Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  For the first time since he had been thrown out of office fourteen years earlier, Machiavelli held an official position with the Florentine government. And though his new title, Secretary to the Overseers of the Walls (with son Bernardo appointed his assistant), was a far cry from the distinguished Second Chancellor and Secretary to the Ten, securing the defenses of the city he loved was a task worthy of his efforts. Machiavelli took to the work with his usual zeal, walking the miles of the city’s fortifications, supervising the digging of trenches, and overseeing the repair of crumbling towers. “[M]y head is so full of ramparts that nothing else can enter it,” Machiavelli told Guicciardini, overjoyed to find himself useful once more.

  In the meantime Guicciardini, now invested with the exalted title of Luogotenente (Lieutenant-General) of the papal army, hurried north to take charge of the forces of the league. Finding them in disarray, in early July Guicciardini asked Machiavelli to come join him in Piacenza to help instill some discipline in the ragtag army. Reluctantly, Machiavelli set aside the important work on the city’s fortifications and hurried to his friend’s side, but even he could make little headway. “He came to reorganize the militia,” Guicciardini told Roberto Acciaiuoli, Florentine ambassador to France, “but seeing how rotten it is, he has no hope of having any respect from it. Since he is unable to remedy the faults of mankind, he will do nothing but laugh at them.”

  Here Guicciardini captures in a few deft strokes a perfect likeness of his friend: a man of contradictions, of light and shadow, laughter and tears, prone to outbursts of enthusiasm that were inevitably followed by bitter disappointment. When duty called he did not excuse himself on the grounds that, at fifty-seven, the rigors of travel or camp life were too onerous, or that in the past his service had been flung back in his face. He remained hopeful that this time would be different, and when he saw his best efforts come to nothing, he turned away with a rueful grin and a derisive shrug as if to say that he expected nothing more. Roberto Acciaiuoli, for his part, appreciated the effort though he despaired of the outcome: “I am glad that Machiavelli gave the orders to discipline the infantry,” he replied to Guicciardini. “Would to God he might put into action what he has in mind, but I doubt whether it is like Plato’s Republic.” In other words, Machiavelli was too much the dreamer to stand much chance of success. How ironic that he who famously declared he preferred to “stick to the practical truth of things,” should turn out to have been an idealist all along!

  But it seemed to be his fate in these dark days to be caricatured as a man of ideas with little sense of the way the world really worked. Even a philosopher with both feet planted firmly on the ground was, after all, still only a philosopher, ill equipped to handle practical chores best left to professionals. While in Piacenza he spent some time in the camp of the famous mercenary Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Giovanni of the Black Bands), whose small army was the one truly capable fighting force in the anti-imperial league. According to the writer Matteo Bandello, who claims to have been there, the battle-tested general thought it might be amusing to teach the author of The Art of War a lesson. Opening Machiavelli’s book to the chapter on infantry drills, Giovanni asked him to attempt to put into practice what he’d written by marching his three thousand men about the parade ground. Machiavelli gamely took up the challenge but, not surprisingly, proved hopelessly out of his depth. The troops were soon milling about in confusion and could only be disentangled by the prompt intervention of their captain. “How great the difference is,” Bandello sneered, “between someone who knows and who has not set in operation what he knows and someone who, as well as knowing, has often rolled up his sleeves and . . . has derived his thoughts and mental view from outward deeds.”

  Poor Machiavelli! The incident was embarrassing, but the test was hardly fair. More than any writer before him, he brought philosophy down off its pedestal to where it could make a real difference in the lives of real people. If his theories did not always stand up to their initial contact with hard fact, he was enough of an empiricist to revise them in light of new data. And for a man with no formal military training he had done surprisingly well by his country, leading Florence to victory against her ancient rival Pisa and helping in the current crisis to defend her against her enemies.vi

  For the remainder of 1526 the forces of the League of Cognac sparred with those of the Emperor. The league scored a victory with the capture of Cremona, but this was followed by notable reverses, including a revolt in Rome led by the Colonna family that forced the Pope to flee to the fortress of Castel Sant’ Angelo. In the wake of this disaster, Clement was obliged to sign yet another humiliating truce with Charles—one he broke almost immediately by ordering the mercenary captain Paolo Vitelli to launch an attack on Spanish-held Naples.

  The league suffered an even more grievous blow late in November when Giovanni delle Bande Nere was killed after being struck in the leg by a cannon ball. He had been Italy’s ablest commander, a man who Machiavelli believed was capable of leading the papal armies to victory and fulfilling, at least in part, the dream laid out in the final chapter of The Prince. Without their finest general, the cause of the Pope, and of Italy itself, seemed more desperate than ever.

  Still the conflict dragged on in fits and starts, a kind of endless Purgatory with ultimate victory and final defeat equally inconceivable. Machiavelli was not spared in all this pointless to-ing and fro-ing, traveling to Milan, Cremona, and then in November to Modena, crossing the Apennine passes on horseback in the sleet and bitter cold. This ceaseless motion was beginning to take its toll. He delayed his departure from Modena for a few days to recuperate from the rigors of the trip; when he finally set out for Florence, he was determined to travel by “daily stages” to spare his aching body.

  In fact Machiavelli was more fully engaged in government work than he had been for years, but the rewards were ever more meager in terms of both money and prestige. His duties were all the more onerous since they seemed to so little purpose. Despite Guicciardini’s capable management, the forces of the league, under the direct command of the dilatory Duke of Urbino, avoided bold action, principally because the Pope himself could not decide between peace and war. In the end he managed to choose the worst possible course, provoking the Emperor’s wrath while doing nothing to protect himself from the consequences. Fortunately, as Machiavelli pointed out, his enemies were hardly any better: “[T]he Spaniards could have beaten us several times, and they have not contrived to do so; we could have been victorious, and we have not known how; the Pope believed in a stroke of the pen more than in a thousand soldiers who could have kept him safe.”

  The “stroke of the pen” Machiavelli referred to was a truce signed between the Pope and the Emperor, the latest in an apparently endless series of treaties each rendered obsolete before the ink had dried. Given this record, no one, except perhaps the Pope himself, was surprised when the agreement failed to halt the advance of the imperial army. Part of the problem was that Clement had signed the pact with representatives of the distant Emperor, while command on the ground was in the hands of Charles, Duke of Bourbon. Whatever deals his master cut with the slippery Pope, Bourbon was more concerned with placating his twenty thousand ill-disciplined and rebellious troops, who were clamoring for blood and plunder. The treaty, Machiavelli noted, was “made in Rome, but not observed in Lombardy.” Worse still, in a desperate attempt to show his good faith, Clement had disbanded the forces needed for the defense of the Holy City, “living in Rome,” as Machiavelli scornfully put it, “in such a way as to let himself be captured like a child.”

  Not surprisingly, the Emperor’s halfhearted attempts to rein in his rebellious commander were ignored. As Bourbon’s army marched southward, the Pope could not even count on the usual last best defense of the papacy—the conscience of troops who might hesitate before lifting a hand against the Holy Father. Though the Emperor was a devout Catholic, many of those who actually did the fighting were Germans—the famed Landsknechts
led by Georg von Frundsberg—followers of Luther who regarded the Pontiff as the devil incarnate, and most of the rest simply thugs who would help themselves to the maidens and treasures of Rome as compensation for years of hardship. Even Machiavelli succumbed to despair. “[O]bserving the behavior of France and the Venetians, the poor order of our men, seeing how hopeless it is for the pope to sustain the war against the kingdom [of Naples] and the power and stubbornness of our enemies, we judge the war as good as lost.”

  As the rogue army snaked south for a final reckoning with Clement, Florentines girded for a possible thrust in their direction. In February, the Eight again dispatched Machiavelli to Guicciardini, who was now in Parma, to urge the Luogotenente not to abandon his native city in her hour of need. For a man in his late fifties, the prospect of yet another journey on horseback in the dead of winter was daunting, but Machiavelli accepted the mission without complaint. He remained with the papal army as it moved south, from Bologna—knee deep in snow, as he reported—to Forli. It was a dispiriting march. The forces of the league could only tag along behind the imperial battalions, keeping a wary eye on them but doing nothing to halt their progress. Morale suffered and the troops under Guicciardini’s command began to melt away. “We began . . . to divide the army at Parma,” Machiavelli wrote to the Eight, “and we have been reducing it bit by bit right up to Forli.”

  By early April the imperial army was only a few days’ march from Florence. The situation was sufficiently ominous that Machiavelli instructed Marietta and the children to leave Sant’ Andrea and take refuge inside the city walls. On April 17 Guido wrote to his father: “As for the lansquenets, we don’t worry about them any more because you have said you would try to be with us if anything happened. And so mona Marietta is no longer fretting. We pray that you write to us if the enemy should think of coming and damaging our property, because we still have many things in the country.”

  Surveying the situation from Forli, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, along with what remained of the league’s forces, were faced with a painful decision: whether to move south to insert themselves between the imperial army and Rome, or to the west, where they could parry a thrust in the direction of Florence. “I do not believe there were ever more troubling matters than these,” Machiavelli wrote to Vettori, “where peace is necessary and war cannot be abandoned; and where we have a prince [Clement] on our hands who decides neither for peace nor for war.”

  Guicciardini was equally disenchanted with his master. On April 16 he made his decision: “I have taken on my own initiative, as I have no assistance from Rome, to send towards Florence all the forces at my disposal.” Machiavelli was relieved. “I love Messer Francesco Guicciardini,” he gushed that same day, adding, as explanation for this sudden outburst, “I love my city more than my own soul.”

  Returning to Florence a few days later Machiavelli found the city in an uproar. The Pope’s irresolution and the misgovernment of his relatives had turned even former allies against the Medici regime. Even the arrival of Guicciardini’s troops outside the walls failed to improve matters. Though they were there to defend the city, they behaved more as occupiers and laid waste to the countryside for miles about. Matters came to a head on Friday, April 26, when mobs of young citizens stormed the Palazzo della Signoria and tried to topple the government. Only the intervention of Guicciardini prevented a violent confrontation as he persuaded the young hotheads to turn in their weapons in exchange for a full pardon.

  Fortunately for Florence, the Duke of Bourbon turned away at the last minute, the mere appearance of Guicciardini’s small army having been sufficient to discourage an assault. Instead, Bourbon and his men, hungry and ill equipped but spurred on by the promise of plunder, made for the undefended gates of Rome. The Duke of Urbino set out after them, but was, as usual, unwilling to risk open battle. Guicciardini, with Machiavelli riding by his side, followed, on hand to witness, but unable to do anything to avert, the disaster they had been warning of for so long.

  The ragged imperial army arrived before the walls of Rome on the evening of May 4, 1527. After months, even years, in the field, the soldiers were cruel, desperate men, coarsened by the horrors of war and seething with resentment against civilians who had spent their days in idle comfort while they were exposed to the dangers of the battlefield and the miseries of camp life. Even those Spanish troops who remained within the Catholic faith now viewed Rome and its masters with contempt.

  The mood of the besieging army grew more ominous when on the night of May 5 their leader, the Duke of Bourbon, was killed by a harquebus discharged from one of the towers. According to Benvenuto Cellini, the great sculptor and goldsmith, it was he who fired the fatal shot, aiming at one “whom I remarked to be higher than the rest.” It was an implausible, though not impossible, claim and, in any case, whoever was responsible for the Duke’s death hardly did the populace of Rome any favors since without their leader the last restraint was lifted from his troops. On May 6, 1527, German and Spanish soldiers poured through the sparsely manned walls and began their bloody rampage. In three days and nights, Christian soldiers managed to inflict more damage on the holy city than the Visigoths had more than a millennium earlier, burning and pillaging, sparing neither holy place nor holy person, scattering relics and putting to the torch countless shrines, bursting into convents and raping the nuns, murdering defenseless women and children, savaging clerics and civilians alike in an unmatched orgy of destruction.

  Machiavelli was with Guicciardini in Orvieto, some fifty miles to the north, when he heard “the dreadful news from Rome.” He mourned, like all Italians, the destruction of the great capital, but he was hardly surprised. He had seen the horrors of war close up, and it was largely because of these experiences that he placed such a premium on strong leaders and stable states that protected their people from random violence. “Wherever you turn your eyes,” he had written after witnessing another battlefield, “you see the earth wet with tears and blood, and the air full of screams, of sobs, and sighs”—a scene now playing out on an even larger scale in Rome.

  News of the horrific sack sent shock waves through the capitals of Europe, but nowhere were the reverberations felt more powerfully than in Florence, where the Pope’s humiliation shook the already fragile edifice of Medici power. With Clement now a prisoner of the imperial army, the citizens of Florence no longer saw any reason to defer to his representatives. On May 16 Cardinal Passerini was forced to step down; a few days later, he and the two young Medici heirs, Ippolito and Alessandro, were expelled and a new republic proclaimed, completing a thorough but bloodless change of regime.

  Machiavelli was an emissary to an army that was now leaderless from a government that no longer existed. As he packed up his bags and prepared to return to his native city, he was torn by conflicting emotions. He rejoiced that the government would now be restored to its ancient republican form, but he was painfully aware that, once again, he had placed himself on the wrong side of history. For someone as politically astute as Machiavelli, it is remarkable how often he seemed to back the losing side, particularly since he was rarely moved by those ideological passions that are so often the undoing of political men. The explanation for this apparent obtuseness is simple. Machiavelli’s misfortune was to be a devoted servant of the state in an age when the state was dysfunctional. The same sense of crisis that motivated his greatest writing undermined his political career. In dedicating himself to the country he loved, he was pledging his loyalty to a faithless mistress, as fickle as Fortuna, whose whim ruled the fate of all mortals.

  One of his companions on his homeward journey recalled that “he heard him sigh many times when he heard that the city was free. I think he was regretting his conduct, because in fact he greatly loved liberty; but he regretted having involved himself with Pope Clement.” Were those feelings of regret made more bitter by a sense of guilt? Five years earlier his friends who were willing to risk all in the cause of liberty had been banished or killed while
Machiavelli survived and even prospered. Now the roles were reversed; the idealists had won the day, and those too timid to take a principled stand found themselves scorned by the victors.

  Whatever his private regrets, Machiavelli believed he had acted in good faith. His unclouded conscience is suggested by the fact that as soon as he arrived in Florence he began to lobby for his old job back. While some regarded this as unmitigated gall on the part of someone who had only a few days earlier been serving the discredited Medici, he maintained that he had been working not on behalf of the regime but on behalf of all Florentines. The walls he had helped repair, the army he had persuaded to place itself between the city and their enemies, had saved Mediceans and republicans alike, and he saw no reason to apologize.

  In fact he had some support among the new leaders of the city. Both Lodovico Alamanni and Zanobi Buondelmonti, who had returned following the expulsion of the Medici, spoke in favor of their old friend. They evidently held no grudges for what had happened five years earlier and tried to get the Signoria to reappoint Machiavelli to the vacant office of Second Chancellor. Unfortunately, Alamanni and Buondelmonti were in a distinct minority. Not only had his recent employment by Pope Clement sullied his reputation in the eyes of most Florentines, but by now his writings, though mostly unpublished and circulating only in manuscript form, had made Machiavelli notorious. One contemporary observed: “[The common people] hated him because of The Prince: the rich thought his Prince was a document written to teach the duke how to take away all their property, from the poor all their liberty; the piagnoni regarded him as a heretic; the good thought him sinful; the wicked thought him more wicked or more capable than themselves—so they all hated him.”