Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  It was not enough, however, to urge his compatriots to take decisive action. An even more critical task was to encourage a little less decisiveness on the part of the French, which he did by reminding the King’s advisers how securing an Italian empire always appeared simpler on paper than it proved to be in fact. The problem, as he saw it, was that “if they make war alone, they know what they bring upon themselves; but that if they engage in it with allies, they will have to share Italy with them, and therefore be involved in a greater and more dangerous war among themselves.” This is typical of Machiavelli’s analysis, which dispenses with all piety and pageantry in favor of a dry account of exactly where each party’s interest lay.

  It is doubtful whether anyone at the French court appreciated being lectured by this underpaid emissary of a second-rate power, but some at least recognized the wisdom of his words, shifting to a strategy that avoided an all-out military clash. This more cautious approach involved striking the Pope where he appeared strongest—at the aura of sanctity that gave him a standing among the lords of Europe out of all proportion to his tangible assets. Calling for a church council to sit in judgment of the reigning Pontiff, the French intended to raise questions of simony in regard to his election (a charge to which Julius, like all his predecessors, was vulnerable) as well as enumerating other crimes against his holy office. Thus Julius would be forced into a war on two fronts, defending his legitimacy as a spiritual leader while sparring with the French on the field of battle.

  Machiavelli returned to Florence in October, much relieved to be done with the onerous and unprofitable mission, though the ill humor of the city was such that he might soon have wished he were back on the road. In the months he had been away discontent with the regime continued to build. The mood had grown so ugly, in fact, that according to one diarist the Eight (in charge of state security) could no longer walk in the streets for fear they would be attacked. The civil discord reflected both a general anxiety about the future and a hardening of differences that had always existed between oligarchic and democratic factions. Soderini was accused of favoring “new men” at the expense of the wealthy clans who traditionally dominated the halls of power, and of being a demagogue who harbored dictatorial ambitions. Nor did the recent success of the Pisan war work entirely to the government’s benefit since it increased suspicion that Machiavelli’s militia might become an instrument of tyranny.

  Opposition to Soderini’s regime now began to coalesce around that most magical—and most reviled—name in Florentine history: Medici. While there had always been a minority among the elite who favored the return of the city’s former ruling family, these men—sometimes referred to as the bigi, sometimes as the palleschi (named for the red balls, palle, that formed the Medici crest)—knew the torment of a love that dared not speak its name. Since the majority still despised the Medici, their secret admirers, though an important constituency within the oligarchic faction, remained little more than a hidden cabal, fearful and conspiratorial. Young pro-Medici hooligans had been among the most militant agitators against Savonarola and his regime, but while they succeeded in destroying the hated preacher, the government that replaced him turned out to be equally hostile to their aims.

  In the early days of their campaign the palleschi were not helped by the man whose cause they championed. Whenever they seemed to be making progress, Piero de’ Medici would engage in some clumsy attempt to overthrow the republican government by force, discrediting his supporters within the city and leading at least a few of them to the gallows. Piero’s death was a godsend to Medici sympathizers. Once the family was in the more capable hands of his younger brother, Cardinal Giovanni, the palleschi could state their preferences with more candor.

  Though the climate now appeared more favorable, the palleschi did not entirely abandon their conspiratorial ways. On December 22, 1510, the state police uncovered a plot to assassinate the Gonfaloniere, led by known Medici sympathizer Prinzivalle della Stufa. Though the plot was unraveled before it could get off the ground, it offered further evidence of growing restlessness within the upper reaches of the ruling class.

  Machiavelli spent much of the winter of 1511–12 building up the militia, spurred to new exertions by the increasingly dangerous international situation. The war between the Pope and France continued to simmer in the Romagna, next door to Tuscany, with possession of the strategic city of Bologna passing back and forth more than once. In October 1511, Julius declared another Holy League—this time directed at the Most Christian King of France—from the pulpit of the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, with the ambassadors of Spain and Venice on hand to demonstrate their solidarity.

  While Florence hoped to repeat its performance in the League of Cambrai, standing aside to let others do the fighting, France was determined not to let the city off the hook. Louis increased the pressure on the republic by insisting that the church council he was organizing meet in Florentine-controlled Pisa. As far as Florence was concerned the only point to this otherwise futile exercise was to arouse the Pope’s fury at Florence for serving as host. Again Machiavelli was dispatched to the court of the French King in an effort to extricate Florence from its predicament. The one heartening sign was that there seemed little stomach among the cardinals for the schismatic council. Most remained either overtly hostile to the project or strangely reluctant to answer their mail. The only ones who showed any enthusiasm were three or four French cardinals, who were regarded as stooges of their King. In his pocket Machiavelli carried a note setting out the difficulties of Florence’s situation:

  No one shows any wish to attend the Council, and therefore it only serves to irritate the Pope against us; and for this reason we make a request either that it shall not sit at Pisa, or shall at least be suspended for the present. No prelate seems to be coming from Germany; from France very few and very slowly. And it is a matter of universal astonishment to see a Council proclaimed by three Cardinals only, while the few others who were said to adhere to it, dissimulate their opinions and defer their arrival . . . . If, therefore, there should be no hope of agreement between the Pope and the King, and if the latter cannot be persuaded to desist altogether, he should at least be induced to delay for two or three months.

  When Machiavelli met with the King in Blois, Louis showed little sympathy for his predicament, demanding that the government of Florence offer safe passage to those few cardinals willing to stick their necks out. Predictably, the Pope retaliated by placing Florence under interdict, a threat that on other occasions had almost brought the republic to its knees. But in the end the council proved to be something of a fiasco and the Pope was soon distracted by more pressing matters: so few cardinals attended that it was more of an embarrassment to the French King than a threat to Julius, who simply ignored the schismatic churchmen.

  Frustrated in his attempts to depose the Pope by bureaucratic means, Louis, throwing aside Machiavelli’s more cautious counsel, now opted for a frontal assault. In the winter of 1512 a new army of invasion, led by the King’s brilliant twenty-three-year-old nephew, Gaston de Foix, marched across the Alps and onto the Lombard plains. Included among the vast host was a token force of three hundred Florentine lances.

  On April 12, in fields near the Adriatic port of Ravenna, French forces under Foix met the army of the Holy League led by Ramón de Cardona, Viceroy of Naples. It was the kind of battle Machiavelli approved of—hard-fought and bloody. Of an earlier confrontation he noted with satisfaction that “it was fought with more virtue than any other that had been fought for fifty years in Italy, for in it, between one side and the other, more than a thousand men died.” Measured by this dismal standard—between ten and twenty thousand were left dead on the field—the Battle of Ravenna was a notable success. Indeed it bore little resemblance to the typical skirmishes of fifteenth-century warfare, anticipating instead the sanguinary orgies of later centuries.

  Throughout the hotly contested battle the small Florentine contingent perform
ed so poorly that the King complained to the ambassador that they failed to pull even their modest weight. His sour mood was provoked, perhaps, by the perplexing and thoroughly discouraging results of the confrontation. Though the French drove the papal army from the field, they lost their young commander, Foix, killed in a skirmish with retreating Spanish infantry. Loss of the dashing general was a blow from which they could not recover, particularly when in the coming months Julius reinforced his army with twenty thousand additional Swiss infantry. Despite their glorious victory, the French were soon, to quote a contemporary witness, “flying like mist before the wind.” It was a repetition of 1494, when early French victories were followed by defeat as a combination of local powers, backed by the might of Spain, harried the overextended and overtaxed forces of the King. Parma, Piacenza, and Bologna were lost in quick succession as the French army fled for home. Julius, the “Warrior Pope,” had proven himself once again a master tactician. “Out with the barbarians!” was his battle cry, and the sight of the French army turning tail must have filled his heart with joy. But the fact that this victory was accomplished only with the help of many thousands of Swiss and Spanish troops—foreigners who showed no signs of joining their fellow barbarians in departing Italian soil—demonstrates the limitations of the Pope’s wider strategic vision, which achieved short-term victories at the risk of long-term goals.

  Among the greatest losers to emerge from the French debacle was Florence, whose contingent of three hundred lances had been too meager to please the King but too prominent to avoid becoming a target of papal wrath. News from Mantua, where the members of the league were meeting to divvy up the prizes, turned ominous when Florence’s ambassador, Giovan Vittorio Soderini, reported the arrival of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and his younger brother, Giuliano. Reciting to all who cared to listen to the long list of missteps and misdeeds by the current government of Florence, the Medici brothers drummed up support for a proposed expedition against their native city. They were joined in this effort by Pope Julius, who publicly called for the resignation of Piero Soderini and his government, though even with the papal sanction the gathering army seemed less an official campaign than an expedition of freebooters. Offering 10,000 ducats as a down payment, Cardinal Giovanni finally managed to assemble about five thousand professional soldiers, hiring the victorious Ramón de Cardona to lead the ragtag band.

  This was the direct thrust at Florence that Machiavelli and his colleagues had long feared and had strained every fiber to avoid. But having backed the wrong horse there was little they could do but gird for battle. The limitations of diplomacy had been reached, and now they would have to depend on their own soldiers, who, despite a few notable successes, had done little to show they could withstand a professional army bent on their destruction.

  To meet the threat, the Eight issued a decree meant to expand the number of soldiers in the militia and turn them into a fighting force that could compete on equal terms with the professionals they would soon be facing: “Seeing the great utility of the Infantry Ordinance [it read], desiring to ensure the safety of the present government and liberty amid the dangers to which they are now exposed, the Nine are hereby empowered to enlist under our banners for the entire year 1512, no less than 500 light horse, armed either with crossbows or matchlocks at the pleasure of the men; ten percent of the number may be armed with lances.” After years of cautious support, the government was now finally committed to a citizen militia as the best means of defending their lives and liberty. The task of preparing their defenses fell once again to Machiavelli, who spent much of the spring of 1512 in the saddle, traveling about the countryside, recruiting soldiers in Pisa, Arezzo, and Poggio Imperiale, and inspecting the frontier forts at Valiano and Monte San Savino.

  As Spanish forces accompanied by the Medici brothers approached the borders of Tuscany in August 1512, Florence had reason to hope it might yet avert disaster. The army led by Viceroy de Cordona was small—numbering about five thousand infantry and another two hundred heavily equipped men-at-arms—far outnumbered by Machiavelli’s beefed-up militia. In addition, the invaders were a motley crew, ill fed and ill supplied. So uncertain was Cordona that victory could be achieved that instead of launching a direct assault on Prato—the city some thirteen miles north of Florence, where the bulk of the militia was gathered to meet the invaders—he sent emissaries to the Signoria to see if they might arrive at a negotiated settlement. Their demands, while not unreasonable for an army on the verge of certain victory, seemed harsh when the outcome was uncertain. Cordona insisted not only that the Medici be allowed to return to the city as private citizens, but that Soderini and his pro-French regime be deposed; and, to compensate him for the inconvenience he had already been put through, he demanded a fee of 100,000 ducats—a repetition of the extortion to which Florence was regularly subjected.

  Meanwhile, in the increasingly restive capital, Soderini moved against the internal opposition whose disloyalty increased as the distance between the Spanish forces and the city walls shrank. Twenty-five of the most prominent pro-Medici stalwarts, many of whom were in direct contact with the Cardinal and his brother, were rounded up and thrown into prison. Upon learning of the terms demanding his resignation, Soderini called a special session of the Great Council where he offered to sacrifice himself for the sake of peace. “To test the mood of the people,” Machiavelli reported in a letter he wrote a month after the events,iii “[Soderini] assembled the entire council and explained to them what had been proposed, offering to abide by their will. And should they decide that his departure would hasten the restoration of peace, he would return to his home.” Soderini almost certainly knew his offer would be rejected. It was one of those grand gestures that politicians often engage in to rally support and garner sympathy, a ploy that apparently proved successful since, as Machiavelli continued, “[e]veryone rejected this and even expressed their willingness to offer up their lives in his defense.”

  For the moment Florence was buoyed by an uncommon sense of unity and purpose, but beneath the confident surface were gnawing doubts about the city’s capacity to withstand the assault. Machiavelli himself admitted: “It was decided initially not to deploy these men in the countryside, because they were not deemed strong enough to resist the enemy.” Despite their improved armaments and greater numbers, the militias suffered from a lack of leadership and experience in the heat of battle. Guicciardini, writing with the wisdom of hindsight, was harsher in his judgment, asserting that the forces Florence was relying on for her salvation “were of such a sort, that never in the memory of man had there existed any less worthy of their pay.”

  With the negotiations at an impasse, Cordona decided to test the mettle of these green troops and assaulted the walls of Prato. But with little in the way of artillery, the attack was repulsed with ease, much to the jubilation of the Florentines. So discouraged was the Viceroy that he almost abandoned the entire campaign. Hoping, however, to salvage one last scrap of honor from what appeared to be a major fiasco, he sent a second delegation to Florence with a proposal to withdraw his forces in exchange for the paltry sum of 3,000 ducats—a far cry from the 100,000 he demanded only a few days earlier—in addition to bread to feed his half-starved troops and a lifting of the banishment of the Medici. Unfortunately, the circumstances that forced Cordona to sweeten the terms made Soderini and his colleagues less inclined to accept them. Years later Machiavelli harshly criticized his old boss’s rejection of this proposal, though there is no indication that he spoke up at the time. He discusses Soderini’s brave but foolish refusal in The Discourses in a chapter titled “Prudent Princes and Republics should be content with Victory, for, when they are not content with it, they usually lose.” If what Cordona was offering Soderini was something less than victory, it was, as Machiavelli pointed out, something close to it. Accusing his compatriots of excessive pride, Machiavelli wrote that “[r]ulers of states, when attacked . . . cannot make a greater mistake than to refuse to co
me to terms when the forces attacking them are a good deal stronger than their own, especially if overtures are made by the enemy.”

  Of course the problem was that the superiority of the Spanish forces was far from obvious at the time the decision had to be made. Cordona had dropped his most onerous conditions precisely because he himself doubted he could achieve victory. But Machiavelli is correct when he points out that Soderini’s rejection was foolhardy. There were in fact plenty of signs that a renewed assault on Prato would yield different results. Florentine stinginess over the years when it came to equipping and training its troops left serious deficiencies in the ranks. The city had agreed to supply squads with matchlocks, for example, but had provided so little ammunition that they were forced to strip lead from the roofs of the houses of Prato to make bullets.

  Having received word of the rejection, and with the situation of his army ever more desperate, Cordona decided to make one last attempt on the city. Late in the afternoon of Sunday, August 29, 1512, the Spaniards began bombarding the walls of Prato and managed to create a small gap in the defenses. Where professional troops would have quickly sealed the breach, Machiavelli’s green militiamen panicked at the first sight of the Spaniards surging forward, abandoning their posts and leaving the city to the mercy of these half-starved warriors. Like many a besieging army, the victors exacted a fearful revenge on the population whose stubbornness had contributed to their discomfort. Machiavelli recalled the mournful scene: “[A]fter minimal resistance, all fled, and the Spaniards, having occupied the city, then proceeded to sack it and massacre the men, a miserable spectacle of calamity . . . . More than four thousand died; the rest were taken and made, through various means, to pay ransom. Nor did they spare the virgins cloistered in holy sites, which were scenes of rape and pillage.”