Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  xviii See, for example, Madison’s Federalist No. 10: “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” And: “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.”

  xix Machiavelli makes the same point in the Prologue to his play Clizia, based on an original by Plautus, where he says: “If into the world the same men should come back, just as the same events come back, never would a hundred years go by in which we should not find here a second time the very same things done as now” (Clizia, “Prologue” in Chief Works, II, 823).

  xx Arguing against the cyclical model of history proposed by some ancient philosophers, Saint Augustine explained, “For once Christ died for our sins; and rising from the dead, He dieth no more” (The City of God, XII, 13).

  XII

  THE SAGE OF THE GARDEN

  “I believe that the following would be the true way to Paradise—learn the way to Hell in order to flee from it.”

  —MACHIAVELLI TO FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI

  MACHIAVELLI WAS A PESSIMIST BY CONVICTION, BUT his gloomy outlook did little to dampen his zest for life. Indeed, it was his honest appraisal of his own appetites that convinced him that any political theory worthy of the name must account for man’s bestial nature. Like many people with a jaundiced view of the world he did not see why this verdict should stop him, or anyone else, from enjoying himself while he could. Even at his lowest moments he never succumbed to despair, and when he was shut out of public life he continued to peer beyond the constricted horizons of his existence. While in the country he collared those who traveled the busy road that passed by his house and pressed them for news of the wider world; in the city he always plunged into the middle of heated discussions over the results of the last election or the latest diplomatic dustup. He was one of those gregarious men who combine a cynical disdain for human nature in the abstract with genuine warmth for people in the flesh. The more Fortune rebuffed him, the more he was inclined to see the comic side of life, discovering in laughter the best antidote to what ailed him. As he wrote to Francesco Vettori, quoting lines of Petrarch:

  So if at times I laugh or sing,

  It is because only thus

  May I give voice to my anguished cries.

  It was when his suffering was at its most acute, as in those desperate weeks spent in the dismal Le Stinche prison, that he tended to see the farcical side of life most clearly, consoling himself by composing humorous verses and meditating on the folly of existence. Work gave his life meaning, and he filled the empty hours by picking up his pen and doing battle with the Muses. It is no coincidence that it was in prison that he first referred to himself as a writer, complaining to Giuliano de’ Medici, “so the poets are treated!”

  Plunging himself into his writing was not the only way he dulled his pain. While he was shackled in his dank cell he longed for the fresh air and simple comforts of Sant’ Andrea, but only a few weeks after his release the four walls of his house seemed only a little less confining. He sought distraction in the local tavern, just across the busy road that led to Rome, or, tiring of the boisterous atmosphere, he would tuck a book of poetry under his arm and seek a shady spot to read and spend some time alone with his thoughts. When rustic diversions grew stale he made the ten-mile journey on foot into the city, where he met old friends and caught up on the latest gossip.

  Bored and frustrated, Machiavelli found consolation in the arms of women. “[E]very day we go to the house of some girl to restore our vigor,” Machiavelli tells Vettori, proof that poverty never pinched so tightly that he could not afford to indulge in those low pleasures to which he had become accustomed.

  It is hard not to sympathize with Marietta, forced to stay home with the children during the many nights her husband was in town restoring his vigor in the brothels near the Old Market, while observing that, at least in this regard, Machiavelli was no worse than most of his peers. Florentine wives were expected to patiently tend to hearth and home while their husbands conducted their business and took their pleasures in the wider world. This inequity continued inside the home, where the husband possessed almost unlimited authority over his submissive bride. By the standards of the day, Machiavelli was not an inconsiderate master, his main fault consisting in neglect rather than cruelty. For over twenty-six years of married life, Marietta kept the household running smoothly and saw to the children’s basic needs, ensuring that her husband had the leisure and peace of mind to meditate on weightier matters.

  Marietta’s personality, like that of most of women of the time, remains largely hidden from view. Even with limited information, however, it is clear that Machiavelli’s wife was no shrinking violet. She wasn’t shy about voicing her displeasure when her husband was away for extended periods, complaining vociferously to the friends he commissioned to drop by and see how she was doing. “Lady Marietta curses God, and says she has thrown away both her body and her goods,” wrote Biagio Buonaccorsi during one of Machiavelli’s many absences, grumbling that he was forced to bear the brunt of her temper since the real object of her wrath was nowhere to be found.

  Machiavelli’s fictional portrayals of Florentine wives suggest an unromantic view of the marital state, but his unflattering depictions of the female sex—including his portrayal of Fortuna as a cruel and inconstant woman—reflect the ubiquitous misogyny of the age rather than any particular disillusionment with his own marriage. In his novella The Fable of Belfagor, Machiavelli’s title character is a demon sent by Pluto to investigate whether it is true, as he has heard, that wives are the source of all men’s ills. After testing this thesis by marrying a Florentine woman named Onesta, the demon Belfagor quickly returns to the Underworld, claiming he prefers Hell to the torments of the “marriage yoke.”

  Fortunately, we have more to go on than this bitter assessment. More attractive than the nagging and unreasonable Onesta is Sofronia from his play Clizia, a long-suffering woman who is far more sensible and appealing than her lecherous husband, Nicomaco. In fact Machiavelli clearly identifies as much with the wife as with the husband, placing in her mouth cynical views that he might have espoused himself. Told of a monk who had helped a woman conceive, the sharp-tongued Sofronia replies: “A fine miracle, a monk making a woman pregnant! It would be a miracle if a nun should make her pregnant.” Even more intriguing in view of Machiavelli’s own family life is Sofronia’s monologue in which she recalls how Nicomaco’s infatuation with a young girl meant that “his affairs are neglected, his farms are going to ruin, his business ventures fail”—a poignant picture of a household turned upside down by a middle-aged man’s philandering. The fact that Machiavelli gives the foolish husband a name so similar to his own shows either admirable self-awareness or a deplorable lack of conscience about his own moral lapses.

  Marietta’s greatest complaint about her husband was that he was so often absent, which suggests she derived a certain amount of pleasure from his company. If Niccolò and Marietta were never soul mates, they remained attentive to each other’s needs. Whenever they were apart, each inquired solicitously of the other’s health, and just as Marietta made sure to supply her absent husband with everything he needed to make his journeys more comfortable, Niccolò commissioned his friends to look after his family’s needs back at home. It is also apparent that despite prolonged absences and frequent infidelities on Niccolò’s part, they shared their bed for a considerable time. By 1514 they had six surviving children: four sons (Bernardo, Lodovico, Guido, and Piero), and two daughters (Primavera and Bartolomea).

  Machiavelli was an affectionate father, though he was too restless and ambitious to find in family life an adequate substitute for his blighted career. In fact the crowded, laughter-filled house in Sant’ Andrea reminded him of responsibilities he could barely meet. One of the most extended glimpses into Machiavell
i’s intimate feelings comes in a letter he wrote late in life to his son Guido:

  My dearest Guido. I received a letter from you that has given me the greatest pleasure, especially since you write that you have quite recovered; I could not have had better news. If God grant you and me life, I believe that I may make you a man of good standing, if you are willing to do your share . . . . But you must study and, since you no longer have illness as an excuse, take pains to learn letters and music, for you are aware how much distinction is given me for what little ability I possess. Thus, my son, if you want to please me and bring profit and honor to yourself, study, do well, and learn, because everyone will help you if you help yourself.

  Since the young mule has gone mad, it must be treated just the reverse of the way crazy people are, for they are tied up, and I want you to let it loose . . . take off its bridle and halter and let it go wherever it likes to regain its own way of life and work off its craziness. The village is big and the beast is small; it can do no one any harm . . . . Greet Madonna Marietta for me and tell her I have been expecting—and still do—to leave [Imola] anyday; I have never longed so much to return to Florence as I do now, but there is nothing else I can do. Simply tell her that whatever she hears, she should be of good cheer, since I shall be there before any danger comes. Kiss Baccina [Bartolomea], Piero, and Totto [Machiavelli’s brother], if he is there. I would dearly appreciate hearing whether his eyes are any better. Live in happiness and spend as little as you can. And remind Bernardo, whom I have written to twice in the last two weeks and received no reply, that he had better behave himself. Christ watch over you all.

  The conventional sentiments—fatherly tenderness combined with sensible admonitions to study hard, as well as his surprising empathy for a poor, crazed animal—belie the sinister reputation of the writer of The Prince. In fact for all his radical notions, Machiavelli was a rather ordinary man, loving if sometimes selfish, pursuing his own pleasures even as he fretted over his wife’s health and his children’s prospects.

  The other family member who played an important role in Machiavelli’s life was his nephew Giovanni Vernacci, son of his sister Primavera. Primavera had died when Giovanni was still a boy, and Machiavelli had taken him in. He looked after Giovanni’s interests in Florence while he was away on business, and regarded him as another son. Giovanni, for his part, returned his uncle’s affection, addressing him as “Honored and dearest foster father.” Machiavelli responded in kind, telling him, “aside from my own children, there is no man I cherish more than you.”

  But family was never the focus of Niccolò’s attention or even the center of his emotional life. One of his favorite haunts was the shop of Donato del Corno, “at the sign of the horn,” a place with a reputation as a homosexual hangout. It is unclear whether Machiavelli himself indulged in an occasional illicit tryst with boys (a vice regarded by some as peculiarly Florentine), but he was certainly tolerant of such behavior in his friends.i Machiavelli’s easygoing attitude was widely shared by men of his class. More prudish Florentines may have condemned such behavior as unnatural—and on occasion those caught in the act were severely punished—but they did not regard those who engaged in same-sex encounters as men who differed in any fundamental way from their peers. Homosexuality was just another vice, like masturbation or visiting prostitutes, and not a deep-seated expression of one’s true nature.

  In any case, it is clear that women remained the focus of Machiavelli’s sexual attention. He was always an unapologetic sensualist. Hypocrisy was far worse than promiscuity in his view. “It is certainly an amazing thing to contemplate how blind human beings are when it comes to their own sins, and how fiercely they persecute those they don’t possess,” Machiavelli wrote to Vettori. Commiserating with his friend after a mild scandal erupted over his sexual peccadilloes, Machiavelli continued:

  And to put it more clearly, given your austere disposition, if it had been I—who enjoy as much as any man the caresses of a woman—who had stumbled into the room: as soon as I’d seen what was up, I would have said: “Ambassador, you will make yourself ill; I don’t think you’re allowing yourself sufficient diversion. Here there are neither boys nor girls. What kind of whorehouse is this anyway?

  Professional disappointment drove Machiavelli to seek distractions outside his own home. After 1512, he plunged into a series of torrid love affairs. Some of the objects of his passion were courtesans—like the curly-haired beauty Lucretia, known as La Riccia, with whom, an anonymous accuser claimed, he had engaged in “an unnatural sex act,” or the singer Barbera Raffacani “who,” according to Guicciardini, “like all her kind, seeks to please all and to seem rather than to be.” Others, like the sister of his neighbor Niccolò Tafani, were women of respectable birth.ii

  Machiavelli found in these women’s beds a sexual excitement he no longer found with Marietta, but there was more to these encounters than physical release. Lust sometimes led to love, an emotion that both elated and exhausted him, as he reveals in an unusually lyrical passage from a letter to Vettori:

  [W]hile in the country I have met a creature so kind, so graceful, so noble, both in nature and in bearing, that neither my praise nor my love would be as much as she merits. I should tell you, as you told me, how this love began, how Love caught me in his nets, where he spread them, and what they were made of. You will see that they were nets of gold, woven by Venus and hung among the flowers. They were so soft and gentle that even though a hard heart could have severed them, I had no wish to do so . . . . Suffice it to say that, although I am nearly fifty [he was then only forty-five], I am no longer bothered by the heat of the day, nor am I exhausted by the rough roads or frightened by the dark hours of the night . . . . I have left behind all my troubles, and nothing in the world would induce me to seek again my freedom. I have banished, then, any thought of matters great and grave, and no longer take delight in reading of the ancients or of more recent doings. All has been transformed into sweet dreams.

  It is hard to believe that even a few years earlier Machiavelli would have allowed himself to be so thoroughly unhinged by a woman’s charms. Love, in this case, was an obsession that took hold in a man who had little else to occupy his mind and engage his heart.

  • • •

  Vettori, who was used to his friend’s many moods, suspected that talk of abandoning his life’s work for the “tender thoughts” of love was a sign of despondency, and he tried to lift Machiavelli’s flagging spirits by engaging him in “the old game” of geopolitical chess. With the King of France vying with his old enemies the Spaniards for possession of Milan, what policy should the Pope adopt? “With your prudence and intelligence and experience, you will be better able to understand what I have tried to say,” the ambassador wrote, playing on his friend’s vanity. And Machiavelli, showing that love had not entirely addled him, rose to the bait, delivering in reply a lengthy and carefully reasoned dissertation on the current balance of power.iii

  Machiavelli was amused when he saw how easily Vettori steered him from one obsession to another, but he also thought he detected in his fleeting passions a larger truth about human nature:

  Anyone who read our letters, my honored friend, and saw their variety, would be greatly astounded, because it would appear at first that we were serious men, deeply engaged in serious matters, and that in our breasts resided nothing that did not bespeak sincerity and grandeur. But then, turning the page, he would discover that these same men are frivolous, inconstant, lascivious, and absorbed in trivial things. And if this manner seems to some undignified, to me it seems laudable: because we are imitating nature, which itself is changeable, and whoever imitates nature cannot be blamed. And though we have grown accustomed to dealing with such varied matters over the course of several letters, this time I wanted to do it in just a single one, as you will see if you read the next page.

  This lighthearted letter reveals the cast of Machiavelli’s thought as clearly as any of his more substantial works. “[
W]e are imitating nature, which itself is changeable, and whoever imitates nature cannot be blamed,” he tells Vettori, as succinct an exposition of his philosophy as one will find in all his writings.

  Although Machiavelli enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh, he could never be satisfied without the stimulation of the mind. He called Love “that little thief,” and even in the heat of erotic passion he strained against invisible bonds. “I fear for my liberty,” he wrote Vettori about his latest lady love, “nor can I conceive of any way to unchain myself.” But even as he wrote these words he was seeking a key that would unlock Venus’s enervating trap. He craved mental exercise, something apparently more difficult to come by in Florence than carnal knowledge, and he prowled the streets in search of intellectual equals, men with whom he could share the ideas that were churning in his fertile brain.

  By the winter of 1515, Machiavelli had reached rock bottom. It was a period when, as he confided to his nephew, “fortune has left me nothing but my family and my friends.” A few months earlier he had hoped that, through the strenuous efforts of Francesco Vettori’s brother Paolo, he might finally find a position with Giuliano de’ Medici. But this wish was shot down by the papal secretary, Piero Ardinghelli, who urged Guiliano to “write to [Paolo] on my behalf that I advise him not to have anything to do with Niccolò.”

  Machiavelli took this latest setback philosophically, telling himself that since Fortune’s wheel never ceased its motion he had only to wait until it turned again. And, in fact, with the coming of spring a few green shoots began to appear in an otherwise bleak landscape. It was during that expectant season that he began attending informal gatherings at the garden belonging to the Rucellai family. Here, some of Florence’s most brilliant and learned men came to dine at their host’s well-appointed table and discuss erudite matters,iv and here among the cypresses and laurel Machiavelli rediscovered the camaraderie he missed from his days in the Chancery.