“To you is given a body more graceful than other animals,” Leon Battista Alberti enthused, “to you most sharp and delicate senses, to you wit, reason, memory like an immortal god.” Excellence was humanity’s birthright, and thanks to liberty, Alberti concluded, “a man can do all things if he will.”19
There was only one problem. The liberty did not last.
Leonardo Bruni died in Florence in 1444. His body was interred with great ceremony in the Church of Santa Croce. The motto inscribed over his tomb was, “History is in mourning.”
Well it might have been. By that date, a short, rather soft-spoken former wool merchant turned banker named Cosimo de’ Medici had been secretly controlling the city for almost a decade. Bruni and other humanists had watched with dismay as he took control of the Florentine constitution. In less than a generation, Florence had its own “soft power” version of Visconti’s tyranny.
There was no coup d’état. Cosimo and the Medici family never drew a sword against anyone. They never tortured or murdered enemies,§ as previous tyrants had done and were doing in other parts of Europe. Far from enriching themselves, they spent lavishly to give Florence a new civic splendor and became great patrons of the arts.
Still, beginning in 1434 and until the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492, the Medici family and their banking interests became indispensable to the running of Florence. Only their friends and cronies ever rose to high political office. Anyone critical of their methods and their political machine found himself frozen out of politics, at times even sent into exile. Florence flourished under the Medici and enjoyed unprecedented peace with their neighbors. The city was still the center of the arts, and humanist scholarship flourished as never before. But in their hearts, the citizens of Florence knew they were no longer free.
How had this happened? The Medici were certainly rich. There had been rich Florentines before but none had enjoyed the kind of power Medici did. The real question was, why were Florentines willing to take their money in the first place? A generation of agonized humanists asked, why had Florence let its freedom slip away?
Not everyone collaborated with the Medici regime. In 1433, when the city council feared Cosimo’s power too much, they had him arrested and driven into exile—but in less than a year, they called him back. It was also true that Leonardo Bruni had secretly joined with others to try to overthrow Cosimo’s power—but the plot never came off. Then in April 1478, a group of young men, inspired by the example of Brutus and the other ancient Romans who slew Caesar to restore liberty, tried to do the same to Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence’s cathedral. They managed to stab his brother to death, and Lorenzo himself narrowly escaped. However, instead of joining in, the Florentine citizenry lynched the assassins and publicly congratulated Il Magnifico on his escape.20
It was a stinging reproach to everything the generation of 1402 had stood for. It also raised a more general point. If Aristotle had been right and it was man’s destiny to be free, if our nature as human beings makes us fit to govern our lives as we see fit, then why is it that everywhere we look human beings are unfree and submit to various forms of tyranny and slavery, including now in Florence? Why did freedom fail, not only in Florence but throughout history—even ancient Greece and Rome?
The man who developed the authoritative answer to this question would become the Italian Renaissance’s most famous, even most notorious, thinker—in part because his answer was so startling and so disturbing.
The journey to his answer began on a cold and gray dawn in May 23, 1498. A long raised scaffold had been built leading from the doors of Florence’s city hall, the Palazzo della Signoria, to a great mound of bundled sticks and lumber in the center of the square. A great throng of people had gathered, and all eyes turned as three barefoot figures in the white robes of penitents stumbled along the elevated walkway toward the mound and the stark wooden stake looming over it in the shape of a cross.
The three men could barely walk. Armed guards had to half carry them to their doom. They had been tortured for hours and days on the rack; only the right arm of the lead figure, a lean, hook-nosed man with dark, flashing eyes, had been left unbroken so that he could sign his final confession, admitting to blasphemy and heresy and conspiring against the Florentine republic.21
His name was Girolamo Savonarola. Ironically, he had once been hailed as the republic’s savior. Lorenzo the Magnificent had died suddenly in 1492, the same year the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World. Savonarola had been a popular Dominican preacher, and from his pulpit he told the Florentines that they had regained their liberty through the grace of God, just as in 1402: but only if they now proved worthy of it.22
Citizens cheered as Savonarola rewrote the constitution to empower Florence’s lower middle class. He organized a systematic purification of the city, closing bars and brothels, and set up the famous “bonfire of the vanities,” where Florentines burned hundreds of carnival disguises, wigs, fancy ladies’ undergarments, playing cards and musical instruments, books of poetry and rare manuscripts, and portrait paintings, including several by Botticelli. In a sardonic twist of irony, the bonfire had been on the very spot where Savonarola would now mount the scaffold to be hanged and burned at the stake.23
Savonarola had tried to secure his power by allying Florence with France. But the pro-Spanish pope Alexander VI imposed economic sanctions on the city that hurt Florence’s wealthy merchants. The urban mob grew tired of Savonarola’s puritanical regime and turned against him. By the time the papal Inquisition’s sentence was pronounced, Florentines were eager to see the end of their once revered messiah.
The burning of Savonarola, from a painting by an unknown artist, circa 1500
So the crowd cheered as one by one Savonarola and his two former aides were hanged. Soon their corpses hung lifeless from their chains. Men moved below to set the stacked dry wood to the torch. As the flames consumed the dangling bodies, the ropes binding Savonarola’s arms burned away. The crowd gasped as the fire’s blast seemed to raise his hand in a gesture of final ironic benediction to the city.
“A miracle! A miracle!” some cried out. But then the flames reached higher and consumed everything. As the smell of roasting flesh grew more intense and the cloud of black smoke rose higher and higher, the crowd dispersed. The deed was done; Florence’s experiment with God-directed democracy was over.24
Only one man continued to watch from the shadows, a lean, ferret-faced man with tears in his eyes.
Niccolò Machiavelli watched and wondered. Savonarola had promised that God would save Florence’s freedom. In the end, the Dominican friar hadn’t been able to save himself. To the twenty-nine-year-old Machiavelli, it was a shattering revelation. It marked the turning point in his life—and a pivot point in the evolution of Western political thinking.
We have been trained to think of Machiavelli as the apologist for power politics. In fact, his passion for the ideal of liberty was so strong, it cost him his career and almost cost him his life. It had made him a follower of Savonarola; paradoxically, it also made him the author of his most notorious work, The Prince. Some would insist that the book was inspired by the devil.25 But Machiavelli was only a close student of Aristotle’s version of civic liberty, which led him in the wake of Savonarola’s fall to ask some uncomfortable questions.
What if God really didn’t care whether Florence survived as a republic or not? What if God didn’t really care whether men lived as free men or slaves? And what if human nature suits us as much for servitude as it does for liberty?
Machiavelli had never known a time when the Medici had not run the city. He was born in 1469, the year Lorenzo de’ Medici assumed power from his uncle Cosimo. Young Niccolò had been bred to read the classics and believe in the ideal of civic humanism, even though that ideal was contradicted everywhere he looked.26 Then came 1492 and Savonarola. The republic had been reborn; it even managed to survive the disgrace and death of its would-be mess
iah. Ironically, the fall of his former hero brought good fortune to Machiavelli. Friends in the new government offered him an important municipal post, which he accepted.
This is a vital point for understanding Machiavelli’s works. The writer was no armchair strategist. For fourteen years he loyally served the restored Florentine republic, traveling and negotiating with the leading political personalities of his day, including the pope, the kings of France and Spain, and the sinister Cesare Borgia.
In 1498, the reborn republic found itself again surrounded by the enemies of liberty, much as in 1402. What could save it? Machiavelli had seen divine grace fail with Savonarola. He had, however, one other hope. It came once again from the pages of Aristotle, in the Ethics, where the Greek philosopher observed that mercenary soldiers (like the ones who fought for Italy’s city-states) will fight only if they think they can win.
Otherwise, “they are the first to flee,” Aristotle declared, “while citizen troops die at their posts” because they know that when one is fighting for one’s homeland, “flight is disgraceful and death preferable to safety.” Courage in battle comes to the citizen not merely as a matter of professional skill, the Master of Those Who Know concluded. It was a matter of civic pride; one more positive fruit of liberty.
Thus was born the modern citizen soldier ideal, which would loom large down through the modern centuries, and in Florence. Aristotle’s argument had impressed Leonardo Bruni enough to inspire his treatise On the Militia, demanding reestablishment of Florence’s citizen militia, which had been abolished in 1351.27 Now Machiavelli agreed. The free active citizen had to be an armed citizen as well, like the Spartan hoplites who fought at Thermopylae and the Athenians at Marathon, or the Roman legionnaires of old. Machiavelli pushed his friend Piero Soderini, the head of the post-Savonarola republic, to organize a citizen militia for Florence. “You need to understand,” he wrote, “the best armies are those of armed peoples: and they cannot be resisted except by armies similar to themselves.”28
Soderini put Machiavelli in charge, and for nearly six years beginning in 1506, Niccolò Machiavelli (who had no military experience) oversaw the recruiting, arming, and training of bakers, weavers, shoemakers, and other Florentine citizens into a fighting force. They drilled and practiced Roman legion maneuvers, even as a large Spanish army advanced on the city to restore the Medici once and for all.
It was the summer of 1512. For Florence, it was the crisis of 1402 all over again—except that this time no miraculous illness cut down their enemy. This time the Florentines would have to fight. Still, Machiavelli had his doubts. “At the beginning we thought we would not put our soldiers in the field,” he wrote later, “because we did not think they were powerful enough to resist the enemy.” It was not until August that Machiavelli was forced to deploy his citizen militia at Prato, about ten miles from Florence.29
Machiavelli had raised nearly three thousand men for Soderini to command. None had ever faced an enemy in battle, including Machiavelli. The Spanish were paid professionals to a man, hardy veterans who had fought their way across Italy. The Florentines managed to beat off their first attack. Then, at the second assault, the Florentines dropped their swords and pikes and fled.30
Prato fell to the Spaniards, and then Florence. Soderini resigned and fled into exile. The Medici agreed to return as private citizens, but everyone knew that they would dominate the city more harshly than ever. By November, they had forced Machiavelli out and disbanded his ill-fated militia.
Florence’s tyrants were not yet finished with him. They imposed a thousand-florin fine and restricted his movements outside the city. Then when rumors circulated of a plot to overthrow the Medici, Machiavelli was one of the first to be arrested.
In prison his hands were tied behind his back, and he was then lifted to the ceiling by rope and pulley. At a command, he was dropped straight down until the rope stopped him with the jerk. The term for this torture was strappado. One drop was usually enough to loosen a prisoner’s tongue; four were enough to dislocate a person’s shoulders, perhaps permanently.
Machiavelli endured six drops of the strappado but still refused to name names. Instead, he was left to rot in prison. “The walls were full of lice so big and fat they seemed like butterflies,” Machiavelli would remember later; the stench was almost unbearable. Day and night, he could hear the sound of clanking chains and the cries of other prisoners being tortured.31 Then, after twenty-two days of wondering whether he would live or die, Machiavelli was set free.
He returned to his house and farm outside Florence, where every evening, as he told a friend in a letter, “at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dirt, and put on garments regal and courtly,” in order to read his favorite ancient authors, including Aristotle.32
His goal was to find out why freedom had failed.
History, people like to say, is written by the winners. The truth is, some of the most profound works on the past were written by those who considered themselves history’s losers. They are men and women trying to figure out what went wrong; what was the turning point when optimistic hopes were dashed and the forces of doom and destruction inevitably closed in.
This was true of ancient historians like Thucydides; Tacitus and Sallust (widely read in Medici Florence); and to a degree Polybius. It was certainly true of Machiavelli. We think of his books, particularly The Prince, as works of political theory. They are above all works of history. History was always for Machiavelli a rich storehouse of the past experience of others, far richer than anything anyone could accumulate in a single lifetime. And for the student of Aristotle, the touchstone of understanding reality must be experience.33
History teaches us what human beings are like in reality rather than what we would like them to be. And when we deal with the sum total of history’s record, high-minded ideals like those of Plato’s Philosopher Rulers have to be pushed off over the side. Reality teaches a very different set of lessons about politics—and Machiavelli’s ambition was to present them to posterity.
That at least was Machiavelli’s goal. What he did in reality was to plug Aristotle’s formula for understanding civic liberty into Polybius’s time machine, the inevitable cycle of historical rise and decline.‖ The result was the Discourses, a much longer work than The Prince but crucial for understanding that more celebrated book. For in writing the Discourses, Machiavelli discovered a basic paradox: When it comes to liberty, nothing fails like success.
The freer a society becomes, the more prosperous and more arrogant it becomes as well. Like ancient Rome or Renaissance Florence, it sows the seeds of its own servitude. Although self-government and liberty are the highest forms of political life, Machiavelli revealed that human nature also makes them the most unstable.34
Machiavelli’s fusion of Polybius and Aristotle yielded a future of gloom. The Romans had read Polybius to discover how a great empire would be doomed if it failed to keep Aristotle’s balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—the One, the Few, and the Many. Machiavelli’s reading was far more pessimistic. Not just Rome, but every free society is doomed from the start. Real republics exist in real time, not on some eternal plane like Plato’s literary version. “All human affairs are ever in a state of flux and cannot stand still,” the Discourses explains, meaning that every society will experience either constant improvement or decline.
When a republic organized around Aristotle’s principle of balance expands its power and place in the world, as it must, it becomes rich and powerful. But in the process, the balance is lost: a free society’s “basic principles will be subverted,” Machiavelli declared, and it will soon be faced with ruin.”35
To Machiavelli, the very things that give a free republic like ancient Rome or Athens or pre-Medici Florence verve and energy—prowess in war, a vigorous politics, the accumulation of riches from trade and empire—ultimately turn back on themselves. Prosperity and success turn men’s passions toward self-enrichment rath
er than service to the State. The battle of conflicting interests between rich and poor, which Machiavelli shrewdly points to as the real source of the Roman republic’s dynamism,36 degenerates into bitter factionalism.
Under these circumstances, the very things that are supposed to preserve liberty become a trap. Each group in the mix of One, Few, and Many is determined to gain power at the expense of the other. Politics becomes a cycle of vendetta and payback.37 Meanwhile, the habits of wealth and luxury undermine the important virtues necessary to sustain free institutions, including honor and service in arms—even the passion for freedom itself. Men become soft and effeminate, like the bakers and tinkers of Machiavelli’s failed militia.38 People prefer the comfortable life to the stern sacrifices of their forefathers.
New legislation on Plato’s model won’t help, either: “The modification of the laws did not suffice to keep men good.” On the contrary, Machiavelli declared, “the new laws are ineffectual, because the [society’s] institutions, which remain constant, are corrupt.”39
Once a free people have reached this point, Machiavelli concluded, there is no hope left. Their empire may expand, as Rome’s did under the emperors. The wealth can continue to pour in. The arts may flourish; the political factionalism makes for dramatic entertainment, while people ignore the underlying rot. But such a society is doomed, unless a major crisis forces a change in its thinking.
“Hence it is necessary to resort to extraordinary methods, such as the use of force and the appeal to arms, to become a prince in the state so that one can dispose of it as one thinks fit” and thus save it from extinction.40 This is where The Prince comes in. He is the instrument of last resort, the man who pulls a corrupt society out of its self-destructive rut and puts it back on the road to political health. However, he is no Platonic soul doctor; no high-minded Philosopher Ruler. As Machiavelli noted in the Discourses, such a man will not be greeted as a messiah.
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