Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  In The Prince, Machiavelli uses Julius to illustrate a point about the necessity of matching the man to the moment: “Pope Julius II acted impetuously in everything he did. He found the times and the situation conformed so well to this approach that things always ended happily for him.” His pugnacious nature, the ferocity that earned him the nickname Il Papa Terribile (The Terrifying Pope), may have fit the mood of the times, but his campaign to impose his will on the motley assortment of territories that made up his vast domain seemed likely to unsettle further an already unsettled situation.

  Julius was in many ways an admirable figure. He shared with his predecessors—in particular with Sixtus and Alexander—a lust for conquest and an apparent indifference to the spiritual dimensions of his office. But unlike those paragons of the nepotistic impulse, Julius did not look on the Church simply as a vehicle to enrich his own family but as a worthy end in itself. As Machiavelli put it: “Julius not only pursued the same goals [as Alexander] but he added to them. He hoped to win Bologna, defeat the Venetians, and chase the French out of Italy; and in all these endeavors he succeeded—gaining all the more praise since everything he achieved was for the Church, and not for his own private gain.” The contrast with Valentino is telling: while the Borgia prince renounced his priestly vows to pursue his own personal aggrandizement, Julius, though equally aggressive, always viewed himself as a soldier toiling on behalf of a revitalized papacy.

  In the realm of the arts, where he had the power to command the service of the age’s most talented men, he presided over unparalleled creativity, but even here his ambitions were often undermined by a restless spirit that led him to launch grandiose projects only to lose interest to a new enthusiasm. In 1506 he laid the cornerstone for a monumental new edifice to replace the crumbling Basilica of St. Peter (dating from late antiquity), destined to become the largest and most splendid church in Christendom. This was only the first step in a project of urban renewal that was meant to restore Rome to her ancient imperial grandeur. In pursuit of this ambitious goal he summoned Michelangelo from Florence (where he was busy making drawings for The Battle of Cascina in the Hall of the Great Council) first to work on his tomb and then to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.i In art, as in life, Julius was used to getting his way and, surrounded by the greatest geniuses of the age, including the architect Donato Bramante, who created the initial designs for the great basilica, and Raphael, whom he brought to Rome to fresco the chambers and audience rooms of the Vatican, he was largely successful.

  In the vastly more complicated realm of Italian politics, where the egos were equally massive but the players more numerous and less tractable, Julius would have a much more difficult time arranging things to his liking. The application of an iron will to issues calling for pliability, nuance, and the capacity to compromise would lead to more tribulation for the already battered nation. But in truth, the problem lay less in the character of the man currently sitting on the papal throne than in the nature of the institution itself. The pope was an anomaly within Italy and unique among the great lords of Europe. He was both the ruler of one of the five major states of the peninsula—jockeying for position with his peers from Milan, Venice, Florence, and Naples—but also the head of Europe’s most powerful bureaucracy and spiritual guide for all of Western Christendom.ii Wearing these multiple and mismatched hats, he could not fulfill his role as father to his spiritual flock while protecting his interests as a secular prince; nor could he rule effectively in his own territory when so many of his resources and so much of his attention were directed to far-flung lands. No one saw these contradictions more clearly than Machiavelli, who wrote eloquently about the destructive role of the papacy in Italian history. “It is the Church,” he wrote in The Discourses,

  that has kept, and keeps, Italy divided . . . . For, though the Church has its headquarters in Italy and has temporal power, neither its power nor its virtue has been sufficiently great for it to be able to usurp power in Italy and become its leader; nor yet, on the other hand, has it been so weak that it could not, when afraid of losing its dominion over things temporal, call upon one of the powers to defend it against an Italian state that had become too powerful . . . . The Church, then, has neither been able to occupy the whole of Italy, nor has allowed anyone else to occupy it. Consequently, it has been the cause why Italy has never come under one head, but has been under many princes and signori, by whom such disunion and such weakness has been brought about, that it has now become prey, not only of barbarian potentates, but of anyone who attack it. For which our Italians have to thank the Church, and nobody else.

  Machiavelli was not alone in his resentment of the Church; in fact his views were fairly typical of Florentines, who too often had suffered at the hands of their erratic neighbor. But he was bolder than most in venting his anger in public, an audacity that won him the eternal hostility of an institution whose many powers included that of branding its critics not as only wrongheaded but positively evil.

  Julius’s reign added to Machiavelli’s argument. The Pope’s determination to reinvigorate the Church, though it was a welcome change from the purely selfish policies pursued by Alexander, plunged Italy into new turmoil. The first salvo in his campaign was aimed squarely at Valentino, a task in which the Pope’s personal inclinations happily aligned with his official duties. With Valentino out of the way, however, others leapt into the vacuum. Quickest to profit from the collapse of Valentino’s empire in the Romagna were the Venetians, who swooped in and snapped up the papal dependencies of Faenza and Rimini. This cheeky bit of opportunism inevitably put the Most Serene Republic on a collision course with the new Pope, who had not maneuvered his entire life to obtain the papal tiara only to see his possessions filched by a nation of arrogant merchants.

  Florence also had reason to fear the Venetians since a major commercial competitor now stood firmly astride their most important trade routes. One of Machiavelli’s tasks during his embassy to Rome in 1503 had been to encourage the new Pope to take a hard line with Venice. In truth, Machiavelli didn’t have to work hard to stoke the anger of the Pope, who told him through clenched teeth “that he would in no way tolerate such an injury to the Church.” Not content with presenting a dry recitation of his conversation with the Pope, Machiavelli offered the Ten a more expansive vision of what was at stake: “And I make, in short, the following prediction, that what the Venetians have done in seizing Faenza will either open for them a door on to all of Italy, or it will be their ruin.”

  Perhaps he should have sent this warning instead to Venice, since he seemed to have a better grasp of what they had stirred up than the Venetians did. On December 10, 1508, Julius announced his latest version of a Holy League, this one aimed squarely at the Most Serene Republic of Venice. The new alliance was holy only in the sense that it had been arranged by the Pope; in every other respect it was a cynical arrangement that appealed to the signatories’ greed rather than serving any higher purpose. Julius’s alliance united long-standing enemies—including the Holy Roman Emperor and the Kings of Spain and France—by promising to each a portion of the rich lands that Venice now held across the length of Italy. To the Pope would go the cities illegally seized in the Romagna; to Emperor Maximillian the mountainous region of the Friuli; Louis coveted the northern cities of Brescia, Bergamo, and Cremona, while Ferdinand of Aragon would acquire the southern Italian ports that Venice had seized as part of her campaign to dominate the Adriatic coastline. The League of Cambrai, as it came to be called, was the most formidable alliance ever forged in Europe, at least on paper, though like any team made up of large egos it suffered from too many would-be leaders and too few willing to be led. Even with this handicap the coalition was strong enough to dominate the forces Venice could bring against them. On May 14, 1509, at Agnadello—near Cremona—league forces under Gian Giacomo Trivulzio routed the Venetians, largely because one Venetian captain, Niccolò Orsini, refused at the critical moment to come to the aid of his collea
gue Bartolommeo D’Alviano. Though the capital remained safe within its lagoon, “Venice lost in a single day the fruit of eight hundred years of painful toil,” as Machiavelli put it in The Prince. The Venetian diarist Marino Sanudo recorded the reaction when the news was announced in the Doge’s Palace:

  At twenty-two hours Piero Mazaruol, a secretary, came running in with letters in his hand from the battlefield, with many gallows drawn on them. Thereupon the doge and the savi read the letters and learned that our forces had been routed. And there began a great weeping and lamentation and, to put it better, a sense of panic. Indeed, they were as dead men.

  But while the battle appeared decisive, nothing was ever that simple in the tangled web of Italian politics. In fact the victors were immediately disoriented by their sudden victory, while the magnitude of the disaster steeled the resolve of the defeated. The resilience of the Venetians was demonstrated when, in July, they reconquered Padua. Though Maximillian attempted a quick counterstroke, Machiavelli, remembering his own experience at the imperial court the year before, warned the Florentine ambassadors at the Emperor’s court not to make any commitments since Maximillian “very often undid in the evening that which he had done in the morning.”

  Despite Machiavelli’s warnings, the government, deploying its favorite tactic, decided to buy off the Emperor. Adding insult to injury, in November Machiavelli himself was ordered to Verona bearing the second installment of the 40,000 ducats the Florentine ambassadors had promised.

  His journey through the territories recently held by the Venetians provided him with one more lesson in the horrors of war. “The invading soldiers have set to robbing and plundering the country,” Machiavelli wrote to the Ten, “and I hear and see terrible things such as I have never known of before.” He recalled the gruesome scenes he witnessed in his poem “On Ambition”:

  Let him turn his eyes here who wishes to behold the sorrows of

  others, and let him consider if ever before now the sun has

  looked upon such savagery.

  A man is weeping for his father dead and a woman for her

  husband; another man, beaten and naked, you see driven in

  sadness from his own dwelling.

  Oh how many times, when the father has held his son tight in

  his arms, a single thrust has pierced the breasts of them both! . . .

  Foul with blood are the ditches and streams, full of heads, of

  legs, of arms, and other members gashed and severed.

  Birds of prey, wild beasts, dogs are now their family tombs—

  Oh tombs repulsive, horrible and unnatural!

  As he traveled through the Veneto he observed unrest in both town and country as forces of the Holy League tried to maintain their hold on the territories won from Venice. The resistance of the local population to the foreigners convinced him that his initial assessment had been correct, that the forces of the Emperor and his allies were losing ground and those of Venice were resurgent. Writing to his superiors in the Palazzo della Signoria he offered a cogent analysis of the situation based not on the traditional measures of armies and economic resources, but in terms of a class struggle. Because the Venetians in their empire had protected the popolo from exploitation by the local nobility, the peasants and laborers would remain fiercely loyal to their former overlords: “And thus so great a desire of death or vengeance has entered into the souls of these country folk, that they are become more hardened and enraged against the enemies of the Venetians, than were the Jews against the Romans; and it daily happens that some one of them, being taken prisoner, submits to death rather than deny the name of Venice . . . . Therefore, all things considered, it is impossible for those monarchs to hold these lands so long as the peasants have breath.”

  This conclusion must have surprised his bosses, who, like most well-informed observers, believed that the Battle of Agnadello spelled the end of Venice as a major power. But Machiavelli peered beneath the surface and discovered deeper currents. In addition to the elements of class warfare that worked against the forces of the league, Venice’s resurgence was abetted by the nature of the coalition arrayed against it, a forced partnership among incompatible partners held together only by a common greed.

  Nowhere was this more apparent than in the actions of the Pope himself. Julius had been the driving force behind the coalition, but now that he had properly chastened the arrogant Venetians he began to regret the monster he had summoned to do the job. Like Machiavelli, Julius was an ardent nationalist at heart. His first loyalty was to the Church he commanded, but he also cared deeply about the larger Italian nation—an as yet amorphous concept that was based not so much on political as linguistic and cultural bonds. No matter how often they were at each other’s throats, Italians remained convinced of their own superiority to those uncultured louts who despoiled their lands and pillaged their cities. The obvious fact that they possessed more of the civilized virtues than their tormentors merely made the humiliation harder to bear. Guicciardini expressed the common view that, like the ancient Israelites punished by God for their transgressions, Italians were the authors of their own troubles, for “if these powers had not been blinded by private greed and had not destroyed the common weal with shame and harm also to themselves, there is no doubt that Italy, restored to its pristine glory by their counsels and resources, would have been safe for many years from the attacks of foreign nations.” Machiavelli shared with his friend and colleague the conviction that Italy’s travails were the outward manifestation of an inner rot, but he also believed in ultimate redemption, a hope to which he gives eloquent voice in the ringing exhortation that ends The Prince:

  Against barbarian rage,

  Virtue will take the field; then short the fight;

  True to their lineage,

  Italian hearts will prove their Roman might.

  Similar sentiments lodged somewhere in Julius’s breast, no matter how deviously he went about achieving his goal. Having just encouraged foreign powers to help themselves to broad swaths of native soil, he now made an about-face and launched a campaign in which his former enemies became his friends, his former allies his sworn enemies. “Fuori i barbari!” (Out with the barbarians) was the new rallying cry as he cut a deal with Venice to drive out the Emperor and the French, whom he had previously emboldened.

  For Florence the sudden realignment proved particularly uncomfortable. While nominally allied with papal forces, the city had remained on the sidelines during the War of the League of Cambrai—which was just the way the Florentines preferred things. But a war between her traditional ally, France, and her southern neighbor, the Pope, was likely to stretch even Florence’s elastic foreign policy to the breaking point.

  Trying to ease the strain placed on Florentine diplomacy would occupy Machiavelli for the foreseeable future, but before grappling with these difficult matters he would have to deal with a crisis closer to home. On December 20, 1509, a masked man, accompanied by two witnesses, went to the house of the notary of conservators in Florence to denounce the Second Chancellor and declare that he was, and had always been, ineligible for the office he now held. “[He] contended that having been born of a father, etc.,” Buonaccorsi reported to his friend, “you can in no way exercise the office that you hold, etc.” Though his friends had rallied around him and, so far, had been able to beat back the challenge, Buonaccorsi urged Machiavelli “not to make a joke of it” since “your adversaries are numerous and will stop at nothing.”

  The nature of the charge is not spelled out by Buonaccorsi, though apparently the scandal was so well known that it was being talked about “even in the whorehouses.” Given the reference to Machiavelli’s father, it is likely that his enemies were challenging him on the grounds that Bernardo was a specchio, that is prohibited from holding office due to unpaid taxes. Since Niccolò had assumed his father’s debts as well as his assets upon Bernardo’s death, he, too, his accusers claimed, should be barred from the Palazzo della Signori
a.

  The timing of the incident is significant. Bernardo Machiavelli’s troubles were old news. The fact that they were dredged up at this particular moment suggests a politically motivated attack on the part of the growing, if still largely underground, movement directed at the Gonfaloniere and the man who was now often referred to as Soderini’s “hatchet man.” The anonymity of the denunciation was disconcerting since Machiavelli had no opportunity to confront his accuser, but it was also reassuring since it implied that the mysterious figure lacked the support to move openly against him. In the end the scandal blew over and Machiavelli remained in his job, but it was an ominous sign.

  In June 1510, Piero Soderini sent Machiavelli back to the French court. In the upcoming battle between King Louis and the Pope, Soderini would adopt the usual Florentine policy of delay and distraction, an evasive tactic that, Machiavelli had long ago discovered, always seem to irritate those toward whom it was directed. Though his natural inclination was to back the French, Florence’s traditional ally, in his secret instructions Soderini reminded his assistant that “although the Pope as a friend is not worth much, as an enemy he can do much harm.” Arriving at Lyons on July 7, Machiavelli dispatched a letter with the usual disclaimer that he expected to achieve nothing “save that of keeping your Excellencies well informed of all that happens from day to day.”

  Machiavelli’s pessimism was well founded. Not surprisingly, Louis had little patience for Florentine equivocations. “[T]here is no way out,” Machiavelli informed the Ten after a tense encounter with the king. “[The French] seek to entangle you in this war.” On August 9 he wrote again: “Your Excellencies may believe, as they believe the Gospel, that should there be war between the Pope and this sovereign, you will not be able to avoid declaring for one side or the other.”