Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  In their initial meeting, Machiavelli was subjected to one of those tirades for which the new Pope would soon become famous, though fortunately the target of his wrath was their common enemy, the arrogant Venetians. Having reassured himself as to the direction of Julius’s foreign policy Machiavelli paid a call on Valentino. The man he saw in his faded Roman palace was a mere shadow of the triumphant general he had left in Perugia. Ravaged by his illness, he was far less physically imposing, and without the aura that unbridled power conferred, Valentino seemed to shrink to insignificance. Most inexplicable to Machiavelli was the fact that the Duke had fallen into exactly the same trap he had sprung on his enemies only months before, placing his faith in the promises of his adversaries. “[A]lways transported by his daring confidence,” Machiavelli wrote to the Ten on November 4, “[Valentino] believes that the words of others are more trustworthy than were his own.”

  Valentino began by trying to frighten the Florentine envoy with elaborate fantasies of redemption and revenge, but to Machiavelli it was evident he had become dangerously detached from reality. Valentino grew furious when Machiavelli told him that Florence would refuse him safe passage through Tuscany on his planned expedition to recover the territories he had lost in the Romagna. The Florentine Secretary had already sounded out Julius, and knew the Pope had no intention of keeping the promises that had persuaded Valentino to back him in the recent election. “We want the states to return to the Church,” Julius explained. “It is our intention to recover them [and although] we made certain promises to the Duke, we intended merely to guarantee his personal safety and his fortune, even though, after all, it was stolen from its rightful owners.”

  To Machiavelli’s ears, Valentino’s bluster now sounded like whining. It was a pathetic and disillusioning spectacle. The man Machiavelli had so recently held up as a paragon of the ruthless leader had about him the stench of failure. “I had no lack of things to say in reply, nor would my words have failed me,” Machiavelli recalled, “yet I took the course of trying to pacify him, and took leave of him as quickly as possible, for it seemed a thousand years till I could quit his presence.” How much had changed since those days in Imola when Machiavelli stood in awe of the great man!

  In the end, Valentino’s demise was more the stuff of farce than of tragedy. Prevented from leading his army on an overland trek to the Romagna, at the end of November the Duke tried to board a ship at the port of Ostia with the intention of reaching his rebellious empire by sea. This act of disobedience offered Julius just the opportunity he needed to finish off his rival; he ordered that Valentino be arrested and returned to Rome. Machiavelli, for one, was pleased with the news, remarking that “since he is taken, whether he be alive or dead, we need trouble ourselves no more about him. One sees that his sins are gradually bringing him to punishment.” Days later, reports arrived that the remainder of Valentino’s army was routed by Gianpaolo Baglioni—the one captain who had survived the purge at Sinigaglia—and its commander, Don Michele Corella, sent in chains to Florence. “[T]hus it would seem,” wrote Machiavelli to the Ten, “that little by little this Duke is slipping into his grave.”

  Though Machiavelli’s obituary was a bit premature, his assessment was essentially correct. For a time, Valentino pinned his hopes on his fellow Spaniards, who were continuing their victorious campaign against the French, but in the end they, too, had little use for the washed-up son of a dead pope. Deported to Spain, he eventually escaped his imprisonment to serve for a time in the army of his brother-in-law, John of Navarre. He died three years later at the age of thirty-one in an obscure battle in a distant province, largely forgotten by the world that once had trembled at the mere mention of his name.

  The catastrophic reversal of fortune for the man who, more than any other, represented for Machiavelli the admirable qualities of leadership—ruthlessness, audacity, cunning, and luck—was unsettling. One can detect in Machiavelli’s discomfort the pain that accompanies the shattering of a cherished illusion. Though he had always perceived Valentino’s faults, Machiavelli had come to see him as the embodiment of the strength that was so sorely lacking in his own government. If such a man could come to grief, what hope was there for a nation led by timid souls? When he sat down to write The Prince, having mulled the matter over for a decade, his final verdict on Valentino is more charitable, though the man’s downfall is no less perplexing:

  Cesare Borgia, called by the masses Duke Valentino, acquired power through his father’s fortune and lost it in the same manner. This despite the fact that he employed every art and did all that a prudent and courageous man should do to secure his hold on those territories won by the arms and fortunes of others . . . . [I]f he failed in the end, it was through no fault of his own, since it was born of extraordinary and extreme malice of fortune.

  Extreme malice of fortune! That seems a weak conclusion for someone intent on discovering the laws that govern the rise and fall of men and nations, but Machiavelli was always attuned to the apparent randomness of the universe. In studying the vicissitudes of history, he was often forced to fall back on the image of Dame Fortune, a capricious goddess who bestowed her gifts promiscuously and then plucked them away with equal gusto.

  It has often been remarked that the picture of Valentino that Machiavelli paints in The Prince is at odds with the fragmentary portrait we can reconstruct from letters and dispatches written at the time. The contrast is particularly striking when we examine the official documents Machiavelli wrote in Rome, where he depicts Cesare Borgia as a broken and pathetic figure. By the time he came to write The Prince, Machiavelli had decided to restore much of the luster. Valentino is once again the heroic figure, dominating lesser men through the sheer force of his will; his ad hoc responses to various crises are recast as part of a brilliant plan to confound his enemies and secure his realm. Machiavelli was surely aware that he was straying from the facts in the course of building his larger narrative, but this fiction was conceived in the service of a larger truth. A decade after their last meeting, Valentino had ceased to be the fatally flawed flesh-and-blood creature whose shrunken form and peevish rantings were so distasteful that Machiavelli wanted to flee his presence. He has become “The Prince,” prototype of the ruthless tyrant, whose courage and vision will restore Italy to her rightful place among nations.

  * * *

  i The ostensible reason for Machiavelli’s trip was to secure safe passage through Valentino’s realm by some Florentine merchants, but it was clear that this minor matter was an excuse to have an emissary in place to keep his eyes and ears on the Duke.

  ii In his essay “Description of the Method Used by Duke Valentino in Killing Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, and Others,” Machiavelli suggests that Florence was firmly committed to Borgia’s side: “But the Florentines, because of their hatred against Vitelli and the Orsini for various reasons, not merely did not join them but sent Niccolò Machiavelli, their secretary, to offer the Duke asylum and aid against these new enemies of his.” But the dispatches Machiavelli sent at the time reflect a more equivocal attitude. In his political essays, Machiavelli often distorted the fact to fit his thesis—in this case that Valentino’s cunning and ruthlessness, noted by the perceptive Secretary of Florence, would inevitably win the day.

  iii In this, Giuliano had apparently forgotten Christ’s injunction: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The quantity of bribes distributed on his behalf were almost equally large, if less effective.

  VI

  MEN OF LOW AND POOR STATION

  “Nor do I wish it thought a presumption that a man of low and poor station set out to examine the laws governing the rule of princes.”

  —MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, DEDICATION TO LORENZO DE’ MEDICI

  IN THE FALL OF 1502, WHILE HE WAS AWAY AT CESARE Borgia’s court in Imola, Machiavelli met a man, a fellow Tuscan, who was serving as Valentino’s military architect. Machiavelli probably knew him by reputation, since the fifty-
year-old had already achieved some fame as a painter, first in Florence and later in Milan, where he had served for many years at the court of Ludovico Sforza. His name was Leonardo and he was born in Vinci, a village tucked in among the olive groves and vineyards that carpeted the hills west of Florence. When Machiavelli was still a child, Leonardo had worked as an apprentice in the studio of Andrea Verrocchio, where he had astonished everyone with his precocious gifts. The painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari relates the almost certainly apocryphal story that when the master saw an angel his young assistant had added to Verrocchio’s painting of the baptism of Christ, he set down his own brushes in despair because he knew he would never be able to match his pupil.i

  But if Verrocchio knew talent when he saw it, most Florentines were less perceptive. Leonardo’s years in Florence were unhappy. More established artists such as Verrocchio and Botticelli grabbed most of the prestigious commissions, and Leonardo had to settle for the crumbs. In 1476, he was dragged before the magistrates on a charge of sodomy, a traumatic experience that colored his attitude toward the city that gave him his professional start. By 1481, Leonardo had left Florence for Milan, where the polymath, unable to choose among his various interests, promoted himself to Duke Sforza as a musician and military engineer. It was in Milan that Leonardo achieved fame as an artist, producing masterpieces like The Last Supper, The Virgin of the Rocks, and the massive equestrian statue of the Duke’s father, Francesco Sforza.

  By the time Machiavelli encountered the middle-aged artist in Imola, however, Leonardo had suffered a string of setbacks and frustrations, punctuated by moments of incandescent triumph. He was, in fact, something of an enigma, a man whose gifts were so enormous that he managed to achieve less than others who deployed with greater efficiency their more modest talents.

  Leonardo and the Second Chancellor of Florence were in many ways kindred spirits. Both were ambitious and driven by social and economic insecurity. As the illegitimate son of a prosperous provincial notary, Leonardo never received the education and status that his father’s position should have entitled him to. In the introduction to his Treatise on Painting he scolds his better educated but less gifted colleagues:

  I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man, certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! . . . my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and [experience] has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.

  Machiavelli, too, was sensitive to the chasm between status and ability. Take, for instance, his dedication to The Prince: “Nor do I wish it thought a presumption,” he tells Lorenzo de’ Medici,

  that a man of low and poor station set out to examine the laws governing the rule of princes. For just as those who draw landscapes place themselves low on the plain to discern the nature of the mountains and high places, and to describe the lowlands they place themselves high above, similarly, to know well the nature of the people one must be a prince and to understand princes one must be of the people.

  Both men make a virtue of marginality. Each claims a vantage point that allows him to see what eludes those more comfortably situated; each eschews empty erudition in favor of practical experience. Here is a new kind of man, unburdened by the dead weight of tradition (a university education in one case, wealth in the other) and free to discover new ways of looking at the world. Both Machiavelli and Leonardo spent their lives enduring the snubs of men whose only claim to superiority was an accident of birth. And in both the artist and the bureaucrat there burned a fierce desire to show those upon whom they depended for their livelihoods that they had something unique to offer the world.

  Unfortunately, neither man left an account of their initial meeting in Imola, though it is inconceivable that the two compatriots were not at least in casual contact during the months they spent hovering like moths about Valentino’s court at the fortress of La Rocca. Thus when, in 1503, the Second Chancellor returned to the thorny problem of reducing the city of Pisa to submission, he recalled Valentino’s former engineer and military architect, who had already shown his willingness to find innovative solutions to intractable problems.

  The idea of employing artists for military purposes might seem incongruous today, but it was only natural in the Renaissance, when art demanded technical proficiency and practical know-how. Leonardo in particular believed that art and science both dissected nature in order to understand the way the world really worked. In his paintings he put to good use his profound understanding of light, obtained by keen observation and enhanced by experiment, by creating images whose verisimilitude astounded his contemporaries. As a scientist, he was both a visionary and a tinkerer—a spinner of improbable yarns and a builder of ingenious devices. Fascinated by the forces of nature, he sought to harness wind, water, and even sunlight to serve the purposes of mankind.

  By the summer of 1503, Leonardo had left the service of Valentino and returned to his native land. He was, as always, seeking new opportunities to test the theories that filled his notebooks and excited his imagination, and attending to the more pressing matter of replenishing his depleted bank account. Approaching members of the government—including, almost certainly, Machiavelli himself, who, as Secretary to the Ten of War was deeply involved in the day-to-day management of military affairs—he presented a plan to defeat Pisa not by use of brute force but by diverting the Arno (the vital artery of both Florence and Pisa), thereby starving the rebellious city of subsistence and commerce.

  The notion was not as outlandish as it might seem. In fact the scheme was a culmination of ideas that had long been brewing inside Leonardo’s fertile mind. Anyone living near the banks of the capricious Arno, as Leonardo had growing up in the Tuscan foothills, would have witnessed the almost yearly floods that uprooted trees, washed away bridges, and submerged whole neighborhoods. In his series of drawings titled Deluge, he envisioned a world engulfed by the watery element, a rain-drenched apocalypse as powerful as anything ever conceived in art. Leonardo dwelled at length on the destructive potential of water, so using a river as an instrument of war must have seemed perfectly natural to him.

  To many within the government, less imaginative but more accustomed to managing large-scale public works projects, the scheme seemed far-fetched. The Ten pronounced it “little better than a fantasy.” More than half a century earlier, another visionary artist, Filippo Brunelleschi, suggested that the republic might defeat her rival Lucca by diverting the river Serchio so that it flooded the city; the project ended in disaster when Luccan soldiers sabotaged the dam and turned the river back on the Florentines. But Leonardo’s plan, presented in a series of detailed maps and drawings, won the support of two critical figures: Machiavelli and, more importantly, Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini.ii The fact that he convinced two such practical men to pursue such an unconventional project was a testament not only to Leonardo’s powers of persuasion but also to their frustration with conventional approaches that thus far had yielded nothing. After so many disappointments, costly in both blood and treasure, desperation was the mother of invention.

  Ironically, the Pisans seemed to have more faith in the project than most Florentines. An interrogation of captured residents of the city revealed “that the defenders feared only one thing, that the Florentines would divert the Arno and so dry up its outlet to the sea, depriving Pisa of the help they had been receiving from ships paid for by Lucca, Siena and Genoa.” Work on the massive project began late in the summer of 1504. The diversion was to take place at Stagno, a few miles to the south of Pisa, near the port of Livorno, where engineers hoped to create a new mouth for the Arno that would serve the double purpose of starving Pisa and nourishing Florence by opening a navigable passage to the sea that circumvented the old port. The hydraulic engineer Colombino was hired to supervise the two thousand laborers who set to work building weirs and digging ditches.

 
But as men moved tons of rock and mud, three-dimensional reality began to diverge from the two-dimensional blueprint drawn up by Leonardo. Those on the scene, forced to deal with uncooperative laborers, unenthusiastic supervisors, and constant harassment from Pisan soldiers, cut corners to save money and adapted Leonardo’s plans to facts on the ground. Machiavelli was initially reluctant to interfere in technical matters—defending Colombino as “an excellent expert on this hydraulic engineering”—but soon he began to fret about the halfhearted efforts and jerry-built modifications. On September 21 he wrote to the engineers: “Your delay makes us fear that the bed of the ditch is shallower than the bed of the Arno; this would have negative effects and in our opinion it would not direct the project to the end we wish.” His concerns proved well founded. At the beginning of October a violent storm damaged the Florentine fleet guarding the mouth of the river and flooded the ditches. A few days later the emboldened Pisans emerged from their defensive works and set about punching holes in the weirs. The labor of months was destroyed in a matter of hours, and the entire project collapsed amidst the usual finger-pointing and recrimination. Francesco Soderini, the Gonfaloniere’s brother and newly minted Cardinal, offered his sympathy, begging Machiavelli not to blame himself for the failure: “Notable man and very dear compare. It gave us great pain that so great an error should have been made in those waters that it seems impossible to us that it should not have been through the fault of those engineers, who went so far wrong.”