his rationale for a more democratic system: “Now the Florentine people, having established a civil form of government long ago, has made such a habit of this form that, besides suiting the nature and requirements of the people better than any other, it has become habitual and fixed in their minds. It would be difficult, if not impossible to separate them from this form of government.” This government was unrepresentative by modern standards, but it was a great advance over the tyrannies that dominated most of the Italian peninsula and over the Medici oligarchy that preceded it. Though the urban proletariat—the unskilled labor that provided the muscle for the city’s various industrial enterprises—was still excluded from representation, the council was perhaps the most democratic assembly in Europe.viii
The establishment of the Great Council placed real power once again in the hands of an unwieldy body that not only spoke for but actually included a wide swath of the citizenry. As it was finally constituted it included 3,500 citizens, though only one third, serving a six-month term, were seated at any given time. Historians have calculated that, in a population of roughly 40,000 to 50,000, this council represented a little under half the male population over thirty, a remarkably expansive franchise for the day. Florence had reconstituted itself as a true republic, responsive to the will of the people to a degree remarkable in an age of deep social and economic inequality. It was this government, where in raucous sessions in the Hall of the Great Council butchers rubbed shoulders and matched wits with wealthy bankers in ermine-lined robes, that Niccolò Machiavelli would serve throughout his career as a civil servant.
• • •
There is no record of what Machiavelli was doing during these transformative days. In November 1494, when angry citizens drove the Medici from power, Machiavelli was already twenty-five years old, an age, even by cautious Florentine standards, when a young man might play a responsible role in the public arena. And yet there is no indication that he participated in any significant way in the great political upheaval. This might seem
peculiar for someone who obviously thought deeply and felt passionately about politics. But a closer examination of his career reveals a certain passiveness, a tendency to stand on the sidelines and observe rather than thrust himself into the fray, particularly when the outcome was as uncertain as it was in the tumultuous days following the French invasion. In the service of his country Machiavelli was willing to risk life and limb, but when it came to determining what sort of government was best suited to make it prosper, that was a matter for intellectual inquiry rather than violent action.
This did not mean he was indifferent. A quarter century later Machiavelli analyzed the faults of the government he would soon be serving.ix “After [the fall of the Medici], the city decided to resume the form of a republic,” he wrote, “but did not apply herself to adopting it in a form that would be lasting, because the ordinances then made did not satisfy all the parties among the citizens.” He believed that the government set up after the fall of Piero was deeply flawed, too weak to prevent the ruling class from splitting into rival factions, but he shared Savonarola’s belief that any constitution that did not take into account the Florentine’s natural love of liberty was doomed to failure. “Never will the generality of Florentine citizens be satisfied if the Hall [of the Great Council] is not reopened,” he later explained to Giovanni de’ Medici, emphasizing that a city accustomed to freedom would never embrace tyranny. As always with Machiavelli, the first consideration—to which all other things were subservient and, in fact, irrelevant—was: What works and what doesn’t? The most elegant solutions on paper were worthless if they did not account for real human passions and failings, while the most morally repugnant systems should be considered if they improved the average man’s lot in life. To this simple and irrefutable logic Machiavelli would cling all his days.
At the time, Machiavelli watched developments with keen interest, but he was not one of those hotheads who took to the streets agitating for radical change. This was simply not in keeping with his temperament. Wry bemusement was his normal response to those who fanatically pursued rigid ideologies. This detachment may be explained in part by his continued marginality: even with the change of government, his father’s fecklessness guaranteed that his particular branch of the family was unlikely to reap any political reward, no matter how broad the franchise.
As Machiavelli continued along the meandering path first set out by his father, the city in which he lived and that was the sole object of his affection—the provider of intellectual stimulation and low pleasures—continued to bubble and seethe. Above all the continued defiance of Pisa rankled, and the inability of the government to deal with it effectively undermined its credibility. No Florentine could countenance the citizens of their former possession enjoying a liberty they themselves took for granted, and while the new government strained every resource to reverse the humiliation—the Ten of War were soon renamed “the Ten Expenders”—Florentines found themselves impoverished by taxes that seemed to purchase only defeat and incompetence. Despite the popular base of support, the new government would be judged as the old had been, on whether it succeeded in preserving Florence’s Tuscan empire. As Machiavelli put it in his narrative poem, The First Decennale, addressing Florence herself:
So all Tuscany was in confusion; so you lost Pisa and those
states the Medici family gave to the French.
Thus you could not rejoice as you should have done at being
taken from under the yoke that for sixty years had been crushing you,
because you saw your state laid waste.
Lacking the means to reconquer the city, the new government pinned its hopes on Charles’s promise to return Pisa. Florentines, as one might imagine, followed the news of his progress to the south with more than academic interest. At first all seemed to go well. So intimidating was the French army that the southward journey was less a military campaign than a triumphal progress. Pope Alexander VI, who had initially taken up the Aragonese cause—the tilt of his policy confirmed when he married off his second son, Juan, to Maria Enriquez, a cousin of King Ferdinand of Aragon—reconsidered when Charles’s vast army arrived on his doorstep. Like Florence, Rome was forced to accept a French occupation, a humiliation the Pope would not soon forget or forgive. At the end of January 1495, Charles finally set out to challenge the army of King Alfonso of Naples. “So with his conquering army he moved upon the Kingdom like a falcon that swoops or a bird of swifter flight,” wrote Machiavelli, imparting epic grandeur to what was in fact a rather pathetic affair. As expected, the Neapolitan forces were no match for the French. By February, King Alfonso and his successor, his eldest son, Fernandino, had both abdicated in quick succession, neither one able to muster more than token resistance, and on the 22nd of the month Charles entered the southern capital having barely struck a blow in anger.
But having labored so long for the prize, at the very moment he achieved his goal King Charles saw all his dreams turn to dust. Again turning to Machiavelli’s evocative verse:
When the report of a victory so great and so easy came to the
Ears of that first mover of Italy’s distress [i.e., Ludovico Sforza],
well he learned his folly clear, and afraid of falling into the
trench that with so much sweat he had dug,
and aware that his own might did not suffice, that Duke,
striving to save the whole, along with the Pope, the Empire and
Saint Mark [i.e., Venice], formed a huge army.
As a more astute statesman might have foreseen, Charles’s success had achieved what no amount of diplomacy could have—near unity among the quarrelsome states of Italy, who were now determined to drive the invader from their soil. It also should have come as no surprise that leading this effort was the treacherous Duke of Milan, who having invited in the French King had now decided that Charles had overstayed his welcome. Each man had used the other for short-term advantage, unable to grasp that their long-term interests made them natural rivals.
In March 1495, Pope Alexander, still smarting from his recent humiliation at the hands of Charles, called for the creation of a grand alliance to drive the French from Italy. The selfish motives of the signatories were glossed over by the Pontiff, who titled the new arrangement “The Holy League.” Most worrisome for the French King, who knew he could sweep away any army the states of Italy could muster against him, was that his success had aroused the jealousy of the other great monarchs of Europe—King Ferdinand of Spain and Maximillian, Emperor of the Romans—who now saw an opportunity to join the game by casting themselves as the protectors of Italian liberty.x
The only major Italian power that refused to join this sacred cause was Florence, which, under the leadership of Savonarola, had its own ideas where righteousness lay. Guicciardini summed up his city’s policy: “We were then pressed to join the league, whose princes hoped to unite Italy to discourage Charles from ever returning. This was rejected because they would not return Pisa to us, and if we did not have Pisa back, the unity of Italy was of no use to Florence. Disunity was more to our purpose.” It was just this kind of selfish parochialism that had permitted the disastrous invasion in the first place, but Florentines—no different in this regard than the natives of Milan, Venice, Ferrara, Urbino, and countless other states—identified too strongly with their own locality to embrace the unity and common purpose that Machiavelli would urge so eloquently in The Prince.
With a hostile army now far in his rear, Charles was effectively trapped on the wrong side of the Alps. In the spring of 1495, he set out from Naples, reversing the triumphant march of the year before.xi On July 6, the armies of Charles and the Holy League met at Fornovo, just south of the northern Italian city of Parma. It was one of the bloodiest battles ever fought on Italian soil—“a great slaughter” Guicciardini called it—but despite the effusion of blood neither the French nor the Italians could claim a decisive victory. Tactically the results were inconclusive, but strategically the French
emerged the big losers. Charles had staved off utter destruction but his only option now was to retreat across the Alps and abandon the land that not many months before had seemed so ripe for the picking.
For Florence, and for Savonarola in particular, the result was disastrous. His decision to opt out of the Holy League placed him in a precarious situation. Not only had it enraged Pope Alexander, but the people of Florence were growing increasingly bitter as the promised benefits of the French alliance failed to materialize. “[Charles] ignored the treaty made with us in Florence and sworn so solemnly on the altar,” Guicciardini complained. “[W]e kept faith with him so completely, giving him so much money and remaining his only allies in all Italy, and he perfidiously sold us and our possessions to our enemies.”
But Savonarola had more important things on his mind, chief among them the renewal of the Holy Church through “scourgings and terrible tribulations.” For the messianic friar, war and disease were to be welcomed rather than feared since the worse things got the sooner the day of rebirth would arrive. Likewise, the diplomatic isolation caused by his refusal to join the Holy League was to be embraced since it hastened the final reckoning with the institution he called a “false, proud whore.”
Pope Alexander VI had so far been more than tolerant of the rebellious prior of San Marco. He looked on indulgently as Savonarola hurled abuse at him from the Cathedral of Florence, perhaps even acknowledging in private that much of what he said was true. As Guicciardini summed it up: “[Alexander] was not disturbed by those things which offended his honor as long as his profit and pleasure was not interfered with.” It was only when Savonarola’s spiritual crusade spilled over into foreign policy that Pope Alexander began to take notice. In November 1496, Alexander demanded that Savonarola place himself and his monastery under the supervision of the Lombard Congregation of the Dominican order, where he would be under more stringent supervision. When Savonarola refused, Alexander was forced to act. At first he tried to buy off the friar with the promise of a cardinal’s hat, to which the Dominican monk replied with scorn: “It is not my habit to seek human glory. Away with that! . . . I want no hats, no miters large or small. I want nothing unless it be what you [my Lord] have given to your saints: death. A red hat of blood: this I desire.”
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