Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  Thus ended the remarkable career of the Moor, a man who imagined himself a paragon of cunning but whose short-term cleverness was accompanied by no real wisdom. “So his shrewdness was mocked,” wrote Machiavelli with obvious satisfaction, a sentiment shared by a majority of his compatriots. It was due largely to his ambition that a great people now lay prostrate beneath the barbarian’s boot, and it was only just that the author of this calamity should find himself caught in the web he had woven.

  Among the first to congratulate the French King was the Florentine ambassador, Tommaso Soderini, who deemed the moment auspicious to remind him of recent commitments. Negotiations were conducted with Georges d’Amboise, Cardinal of Rouen,x a man whose business acumen and ability to drive a hard bargain were more typical of a merchant than a man of God. He finally agreed to lend the troops already promised—five hundred spearmen, four thousand Swiss pike men, and two thousand Gascons—but only at the exorbitant price of 24,000 ducats a month. Soderini acceded to the onerous terms reluctantly, hoping that a quick campaign would bring victory before bankruptcy.

  But the expedition was doomed from the outset, largely because the two allies had divergent aims. For the French, Florence was of little use except as a bank from which to withdraw funds for the maintenance of their army on foreign soil; their strategy was to extract as much cash as they could up front, while providing as few troops as they could get away with. For Florence, the conquest of Naples was a matter of indifference unless Pisa was part of the campaign. The truth was that Florence needed France more than France needed the militarily insignificant republic. Soderini, like Machiavelli at Forli, was discovering the tribulations of representing a state regarded with contempt by its partners. The army was slow to set out, and once in motion moved with the leisurely pace, if not the tight discipline, of soldiers on parade. In fact the greed and unruliness of the French troops, who extorted money and provisions from every community they approached—friend and foe alike—undermined the cause of the city that employed them even before any blows were struck.

  Hoping to bring order to a situation that was fast spinning out of control, the Florentine government dispatched to Cascina, ten miles to the east of Pisa where the army was now bivouacked, two commissioners, Luca degli Albizzi and Giovan Battista Ridolfi. Also included in the delegation was Machiavelli, who was to serve as secretary. Riding into camp, they found the troops close to mutiny. In the tradition of hired guns throughout the ages, the men complained of poor rations and salaries owed, turning their fury on their paymasters rather than on the enemy they were supposed to fight. Albizzi deemed the situation so dangerous that he told his colleagues, “He who is afraid may go back to Florence,” an offer that Ridolfi immediately seized.

  Despite friction between the Florentine representatives and the army, in late June eight thousand men advanced on Pisa, and on the 27th French artillery opened up on the walls of the city. But in a repetition of the Vitelli fiasco a year earlier, stalemate was plucked from the jaws of near certain victory, and this time the results were even more injurious to Florentine interests. On July 7, the Gascons deserted en masse, while the Swiss concluded that they risked fewer injuries if they stormed the headquarters of the Florentine commissioner rather than the Pisan fortifications. “It might . . . be well,” Albizzi now wrote to the Signoria with calculated understatement, “whether it is desired that my life should be saved . . . . Let not your Excellencies think that cowardice moves me in this, since by no means would I flee from any peril, that should be deemed indispensable by my city.” Machiavelli, who actually penned these letters dictated by his boss, was of the same mind, willing to do what he could but anxious not to lose his life in a doomed effort. The following day Albizzi was seized by the disgruntled troops, who threatened to kill him if he did not come up with the money they claimed they were owed; he was released only when he signed a guarantee that he would cover his government’s obligations from his own bank account. But by this time it was too late to salvage the expedition. The army for which Florence had paid so dearly and from which so much had been expected no longer existed. It had dissolved before the walls of Pisa, taking with it much Florentine pride and treasure.

  Machiavelli recalled this unfortunate episode in his First Decennale, which sets out in verse form the trials of serving a state that lacked the will and courage to defend itself:

  But when they confronted the Pisans, the Gauls, full of confusion,

  struck by fear, did not show their forces at all prepared,

  but went away almost defeated and marked with severe disgrace;

  so the truth was known that the French can be conquered.

  And it was not an affair to pass over lightly, because if it made

  [Florence] groveling and servile, upon the French was the chief reproach;

  but you were not free from blame, although the Gaul

  tried to cover his shame with the failure of others;

  and your government too did not understand how to make decisions.

  Though he grants to the French “the chief reproach,” he blames his native land almost equally. “Groveling and servile,” Florence had allowed itself to become dependent on another nation, one, moreover, that proved itself inept as well as faithless. Failure to capture the puny city of Pisa revealed the weakness of both states. Under more settled conditions such a revelation might not have proved fatal, but with Italy fast becoming the proving ground for the armies of Europe, such an opening could not remain long without someone walking through it.

  * * *

  i This salary could provide a comfortable, if not luxurious, living. It was double what a skilled artisan would take home in a year. But given the expenses of the job—including travel on behalf of the government that was often not compensated—Machiavelli continued to struggle to make ends meet. Adriani, the Chancellor of Florence, was hired at a salary of 330 florins per year.

  ii Diarist Marco Parenti declared that at this time Savonarola’s “friends were approved [for election] and those suspect left outside” (Rubinstein, “The Beginnings of Machiavelli’s Career in the Florentine Chancery,” 80).

  iii Machiavelli’s other sponsor was Antonio della Valle, Adriani’s assistant in the First Chancery.

  iv The Romagna was the province that bordered Tuscany to the east and north. Theoretically it was ruled by the Pope, but in reality it was divided among numerous, largely independent potentates. The tensions thus created were a source of endless headaches for the Florentine Republic.

  v The children were spared.

  vi Pierfrancesco de’ Medici belonged to the so-called younger branch of the Medici family descended from Lorenzo, brother of Cosimo—grandfather of Lorenzo the Magnificent and great-grandfather of Piero. Piero had exiled his cousins before his own expulsion brought them back to Florence. Giovanni de’ Medici and Caterina Sforza gave birth in 1498 to another Giovanni, who grew into a famous mercenary general nicknamed Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Giovanni of the Black Band, the name for his renowned company). He, in turn, fathered Cosimo de’ Medici, who became Grand Duke of Tuscany.

  vii The florin and ducat were roughly comparable. The florin was minted at Florence, the ducat at Venice. Both coinages were in use throughout Italy and Europe.

  viii This practice happened surprisingly often in Renaissance Italy, perhaps one of the reasons condottieri felt little sense of obligation to their employers. The other famous case of a mercenary general beheaded by his employers was that of Carmagnola, a condottiere in the employ of Venice who was beheaded in 1432 after similar accusations of treachery. It is safe to say that relations between mercenary generals and the governments who hired them were marked by mutual suspicion.

  ix It is from this dukedom that Cesare took the title by which he is best known in Italy: Valentino.

  x The elevation of d’Amboise, a favorite of the King, to the College of Cardinals was one of the conditions of the agreement between Louis and Pope Alexander. The red cardina
l’s hat was carried in the luggage of Cesare Borgia on his voyage to France.

  IV

  SIR NIHIL

  “The French are blinded by their own power, and only think those who are armed or ready to give money worthy of their esteem. They see that these two qualities are wanting in you, so they look upon you as Sir Nihil.”

  —MACHIAVELLI, DISPATCH TO THE TEN OF WAR

  RODRIGO BORGIA, THE SPANISH-BORN POPE ALEXANDER VI, was on intimate terms with most of the Deadly Sins. Greed, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, and Pride: all these vices he possessed in more than full measure. It was as if he modeled himself on the Borgia family crest, whose heraldic device featured a black bull. Rather than conceal his failings, as his equally corrupt but more timid predecessors had, Rodrigo reveled in them, boasting of his sexual prowess and gargantuan appetites. In July 1501, Machiavelli received a report from Rome chronicling the misdeeds of the Pontiff. “Benefices are sold here like melons,” Agostino Vespucci explained to his friend. “[E]very evening, from the Ave Maria to an hour after sunset, twenty-five or more women are brought into the palace . . . until the whole [Vatican] palace is turned into a brothel filled with every obscenity.” In a break from the custom of the time, Rodrigo openly acknowledged his many children rather than passing them off as his nieces and nephews. He may have been no worse than some of the other recent occupants of the papal throne, but he embraced his sinful nature with unusual gusto.

  Machiavelli himself had a decidedly mixed opinion of this powerful figure “who, of all the pontiffs that have ever been, showed how much a pope—with both money and an army at his disposal—could accomplish.” But, as Machiavelli also noted, his abilities were employed in pursuit of selfish ends, “to ensure the greatness not of the Church, but instead of the Duke [Cesare, his son].” In The Prince, Machiavelli treats him with grudging respect: “Alexander VI . . . never thought of anything but deception, and always found subjects on whom to practice this art. There never was a man who made promises more effectively, or affirmed an oath with as much solemnity, while observing them less. Nonetheless, his tricks always paid off, for he was well acquainted with this side of the world.”

  Alexander’s oldest and most capable son, Cesare—known as Valentino—had followed his father into the Church. Elevated in 1493 to the College of Cardinals at the age of eighteen, he was insulated to some extent from the squabbles that set one minor state against the other. Of course the Renaissance Church was a highly political institution and, as his father’s right-hand man, he was a force to be reckoned with in temporal as well as ecclesiastical matters, but since he was prohibited by the nature of his office from producing legitimate heirs and founding his own dynasty, he remained largely on the sidelines while others fought to rearrange the map of Italy to their liking. Within the Church his future was unlimited, and to one of a more placid temperament the prospect of ascending to the very pinnacle of power without risk to life and limb might have seemed an attractive alternative. But to Cesare, honors won by peaceful means seemed hardly worthy of a man.

  Despite the fact that Cesare did not allow his office to interfere unduly with his lifestyle—even his generally tolerant colleagues in the Holy College complained that he preferred the doublet and hose of a courtier to the scarlet robes of a cardinal—he was restless and discontented. A handsome, athletic man, he was already exhibiting the telltale “flowers” of syphilis—the Gallic disease, it was often called by Italians, who believed it had arrived with Charles’s invading army in 1494—proof that, like his father, he was not inclined to take his vow of celibacy literally. Another rule he apparently found onerous was the one prohibiting men of the cloth from engaging in acts of violence. When his sister Lucrezia was discovered in flagrante with a valet in her husband’s employ, Cesare drew his sword and chased the man through the Vatican. The valet’s life was initially spared when he threw himself at the feet of the Pope, but his body was later discovered floating facedown in the Tiber—the kind of unfortunate accident that seemed to befall those who got in the way of the Cardinal.

  The one man whose mere existence stood between Cesare Borgia and his fondest ambitions was his brother, Juan, who received the title the Duke of Gandía after marrying a cousin of the Spanish King. Described by a contemporary as “a very mean young man, full of ideas of grandeur . . . haughty, cruel and unreasonable,” Juan was nonetheless his father’s favorite and, it seemed to Cesare, the undeserving recipient of all those titles that rightfully should have gone to him. In 1496 Juan was appointed by Alexander second-in-command of the papal armies, a post for which Cesare thought himself far better suited. Events seemed to confirm Cesare’s judgment when Juan’s incompetence led to the army’s defeat at the hands of their own vassals, the insufferable Orsini counts, who were reluctant to submit to their papal overlord.

  On the evening of June 14, 1497, the two brothers dined together at the home of their mother, the Pope’s former mistress Donna Vannozza. Riding home that night the two parted company somewhere near the Piazza degli Ebrei, in Rome’s Jewish quarter. When the Duke failed to return home, and when the following morning his bodyguard was found dead, his desperate father launched a massive search effort. After searchers spent a couple of days combing the slums and alleys of the Eternal City, a charcoal vendor came forward to report that on the night of the disappearance he had seen a body being tossed into the river near where the Duke had last been seen with his brother. (When asked why he had not told his story earlier, he explained that this was such a common occurrence he had not thought it worth reporting.) Dredging the Tiber, the Pope’s men discovered the Duke’s body, dressed in the clothes he had worn while dining with the Cardinal.

  Suspicion immediately fell on Cesare, the man last seen in the Duke’s company and the one who had most to gain by his departure from the scene.i This, at least, was the rumor whispered in the rooms of the Vatican, though only out of the Pope’s hearing. Alexander was devastated by his favorite son’s death, “shutting himself away in a room in grief and anguish of heart, weeping most bitterly.” When he finally emerged from his isolation he appeared to be a changed man. “Life has lost all interest for us,” he declared. “It must be that God punishes us for our sins, for the Duke has done nothing to deserve so terrible a death.”

  But after a period of mourning, and a well-publicized campaign to reform a Church that under his tenure had grown, if possible, even more corrupt than before, Alexander reverted to his old ways, this time lavishing on the likely murderer all the favors he had previously bestowed on his victim. “Even more than by anger or by any other emotion,” Guicciardini declared, discovering in this simple formula the lodestar of all his policies, “the Pope was motivated by his unbounded greed to exalt his children, whom he loved passionately.” Thrusting aside any suspicions he might have harbored, Alexander was now determined to set Cesare on the path to worldly triumph that had eluded his ill-fated brother.

  The first step was for Cesare to exchange the robes of a prince of the Church for the sword and armor of a secular lord. Fortunately, a likely sponsor immediately stepped up in the person of King Louis of France, whose ambitions in Italy could best be realized by forging an alliance with the Pope. Soon Cesare was headed to France with the King’s guarantee of a dukedom in his pocket and, even more to his taste, the promise of a prominent role in the army of invasion.

  For the Republic of Florence the return of the ambitious Cesare Borgia to Italian soil at the head of an army was about as welcome as the plague. Papal relatives always proved troublesome since the territories in which they could fulfill their ambitions abutted those of the Florentine empire and often lay within what Florentines considered their sphere of influence. During the reign of Sixtus IV, the Pope’s desire to provide his nephew Girolamo Riario with his own fiefdom embroiled Florence in a two-year war that almost extinguished the independent republic. Geography alone made the Pope and his spawn a threat to Florentine independence. To the south lay the Papal States, the region n
ear Rome that constituted the most ancient possession of the Holy See; to the east and north the Romagna: both regions owed theoretical allegiance to the heir of Saint Peter, however much each vassal might act as if he commanded an independent state. Should Alexander and Cesare succeed in forcing these unruly dependents into submission, they would virtually encircle the republic. It is not surprising, then, that in the Palazzo della Signoria news of Cesare’s arrival in northern Italy was greeted with near panic.

  Everything indicated that Cesare was unlikely to settle for less than his predecessors. As a newly minted lord with a high-sounding title but little real power, he now contemplated the patchwork of Italian states like a ravenous man surveying a mouthwatering buffet. The only decision was which delicacies he should pop into his mouth first.

  Once Milan fell to the French—with Cesare, Duke Valentino, riding into the city triumphantly at the King’s side—he was free to set off in pursuit of his own territorial ambitions. First to attract his covetous eye was Forli, the same small state Sixtus had bequeathed to his nephew and that was still in the hands of his widow, the formidable Caterina Sforza. The unhappy outcome of Machiavelli’s earlier mission to Forli had resulted from Caterina’s conviction that Milan, under her uncle Ludovico Sforza, was in a better position to rescue her from the clutches of the Borgia than the weak, vacillating Florentine Republic. With her uncle now driven from Milan by the French, it seemed she had placed her bet on the wrong horse. Nor was this her only misstep. “[I]t would have been safer for her,” Machiavelli observed dryly, “had she not been hated by the people.” Caterina had run out of champions. After a brief siege, Valentino’s army stormed her last remaining citadel, captured the Countess, and threw her into prison.ii Thus the son of Pope Alexander destroyed the last vestiges of the fiefdom his predecessor had hoped to establish for his nephew, Girolamo Riario, once again demonstrating how difficult it was to build a secular dynasty on a foundation of papal power.iii