Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  Even with the support of the Gonfaloniere and the Cardinal, Machiavelli’s efforts to institute a civilian militia met with fierce resistance. The rich merchants who made up the bulk of the Great Council refused to arm the urban workforce they regarded as a potentially violent, revolutionary element. Ultimately, Machiavelli was forced to abandon his broader scheme in favor of a more limited one in which the militia was recruited from peasants in the countryside rather than the Florentine proletariat.

  With Piero Soderini’s blessing, and a grudging wait-and-see approach adopted by the Signoria, Machiavelli began to recruit his army in the winter of 1505–6. He plunged into the work with typical enthusiasm, riding out into the countryside himself to hire captains and draft infantrymen in the village squares and rustic hamlets. His efforts were so successful that by February he was able to march his first recruits through the Piazza della Signoria. The event was described by the apothecary Luca Landucci, who hurried to the square to catch a glimpse of Florence’s latest fighting force:

  There was a muster in the Piazza of 400 recruits whom the Gonfaloniere had assembled, Florentine peasants, and he gave them each a white waistcoat, a pair of stockings half red and half white, a white cap, shoes, and an iron breastplate, and lances, and to some of them muskets. These were called battalions; and they were given a constable who would lead them, and teach them how to use their arms. They were soldiers, but stopped at their own houses, being obliged to appear when needed; and it was ordered that many thousand should be made in this way all through the country, so that we should not need to have any foreigners. This was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence.

  Landucci’s testimony indicates that public opinion was turning in favor of the militia. All Machiavelli had to do now was demonstrate their effectiveness in the field. In August he began to test their mettle in small skirmishes in the countryside near Pisa, where their numbers added weight to the mercenary forces besieging the city. Though the exam was not very rigorous—most of the fighting was still left to the professionals—they acquitted themselves admirably in their limited roles.

  Even the skeptics in the Great Council were beginning to come around; the militia was given official sanction on December 6, 1506, when the Great Council, by a vote of 841 in favor to 317 opposed, created a new body, the Nine of the Militia, to organize and oversee the newly created force.ii When it came time to appoint a chancellor the choice was obvious. Niccolò Machiavelli now added another title to his bulging portfolio. Upon learning of his assistant’s election, Piero Soderini congratulated him, and insisted that God must favor the project since “it daily increases and flourishes, in spite of malignant opposition.”

  As Soderini’s letter suggests—and as the vote on the militia, lopsided as it was, confirms—the government and its policies were not without opponents. Machiavelli had his new militia, but there were many, particularly among the ottimati, who feared it would become an instrument of tyranny in the hands of a ruler who was aggregating more power every day. In fact many of the ruling families had never reconciled themselves to Soderini. The idea of a Gonfaloniere-for-life appeared to them not much different from a dictator, and while few questioned Soderini’s honesty, it was also noted that he did not stint himself when it came to the trappings of office. At one point a florin was issued with the likeness of the Gonfaloniere, a sign, his critics claimed, that he now saw himself as King. Also smacking of regal pretensions was the behavior of his family. As a lifetime appointee it was only natural that his wife should come to live with him in the Palazzo, but this departure from tradition—exacerbated by Madonna Soderini’s taste for elegant gowns and dinner parties—offended the more traditional-minded, who thought that no serious business could be transacted in proximity to the fairer sex.

  Criticism of Soderini’s domestic life was a symptom of a deeper anxiety on the part of the ottimati, who saw their own power wane as the Gonfaloniere’s increased. There was never any indication that he intended to use the militia to intimidate the domestic opposition, but it is not far-fetched to imagine that in time he might have succumbed to the temptation to use a standing army to whip recalcitrant legislators into line.

  Signs of growing friction between the ottimati and the Soderini executive were apparent in 1507 when Soderini tried to appoint Machiavelli to head an important embassy to the German Emperor-Elect Maximillian I. After vociferous complaints from leading ottimati who were afraid the Second Chancellor was too closely allied with the Gonfaloniere, Machiavelli’s name was withdrawn in favor of the more aristocratic, better connected, and more independent Francesco Vettori.

  Among the great monarchs of Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor (or Emperor of the Romans as he was usually styled before actually receiving the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope) was at once the most exalted and the least powerful. As the heir to Charlemagne, he was the feudal overlord not only of much of central Europe but of northern Italy as well. Unlike his famous medieval predecessors—most notably Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II—the Renaissance version of the Emperor claimed an authority that was almost limitless in theory and negligible in practice. Should he ever reassert his feudal rights and back up the claim with armed force, as Maximillian was now proposing to do, he could become once again a serious, and seriously disruptive, factor in Italian geopolitics.

  As it turned out, keeping an eye on the restless monarch was apparently too much responsibility for Vettori, who was put on the spot when the Emperor demanded from Florence a tribute of 50,000 ducats to help him defray the expense of maintaining his army in Italy. Vettori’s letter prompted the Signoria to convene an emergency committee to craft a response. The prospect of emptying their already depleted coffers to finance an adventure from which the best they could hope was to emerge no worse off than they already were, was unappetizing enough. But bowing to the extortionate demand would also enrage the French, who now faced the prospect of being ground to a powder between German and Spanish millstones. With Vettori clearly not up to the job, the government finally agreed to send Machiavelli to stiffen the ambassador’s backbone, though only after much grumbling from those who accused him of being Soderini’s “puppet.”

  The mission to Maximillian promised to be another thankless venture. Machiavelli was authorized to offer the emperor 30,000 ducats, going as high as 50,000 if the Emperor proved a hard bargainer, and then only if it was clear that the promised expedition would get off the ground, a questionable proposition given Maximillian’s mercurial temper. As usual, the Florentine government was facing a crisis by delaying any real decision, hoping to placate the Emperor without antagonizing the French (an almost impossible task given their mutually incompatible interests) and relying on the Second Chancellor’s skills to keep all these mismatched balls in the air.

  In December, Machiavelli packed his bags and set out on his journey along snow-choked mountain passes to the Swiss cantons, where the Emperor was trying to conjure up an army and the funds to pay for it. “[I] promise you,” he wrote to the Gonfaloniere upon arriving in Bolzano, “that if ever there were a wretched journey, it was the one that I made.” Despite the discomfort of the winter weather and poor accommodations, he carefully observed local customs, hoping to discover those secrets that made the Swiss the most feared warriors of the age. “Between Geneva and Constance I made four halts,” he later recorded: “The twelve Cantons each contribute four thousand men for the defense of the country, and from one thousand to one thousand five hundred for foreign service. And this because, in the first case, all are by law compelled to bear arms; in the second, namely, when it is a question of going to fight elsewhere, no one need go, save of his own free will.”

  Later he gathered his observations in a pamphlet titled Report on Germany.iii The frugal habits of the Swiss offered the starkest possible reproach to the decadent lives of his compatriots: not only were they a free people, governing themselves in their rural hamlets, but they produced a breed of soldier
that more than once in recent years had humbled the professional forces the Italians sent against them. Machiavelli paints a largely idyllic portrait of these northern rustics:

  There can be no doubt of the power of Germany, with her abundance of men, money, and arms. The Germans spend little on administration, and nothing on soldiers, for they train their own subjects in arms. On festival days, instead of playing games, their youth seek diversion in learning the use of the petronel, the pike, and of other weapons. They are frugal in all things, for they affect no luxury in their buildings or their attire, and have but few chattels in their dwellings. It suffices them to have abundance of bread and meat, and to have stoves to protect them from the cold; and he who owns no other possessions, does without them and desires them not. Therefore their country exists on its own produce, without needing to buy from others; and they sell things fashioned by their hands, which are scattered over nearly the whole of Italy, and their gains are all the greater because earned by labor with very little capital. Thus they enjoy their rough life and liberty, and for this cause will not go to war, excepting for great recompense; nor would even that suffice, but for the decrees of their communities.

  Rough life and liberty—these two qualities were intimately connected in Machiavelli’s mind. Like the ancient Spartans or the citizen soldiers of early Rome, the Swiss, while possessing little in the way of material comforts, were happy and free, relying on nothing but their own courage and strength to defend their liberties. They were self-sufficient and self-reliant, a striking contrast to his fellow countrymen, who purchased their ease at the price of their liberty.

  Machiavelli was not wholly uncritical. Though their fighting spirit was admirable, the Germans’ inability to work together for a common purpose—a quarrelsomeness that the Italians shared, without possessing compensatory virtues—prevented them from achieving greater things. The Emperor commanded enormous resources on paper but was constantly fighting with his vassals “so that it is easy to comprehend why, notwithstanding the great strength of the country, it is in fact much enfeebled.”

  In truth, Machiavelli is a less than ideal tour guide since he tends to file down the inconvenient edges of any fact until it fits into his preformed thesis. His report is really an argument in the form of a description. It follows a long tradition, dating back at least to Tacitus—who, almost a millennium and a half earlier, drew a similar comparison between the Romans and the rude but virile Germans—in which a traveler from a rich and sophisticated land sings the praises of simple folk he encounters in order to shame his compatriots. For Machiavelli the moral of the story was all too clear. Italians had forgotten the simple virtues of their forebears and unless they mended their ways—in part by relearning the discipline of war as those conscripted into his militias were doing—they were doomed to end their lives as slaves.

  Machiavelli’s teeth-chattering journey through the mountains would eventually furnish material for the grand theories of power politics he was building in his head. In the meantime, he encountered the usual frustrations that came from serving as the envoy of the Florentine Republic. When he presented himself to the Emperor in Bolzano, Machiavelli’s initial offer of 30,000 ducats was met with a curt rebuff. But before he could get down to haggling over sums he needed to divine the Emperor’s real intentions. Following the Emperor’s court from Bolzano to Trent, Machiavelli struggled to interpret conflicting signals. “It is difficult to forecast events,” he wrote to the Ten, explaining the forces pulling in opposite directions that made any prediction perilous: “The Emperor has many worthy soldiers, but he has no money, neither is it apparent from what quarter he will get any, and he is too lavish of that which he has . . . . He is skilled in war, patient of fatigue, but so credulous that many have doubts of the expedition, so that there is matter both for hope and fear . . . . I dwell in uncertainty,” he concluded.

  The Emperor’s indecisiveness was matched only by that of the Florentine government, which was caught somewhere between defiance and abject capitulation. “Your Excellencies have spun so fine a web,” Machiavelli complained, “that it is impossible to weave it . . . . You must come to a decision, divine the less dangerous course, and entering upon it, settle your minds in God’s name; for by trying to measure great matters like these with compasses, men are led to error.”

  This was a repetition of Machiavelli’s mission to Valentino six years earlier, or, to tell the truth, of almost all the embassies upon which he embarked over the course of his career—an extended variation on themes of evasion and delay. In one particularly candid exchange with his fellow ambassador Luigi Guicciardini, Machiavelli admitted: “It’s as if I’m here on a desert island, since I know nothing about anything. Still, to show I’m still alive I invent diligent reports to send to the Ten.” Trying to make the best of a bad situation, he wrote to the Gonfaloniere, “I shall do here what little good I can think of, even if my staying here is completely superfluous.”

  Machiavelli spent more than six months at the court of the German Emperor as, Hamlet-like, the great man attempted to make up his mind. Repeating the frustrations of that earlier mission to the Borgia duke, no matter how often Machiavelli insisted he was accomplishing nothing, his superiors in Florence insisted his presence was essential. At one point suggestions that he be recalled were countered by Vettori, who wrote, “it would be the most inopportune thing in the world to recall Machiavelli . . . it was necessary for him to remain until everything was settled.”

  On February 4, after receiving word from Pope Julius that he had been granted the title of Emperor, Maximillian entered the cathedral of Trent, accompanied by pompous fanfares and attended by a resplendent guard of honor, and had himself officially invested by the Bishop of Gurk. But, as was often the case with the Emperor, the elaborate ceremony was a substitute for rather than the prelude to decisive action. In the coming weeks troops marched here and there, rumors flew faster than cannonballs, and skirmishing among the forces of Venice, France, and the Emperor did little but inflict misery upon the peasants whose fields were trampled and houses burned. After months filled with sound and fury, word arrived on June 6 of a grand bargain among the great powers proclaiming a three-year truce. Four days later, Machiavelli headed for home.

  Having spent more than half a year at the court of the Emperor pursuing insubstantial rumors, Machiavelli was anxious to return to more manly pursuits. The months spent among the Swiss had only strengthened his conviction that he was on the right track with his citizen army. Now, with the Gonfaloniere’s backing, he increased the size and scope of his forces, adding cavalry to the already substantial infantry arm. Machiavelli was so intimately involved with every aspect of the project that those requiring his attention were more likely to find him in camp with the troops than at his desk at the Chancellery.

  By the spring of 1509 the war against Pisa, which had dragged on for fifteen grueling years, was finally showing signs of progress. Advances were partly the result of the increased resources brought to bear after the creation of the militia, but also of a change in strategy. After numerous repulses at the walls of Pisa, the commanders reverted to the slow but sure method of starving the city into submission. While Machiavelli’s militias stripped the land bare, Genoese corsairs under Florentine command blockaded the sea routes, effectively isolating the beleaguered city. For the better part of the season Machiavelli and his militia were stationed near Lucca, which had earned Florence’s wrath by secretly funneling supplies to their Pisan allies. The militia was assigned the task of burning the crops of millet and oats that were finding their way to the hungry residents of the besieged city, and otherwise making life miserable for the civilian population. It was an unpleasant, if not very dangerous, mission that reflected the grim war of attrition now underway. Ever willing to suppress humane considerations when it came to the security of his country, Machiavelli had few qualms about the suffering his troops were inflicting on noncombatants. But he was not alone in harboring bitter rese
ntment toward the enemy. Luca Landucci recounts one story that illustrates the deep-seated hatreds that fueled the war:

  A woman of Pisa came out of the city with her two children and went before the [Florentine] commissary, saying that she was dying of hunger, and had left her mother in Pisa who was almost famished; and the commissary ordered that bread should be given her for herself and her mother and children. Going back into Pisa with the bread, she told her mother, who was ill from want of food, and on seeing the white bread, the old woman said: What bread is this? And when her daughter told her that she had had it outside, from the Florentines, the old woman cried: Take away the bread of the accursed Florentines; I would rather die!

  Though Landucci shows a certain empathy for the plight of Florence’s enemies, his compassion extends only so far:

  Oh, what grievous sin it is to command that there should be a war! Woe to him who is the cause of it! I pray God to forgive us; although this enterprise of ours is undertaken legitimately: think what is the sin of those who go to war without legitimate cause!

  Machiavelli, like Landucci, was convinced that the stubborn Pisans had no one to blame but themselves. Though he admits the hardships of the civilian population of Pisa, he reserves his sympathy for his own troops, who “with great sufferings and much toil, and with much expense . . . starved her.” It is difficult today to feel much pity for troops whose job was to starve their Tuscan brothers and sisters, but from Machiavelli’s jingoistic perspective Pisa’s culpability was so self-evident that it was pointless to waste emotional energy on them. No doubt he would have agreed with General Sherman’s observation, made some three and a half centuries later: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Like Sherman, he believed that what followed from this truism was not that one should attempt to wage war more humanely—the concept of a humane war being a contradiction in terms—but rather that it ought to be prosecuted with sufficient ruthlessness to achieve a swift and decisive victory.