In the case of The Prince, Machiavelli had been dissuaded by his friend’s less than enthusiastic reception, but this time he ignored Vettori’s warning and set out for Rome with the manuscript in his saddlebag. He arrived in the Holy City late in May. Despite Vettori’s gloomy prediction, Clement received him warmly and gratefully accepted the work from his hands.ii
But, as Vettori correctly noted, the times were not conducive to the leisurely perusal of scholarly tomes. As Machiavelli and the Pope talked in the opulently furnished chambers in the Vatican, the conversation soon turned to the troubles facing the Italian people and the papacy in particular. Though Clement would not admit it, his difficulties were largely due to his own misjudgments. Like his cousin before him, the new Pope proved incapable of sticking to a single farsighted policy, shifting allegiances as easily as other men change their clothes. He had been lifted to the throne on the Emperor’s strong arm, but once in power he began to look for ways to wriggle free from Charles’s suffocating embrace. Shortly after he took office he secretly allied himself with the French, a policy that looked as if it might pay dividends when in October 1524 Francis arrived in Italy at the head of an apparently invincible army of forty thousand. But, as had happened so often in the past, French dreams were soon dashed on the plains of Lombardy. On February 23, 1525, Francis was routed by imperial forces near the northern Italian city of Pavia, leaving ten thousand of his best soldiers dead and maimed on the field of battle. Worse still for the French cause—and for the Pope who had staked his future on their success—Francis himself was captured and dragged off in chains to a Spanish prison.
With the French army decimated and their King held captive, all Italy lay open to the victorious imperial army. Florence quickly came to terms with the new master of Italy, paying 100,000 ducats for the privilege of not being invaded. But for Pope Clement the consequences were nothing short of calamitous. Even the usually resourceful Guicciardini was at his wits’ end: “I well understand that just now every good brain is puzzled,” he wrote, “but he who sees that by standing still he will be overwhelmed by destruction, ought to prefer the worst dangers to certain death.”
Small wonder, then, that the Pope was preoccupied. But while Clement was despondent, the crisis seemed to have rekindled some of Machiavelli’s old fire. Once again he found himself—almost by accident—at the very heart of the action. Believing that Clement’s despair provided an opportunity to translate his ideas into concrete action, he filled the Pope’s ears with plans, schemes, and theories that he had long ago set down on paper. It was clear, Machiavelli explained, that so long as the Pope had no reliable army of his own he would remain—to borrow a phrase he had used in another context—“an unarmed prophet,” a slave to those who could impose their will through powder, shot, and cold steel. The only solution was the creation of a national citizen militia, which to Machiavelli remained the cure for every ill. Humbly reminding the Pope how nobly his small force had acquitted itself before the walls of Pisa (while ignoring their abject failure at Prato), Machiavelli tried to convince Clement that he could mold the villagers and peasants of the Papal States into a fighting force capable of standing up to the Emperor and his Swiss pike men.
As Clement listened he caught some of his guest’s enthusiasm. Perhaps it was the delirium of despair, but standing still, as Guicciardini had observed, was not an option. With a sense of renewed purpose the Pope sent Machiavelli off to the Romagna with instructions to make an inventory of available resources. “[T]he matter is of great importance,” read the papal brief Machiavelli carried in his saddlebag, “and on it depends the safety of the Papal States as well as that of the whole of Italy, and practically the whole of Christendom.”
Machiavelli set out in high spirits, pleased to be on the road again in the fine summer weather and excited to be taking part in a mission of such vital importance to the future of Italy. He had every reason to be optimistic. Not only did the Pope appear to be fully behind the project, but the recently appointed President of the Romagna, whose cooperation was crucial to the success of the venture, was none other than his old friend Francesco Guicciardini. Unfortunately for Machiavelli, when he arrived in Faenza, capital of the Romagna, he found the phlegmatic Guicciardini less than enthusiastic. In the past Guicciardini had often chided his friend on his too vivid imagination, and this latest proposal struck him as one of those pie-in-the-sky schemes Machiavelli occasionally pursued without regard to practical details. While he did not oppose Machiavelli’s goals, he thought current conditions inauspicious for such a bold undertaking. “[I]f it could be brought to the desired fruition,” Guicciardini wrote to the papal secretary, “there is no doubt that it would be one of the most useful and praiseworthy things which his Holiness could do.” But, he concluded, “if he intends it as a remedy for present dangers, it is a provision which cannot come in time.”
In fact Clement had already begun to waver. While Machiavelli enjoyed Guicciardini’s hospitality in Faenza, the Pope blew alternately hot and cold. “When I asked him again if His Beatitude had made up his mind,” wrote the Pope’s adviser, “he replied that he wants to think about it some more.”
By the end of the month Machiavelli’s initial enthusiasm was gone, undone by the Pope’s vacillation. He packed up his bags and headed home for Florence, convinced that the Pope would never make up his mind. It had been a frustrating mission, and Machiavelli returned to his farm disgusted once more with affairs of state that seemed to bring him nothing but aggravation. His brief return to public life merely confirmed his conclusion made years earlier that those who toil on the people’s behalf “sow in sand and in water.”
The one person Machiavelli apparently did not blame for the failure of his scheme was Guicciardini. His recent sojourn at the presidential palace in Faenza had strengthened a bond that was growing closer with each passing year. It was a relationship built on mutual admiration; however much the two disagreed on specific policies, neither doubted the other’s sincerity and genuine passion for the well-being of Italy. It didn’t hurt that the wealthy Guicciardini treated his guest royally. Crossing swords with his aristocratic friend was always made more enjoyable by the good food and wine that accompanied their lively debates.
Their friendship was marked by a warmth that went beyond intellectual respect and high-minded ideals. The reserved, aristocratic president of the Romagna and the irrepressible former Second Chancellor, like many who come from varied backgrounds and possessed contrasting temperaments, discovered in their differences a source of both wonder and amusement. When Machiavelli insisted on addressing Guicciardini by his honorific, Guicciardini shot back: “I must warn you that if you address letters to me with ‘Illustrious,’ I shall address yours ‘Magnificent,’ and thus, with these reciprocal titles we shall each of us please the other. But soon enough it will turn to mourning when we find ourselves, I say all of us, with our hands full of flies at the end. So decide how much weight you wish to give to titles, measuring mine against those you would delight in having given to you.”
Not all their correspondence is marked by similar compliments. In fact they felt sure enough of their mutual affection to goad each other mercilessly. Shortly after Machiavelli returned to Florence, Guicciardini asked his friend to survey a piece of property he had purchased. “[F]or about three miles about, you can see nothing pleasing,” Machiavelli began his report. “The house cannot be called bad, but neither would I call it good.” It was an assessment made by a poor man who believed that wealth made for careless judgments. But if Guicciardini had no eye for real estate, Machiavelli, according to Guicciardini, had his own blind spot. Pretending to be hurt by his harsh verdict, Guicciardini sent a sharply worded retort. Adopting the persona of the offended estate herself, Milady Property of Finocchieto, he wrote:
You are accustomed to your Barbera who, like all of her kind, seeks to please all and to seem rather than to be. However in this case your eyes, accustomed as they are to meretricious comp
any, are not satisfied with what is but rather by what seems to be. As long as they detect some vague hint of beauty, they fail to delve beneath appearances. But you who have read and written so much history and seen so much of the world should be able to discern that another mode of adornment, another beauty, a different manner of making oneself up and of presenting oneself is sought in a woman who lives with everyone and loves no one.
Bringing up the less than chaste habits of his mistress might seem like hitting below the belt, but if Machiavelli felt the need to leap to the defense of his lady love that letter has not come down to us. Instead, when he next writes to Guicciardini it is to offer him a recipe to relieve his constipation, repaying him for all the delicacies he had consumed at his table with a concoction of bitter aloe, saffron, and Armenian bole.
Though Machiavelli returned to Florence having achieved little, his efforts did not go unrecognized. In September 1525 his name was finally added to the electoral rolls, making him a full-fledged citizen of the republic he had served for so long. Though his friends teased him that the honor had been won through the charms of his mistress Barbera, it is more likely that it came at the urging of the Pope, who perhaps felt bad that he had put Machiavelli through so much trouble for nothing. In any case the honor was largely empty since real power was jealously held by Cardinal Passerini da Cortona, sent by Clement to supervise the two Medici bastards, Ippolito and Alessandro, who governed much as their fathers had—with a combination of arrogance and incompetence that marked all the descendants of Il Magnifico.
Machiavelli seemed to regard being imborsato (having his name placed in the electoral bags) as little more than a consolation prize and was determined not to let politics rule his life. In October his oldest son, Bernardo, came down with “double tertian fever,” and as long as he was in danger Machiavelli could think of nothing else. Once his recovery was assured, Machiavelli’s attention turned to other matters, most notably a production of La Mandragola that Guicciardini was organizing in Faenza for the Carnival season of 1526. With the international situation going from bad to worse, one might have thought that the two greatest political minds of the day might have had better things to do than worry about the staging of a frivolous comedy, but as Guicciardini noted it was in times such as these that diversions were most welcome. “Honored Niccolò,” he wrote, “I shall begin to answer you with the comedy, because it does not seem among the less important things that we have on our hands, and at least it is something over which we have some control, so that it is not a waste of time to think about it, and now more than ever recreation is needed amidst all this tumult.” Machiavelli agreed with his friend about the benefits of distraction, but he also knew that laughter is often the most direct path to deeper truths. Trying to explain a particularly obscure passage in La Mandragola, Machiavelli told his friend that he should interpret its meaning as: “time is endlessly repeating but we are always the same”—a notion that also lay at the heart of his political philosophy.
As it turned out the performance in Faenza had to be postponed indefinitely.iii Laughter might be an antidote to the poison of political strife, but it could not keep reality at bay. Foreign armies, restless and ill-disciplined, roamed the land, feeding themselves by starving the native population, while powerful men hatched schemes for deploying their lethal power. Friends contemplated mutual betrayal, while sworn enemies slipped discreetly into bed together. Rumor and conjecture filled the information vacuum as civilians tried to make sense of a shifting tapestry that followed no discernible pattern. Before he could put the finishing touches on the performance, Guicciardini was swept up in the maelstrom, summoned to Rome on urgent business with the Pope. Machiavelli did not have much time to grumble about the change in plans; soon he, too, would be plucked out of his present idleness to play his own small part in the unfolding drama.
• • •
With Francis’s calamitous rout at the Battle of Pavia, Charles had become the master of the Italian peninsula. But in the tangled web of European politics no victory was final and no defeat irretrievable. Success, in fact, brought to the victor its own set of problems. The Emperor’s triumphant troops were a motley assortment drawn from the four corners of his empire, underpaid and underfed; to maintain them in the field indefinitely and preserve their discipline was almost impossible. And even though Charles ruled more territory than any monarch since the Roman Empire was divided between east and west, along with the immense expanse of his realm came an equally long list of troubles, from the fragile colonies of the New World to the religious quarrels of the Old. Charles, in short, was vastly overextended.
What saved the Emperor, at least for the moment, was the fact that his many foes lacked the will or foresight to take advantage of his weakness. Ever since Ludovico Sforza had played his dangerous game with the French King in 1494, the statesmen of Italy had attempted to secure their realms through subterfuge rather than strength of arms, until all virtue was lost and the country reduced to abject servitude. Elaborate plots replaced sound military strategy, the art of conspiracy substituted for martial valor. Pope Clement was only the most nimble practitioner of this sly art, making solemn commitments one day only to break them the next, infuriating everyone with his pusillanimous and devious conduct.iv Machiavelli, for one, was thoroughly fed up, telling Guicciardini, “I have to conclude that this gang here will never ever accomplish anything honorable or heroic to justify either living or dying.”
One could argue that this is exactly the world he himself had promoted in The Prince: “Since a prince is required to play the beast, he must learn from both the fox and the lion, because a lion cannot defend himself against snares, nor the fox against wolves.” But what separated the current Pope from the idealized prince he had conceived was that there was too much of the fox and none of the lion in him. There was nothing Machiavelli despised more than weakness, and all the intricate plots and counterplots spun by the Pope and his allies were little more than the desperate ploys of men lacking courage or conviction. With his eyes set firmly on the ultimate objective—the liberation of Italy from the barbarians—Machiavelli was willing to forgive a great deal if it helped achieve his goal. He was, however, unsparing toward those who sacrificed the ultimate objective for short-term advantage or who were simply too inept to get from point A to point B without tumbling into a ditch. Had the Pope’s erratic course brought freedom to Italy, Machiavelli, like most of his countrymen, would have ignored his faults. As it was, those faults contributed to the looming disaster.
It was a disaster that both Machiavelli and Guicciardini foretold but could not forestall. “I vent my feelings against these princes, who have done everything possible to bring us to this pass,” Machiavelli wrote in despair. Guicciardini was hardly more sanguine. “As to public affairs, I do not know what to say because I have lost my bearings . . . . If I am not deceiving myself, we will all be better acquainted with the evils of peace when the opportunity for making war has passed. One never sees anyone who, when bad times approach, did not seek in some way to try and cover himself, except for us, who want to meet them unprotected in the middle of the road.”
During these troubled days the two men remained in constant touch, hoping to discover some way out of the morass. In January 1526, to the surprise of many (including Machiavelli), Charles agreed to release the French King in return for territorial concessions and a formal revocation of any claims he had in Italy. Compliance was to be assured by sending two of the French King’s sons to Spain and arranging a marriage between Francis and Charles’s sister, Leonora. Machiavelli thought the plan was madness on the Emperor’s part. “It would be, as I have said, a foolish move for the emperor to release the king,” Machiavelli wrote to Guicciardini, though, he added, “it would be smart for the king to promise anything to obtain his freedom.” Machiavelli, who had literally written the book on how to behave in such situations, proved prophetic once again. As soon as he safely crossed the Pyrenees, Francis backed out
of the agreement, a breach of promise for which the Pope—no stickler in such matters—quickly absolved him on the grounds that it was made under duress.
“[T]here will be war in Italy, and soon,” Machiavelli glumly concluded. Since a victory by Charles would reduce them all to servitude, the only option for Italians was to arm themselves and side with France, a course of action with which Guicciardini heartily agreed. In fact the President of the Romagna was already beginning to put such a plan into motion, urging the Pope to make a stand, like Julius before him, for Italian liberty. “Those dreading war should be shown the perils of peace. Over-prudence is now imprudence, and it is no longer possible to undertake measured enterprises. It is indispensable to resort to arms to avoid a peace that makes us slaves.” Prodded by Guicciardini and other Italian patriots, the Pope finally signed an anti-imperial pact. The League of Cognac, as this new alliance was called, included France, Venice, Florence, Milan, and the papacy, a coalition that, at least on paper, should have been more than sufficient to stand up to Charles.v
Having made the decision to confront the Emperor, one of the first orders of business was to shore up the crumbling defenses of the Pope’s native Florence, which stood directly in the path of any army descending on Rome. Clement, who had received one of the first copies of Machiavelli’s Art of War, immediately sent for the former Second Chancellor to discuss the state of the city’s fortifications. After making a brief inspection, Machiavelli headed to Rome in late April 1526, where he delivered a report titled “Provision for the creation of the office of the five superintendents for the walls of the city of Florence.” He remained in the Holy City only a few days, but when he returned to Florence, he carried with him a document from Clement naming him secretary of the new commission in charge of the reconstruction project. “Machiavelli has left with the orders for the supplies and officers to be carried out,” Guicciardini wrote to his brother Luigi in Florence: “people are to start the fortifications in the way that you will learn from him . . . . Machiavelli was the man who fostered this plan, hence please be obliged to treat him well during his stay and in the other matters that may be required because he has earned his share full well.”
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