This was actually Machiavelli’s second attempt to land a government job; at the beginning of the year he had unsuccessfully applied for the post of First Secretary to the Signoria. This came at a time when Savonarola’s men were still in power, and Machiavelli’s defeat offers one more clue that he was out of favor with the religious zealots.ii But in the days following the arrest of Savonarola, Machiavelli’s prospects began to look up as the government purged the frateschi from its midst. Among those who lost his job in the shake-up was Alessandro Braccesi, chief of the Second Chancery. Braccesi was closely associated with the disgraced preacher and his dismissal was part of a general purge of the friar’s men. On June 15 the Eighty nominated Niccolò Machiavelli to serve out the remaining two years of Braccesi’s term, beating out three other candidates. The appointment was ratified by a vote in the Great Council on June 19.
The hidden web of patronage that landed Machiavelli his job is difficult to untangle, but it is clear he had friends and admirers among the moderates who now dominated the government. He almost certainly lobbied for the job since they were highly competitive and no one with the power to grant the favor was going to bestow it on someone who wasn’t sufficiently grateful. It may have been Bernardo’s friendship with the former Chancellor of Florence, Bartolomeo Scala, that first brought his son Niccolò to the attention of the new regime. Niccolò was also friendly with Alammano Salviati, Piero de’ Medici’s son-in-law, who was now a member in good standing of the ruling elite, and he was on cordial terms with the new Chancellor, Marcello Virgilio Adriani, a man who, like Scala and like all the chancellors before him, shared Machiavelli’s taste for classical literature. Five years his junior, Machiavelli probably knew Adriani from his time spent rounding out his education at the Studio, Florence’s university, while Adriani was a professor there.iii Most significantly, perhaps, Ricciardo Becchi, the ambassador to the Holy See who had just employed him to snoop on the sermons of the friar, could have vouched for his anti-Savonarola views.
Machiavelli’s politics made him acceptable and his connections brought him to the attention of the right people, but it was his literary skills that qualified him for the job. Unlike the First Chancellor’s position, which was largely ceremonial and involved writing magisterial encomiums to the wisdom and greatness of the republic he served, the post of Second Chancellor was far less prestigious but equally important to the actual functioning of the government. The Second Chancery was tasked with handling the bulk of the state’s correspondence. In theory, foreign affairs were under the jurisdiction of the First Chancery but, in typically Florentine fashion, the boundaries between the departments were porous, if not actually confused. Machiavelli did not limit himself to domestic matters but plunged almost immediately into diplomatic and foreign affairs. His role in the city’s foreign service was made official in July when he was given the additional title of Secretary to the Ten of War and Peace, charged with handling the correspondence of this all-important body that oversaw the republic’s military forces.
Machiavelli’s role was not to set policy but to aid his superiors in implementing it. His immediate subordinates at the Chancery included ten to fifteen notaries and secretaries, learned men of modest means who had the skill and command of both Latin and the vernacular to convert the often garbled instructions of their superiors into comprehensible documents drafted in a fine, legible hand. As worldly and well educated as those who ruled the state, they differed from their bosses to the extent that they needed to draw a steady income. Their office was located on the second floor of the Palazzo della Signoria, just off the Room of Lilies where their lordships dined in regal splendor beneath frescoes by Ghirlandaio.
Machiavelli was on friendly terms with many of these high dignitaries, but it was clear he was their employee, not their equal. Passing the highest office holders on his way to his office, he would bow before exchanging a few pleasantries. If he could not match them in terms of wealth or status, he was not far removed from their world. In fact he was in many ways a man of their class, equally well educated and with an old, distinguished family name. The distinctions were real but subtle, making Machiavelli’s relations with his superiors complicated, ambiguous, and fraught with unarticulated tensions. When he came to write his great political and literary works, this marginality would offer a fresh perspective on age-old questions.
While in town Machiavelli would make the ten-minute walk daily from his house, across the Ponte Vecchio, to the palace where he would spend his days bent over at his desk piled high with the most important documents of the Florentine Republic. Working with him were his assistants Biagio Buonaccorsi and Agostino Vespucci, men who would become his friends and most reliable correspondents over the course of the next few years. Buonaccorsi was particularly close to his new boss. In one letter he describes how the two of them could be found on most days at adjacent desks, happily writing side by side as they shared the latest gossip and made snide comments about their colleagues. They had been friends before their appointment (on the same day) and it is largely thanks to their correspondence that we can paint a detailed portrait of Machiavelli’s life in the first years of his career.
Though much of the work was routine, and always voluminous, Machiavelli clearly relished it. Plowing through the dispatches of various ambassadors, firing off letters of his own—sometimes encouraging but often, if he felt his correspondent had shirked his duty, acerbic—he was in his element. “If I have not written as often as I would have liked,” Machiavelli wrote to one of his colleagues, “it is because I have been so busy”—a common complaint among those employed in the Second Chancery since the always parsimonious government tried to extract the maximum effort from its paid staff.
In part, his growing portfolio was a tribute to Machiavelli’s native abilities, but it was also a product of the built-in inefficiencies of the government. Elected offices were usually of short duration—in the cases of the most important ones like the Priors and Gonfaloniere (Standard-Bearer of Justice), the titular head of state, as little as two months—which placed greater burdens on the permanent bureaucracy. While elected officers came and went, the salaried officials provided continuity and institutional memory.
This was all the more critical in this time of crisis. The wounds to the body politic in the wake of Savonarola’s death were more than political and healing would require more than just a change in personnel. A few months earlier Florence was held spellbound by a leader who promised a wholesale reformation of the human spirit. During his first days in office, Machiavelli passed on his way to work a group of women who knelt in prayer on the spot where their leader had met his death, and they were not the only ones who found it difficult to turn their gaze from heavenly realms to gritty, earthbound realities. What could the current government of merchants and bankers offer to compete with Savonarola’s metaphysics?
For the administration of which Machiavelli was now a part, the job was complicated by the fact that those who had brought about Savonarola’s downfall did not necessarily share a common vision for the future. “[M]any,” wrote Guicciardini, “believed that by overthrowing the friar the Great Council would be destroyed, and that was why they had worked so vigorously against him,” but these reactionary elements were quickly disappointed “when they saw that many of their followers . . . and all the people wanted to keep the council.” Chronic tensions between ottimati, who wished to preserve the dominant role of the traditional elite, and popoleschi, who continued to push for broader representation, made it difficult to implement consistent policies. The normal friction between the two groups threatened to erupt into chaos with each new fiscal challenge or military setback. In one heated debate over implementing a system of progressive taxation, a spokesman for the popular faction captured the resentments of his class. “[I]f [the ottimati] complain that this tax will impoverish them,” sneered Luigi Scarlatti, “let them reduce their expenses; and if they can’t keep their horses and servants, let them do as
he does and walk to their country houses and serve themselves.” The rich, for their part, suspected that legislation enacted by the popular faction was designed with the sole intent of ruining them. “What a disgusting thing it is,” complained the wealthy and well-connected Guicciardini, “that among the city’s leading citizens, who have the same interests and should have the same judgments about things, there is so little loyalty, so little unity, and so little courage in matters that one might say concern their very existence.”
Machiavelli, less moralizing and more imaginative than his friend, drew different lessons from his city’s fractiousness. Like James Madison, who structured the U.S. Constitution to resolve the conflicting needs of its citizens through a system of checks and balances, Machiavelli viewed such tensions as both inevitable and even creative. “[I]n every republic,” he wrote in The Discourses, “there are two different dispositions, that of the populace and that of the upper class and . . . all legislation favorable to liberty is brought about by the clash between them.” But while acknowledging the perennial conflict of interest among the haves and have-nots, and insisting that at least some level of conflict is a necessary precondition of liberty, he faulted his compatriots who shortsightedly pursued the interests of party, failing to recognize that their own rights would best be protected by acknowledging the legitimate aspirations of their neighbors. “The reason why all these governments [in Florence] have been defective,” he explained, “is that the alterations in them have been made not for the fulfillment of the common good, but for the strengthening and security of the party.” The problem was not with human nature, which he fully acknowledged was selfish and quarrelsome, but with those legislators who failed to put in place political structures that imposed equal obligations on all the citizens and, in return, offered a fair distribution of society’s benefits.
Machiavelli’s view of politics as an unceasing battle between competing groups and individuals came naturally to one intimately acquainted with Florentine politics. From the beginning of his tenure the government he served was divided both horizontally along class lines and vertically among multiple networks of patronage. Constantly bickering and with the blood of holy men on their hands, the current government lacked legitimacy in the eyes of many citizens. It was above all the haplessly conducted war to reconquer Pisa, whose only tangible result so far was to part Florentines from their hard-earned money, which served as the focus of popular discontent. The piling up of disaster upon disaster that had soured the people of Florence on Savonarola’s leadership, would surely do the same for the current occupants of the Palazzo della Signoria unless they quickly did something to relieve the pressure.
• • •
A cornerstone of Machiavelli’s philosophy is that success, particularly in the tricky realm of politics, depends on a willingness to adapt to circumstances. “[A] prince is successful,” he writes, “when he fits his mode of proceeding to the times, and is unsuccessful when his mode of proceeding is no longer in tune with them.” This commonsense observation, based on his own experience in the Chancery tailoring policies to the exigencies of the moment, is actually more radical than it seems since it leads ultimately to moral relativism. Unlike the philosophers who preceded him, Machiavelli does not seek to establish universal laws but only limited rules for individual cases. There can be no absolute notion of the Good when an approach that proves effective on one occasion leads to disaster on another.
This flexibility has outraged generations of critics who accuse Machiavelli of a deplorable moral slipperiness, but he would argue that sticking to principle when the facts have changed leads to human suffering. His was an elastic philosophy tailor-made for troubled times, hard won from years of toil on behalf of a weak and faction-ridden government.
Both Machiavelli’s career and thought were shaped by war and by the unsettled condition of Italy following the French invasion four years before he took office. The reverberations from that cataclysmic event continued to rattle the fragile political structures that divided the peninsula, offering opportunities to a few adventurers but anxiety for the remainder who sought security in an age that seemed to offer little of that precious commodity. For the Republic of Florence, once again free to pursue its interests without distraction from messianic preachers, innumerable difficulties lay ahead. Fantasies of Kingdom Come had been jettisoned in favor of more obtainable objectives here on earth, but even with these more realistic and more limited goals in mind, those in government were forced to concede that the resources seemed inadequate to the task at hand. Florentines, who preferred to expend their coin rather than their blood but were inclined to be stingy with both, found the coffers almost bare as those they hired to do their fighting for them seemed more interested in prolonging the profitable enterprise than risking all in a decisive confrontation. As Luca Landucci observed, “The rule for our Italian soldiers seems to be this: ‘You pillage there, and we will pillage here; there is no need for us to approach too close to one another.’ ”
In retrospect it is clear that Machiavelli’s service in the government of Florence at this particular moment in history provided the ideal education for the philosopher he was to become. It was a school of hard knocks that opened his eyes and toughened his spirit. It provided innumerable practical lessons in practical politics, and he learned from both his occasional triumphs and his far more common setbacks.
Much of Machiavelli’s writing, from The Prince to The Art of War, deals with military matters, since he concluded that it was pointless to discuss the proper form of government unless and until a state could adequately defend itself. “A prince must have no other objective, no other thought, nor take up any profession but that of war,” he insisted. This bellicose attitude was a response to his frustration at Florentine fecklessness when it came to protecting itself from foreign aggressors. From the beginning of his career, Machiavelli found himself embroiled in endless quarrels between the cash-strapped government and the various generals in its employ. In March 1499, he was sent to the camp of one of the condottieri involved in the effort to reconquer Pisa, Jacopo, lord of Piombino, who was threatening to withdraw his services unless he received more money and more troops. Machiavelli’s mission was a success; he managed to persuade Jacopo to adhere to the terms already agreed to. More importantly, it was his first opportunity to witness the disastrous consequences of relying on soldiers for hire. As the war to conquer Pisa dragged on apparently without end and as Florence sought protection against a host of foreign threats, relying on those who owed loyalty to no one but the highest bidder seemed to Machiavelli a dangerous and shortsighted policy unworthy of free men.
On a second junket, this time to Forli, a small state in the Romagna some fifty miles northeast of Florence, Machiavelli plunged more deeply into thickets of military strategy and diplomatic intrigue.iv Setting out on horseback on the 12th of July, he arrived at the court of Caterina Sforza four days later. Here he plunged into negotiations with the Countess over renewing the contract with her son, Ottaviano Riario, as a condottiere in the service of the republic. On this, his first important diplomatic mission, he was brought face-to-face with one of the truly remarkable characters of the age. A woman of great courage and beauty (Biagio Buonaccorsi requested that his friend bring back a portrait for him to admire), Caterina was the illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who had ruled Milan until his assassination in 1476. At the tender age of fourteen she had been married to Girolamo Riario, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV. It was Girolamo who, regarding Florence as the chief impediment to his ambition to carve out a state for himself in the Romagna, planned the murderous attack on Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici known as the Pazzi Conspiracy. A cruel and violent prince, he himself was assassinated by his long-suffering subjects in 1488. During the revolt, Caterina’s young children were taken hostage; when the rebel leaders threatened to kill them unless she surrendered the fortress into which she had fled, she leapt onto the parapet, pulled up her skirts, and,
pointing to her genitals, declared she was ready and able to make more.v When her second husband met the same fate as her first, she wreaked terrible vengeance on the people of Forli, executing forty suspected conspirators in the public square.
If her sex made her exceptional among the petty rulers of Italy, the frequency with which those close to her tended to meet violent deaths was only slightly above the norm. In the barely contained chaos of Italian politics, minor states were fought over by the larger ones like dogs snarling over a meat bone, and any petty potentate hoping to avoid being devoured needed to be both resourceful and quick on her feet. Caterina was both. She had survived this long through a certain ruthlessness and an aptitude for finding champions—neighbors, relatives, and husbands—who would protect her from her covetous neighbors without demanding that she forfeit her independence. Her most recent marriage was to Giovanni de’ Medici, son of Pierfrancesco,vi and her court was, according to Machiavelli’s report, “crowded with Florentines, who appear to manage all the concerns of the State.”
With so many Florentines in positions of influence, Machiavelli hoped they would promote the republic’s cause. But Caterina was a master at playing one power off against the other. Not only were Florentines here in force, but so were agents from the Duke of Milan, Caterina’s uncle, who also hoped to retain Ottaviano Riario’s services for his own impending battle with the French King. After days of haggling, Machiavelli thought he had struck a mutually beneficial arrangement, but the following morning he was called before the Countess and found her in close consultation with the Milanese ambassador. Now “having thought the matter over in the night,” Machiavelli reported, “it seemed to her better not to fulfill the terms, unless the Florentines would pledge themselves to defend her state. That although she had sent him a message of a different nature the previous day, he ought not to be surprised at the change, since the more things are talked over, the better they are understood.”
Machiavelli Page 10