Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  As always he worked zealously on behalf of the state, while using the daily frustrations of his office—the incessant quarrels with various captains over pay and dispositions—as grist for the analytical mill that was turning slowly in his head. He had received a traditional humanist education, built around the great classical authors and texts, so it was only natural for him to compare his own experience to the ancient models set forth in Livy, Plutarch, and Thucydides—almost always discovering that the present fell far short of the past. “I have heard,” he wrote, “that history is the teacher of our actions, and especially of our rulers; the world has always been inhabited by men with the same passions as our own, and there have always been rulers and ruled, and good subjects and bad subjects, and those who rebel and are punished.”

  Comparing the professional soldiers of his own day with the citizen militias of the Roman Republic, Machiavelli extolled the virtues of the latter: “[A]s long as the Roman republic continued incorrupt,” he would later write in The Art of War,

  no citizen, however powerful, ever presumed to avail himself of that profession [of arms] in peacetime so as to trample upon the laws, to plunder the provinces, or to turn tyrant and enslave his country . . . . The commanders, on the contrary, contenting themselves with the honor of a triumph, returned with eagerness to their former manner of living, and the common soldiers laid down their arms with much more pleasure than they had taken them up. Each resumed the calling by which he had gotten his bread before, and none had any hopes of advancing himself by plunder and rapine.

  Compare this happy picture to the professional soldiers for hire Machiavelli was forced to deal with on a daily basis:

  Mercenary captains are either skilled at arms, or they are not [he wrote in The Prince]. If they are, you cannot trust them, because they will always aspire to achieve greatness for themselves, either by suppressing you who are their master, or by suppressing others whom you wish to protect. If, instead, they are not courageous and skillful soldiers, they will ruin you just the same.

  The habit of viewing current events through the prism of the classical past was not unique to Machiavelli, but few could speak with the authority of the Second Chancellor of Florence, who combined theoretical knowledge with a wealth of practical experience.

  Even at this early stage Valentino had made a powerful impression on Machiavelli. His boldness stood in stark contrast to Florence’s indecision. While Valentino led his own troops into battle, seizing the initiative through quick movements and judicious application of force, Florence depended on the favor of distant lords and mercenaries whose loyalty was to themselves rather than to their employers. The city’s impotence was amply demonstrated in the spring of 1501 when Valentino was allowed to cross Florence’s borders unchallenged.

  Borgia’s policy was to put as much pressure as he could on the republic without actually provoking a French backlash. In May, with his army on Florentine soil, he demanded they reward his insolence by offering him a condotta (contract) as a captain in their army. Reports of atrocities committed by his troops added to the urgency to strike a deal. “The whole morning,” wrote Luca Landucci in his diary, “we heard nothing but the iniquities of Valentino’s troops; among other things they sacked Carmigiano, and carried off all the girls they found there, who were gathered in a church from all the country round.” Too weak to confront their tormentor on the field of battle, Florence was forced to buy him off by offering him a contract to supply three hundred men-at-arms in return for the exorbitant fee of 36,000 ducats.

  This was less a traditional contract than a form of extortion, though in truth in the hiring of mercenary troops there was often little to distinguish the two. Valentino was proving that, in addition to his other talents, he was adept at running a Mafia-style protection racket. Fortunately the republic was saved from further bullying by Louis, who summoned his vassal to help with the reduction of the Kingdom of Naples, which, by the terms of the Treaty of Granada—signed secretly in November 1500—had been divided between France and Spain.x Valentino himself was ordered to capture the strategic city of Capua, which he treated with his characteristic brutality. “They killed without pity priests, monks and nuns, in churches and convents, and all the women they found: the young girls were seized and cruelly abused; the number of people killed amounted to around 6000.” On August 19, the French army occupied Naples and, for a few weeks at least, Florence could relax while Valentino, with all the arrogance and cruelty of a conquering hero, enjoyed himself with a harem he created by seizing forty of the most beautiful women in the city.

  • • •

  At the same time Valentino was wading in gore and indulging in sensual excess in Naples, Machiavelli’s life in Florence was taking a more domestic turn. Sometime in August 1501, Machiavelli—now thirty-two years old—married Marietta Corsini, a young woman from a distinguished family in the adjacent neighborhood in the Oltrarno, the Gonfalone Ferza (the Banner of the Whip). The Corsini, like the Machiavelli, were an old and respected Florentine family, well represented among the office holders who ran the city, though not among the great clans who dominated the halls of power. The union was professionally advantageous for Niccolò since Marietta’s sister was married to Piero del Nero, a member of the Ten of War and thus, effectively, Machiavelli’s boss. It was one more sign that Machiavelli was well regarded in the upper echelons of the government; in marrying Marietta Corsini, Niccolò was marrying up.

  As head of the household Machiavelli conducted the negotiations for the marriage contract himself. Marietta remained in the background and had little say in the matter. Instead, Machiavelli haggled over the dowry over a period of months with Marietta’s father, Luigi, and possibly her brother, Lanciolino. There is no question of a romantic motive.xi Marriage in Renaissance Florence was largely an economic arrangement between two families. At most, the groom would have examined his intended—either himself or through third parties—to determine whether she was physically suitable and of good character, while the prospective bride had little input, relying on the male members of her family to protect her interests.

  We have no records of the various contracts or ceremonies involved, though we know enough about the process to paint a detailed, if somewhat generic, picture. After an initial marriage contract (sponsalia)—arrived at only after many offers and counteroffers—the bride would have been escorted to the house of her husband where the wedding feast was laid. Months or even years could pass between the initial sponsalia and the moment when the bride left her father’s house to live under the roof of her husband. The wedding feast was the public face of a union that was as much civic as private, the moment when the community gave its blessing to the joining of two families. Given Machiavelli’s modest means, this was unlikely to have been an elaborate affair, but it would have included not only members of both families, but also friends and neighbors who were politically and financially invested in the successful merging of two respected clans. Only after the plates were cleared and the guests had departed was a more intimate union forged as the couple retired to the bedroom to consummate marriage.

  No doubt Niccolò and Marietta followed these time-honored customs, though neither the bride nor groom was an important enough personage to have the event recorded for posterity. Nor did Machiavelli himself feel compelled to memorialize the occasion. True, his marriage to Marietta Corsini marked a profound change in his life, the moment when he began to build his own household, looking forward to fatherhood and assuming the added burdens of supporting a family of his own. But it was also something prosaic, the next step in a logical progression from youth to maturity. It is telling that having taken this momentous step he saw no reason to alter his habits or his outlook on life. His passion continued to be his job; his time was taken up with work and with friends, who no doubt spent many a hilarious hour at the tavern making obscene jokes at the expense of their newly married friend. He found little time, and spared little thought, for the young bride who
waited for him while he pursued his various pleasures.

  Like Niccolò’s mother, Bartolomea Nelli, Marietta remains a shadowy figure. But few Renaissance women—and almost all of these, like Caterina Sforza or Lucrezia Borgia, are members of ruling dynasties—are anything but two-dimensional. Custom relegated women to the domestic realm, to housekeeping and childrearing, and even in these limited roles they almost never received the credit they deserved. Writers on domestic issues tended to treat women with patronizing indulgence or, worse, with outright contempt. The Venetian aristocrat Francesco Barbaro in his influential essay “On Wifely Duties” speaks of the wife’s “obedience [to her husband], which is her master and companion.” In his Books on the Family, Leon Battista Alberti lists the characteristics of an ideal wife—“to wish to appear a woman of honor, to command the household and to make herself respected, to care for the welfare of the family and to preserve the things that are in the house.” Even in this limited and distinctly female role, she can only hope to fulfill her potential by listening attentively to her husband, who should instruct her with the patience and forbearance one might use with a child.

  A relationship in which the husband claimed absolute authority over his submissive wife was encouraged in Florence by the large age difference between the two. Marrying at thirty-two, Machiavelli fell within the normal range for men. Marietta’s age at the time of her wedding is not known for certain, but she was almost certainly in her late teens. Though her family was at least as distinguished as her husband’s, she was a young girl of far less education and worldly experience. For all his imagination when it came to matters of state, there is no indication that Machiavelli was more enlightened than his peers when it came to relations between the sexes. In fact one can glean from various remarks scattered throughout his writings that he possessed the usual prejudices of males of his class. “I hope I shall never be a husband if I can’t get my wife to do what I want,” remarks Callimaco, the hero of his play La Mandragola, an attitude of superiority reflected in somewhat softer terms by Callimaco’s servant, who says, “with gentle words you can usually get a woman where you want her to go.” There is no question of Machiavelli treating his wife, or any of the other women in his life, as an equal. Men who doted on their wives were considered fools and, in all likelihood, cuckolds who deserved what they got for having turned the natural order of their households upside down.

  In his own writings Machiavelli enjoys skewering men who strayed from the “ideal” prescribed by moralists like Barbaro and Alberti. The foolish husband whose wife runs rings around him is a stock comic character, and Machiavelli squeezes maximum laughs from such situations in his two best-known plays, Clizia and La Mandragola. Here it is the men who are weak, easily deceived, and done in by their own vices—lust in the case of Nicomaco in Clizia, stupidity and greed in the case of Nicia in La Mandragola—while their wives are both more virtuous and more capable. In both cases Machiavelli gives the husband a name that is a variation of his own, demonstrating a generous capacity to laugh at himself.

  This is not to say that these plays are necessarily an accurate depiction of his own marriage, but they do reflect a nuanced, if not entirely unprejudiced, attitude toward the potential of both sexes. He certainly had no trouble imagining strong, sensible women, women who, in the eyes of the pompous Barbaro, would have been condemned for not knowing their place. How much of Marietta is there in the character of Sofronia, the long-suffering wife in Clizia who must hold the family together while her husband recklessly pursues the object of his obsession? Perhaps a great deal, but it is also true that comedy often depends on reversing the normal order of things (which is why cross-dressing is such a staple of the genre). Despite his sympathy for his female characters, Machiavelli was capable of a misogyny distasteful to modern ears. Noting the vicissitudes of life, for instance, Machiavelli wrote “fortune is a woman and in order to be mastered she must be jogged and beaten,” words that elicit sympathy for the flesh-and-blood woman forced to share a house, and a bed, with the writer.

  Marietta seems to have been devoted to Niccolò, but not so cowed by the master of the house that she didn’t feel free to lash out when she felt she had been wronged. Her main complaint was that he was so often out of town on business that she rarely got to see him. Only a year after their wedding, while Machiavelli was away on government business, she was berating him for abandoning her. “Lady Marietta,” wrote Biagio Buonaccorsi—whose job, it seems, was to look after her while he was away—“curses God, and says she has thrown away both her body and her goods.” Similar complaints are a regular feature of their correspondence, but a wife whose main complaint is that her husband is never around is a wife not entirely dissatisfied with her mate.

  The following year, 1503, Marietta wrote the one letter we have from her hand. The short missive offers a precious glimpse into Machiavelli’s domestic world and is worth quoting in full:

  My dearest Niccolò. You make fun of me, but without reason, for I would thrive if you were with me.xii You know how happy I am when you are not down there [in Rome]; and now more than ever since I have been told how much disease is going around. How can I be content when I can rest neither day nor night. The happiness I find comes from the baby.xiii So I beg you to send me letters a little more often than you do, since I have only had three so far. Don’t be surprised if I have not written, because I have not been able to since until now I have had a fever. I am not angry. For now the baby is well. He looks like you, white as snow, with his head a velvety black, and he is hairy like you. Since he looks like you he seems beautiful to me. And he’s so lively he acts as if he’s been in the world for a year. As soon as he was born he opened his eyes and filled the whole house with his cries. But our daughter [Primavera] is not feeling well. Remember to come back home. Nothing more. May God be with you and keep you safe.

  I am sending you a doublet and two shirts and two kerchiefs and a towel, which I have here for you.

  Your Marietta in Florence

  There’s a tenderness to this simple note that belies the caricature of Machiavelli as a soulless hedonist, pursuing low pleasures while offering his sardonic take on the world around him. In assessing Machiavelli the man, one should recall these words along with seedier details revealed in his letters and his plays. Though it could not have been easy putting up with his infidelities and frequent neglect, there nonetheless seems to have been genuine affection between husband and wife, a bond cemented over the years by the shared love of their children.

  Judged by the less sentimental measures favored by Renaissance Florentines, Machiavelli’s marriage was an unqualified success. By March 1506, when it was the turn of Agostino Vespucci to assume the pleasant chore of dropping in on Machiavelli’s family and filling him in on their progress, the household was already overrun by young children. “I’ll go to your house before heading off to the chancellery, and before I finish I’ll let you know what’s happening with your little troop,” Vespucci assured him. Later he reports: “I’ve just returned from your house, and took care of everything that you asked of me in your letter. All are well, excellent in fact, and Marietta was anxious for me to pass along her regards, as well as that of the children. As I said: all are well. Only Bernardo is a little bit fussy, but has no fever or other illness.”

  • • •

  Machiavelli, in any case, had little time to bask in domestic bliss. By the autumn of 1501 Valentino was back in Tuscany and renewing his assault on Piombino, which quickly fell to his forces. New and alarming reports concerning Valentino’s intentions landed on the Second Chancellor’s desk almost daily, including one in December that the Pisans had reopened talks to have Borgia declared their Duke, a move that would put an end to Florentine hopes of regaining the wayward city. Borgia’s promises to the French King precluded a direct assault on Florence but did not prevent him from toying with the republic like a cat with a wounded bird.

  In June 1502, with Valentino making various pro
vocative demonstrations in the vicinity, the citizens of Arezzo—a city some forty miles southeast of Florence that had been an important dependency since the fourteenth century—rebelled, offering to place themselves instead under the protection of one of Valentino’s chief lieutenants. The man to whom they turned was Vitellozzo Vitelli, the brother of Paolo Vitelli, whose execution at the hands of Florence had transformed the surviving sibling into an implacable enemy. The dimensions of the threat were exposed when Vitellozzo was joined by Piero de’ Medici, who hoped to use Arezzo as a launching pad for an attempt on Florence itself.xiv

  Though Valentino disavowed his subordinate’s action, he clearly enjoyed watching the squirming of a government he regarded as little more than a collection of pusillanimous shopkeepers.xv His poor estimate of the republic’s fighting capacity was confirmed when a Florentine force detached from the Pisan campaign to rescue Arezzo turned back without striking a blow. All Florence could now do was go scurrying off once more to the King of France, whose friendship they had recently purchased at a high price.

  Cesare Borgia clearly had the upper hand, but he still needed to tread carefully to avoid provoking Louis. It was a delicate three-way dance among partners who circled each other warily, daggers half drawn. Tensions only increased when Valentino added yet another state to his long list of conquests. His latest victim was the Duchy of Urbino, a mountain stronghold in the Marches about seventy miles east of Florence that he seized in a surprise attack on June 21.xvi It was from a position of strength, then, that Valentino now requested from the government of Florence a delegation to discuss a new arrangement, one that acknowledged his supremacy in the region. Appointed to head the mission was Francesco Soderini, Bishop of Volterra; in the now familiar supporting role was Niccolò Machiavelli.