Angry and dispirited, Machiavelli left Florence for his country house in Sant’ Andrea in Percussina, ten miles beyond the southern gates among the rolling hills clad with olive groves and vineyards.iii Here, framed by the bare branches of a gray Tuscan winter, he could still see the city to which he had devoted his life and that now seemed content without him. Few visitors stopped by his rustic retreat, and those who did make the journey had little encouraging news to report. The new regime was now in firm control and bent on purging anyone suspected of harboring popolani sentiments. Soon, however, the attacks on Machiavelli began to die down. He was no longer a topic of discussion in the halls of the Palazzo but, what was worse, forgotten. The architect of the victory over Pisa, the familiar of popes, kings, and even an emperor, was now a nobody.
But if Machiavelli’s name soon dropped from the lips of those who wielded power in the state, there were still some who remembered the former Second Chancellor of the Republic of Florence.
Early in February 1513, three months after his dismissal and more than five since the sack of Prato, one Bernardino Coccio, a citizen of Siena, entered the Palazzo della Signoria demanding an immediate audience with the Eight, the committee in charge of state security. Ushered into their presence, he handed them a slip of paper containing the names of twenty citizens of Florence, most of them associated with the former regime. The paper had fallen, Messer Coccio told them, from the pocket of a young man named Pietro Paolo Boscoli while the two were guests at the house of the Lenzi family, kinsmen of the Soderini. Since Boscoli had been a vocal opponent of the Medici, the list of names took on sinister contours in the minds of the authorities.
Constables of the Eight quickly arrested Boscoli and his friend Agostino di Luca Capponi. Under torture, they confessed to being involved in a plot to assassinate Giuliano de’ Medici and seize the government by force. Giuliano himself never believed the conspiracy amounted to much: “Boscoli and Capponi, young men of good families, but without followers, have been the ringleaders of the conspiracy. They meant to dispossess us; they had fixed the spot, and drawn up a list of persons with whom they thought to find favor.” Even though those named were never actively involved in the conspiracy—in fact it was clear the Boscoli and Capponi never even had a chance to contact them—nonetheless they were immediately suspect in the eyes of the still insecure regime.
Seventh on Boscoli’s list was Niccolò Machiavelli. The appearance of the former Second Chancellor’s name on the slip of paper is hardly surprising since few men were as closely identified with the old regime, but there was never any indication that he had the faintest notion of what was afoot or would have approved had he known. Machiavelli, as we have seen, was hardly a starry-eyed idealist likely to risk his neck in a desperate scheme. Had the conspirators been able to read his mind—or leap a few years into the future when they could have read his words—they would almost certainly have crossed him off the list. Unfortunately, Machiavelli had not yet written the Discourses, whose chapter “On Conspiracies” makes clear how little faith he placed in such adventures: “There is . . . no enterprise in which private persons can engage,” he writes, “more dangerous or more rash than is this, for it is both difficult and extremely dangerous in all its stages. Whence it comes about that, though many conspiracies have been attempted, very few have attained the desired end.” Later in the chapter he makes clear his disdain for such amateurs: “I maintain that one finds in history that all conspiracies have been made by men of standing or else by men in immediate attendance on a prince, for other people, unless they be sheer lunatics, cannot form a conspiracy; since men without power and those who are not in touch with a prince are devoid alike of any opportunity of carrying out a conspiracy successfully.” This describes the two unfortunate young men to a tee, and had they approached him with their half-baked plan Machiavelli would surely have dismissed them as the lunatics they were, even had he shared their ideology—a doubtful proposition since his natural inclination was to defer to legitimate authority. Machiavelli, in fact, was the least likely revolutionary, a loyal bureaucrat who preferred to reform the state from within rather than risk the chaos of violent revolution.
None of this could save Machiavelli. Given the uncertainty of the moment, the newly installed government was naturally sensitive to the least hint of sedition. As Machiavelli would shortly observe in The Prince: “One must recognize that there is nothing more difficult, nor less likely to succeed, or more perilous to undertake, than to introduce a new system of government, for he who seeks to create a new order makes enemies of all those who profited from the old.” As one of those who profited most from the old regime, he was always on the thinnest ice with the new one.
On February 18, armed guards showed up at Machiavelli’s door and arrested him. Led to the dismal prison known as Le Stinche, he was thrown into a dark, vermin-infested cell only a few blocks from where he had toiled for so many years on behalf of his beloved republic.
There he languished for twenty-two days in the cold and dark, the lonely hours interrupted only when the cell door clanged open and he was led stumbling into the torturer’s chamber. There he was forced to mount a platform, his hands bound tightly behind his back. The rope around his wrists was then knotted to a second cord attached to the wall. When he had been properly trussed, the platform was yanked from under his feet, causing his body to plummet while his arms, still bound behind his back, were wrenched upward, tearing muscle and tendon and dislocating the joint. This favorite Florentine punishment, the strappado, was the same used on many illustrious prisoners before him, from Savonarola, who quickly broke from the excruciating pain, to Paolo Vitelli, who proudly defied his tormentors.
Machiavelli had six appointments with the torturer, “that I bore,” he later told Vettori, “with such stoicism, that I am proud and esteem myself more highly than before.” Though he confessed nothing—indeed he had nothing to confess—Machiavelli knew that in the current climate mere suspicion of treason was sufficient to justify his execution. Writing to his nephew a few months after his ordeal he acknowledged, “it is something of a miracle that I am alive, because I was deprived of my office and was on the verge of losing my life, which only God and my innocence have saved for me.” Despite the constant terror and grim accommodations, he managed to describe the horrific scene in the jaunty little sonnet he composed for Giuliano de’ Medici: “One is chained up and another is unironed with a pounding of locks, keys, and bars; another shrieks he is too high above the ground!” Even more irritating than the screams of his fellow inmates, he jokes, is the incessant chanting of paternosters by the pious who stand outside the prison at dawn to give comfort to those about to die.
On the morning of February 23, the pious lifted their voices for Boscoli and Capponi, who were led into the courtyard of the Bargello and beheaded. Still, Machiavelli managed to retain his sense of humor, even if it was of the gallows variety:
Last night, beseeching the Muses that with
their sweet cither and sweet songs they would, to console me,
visit Your Magnificence and make my excuses,
one appeared who embarrassed me, saying: “Who are you, who
dare to call me?” I told her my name; and she, to torture me, hit
me in the face and closed my mouth for me,
saying: “You are not Niccolò but Dazzo,iv since you have your
legs and your heels bound and you sit here chained like a madman.”
I wished to give her my arguments; she replied to me and said:
“Go like a fool with that comedy of yours in rags.”
Give her proofs, Magnifico Giuliano, in the name of High God,
that I am not Dazzo but myself.
The imagery is typical of Machiavelli’s sardonic sense of humor. While many poets have called upon the Muses in their moment of need, few have found them to be as belligerent as Machiavelli’s sharp-tongued and pugilistic visitor. The Muses, like Fortuna herself, are capricious
and malicious, not interested in wasting their time on weaklings or fools.
Machiavelli’s prison sonnets are not the usual appeals of a condemned man. While they proclaim his innocence, they do so only indirectly, depicting their author as a hapless wretch, a figure of fun rather than pity. Above all, these slight poems provide an emotional release to their author at a particularly painful moment. Machiavelli, as his colleagues at the Chancery attested, was a consummate entertainer, purveyor of off-color stories and satirical portraits. By eliciting laughter, his verses helped relieve his aching heart and, as an added bonus, might even encourage their recipient to conclude that the author was an amusing fellow worth having around.
These prison sonnets also register a profound psychological rupture. Written in the darkest hours of his life, they trace the first tentative steps on a new journey, one that will ultimately bring him far more fame than he could have hoped for had he never suffered misfortune and disgrace. Before the crisis he had made his living and his reputation on the public stage; after, he lived in relative obscurity, forgotten by the state he had served so well and that ultimately scorned him. Before, he had been a man of action; after, a man of words and ideas. It was only following the collapse of his professional career that he transformed himself into a writer and philosopher, discovering hidden talents and blazing trails through uncharted territory. The choice was not his, but he accepted, if only begrudgingly, the hand Fate had dealt him. Even at his lowest point he did not abandon himself to despair. He coped with his sorrows by writing, turning inward and plumbing the depths of his own soul, but also gazing out on the world, casting the same unsparing eye on his fellow man and relishing the human comedy that emerged. If the Muses were an unfriendly lot, Machiavelli never lacked for their company. They were to be his familiar companions for the remainder of his life, inspiring him to climb to creative heights but also cutting him down to size whenever he took himself too seriously.
• • •
In the end it was not his poems that won his freedom, nor even the pleading of friends on his behalf. His rescue from the executioner’s block came almost as an afterthought, an offhand gesture from that most fickle goddess Fortuna, who plucked him from troubled waters and flung him unceremoniously upon the farther shore.
At the very moment Machiavelli was being locked into his cell in Le Stinche, another event occurred in Rome that transformed the political and military map of Europe. Julius, the seventy-year-old “Warrior Pope,” was smitten by a sudden attack of malarial fever, dying a few days later, on February 20, 1513. Though all the European powers would have to recalibrate their policies in light of the change in Rome, the impact was likely to be most keenly felt in Florence. Often the fortunes of the republic were determined by the policies and character of the man on the Throne of Saint Peter, and the interregnum between one pope and another was normally a period of great anxiety. This time the mood was subtly different, the usual consternation tempered by the hope that for the first time in history a native son would be elevated. For among the frontrunners for the job was Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, head of the powerful clan and unofficial boss of the city. No Florentine had ever sat on the papal throne, and to have a native son presiding over the Vatican—particularly one as powerful as Cardinal de’ Medici—held out the prospect of a prosperous age where streams of golden ducats would flow through the hands of Tuscan bankers and economic partnership would replace military confrontation.
First, however, Giovanni would have to hurry back to Rome to be included in the conclave. Departing in late February he arrived in time to join his fellow cardinals on March 6. Five days later, after the usual horse-trading and deal-making, the thirty-eight-year-old Giovanni de’ Medici was elected, taking the name Leo X. The happy news took only one day to reach Florence, and no sooner was it announced than the city gave itself over to wild celebrations. Shops closed and people poured into the streets; all the church bells of the city were set a-ringing and bonfires kindled in the squares. In the joy of the moment, feeling invincible and magnanimous, Giuliano de’ Medici ordered a mass release of prisoners. Among them were those survivors implicated in the abortive Boscoli plot, including the former Second Chancellor of Florence.
On March 12, Machiavelli, distressed in body but resilient in spirit, surrounded by his friends, hobbled from his cell and stood blinking in the cold light of the Florentine winter. Within a few days he was back on his farm in Sant’ Andrea, enjoying a rare and much needed period of repose to heal his limbs and adjust to new circumstances.
Machiavelli could be forgiven had he decided to give up politics and turn his back on the city that had treated him so poorly. Most men would at least have taken the opportunity to enjoy an extended period of rest. But Machiavelli was ill-suited to a life of indolence. Boredom and frustration, as well as more practical concerns, soon roused him from his convalescence.
He had, first of all, to take stock of his life and plan for an uncertain future. The one thing he did not lack for was time to think. Everything else, however, was in short supply. Even when he was taking home a government salary it had been hard to make ends meet; now he faced a prolonged period of belt-tightening, a particularly grim prospect since, as he himself admitted, “I am accustomed to spending and cannot do without spending.” The most sensible course would be to make the most of his meager resources and perhaps invest his profits, but he had no aptitude for commerce and little interest in the day-to-day management of his properties. He would much rather speculate about the military strategy of the Spanish King or the strength of the Swiss mercenaries with his friend Vettori than drive a hard bargain with a neighbor over the price of timber or olive oil he was selling from his farm. Shrewd peasants cheated him and even friends took advantage of his generosity. He was not frugal by nature. He enjoyed afternoons in the tavern and nights on the town, but now he would be forced to cut back just when he was most in need of distraction.
Sharing Niccolò’s shrinking horizons were the long-suffering Marietta and their children—eleven-year-old Primavera, ten-year-old Bernardo, and two younger sons, Ludovico and Guido. They divided their time between the house in the city and the farm in the countryside, thrown, for better or worse, in each other’s company. If the bustle was a welcome relief after the solitude of Le Stinche, it was also a reminder of the large and growing household he could now barely feed and clothe. “[F]ortune has left me nothing but family and friends,” he wrote to his nephew, “and I make what capital I can from them.”
Despite his affection for his wife and children, Machiavelli was hardly the ideal family man. He was too restless and ambitious to find fulfillment in hearth and home and too addicted to illicit pleasures to remain faithful to one woman. Celibacy was never an option for Machiavelli, even for brief periods, and when Marietta wasn’t available—and even when she was—he found other means of sexual release. Often this led him into grotesque situations, the salacious details of which he was only too happy to recount to his friends. One particularly unappetizing encounter occurred a few years earlier while he was away in Verona on state business. “[B]linded by matrimonial famine” and “desperately aroused,” as he described himself to his correspondent Luigi Guicciardini (brother of the famous historian), he allowed himself to be tempted into a darkened room with the promise of sensual delights. The resulting encounter was something less than advertised: “Having done the deed, and wanting to check out the merchandise, I took a burning ember from the hearth in the room and lit a lamp overhead. The lamp was hardly kindled before it almost fell from my hand. I nearly dropped dead right then and there, the woman was so hideous.” The description of the wrinkled, toothless, lice-infested hag that follows is so revolting that one can only hope Machiavelli was exaggerating for comic affect. He concludes his narrative with the equally implausible pledge: “I stake my berth in heaven that as long as I am in Lombardy I’ll be damned if I think I shall get horny again.”
The letter to Guicciardini capture
s the earthy side of Machiavelli’s humor that he will put to good use in plays like Clizia and La Mandragola, but it also offers insight into the methods he deployed in his political writings. Whether he was recounting his own sexual misadventures or uncovering the real motives of princes artfully concealed beneath diplomatic doublespeak, Machiavelli demonstrated a willingness to face unflinchingly the seamier side of life. He takes mankind as he finds it, not passing judgment or seeking reformation. (All attempts in this direction were bound to fail, he thought, as amply demonstrated by Savonarola’s ill-considered campaigns against vanities and vice.) Depending on one’s perspective, his attitude reveals either a generosity of spirit, an empathy with the flawed human animal, or an overeagerness to accommodate our baser instincts. In dealing with personal failings or political machinations, Machiavelli demonstrated a contempt for decorum that has scandalized and intrigued generations of readers.
For Machiavelli, domestic bliss rarely seemed more blissful than when he was many miles away; upon prolonged exposure it inevitably lost its charm. The longer Machiavelli was away, the more he missed his family, often begging his bosses to relieve him so that he might return to them. But when he was home for any length of time, and when there were no great affairs to be dealt with, he grew ill-tempered and longed to be where the action was.
Though there was no longer any important business to keep him in Florence, he often returned to the city house to relieve the tedium of country life. He was not one of those city dwellers who extolled the beauties of the countryside or romanticized the simple folk who tilled the soil. Machiavelli was a cosmopolitan and enjoyed those pleasures, both high and low, the city had to offer. Whenever he was in town he spent much of his time with what he called “la brigata,” (the gang) a group of old friends who seemed to have as much time on their hands and as little money as he did. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that they got on each other’s nerves. On one occasion Machiavelli was invited to share in a veal roast purchased by Tommaso del Bene. Having rounded up his friends to share a luxurious meal he apparently could not afford, Tommaso then proceeded to charge his fellow diners for the privilege. “We dined,” Machiavelli recounted to Vettori, “and when it came time to add up the bill it came to fourteen soldi each. I had only ten on me, so I owed him four. Now every day he pesters me for it. Just yesterday on the Ponte Vecchio he accosted me again.”
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