Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  Catastrophic as this was for the citizens of Prato, it might prove equally calamitous for the Florentines, who were now without means to defend themselves against a foreign army that had just showed its cruelty. Florence might have anticipated some mercy from Cardinal de’ Medici, who had no reason to reduce to rubble the city he had spent much of his adult life trying to reclaim, but had the citizens of Florence been able to read a letter he wrote to the Pope a week or so after the sack they would have found little comfort: “The taking of Prato, so speedily and cruelly,” he told Julius, “although it has given me pain, will at least have the good effect of serving as an example and a terror to the others.”

  The “others” were the Florentines, who, much to the Cardinal’s satisfaction, seemed to be taking the lesson to heart. “[E]veryone began to fear a sack,” Machiavelli recalled, tacitly accepting some responsibility by admitting that the calamity was due largely to “the cowardice of our soldiers.” The mood in the city was approaching full-scale panic: respectable women checked themselves into convents; rich merchants fled the city with their valuables; and the guards at the Palazzo della Signoria charged with protecting the government abandoned their posts. Even more encouraging from the Cardinal’s point of view were the crowds of palleschi who now streamed into the streets and the piazzas proclaiming their devotion to the Medici cause. The old chant “Palle! Palle!” rang through the streets and squares of Florence once more. Political fortunes were turned topsy-turvy as Soderini’s supporters were shouted down and overwhelmed by the suddenly emboldened adherents of the former ruling family.

  Also emboldened was Cordona. When Florentine envoys arrived in Prato, they found that the Viceroy’s demands had grown with his victory. Not only did he now insist they pay him 60,000 florins (soon raised to 120,000) for his troubles, but he told them that Soderini must resign and the Medici be immediately reinstated. The proposal was made slightly more palatable by maintaining the fiction that the Medici were to return to the city merely as private citizens, but once inside Florence, surrounded by their jubilant supporters and with Spanish troops within shouting distance outside the walls, no one doubted who the new bosses would be. Though Soderini himself was initially tempted to reject the demand, “relying,” as Machiavelli scoffed, “on idle dreams of his own,” the ground was swiftly crumbling beneath his feet. Only days earlier Soderini had stood before the Great Council and won overwhelming support for his defiance, but faced with an almost certain repetition of the horrors visited on Prato, public opinion swung decisively against him. A more direct form of pressure was applied when a group of young aristocrats with ties to the Medici broke into the Gonfaloniere’s apartments in the palace and threatened to run him through with their swords unless he released their twenty-five imprisoned colleagues. By the morning of Tuesday, August 31, only two days after the fall of Prato, Soderini conceded the game was lost. Rather than engage in what would almost certainly have been a bloody and ultimately unsuccessful resistance, he chose the only sensible course. Summoning Machiavelli, he asked him to approach their mutual friend Francesco Vettori. Though Vettori, who had served with Machiavelli on the mission to the Emperor four years earlier, had ties to the current government, he was also related to the Medici and was known to be sympathetic to their cause. Hurrying to the palace around midday, Vettori met with an evidently shaken Gonfaloniere in his private apartments. Soderini informed him that he had decided to step down but was concerned for his own safety and that of his family. Vettori agreed to allow him the use of his own house during the perilous hours while final arrangements were being made. It was only after the Gonfaloniere had slipped quietly out of the palace that Vettori went before the Signoria and recounted their conversation. At first they refused to depose Soderini, until Vettori explained to them that if he did not resign immediately he would surely be assassinated. No one, in the end, had the stomach for violent confrontation. The palleschi were sober in their triumph, supporters of the republican government glum but resigned. A few hours later—accompanied by Vettori and an escort of forty cavalry—Soderini left the city by the Roman Gate and set out on the road that led to Siena and a life of exile.

  Machiavelli was not unhappy to see him go. He remained ambivalent about his former boss, believing that he was a genuinely good man but that he lacked the backbone to be a real leader. His most reasoned postmortem on Soderini’s career comes in Book III of The Discourses: “Piero Soderini . . . conducted all his affairs in a good-natured and patient way. So long as circumstances suited the way in which he carried on, both he and his country prospered. But when afterwards there came a time which required him to drop his patience and his humility, he could not bring himself to do it; so that both he and his country were ruined.” He was, in fact, a prime example of a man unable to adapt “in conformity with the times.” Machiavelli had little patience for well-meaning incompetents since they often cause more suffering than those who are deliberately cruel. His final verdict was harsh. Upon hearing of Soderini’s death in 1522, Machiavelli composed a little verse that suggests a certain contempt for a man whose indecisiveness cost him and his city dearly:

  The night that Piero Soderini ceased to breathe,

  His soul journeyed to the mouth of Hell;

  But Pluto cried: “Thou foolish soul,

  No Hell for thee! Go seek the Limbo of the babes!

  Though Soderini’s regime outlived him by a few days, it was clear to everyone that one era had passed and a new one was beginning. On the first day of September, to the shouts of “Palle! Palle!” from the crowds lining the street, Giuliano de’ Medici returned to the city of his birth, his beard, which he had recently grown in the Spanish fashion, shaved to demonstrate his desire to abide by local customs. As he walked the streets of Florence, unaccompanied by those retinues so beloved by powerful men, his manner was respectful, his dress and comportment modest, winning him praise among citizens who remembered the high-handed manner of his brother Piero.

  While Giuliano charmed everyone with his affable manner, his supporters, reinvigorated after their years in the shadows, began to flex their muscle. On the same day that Giuliano returned, and as the new Signoria prepared to take their seats, Luca Landucci watched as “all the citizens who considered themselves friends of the Medici, assembled at the door of the Palagio and in the Piazza, all fully armed, and barred every way into the Piazza.” With the palleschi mustered menacingly on the doorstep, free and open debate in the Great Council was impossible.

  In fact the government remained rudderless until September 14, when Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, accompanied by four hundred lances and one thousand foot soldiers, made his triumphal entrance to the cheers of thousands of his supporters. Taking up residence at his boyhood home on the Via Larga—built by his great-grandfather Cosimo and, until the plundering that followed the Medici’s expulsion, filled to the rafters with priceless treasures of ancient and modern art—he played the role of the reluctant suitor dragged back into political life by the tearful supplications of his fellow countrymen. Two days after his return, the Medici and their supporters called a parlamento, a mass gathering of the citizens in the Piazza della Signoria where, as if by unanimous acclaim, the people of Florence called for a committee with special powers to reform the government. This was the oldest trick in the playbook of Florentine politics, one often exploited by earlier generations of Medici to consolidate their power. Though ostensibly an exercise in pure democracy, the seething mass, often surrounded by armed men who made the consequences of dissent immediately apparent, always ratified the wishes of those already in power. This gathering was no different from its predecessors. With one voice the citizens of Florence proclaimed their desire for radical reform.

  The Balia, or special committee, tasked with implementing the reforms was comprised of forty-five leading citizens (soon expanded to sixty-six), all of them Medici loyalists. In short order they discarded all the changes that had occurred since 1494, reinstituting those smal
l councils that had been the instruments of Medici control and stocking them with their trusted followers. Guicciardini’s verdict on the new government is terse. “In this way,” he declared in his History of Italy, “the liberty of Florence was crushed by force.” Even Francesco Vettori, who was sympathetic to the Medici and helped ease them back to power, was critical of the newly constituted government, complaining: “The city was reduced to the point of doing nothing save by the will of Cardinal dei Medici; and this method is the method of perfect tyranny.”

  As for Machiavelli, the man most closely identified with the exiled Gonfaloniere, his reaction, at least for the moment, was muted. He navigated this latest and most tumultuous storm with the imperturbability with which he had navigated those minor tempests that too often agitated the government for which he worked. Though a political animal through and through, he never regarded himself as a party man. He contemplated the quarrels that consumed his superiors with a disdainful eye, seeing in their petty squabbles the telltale signs of ravenous human ambition, but also determined to rise above them as a devoted servant of the state, whichever party temporarily gained the upper hand. The letter he wrote to an unnamed noblewoman sometime that very month offers the best window into his mood, without the coloring provided by the traumatic events still to come. After describing in rather dry terms the momentous events that had just transpired, the Second Chancellor, apparently still secure in his job, concludes on an optimistic note: “The city remains most peaceful and hopes, with the help of [the Medici], to live no less honorably than in times past, when their father Lorenzo the Magnificent, of most happy memory, governed them.”

  There may be an element of wishful thinking here. Machiavelli must have suspected that the big brooms currently deployed in the Palazzo might well sweep him out along with much else associated with the former regime. But his hopeful tone reveals something about how Machiavelli saw himself, as the consummate bureaucrat willing and able to serve any government. So great and simple was his patriotism that he could not conceive that anyone would regard him as other than what he was: a devoted servant of the city they all loved. The next few months would disabuse him of his naive assumption and shape his increasingly cynical worldview.

  * * *

  i The clash of wills and of egos that resulted is memorably evoked in Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy.

  ii The Pope’s title to large swaths of territory in central Italy was based largely on a document known as The Donation of Constantine. The document, purportedly dictated by the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine I, granted the Pope lordship over large tracts and transformed the Pope into a secular as well as spiritual prince. By Machiavelli’s day, many scholars—including most prominently Lorenzo Valla—suspected that the Donation was a medieval forgery, but the Pope would not countenance any challenges to its authenticity.

  iii The letter in which Machiavelli recalls the events leading to the downfall of the Soderini government is addressed simply “To a Noblewoman.” Many scholars believe it was written to Isabella d’Este, the brilliant and cultured wife of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua (see Machiavelli et al., Machiavelli and His Friends, note 1, p. 495). Others believe it was meant for Alfonsina Orsini, widow of Piero de’ Medici.

  IX

  DISMISSED, DEPRIVED, AND TOTALLY REMOVED

  “I should like you to get this pleasure from these troubles of mine, that I have borne them so straightforwardly that I am proud of myself for it and consider myself more of a man than I believed I was.”

  —MACHIAVELLI TO FRANCESCO VETTORI, MARCH 18, 1513

  MACHIAVELLI’S INITIAL OPTIMISM WAS ENCOURAGED by happy memories of his youthful friendships with members of the Medici circle, including Giuliano himself, to whom he dedicated one of his first literary works. Hoping to renew old acquaintances, in the first days of the new regime Machiavelli wrote at least two letters to Giuliano’s older brother, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici. Whether this was a sign of complacency or a desperate attempt to ingratiate himself with those now in charge, the tone and substance were typical of the man whose profound psychological insight seemed to desert him when cultivating those who could help his career. “In the belief that affection may serve as an excuse for presumption,” he began his letter to the head of the Medici family, “I will venture to offer you this piece of advice.” The matter upon which he offered his unsolicited opinion was a particularly touchy one for the newly reinstated lords of the city since it had to do with efforts by the family to take back various properties that had been confiscated following their exile. While acknowledging the legitimacy of their claims, Machiavelli explained that “their seizure . . . will generate inextinguishable hatred, for men feel more grief at the loss of a farm than at the death of a father or brother, everyone knowing that no change in government can restore a kinsman to life, but that it may easily cause a restoration of a farm.” However sound, this advice was unlikely to be well received by a proud family that had endured more than a decade and a half of exile and felt entitled, at the very least, to reclaim what had been stolen from them.

  Given Machiavelli’s sensitivity to the myriad ways it was possible to offend and to take offense, it is remarkable how obtuse he was about his own behavior. He always overestimated people’s capacity to listen to unpleasant truths, which tended to get him into trouble with his colleagues and contributed to his posthumous reputation as the world’s greatest scoundrel. The caricature of Machiavelli as a man without scruple or conscience derives largely from his tendency to speak bluntly those truths that others would acknowledge only in private. Much of what Machiavelli wrote is self-evident—or at least seemed so to him—and it never occurred to him that with the facts clearly on his side he had anything to apologize for. Along with his famous cynicism, Machiavelli possessed a naïveté that assumed any opinion honestly given would be welcomed in the spirit in which it was offered.

  The Cardinal was neither the first nor the last man to bristle at Machiavelli’s candor, but while disinclined to entertain suggestions from a mid-level civil servant who had until recently been among the most dedicated officials of the government responsible for his exile, Giovanni appeared, at least for the moment, to have judged Machiavelli more a nuisance than a threat.

  Not content with offering his opinion on the restitution of lost property, Machiavelli dashed off a second letter in which he offered his insights into the current political situation. Who wouldn’t welcome pearls of wisdom, particularly when they came from one as well-placed as Machiavelli to ferret out the hidden motives of his colleagues? The Medici, he concluded, had been away so long that they had forgotten the deviousness of their compatriots, a gap in their knowledge he was only too happy to fill. Warning them to be on guard against those enemies of the former government now posing as Medici loyalists, Machiavelli condemned the ottimati as mere flatterers and opportunists “who can come to terms either with this or that government, for the sake of achieving power.” Of course Machiavelli could fairly have been accused of the same thing, but his flexibility, as he saw it, was a matter of putting country first, while his rivals valued party over patria. They constituted one of those “sects” Machiavelli deplored, the kind of conspiratorial cabal whose quarrelsomeness, he pointed out in his Florentine Histories, left “as many dead, as many exiles, and as many families destroyed as ever occurred in any city in memory.”

  Machiavelli’s advice to Cardinal Giovanni is perfectly reasonable and perfectly consistent. While the Medici might benefit in the short run from an alliance with the oligarchs, in the long run they risked not only revolution from below but more insidious threats from among their peers. He expands on this theme in The Prince, where the specific dilemma faced by the returning Medici takes the form of a general principle:

  He who becomes prince through the help of the magnates maintains his position only with more difficulty than the man who becomes prince through the help of the people, because he will find himself surrounde
d by many who believe themselves his equal . . . . [I]t is not possible to justly satisfy the nobles without injuring others, but it is indeed possible to satisfy the needs of the people, since while the nobles wish to oppress them, they seek only to avoid being oppressed.

  In fact Cardinal Giovanni was well acquainted with the dangers posed by an ambitious nobility, since rebellions against Medici rule had always come from within the ruling elite,i and he might well have given more weight to the argument had it come from another source. As it was, Machiavelli’s tactless presumption only added to the voices now clamoring for his dismissal.

  On November 7, 1512, two and a half months after Soderini fled the city, Niccolò Machiavelli was thrown out of office. “Cassaverunt, privaverunt et totaliter amoverunt” (Dismissed, deprived, and totally removed) read the decree passed unanimously by the Signoria. His friend Biagio Buonaccorsi was fired the same day. Interestingly, their boss, the Chancellor of Florence, Marcello Virgilio Adriani, managed to retain his post, both because he was better connected than Machiavelli and Buonaccorsi but also because his interests were literary rather than political. During his tenure in office he had accomplished little and so had stirred up little controversy. It was his underling, the consummate civil servant who had strained every fiber of his being to promote the interests of his country, who got the ax.

  More penalties were soon heaped on Machiavelli. The Signoria issued a decree limiting his travel within the territory controlled by Florence and, showing how little they trusted him, demanded that he post a bond of 1,000 lire to guarantee his compliance. Upon further reflection they decided these humiliations were insufficient and banished him from the Palazzo for a year.ii

  His enemies continued to hound him for another few weeks, before turning their minds to more pressing matters. They had high hopes that an audit of his accounts in office would uncover evidence of corruption, all too common among the underpaid civil servants of the Chancery, but much to their disappointment they came up empty. As he told Francesco Vettori, “my poverty is a testament to my loyalty and honesty.”