Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  Though Machiavelli had no formal military training (as critics of his Art of War will later point out), his zeal for the cause and impatience with what he regarded as halfhearted efforts on the part of his colleagues meant he was ever more deeply engaged in day-to-day military operations. In March of 1509, for instance, he personally supervised the construction of a crossing over the Oseri River, boasting that the job was so well done that “even the horses of Xerxes might ford it.” This hands-on approach did not always sit well with those whose job it was to supervise the commanders in the field. Commissary-General Niccolò Capponi complained to the Ten that Machiavelli frequently overstepped his authority and failed to inform him of his movements. After Capponi lodged an official complaint with the Nine, Biagio Buonaccorsi advised Machiavelli to treat him with more circumspection. “[T]he more powerful must always be right,” he explained facetiously, “and it is necessary to treat them with respect. You should be patient and learn how to handle yourself in such circumstances.” Patience and tact were two qualities Machiavelli had a hard time summoning when that meant putting up with fools and idlers. But though he continued to step on the sensitive toes of powerful men, he had made himself indispensable to the one person who counted, Piero Soderini, who continued to shield Machiavelli from the barbs of his enemies, even as he reminded him “that the way of this world is to receive great ingratitude for great and good operations.” So deep did Machiavelli plunge into the weeds of military tactics that Buonaccorsi began to address him mockingly as “Captain General.”

  As Pisa slowly crumbled from within, Machiavelli redoubled his efforts, determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past when confident predictions of victory were followed by embarrassing reverses. When the Ten ordered Machiavelli back from the front lines, he pleaded with them to let him stay: “[I]f I wished to avoid fatigue and danger, I should not have left Florence; therefore, I beg your Excellencies to permit me to stay among these camps, and labor with these Commissaries on necessary matters; for here I can be good for something, and there I should be good for nothing, and should die of despair.”

  The relentless pressure was paying dividends. In March, Machiavelli was ordered to Piombino to meet with a Pisan delegation that had come to explore the possibility of peace. What terms, they asked, were the Florentines willing to offer? “[The Ten],” he told them, “desired obedience, [but] demanded neither their life, their property nor their honor, and would allow them reasonable liberty.” Encouraging as these words were, the delegation could not commit to anything. Still, it was becoming increasingly clear that the surrender of Pisa was just a matter of time. With the naval blockade now securely in place and with Machiavelli’s militia laying waste to the countryside, Pisa’s allies could no longer prolong the contest by resupplying the city. On May 24, Machiavelli and Alamanno Salviati escorted a second delegation of high-ranking Pisans to the Florentine suburb of San Miniato, where they were to meet with government officials to negotiate the terms of surrender. Machiavelli was present on June 1 when the official surrender was signed in the Palazzo della Signoria, affixing his name on the treaty next to that of the First Chancellor, Marcello Adriani. Anxious to be where the action was, Machiavelli hurried back to camp and was among those who watched as hundreds of emaciated citizens broke out of Pisa and entered Florentine lines, where they were fed and clothed.

  While Pisan dignitaries finalized terms with their Florentine counterparts, Machiavelli was involved in discussions of his own that would determine exactly how and when the city would be handed over. Perhaps the most important conversation was with a man named Lattanzio Tedaldi, though his expertise was neither political nor military. He was, in fact, an astrologer, and at Machiavelli’s request he was charting the planetary orbits to determine the most auspicious moment. On June 5, Machiavelli received his answer. “I would like you,” Tedaldi told the Second Chancellor, “to instruct the commissioners that, having decided to take possession of Pisa on Thursday, they should under no circumstances enter before the 12th hour and a half in the morning, but if possible a little after the 13th,iv which will be a moment most auspicious for us.” Thus, after fifteen long years of blood and toil here on earth, the exact moment of Pisa’s fall would be determined by the serene procession of the heavenly bodies.

  It might at first seem surprising that a hardheaded realist like Machiavelli should have succumbed to such superstitious nonsense. Though he saw through many of the pieties and prejudices that blinded his contemporaries, he did not free himself entirely from such mumbo jumbo. Astrology was something of an obsession in Renaissance Europe, and while not everyone was convinced—Savonarola condemned it and Pico della Mirandola offered a stinging indictment of the ancient art in his Disputations Against Astrology—belief was so widespread that no cornerstone was laid or battle fought without consulting a master of the inscrutable discipline. Even popes were not immune to the superstition, despite condemnation by many Church fathers, who saw astrology as little different from witchcraft. But Machiavelli was no superstitious peasant carrying amulets and chanting spells to ward off evil spirits. He subscribed to the conventional wisdom of the day that the arc of human life was influenced by cosmic forces, while insisting such forces were not determinative. To believe that our fates are sealed at birth would have made a mockery of his world-view, which was predicated on the notion that individuals could, through strength of will and clarity of mind, forge their own destiny. What point would there be in offering advice to the would-be prince if his fate, and the fate of his subjects, was indelibly written in the stars?

  Machiavelli’s attitude is suggested by a letter he received from Bartolomeo Vespucci, a famous professor of astrology at the University of Padua, responding to one, now lost, from Machiavelli. “Suffice it that your opinion must be called absolutely correct,” Professor Vespucci answered, “since all the ancients proclaimed with one voice that the wise man himself is able to alter the influences of the stars.” This, in turn, is a paraphrase of a famous saying of Ptolemy, the ancient astronomer, who declared: “The wise man will control the stars.” Charting a middle course between fatalism, on the one hand, and the more acceptably Christian belief in free will was a common intellectual compromise for men of the Renaissance who cherished ancient teachings while still subscribing to the basic tenets of the Church. It was a compromise that appealed to Machiavelli as well since it allowed him to acknowledge the role of what we might call external factors, i.e., those aspects of life over which we have no control, without succumbing to the passivity such beliefs engendered.

  In his own writing Machiavelli invokes Fortune, a capricious goddess who stands for the unpredictability of life. When he declares in The Prince that “fortune is a woman and in order to be mastered she must be jogged and beaten,” he is reiterating, in more colorful language, the point he made to Bartolomeo Vespucci: that powerful men make their own luck.v But they are the exception since “in the world most men let themselves be mastered by fortune.” Machiavelli’s larger point is that whatever invisible strings tug at us, we ought to live as if our fate were in our own hands. This is certainly the way he lived his own life, though when things didn’t work out he was apt to take at least a rhetorical swipe at the wicked goddess. On those occasions when things were looking up, however—as they surely were in the summer of 1509—he forgets about Fortuna and takes full credit for his success.vi

  • • •

  Having determined the exact moment with metaphysical precision, Machiavelli saw to the more mundane details that would guide the conquering army as it took possession of the city. Perhaps the most important provision he made was to ensure that the occupying troops were paid in advance so that they would not resort to the looting that victorious armies often regarded as a well-earned bonus after months of hard work.

  Florentine forces entered Pisa on the morning of Thursday, June 7, marching in orderly arrays past the gaunt faces of their defeated foes. Riding alongside them was the Second Chancell
or, proudly accompanied by members of the militia that owed its existence to his persistence, patriotism, and tireless devotion. It was a moment of triumph for Machiavelli, who had every right to bask in the glow of victory.

  Indeed, he had more to be pleased with on that bright June morning than the fact that he had succeeded where others far better versed in the military arts had failed. Having prosecuted the war with utmost vigor, Machiavelli was equally determined to win the peace, and here his careful arrangements paid off as the troops maintained the discipline that would help reconcile the populace to its new situation. Among the Pisans the mood was a mixture of sullenness and relief. If they had been hurt in their pride, at least the immediate future promised to be much more pleasant than the recent past. As Machiavelli made clear to the Pisan delegation in March, Florence was willing to be magnanimous in victory. Property and civil liberties were guaranteed, and while some prominent families chose exile rather than remain in a city now under foreign domination, most adjusted to the new state of affairs.

  In contrast to the rather sober mood in Pisa, forty miles to the east in Florence there were scenes of riot occasioned by an excess of high spirits. The arrival of a horseman falsely rumored to be carrying news of the surrender was sufficient to empty the churches as citizens gathered in the squares to share in the glorious moment, while in the cells of Le Stinche prisoners attacked their guards on the principle that the city’s good luck ought to extend to the least fortunate. In the end, according to one eyewitness, all the prisoners broke free and disappeared into the crowds of revelers.

  With the official news, arriving the following day, celebrations were better controlled but equally exuberant. “At about 18 in the afternoon [2 P.M.],” recorded the apothecary Luca Landucci, “the horseman bearing the olive-branch arrived with the surrender of Pisa; there was a great festa, the shops being shut, and bonfires made, and illuminations placed on all the towers and on the Palagio.”

  Landucci makes no mention of Machiavelli’s role in bringing about this joyous day, but his colleagues in the Chancery knew who deserved the victor’s laurels. That same day Agostino Vespucci wrote to the Second Chancellor: “If I did not think it would make you too proud, I should dare say that you with your battalions accomplished so much good work, in such a way that . . . you restored the affairs of Florence. I do not know what to say. I swear to God, so great is the exultation we are having that I would write a Ciceronian oration for you if I had time.” Another friend chimed in: “May a thousand good fortunes result to you from the grand gain of this noble city, for truly it may be said, that you personally have had a great share in the matter . . . . Each day I discover in you a greater prophet that the Jews or any generation ever possessed.”

  This was heady stuff for Machiavelli, but he understood the character of his countrymen well enough to know that his current popularity was likely fleeting. As he often observed, Fortuna seemed to enjoy the prospect of bringing down those she had recently exalted, as if to make the sting of failure all the more bitter. Indeed this would prove to be the high point of Machiavelli’s career. But his downfall, coming close on the heels of his greatest triumph, was not attributable to some abstract property of the universe, but rather to a peculiarity of human nature. Years later he would write in the Discourses, “Whoever reads of the doings of republics will find in all of them some sort of ingratitude in the way in which they deal with their citizens,” something Machiavelli learned from hard experience. He was so obsessed with the topic that he devoted four chapters to discussing envy in all its Hydra-like deformity. The problem was particularly acute in Florence, where military success tended to be regarded with almost pathological suspicion—one reason its citizens so rarely achieved it. As Piero Soderini and his faithful assistant rode the crest of popular adulation, those who opposed the regime redoubled their efforts to bring it down.

  But it was not only the uncertainty of his own prospects that made this moment less than an unadulterated triumph. As a careful student of history, Machiavelli had reason to believe that Florence would have difficulty holding on to what it had captured. Writing years later in The Prince, he offered a pessimistic analysis:

  He who becomes master of a city accustomed to live in liberty, and who does not destroy it, can expect to be destroyed himself, because the city can always justify rebellion in the name of its ancient liberty and institutions. Neither the span of years nor the benefits received can make the citizens forget. Whatever actions are taken or provisions made, if the inhabitants are neither divided nor dispersed, they will long for what they have lost, and take advantage of every opportunity, as did Pisa after a hundred years of servitude under Florence.

  Machiavelli worried that what he had achieved with Pisa was a classic example of that middle way he so despised. Florence had done more than enough to ensure the undying enmity of a people who had bled and starved in the cause of freedom, without actually depriving them of the means of exacting their revenge. Fifteen years of bitter struggle could not be erased from the minds of a conquered people by handing out a few loaves and allowing them a modicum of self-rule—however necessary these were to the immediate problem of pacification. The thirst for liberty was too strong and the memories of injustice too long, Machiavelli believed, to expect that the events of the summer would form the basis of a lasting peace.

  Nor would he salve the conscience of his compatriots by telling them the Pisans were better off under the Florentine yoke. War was cruelty and peace hardly less so as the victors imposed their will upon the defeated. Resentment and fear were the most enduring monuments of such a campaign. Machiavelli offers a bleak epilogue in his Second Decennale, highlighting the despair of the loser rather than the triumph of the victor: “And though she was a stubborn enemy, yet, by necessity compelled and conquered, she went back weeping to her ancient chain.”

  * * *

  i Machiavelli’s First Decennale was published by his friend Agostino Vespucci at his own expense. Its popularity is suggested by the fact that it was immediately pirated by another printer, much to the chagrin of Vespucci, who stood to lose his investment. The fact that Machiavelli went to the trouble of composing it and having it published reveals that he had not abandoned his earlier literary ambitions.

  ii It couldn’t have hurt that the vote was taken in the very room where Leonardo and Michelangelo had been hard at work depicting scenes of the republic’s past military glories.

  iii Machiavelli lumped all the German-speaking regions of Europe under the heading of Germany. This region of central Europe, spreading from the North Sea to the Alps, consisted of innumerable principalities, duchies, and small kingdoms, some loosely confederated, others, like the Swiss cantons, independent.

  iv About 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning, since the hours were counted from the previous sunset.

  v This same idea is expressed by Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when he says, “Men at some time are masters of their fates; The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.”

  vi Machiavelli, with his usual psychological insight, recognizes this as a basic human trait. In “On Fortune” he wrote, “Hence all the evil that comes upon mankind is charged to [Fortune]; but any good that befalls a man he believes he gets through his own worth” (Chief Works, II, 746).

  VIII

  REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

  “[Y]our adversaries are numerous and will stop at nothing.”

  —BIAGIO BUONACCORSI TO MACHIAVELLI

  THE OUTPOURING OF JOY THAT FOLLOWED THE CONQUEST of Pisa was as understandable as it was shortsighted. Florence and Pisa had been bitter rivals for at least three hundred years, since the upstart inland power first began to challenge the great seaport as the preeminent city of Tuscany. Florence’s original conquest of her ancient foe in 1406 had been the crowning achievement of her centuries-long climb to imperial status, and Pisa’s successful rebellion in 1494 had been a crippling psychological loss. But what had begun in the Middle Ages as
a clash of titans was now a spat between minnows. Florence was a military nonentity and Pisa a shadow of her former self. This mutual diminution took place within the context of a wider demographic and economic shift: Italy was no longer the vital corridor of commerce from East to West; centers of banking and trade like Florence and Milan were being marginalized; and the fleets of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice were overtaken by the Atlantic-based armadas of Spain and Portugal, and the rising Mediterranean power of the Ottoman Turks. What Florence had gained from Pisa’s recapture was primarily a boost to her self-esteem.

  While Florentines dreamed of past glories, France and Spain vied for supremacy on the peninsula, thrashing about like two great beasts, destroying everything in the vicinity. Cities were ruined almost as an afterthought; governments were overthrown; and along the length and breadth of Italy, the countryside was despoiled by armies that found it more profitable, and a good deal safer, to prey upon the civilian population than to meet their adversaries in battle. Given the potential that Florence herself might well be trampled, her obsession with recapturing her longtime enemy seems myopic.

  Spain and France were undeniably the two greatest military powers on the Italian peninsula, but the dominant personality of the moment was Pope Julius II. Born to a poor family in Albiola, a small fishing village near Genoa, he had succeeded his uncle as Cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli (Saint Peter in Chains) when the latter was elected Pope Sixtus IV(1471–84). Unlike Cesare Borgia, who shed his cardinal’s robes before making a career as a soldier, Giuliano della Rovere (as he was called then) strapped his breastplate over his priestly vestments to lead the papal armies against the enemies of the Church. Ascending the throne following a decade-long exile in France during the reign of the Borgia Pope, the sixty-year-old Pontiff demonstrated through his militant defense of papal prerogatives that the passage of years had done nothing to dull his warrior spirit.