VII
“Each day I discover in you a greater prophet than the Jews or any generation ever possessed.”
—FILIPPO CASAVECCHIA TO MACHIAVELLI
ON DECEMBER 28, 1503, ON THE BANKS OF THE GARIGLIANO River some thirty miles north of Naples, the French army in Italy suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Spanish forces under Gonzalvo de Cordoba. The news, arriving in Florence a few days later, caused near panic in the government palace. The republic’s fate had long been linked to the success of the French, and with their ally now retreating before the hostile Spaniards, Florence’s future as an independent republic appeared in jeopardy.
The news, however, was not universally bleak. Among the casualties of the battle was Piero de’ Medici, who had drowned in the swift-flowing stream while trying to evade capture by the victorious Spanish forces. While Piero’s death did not end the threat from the exiled Medici, the new head of the family, his younger brother Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, was a far more prudent man. Their father was once reported to have remarked: “I have three sons: one is foolish, one is clever, and one is kind.” With the foolish son now out of the way, Florentines thought they might have better luck with the clever Giovanni and mild-mannered Giuliano.
For the Second Chancellor and Secretary to the Ten of War, the shift in the balance of power in Italy posed new challenges. With the goal of subjugating Pisa no closer to completion than it had been when Machiavelli first entered office, the beleaguered republic could ill afford to fight on a second front. Should the victorious Spaniards choose to march north, Florence had nothing to block them but a few mercenaries whose performance before the walls of Pisa had given little reason for encouragement. On January 14, 1504, Machiavelli was again dispatched to the court of the French King to “make it clearly understood,” according to Niccolò Valori’s instructions, “that we are not in a position to gather troops sufficient for our defense, and that accordingly we should be obliged to turn for aid wherever it was to be found.” In other words, he was to make it plain to the French that should they be unwilling or unable to help, Florence might be forced to throw herself into the arms of Spain. Fortunately, such a scenario was never put to the test. The Spaniards, it turned out, were stretched too thin both militarily and financially to pursue their advantage. On February 11 the warring nations signed a three-year truce that guaranteed, at least for the time being, the survival of the republic.
But while the immediate threat had dissipated, Florence’s position remained precarious. Machiavelli’s agitated state of mind at the time is evident in his First Decennale, an epic poem on current affairs he completed in November 1504 and dedicated to his early patron, Alamanno Salviati.i After chronicling the tumultuous ten years just passed, Machiavelli captures the uncertainty of the times he was living through:
[M]y spirit is all aflame; now with hope, now with fear,
it is overwhelmed, so much that it wastes to nothing bit by bit;
because it seeks to know where your ship can sail, weighted with
such heavy weights, or into what harbor, with these winds.
Likening Florence to a storm-tossed boat unable to steer its own course through turbulent waters, he nonetheless ends on an optimistic note:
Yet we trust in the skillful steersman, in the oars, in the sails, in
the cordage; but the voyage would be easy and short if you
would reopen the temple of Mars.
The “skillful steersman” is Piero Soderini, with whom Machiavelli had struck up a close personal and professional relationship. Most intriguing is the closing line about the “temple of Mars,” the first explicit reference to the project that dominated the remainder of his time in office and that would first catapult him to fame as the hero of the reinvigorated Florentine Republic before reducing him to the role of scapegoat, blamed for its sudden collapse.
From the moment he was elected Second Chancellor in the spring of 1498, Machiavelli was consumed by a single idea: How could his beloved republic halt the steady decline of her fortunes? In centuries past she had been the capital of a proud and growing empire; now, with no standing army of her own, she was forced to throw herself into the arms of one protector or another. “[T]he worst thing about weak republics,” he wrote in The Discourses, “is that they are irresolute, so that all the choices they make, they are forced to make.” Instead of being masters of their fate, Florentines had been reduced to pawns in a high-stakes game played by those with little reason to consider their interests. During the reign of Lorenzo de’ Medici, adroit diplomacy had masked inherent weakness. The French invasion of 1494 had exposed the impotence of all the states of Italy, but none more starkly than Florence, which for centuries had relied on paid mercenaries to compensate for her own lack of martial vigor. Machiavelli felt the humiliation keenly as he represented the republic in foreign courts, where he was dismissed as a man of no account serving a state that had long ceased to matter on the world stage.
As a careful student of ancient history, Machiavelli knew there was another way. Like many Florentines, he was a great admirer of the Roman Republic, whose citizen soldiers had set out from their farms and shops to conquer the known world. What, Machiavelli asked himself, allowed these simple folk to face down the armies of Sparta and Persia, while his compatriots hardly ever picked up a sword unless it was to avenge a petty insult from a rival family? Florentines had forgotten the ways of war. They had, in his memorable phrase, closed the temple of Mars.
Machiavelli’s first mission as Secretary to the Ten of War, in March 1499, had been to the camp of Jacopo of Piombino, where he tried to coax the disgruntled and underpaid condottiere from his tent. In the years since, hardly a month passed without a similar incident involving one of the many mercenary generals in Florentine employ, in which accusations of treachery on one side were met by countercharges of bad faith on the other. The most serious ended with the beheading of Paolo Vitelli, though there must have been many times before and since where Machiavelli felt that the ax man’s services were called for.
Instructed by the Ten to offer Gianpaolo Baglioni a contract, Machiavelli unleashed a diatribe against the man in particular and the breed in general: “[H]e was like the other pillagers of Rome, who are thieves rather than soldiers, and whose services are sought for the sake of their names and influence, rather than for their valor, or the number of men at their command. Moved as they are by personal interests, the alliances they make last till it suits their purpose to break them.”
By contrast, he observed, armies made up of citizen conscripts fighting for hearth and home were far more effective. The massive French army combined a hardened professional force of Swiss pike men with peasants and laborers levied from the local populace, while the militias instituted by Cesare Borgia and Remirro that Machiavelli had reviewed during his tour of the Romagna were an essential ingredient in Valentino’s early success. But Machiavelli’s faith in a citizen army went beyond empirical observation; he had an almost mystical belief in the virtue of the citizen soldier and a visceral hatred for the hired gun—a conviction that a man who refused to fight on behalf of his own country was no man at all, and that a nation that relied on its purse rather than its people would soon be reduced to slavery. In the final chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli urges Lorenzo de’ Medici to free Italy from foreign domination, telling him “above all other things, it is necessary . . . to provide yourself with your own army; for there cannot be more faithful, truer, or better soldiers than these.” These loyal soldiers stand in stark contrast to those who sell their services to the highest bidder:
Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous, and anyone who founds his state on such men will never know stability or security, because they are disorganized, ambitious, without discipline or faith. Brave among friends, they are cowards before their enemies. They have no fear of God nor loyalty to men. Ruin can be avoided only by avoiding action. In peace the prince will be despoiled by his own men, in war he will be despoiled by his enemies. The reason for this is that they have no loyalty, nothing that keeps them in the field, but a little bit of money insufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are happy to be your soldiers as long as you avoid war, but when war comes they will desert or flee.
I hardly need to trouble myself persuading anyone of the truth of what I say since Italy’s ruin can be traced to no other cause than her reliance, for so many years, on mercenary armies.
For Machiavelli, the use of mercenary armies was not only impractical—it represented an acute moral failing. Free men did not pay others to fight for them but defended their liberty with their blood. “[W]here military organization is good,” he wrote in The Discourses, “there must needs be good order.” Only a corrupt and sybaritic people would stoop to hiring professional soldiers, who inevitably gained a stranglehold over those who employed them. Passionately patriotic and proud of the city’s history of independence, Machiavelli concluded that Florence would never equal past glories unless she revived the ancient tradition of the citizen army.
This would require a reversal of almost two centuries of military policy. More importantly, it would involve a radical shift in the way the citizens viewed their obligations to the state. Florentines, as Machiavelli recognized, had long since forgotten the discipline of war; they had grown prosperous and complacent. They paid taxes reluctantly, using all manner of trickery to hide their assets, and then grumbled when the armies they hired on the cheap failed to meet their objectives. Given the generally low sense of civic duty, it was certain they would howl at any attempt to drag them from their comfortable homes to drill on the parade ground and resist any policy that might endanger life and limb on the field of battle.
Perhaps even more difficult to overcome was the near paranoia regarding any policy that led to the arming of the common people. While the prosperous middle class had no desire to take up arms, it was equally averse to placing weapons in the hands of employees who might be tempted to turn on their masters. The uprising by impoverished workers in 1378 known as the Revolt of the Ciompi had instilled in the ruling elite an almost hysterical fear of class warfare. In 1466 a coup against the Medici failed in large part because, according to one eyewitness, they feared “that the little people, all in arms . . . would be so aroused that, having tasted the sweetness of such destruction, would turn against other magnates, thinking in this way to relieve their poverty.” If these poor, hungry laborers were conscripted, how long would it be before they asserted their political and economic rights?
Machiavelli understood the difficulties involved, but frustration with the army’s recent shameful performance had grown so great that most now admitted there was a problem, even if they still disagreed on a solution. The key figure in all this was the Gonfaloniere. Fortunately, Soderini had come to rely on the Second Chancellor’s sound judgment and to appreciate his tireless dedication. Machiavelli had made a convert of Cardinal Francesco Soderini, whose enthusiasm for the project rubbed off on his brother.“Your letter being longer,” the Cardinal wrote to Machiavelli, “gave us all the more pleasure, because we now understand more clearly your new military strategy, which corresponds to our hope for the health and dignity of our country, is progressing . . . . And it must be no small satisfaction that it is from your hands that such an honorable undertaking should have begun. So persevere and bring this affair to the desired end.”
Even with the support of the Gonfaloniere and the Cardinal, Machiavelli’s efforts to institute a civilian militia met with fierce resistance. The rich merchants who made up the bulk of the Great Council refused to arm the urban workforce they regarded as a potentially violent, revolutionary element. Ultimately, Machiavelli was forced to abandon his broader scheme in favor of a more limited one in which the militia was recruited from peasants in the countryside rather than the Florentine proletariat.
With Piero Soderini’s blessing, and a grudging wait-and-see approach adopted by the Signoria, Machiavelli began to recruit his army in the winter of 1505–6. He plunged into the work with typical enthusiasm, riding out into the countryside himself to hire captains and draft infantrymen in the village squares and rustic hamlets. His efforts were so successful that by February he was able to march his first recruits through the Piazza della Signoria. The event was described by the apothecary Luca Landucci, who hurried to the square to catch a glimpse of Florence’s latest fighting force:
There was a muster in the Piazza of 400 recruits whom the Gonfaloniere had assembled, Florentine peasants, and he gave them each a white waistcoat, a pair of stockings half red and half white, a white cap, shoes, and an iron breastplate, and lances, and to some of them muskets. These were called battalions; and they were given a constable who would lead them, and teach them how to use their arms. They were soldiers, but stopped at their own houses, being obliged to appear when needed; and it was ordered that many thousand should be made in this way all through the country, so that we should not need to have any foreigners. This was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence.
Landucci’s testimony indicates that public opinion was turning in favor of the militia. All Machiavelli had to do now was demonstrate their effectiveness in the field. In August he began to test their mettle in small skirmishes in the countryside near Pisa, where their numbers added weight to the mercenary forces besieging the city. Though the exam was not very rigorous—most of the fighting was still left to the professionals—they acquitted themselves admirably in their limited roles.
Even the skeptics in the Great Council were beginning to come around; the militia was given official sanction on December 6, 1506, when the Great Council, by a vote of 841 in favor to 317 opposed, created a new body, the Nine of the Militia, to organize and oversee the newly created force.ii When it came time to appoint a chancellor the choice was obvious. Niccolò Machiavelli now added another title to his bulging portfolio. Upon learning of his assistant’s election, Piero Soderini congratulated him, and insisted that God must favor the project since “it daily increases and flourishes, in spite of malignant opposition.”
As Soderini’s letter suggests—and as the vote on the militia, lopsided as it was, confirms—the government and its policies were not without opponents. Machiavelli had his new militia, but there were many, particularly among the ottimati, who feared it would become an instrument of tyranny in the hands of a ruler who was aggregating more power every day. In fact many of the ruling families had never reconciled themselves to Soderini. The idea of a Gonfaloniere-for-life appeared to them not much different from a dictator, and while few questioned Soderini’s honesty, it was also noted that he did not stint himself when it came to the trappings of office. At one point a florin was issued with the likeness of the Gonfaloniere, a sign, his critics claimed, that he now saw himself as King. Also smacking of regal pretensions was the behavior of his family. As a lifetime appointee it was only natural that his wife should come to live with him in the Palazzo, but this departure from tradition—exacerbated by Madonna Soderini’s taste for elegant gowns and dinner parties—offended the more traditional-minded, who thought that no serious business could be transacted in proximity to the fairer sex.
Criticism of Soderini’s domestic life was a symptom of a deeper anxiety on the part of the ottimati, who saw their own power wane as the Gonfaloniere’s increased. There was never any indication that he intended to use the militia to intimidate the domestic opposition, but it is not far-fetched to imagine that in time he might have succumbed to the temptation to use a standing army to whip recalcitrant legislators into line.
Signs of growing friction between the ottimati and the Soderini executive were apparent in 1507 when Soderini tried to appoint Machiavelli to head an important embassy to the German Emperor-Elect Maximillian I. After vociferous complaints from leadingottimati who were afraid the Second Chancellor was too closely allied with the Gonfaloniere, Machiavelli’s name was withdrawn in favor of the more aristocratic, better connected, and more independent Francesco Vettori.
Among the great monarchs of Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor (or Emperor of the Romans as he was usually styled before actually receiving the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope) was at once the most exalted and the least powerful. As the heir to Charlemagne, he was the feudal overlord not only of much of central Europe but of northern Italy as well. Unlike his famous medieval predecessors—most notably Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II—the Renaissance version of the Emperor claimed an authority that was almost limitless in theory and negligible in practice. Should he ever reassert his feudal rights and back up the claim with armed force, as Maximillian was now proposing to do, he could become once again a serious, and seriously disruptive, factor in Italian geopolitics.
As it turned out, keeping an eye on the restless monarch was apparently too much responsibility for Vettori, who was put on the spot when the Emperor demanded from Florence a tribute of 50,000 ducats to help him defray the expense of maintaining his army in Italy. Vettori’s letter prompted the Signoria to convene an emergency committee to craft a response. The prospect of emptying their already depleted coffers to finance an adventure from which the best they could hope was to emerge no worse off than they already were, was unappetizing enough. But bowing to the extortionate demand would also enrage the French, who now faced the prospect of being ground to a powder between German and Spanish millstones. With Vettori clearly not up to the job, the government finally agreed to send Machiavelli to stiffen the ambassador’s backbone, though only after much grumbling from those who accused him of being Soderini’s “puppet.”
The mission to Maximillian promised to be another thankless venture. Machiavelli was authorized to offer the emperor 30,000 ducats, going as high as 50,000 if the Emperor proved a hard bargainer, and then only if it was clear that the promised expedition would get off the ground, a questionable proposition given Maximillian’s mercurial temper. As usual, the Florentine government was facing a crisis by delaying any real decision, hoping to placate the Emperor without antagonizing the French (an almost impossible task given their mutually incompatible interests) and relying on the Second Chancellor’s skills to keep all these mismatched balls in the air.
In December, Machiavelli packed his bags and set out on his journey along snow-choked mountain passes to the Swiss cantons, where the Emperor was trying to conjure up an army and the funds to pay for it. “[I] promise you,” he wrote to the Gonfaloniere upon arriving in Bolzano, “that if ever there were a wretched journey, it was the one that I made.” Despite the discomfort of the winter weather and poor accommodations, he carefully observed local customs, hoping to discover those secrets that made the Swiss the most feared warriors of the age. “Between Geneva and Constance I made four halts,” he later recorded: “The twelve Cantons each contribute four thousand men for the defense of the country, and from one thousand to one thousand five hundred for foreign service. And this because, in the first case, all are by law compelled to bear arms; in the second, namely, when it is a question of going to fight elsewhere, no one need go, save of his own free will.”
Later he gathered his observations in a pamphlet titled Report on Germany.iii The frugal habits of the Swiss offered the starkest possible reproach to the decadent lives of his compatriots: not only were they a free people, governing themselves in their rural hamlets, but they produced a breed of soldier that more than once in recent years had humbled the professional forces the Italians sent against them. Machiavelli paints a largely idyllic portrait of these northern rustics:
There can be no doubt of the power of Germany, with her abundance of men, money, and arms. The Germans spend little on administration, and nothing on soldiers, for they train their own subjects in arms. On festival days, instead of playing games, their youth seek diversion in learning the use of the petronel, the pike, and of other weapons. They are frugal in all things, for they affect no luxury in their buildings or their attire, and have but few chattels in their dwellings. It suffices them to have abundance of bread and meat, and to have stoves to protect them from the cold; and he who owns no other possessions, does without them and desires them not. Therefore their country exists on its own produce, without needing to buy from others; and they sell things fashioned by their hands, which are scattered over nearly the whole of Italy, and their gains are all the greater because earned by labor with very little capital. Thus they enjoy their rough life and liberty, and for this cause will not go to war, excepting for great recompense; nor would even that suffice, but for the decrees of their communities.
Rough life and liberty—these two qualities were intimately connected in Machiavelli’s mind. Like the ancient Spartans or the citizen soldiers of early Rome, the Swiss, while possessing little in the way of material comforts, were happy and free, relying on nothing but their own courage and strength to defend their liberties. They were self-sufficient and self-reliant, a striking contrast to his fellow countrymen, who purchased their ease at the price of their liberty.
Machiavelli was not wholly uncritical. Though their fighting spirit was admirable, the Germans’ inability to work together for a common purpose—a quarrelsomeness that the Italians shared, without possessing compensatory virtues—prevented them from achieving greater things. The Emperor commanded enormous resources on paper but was constantly fighting with his vassals “so that it is easy to comprehend why, notwithstanding the great strength of the country, it is in fact much enfeebled.”
In truth, Machiavelli is a less than ideal tour guide since he tends to file down the inconvenient edges of any fact until it fits into his preformed thesis. His report is really an argument in the form of a description. It follows a long tradition, dating back at least to Tacitus—who, almost a millennium and a half earlier, drew a similar comparison between the Romans and the rude but virile Germans—in which a traveler from a rich and sophisticated land sings the praises of simple folk he encounters in order to shame his compatriots. For Machiavelli the moral of the story was all too clear. Italians had forgotten the simple virtues of their forebears and unless they mended their ways—in part by relearning the discipline of war as those conscripted into his militias were doing—they were doomed to end their lives as slaves.
Machiavelli’s teeth-chattering journey through the mountains would eventually furnish material for the grand theories of power politics he was building in his head. In the meantime, he encountered the usual frustrations that came from serving as the envoy of the Florentine Republic. When he presented himself to the Emperor in Bolzano, Machiavelli’s initial offer of 30,000 ducats was met with a curt rebuff. But before he could get down to haggling over sums he needed to divine the Emperor’s real intentions. Following the Emperor’s court from Bolzano to Trent, Machiavelli struggled to interpret conflicting signals. “It is difficult to forecast events,” he wrote to the Ten, explaining the forces pulling in opposite directions that made any prediction perilous: “The Emperor has many worthy soldiers, but he has no money, neither is it apparent from what quarter he will get any, and he is too lavish of that which he has . . . . He is skilled in war, patient of fatigue, but so credulous that many have doubts of the expedition, so that there is matter both for hope and fear . . . . I dwell in uncertainty,” he concluded.
The Emperor’s indecisiveness was matched only by that of the Florentine government, which was caught somewhere between defiance and abject capitulation. “Your Excellencies have spun so fine a web,” Machiavelli complained, “that it is impossible to weave it . . . . You must come to a decision, divine the less dangerous course, and entering upon it, settle your minds in God’s name; for by trying to measure great matters like these with compasses, men are led to error.”
This was a repetition of Machiavelli’s mission to Valentino six years earlier, or, to tell the truth, of almost all the embassies upon which he embarked over the course of his career—an extended variation on themes of evasion and delay. In one particularly candid exchange with his fellow ambassador Luigi Guicciardini, Machiavelli admitted: “It’s as if I’m here on a desert island, since I know nothing about anything. Still, to show I’m still alive I invent diligent reports to send to the Ten.” Trying to make the best of a bad situation, he wrote to the Gonfaloniere, “I shall do here what little good I can think of, even if my staying here is completely superfluous.”
Machiavelli spent more than six months at the court of the German Emperor as, Hamlet-like, the great man attempted to make up his mind. Repeating the frustrations of that earlier mission to the Borgia duke, no matter how often Machiavelli insisted he was accomplishing nothing, his superiors in Florence insisted his presence was essential. At one point suggestions that he be recalled were countered by Vettori, who wrote, “it would be the most inopportune thing in the world to recall Machiavelli . . . it was necessary for him to remain until everything was settled.”
On February 4, after receiving word from Pope Julius that he had been granted the title of Emperor, Maximillian entered the cathedral of Trent, accompanied by pompous fanfares and attended by a resplendent guard of honor, and had himself officially invested by the Bishop of Gurk. But, as was often the case with the Emperor, the elaborate ceremony was a substitute for rather than the prelude to decisive action. In the coming weeks troops marched here and there, rumors flew faster than cannonballs, and skirmishing among the forces of Venice, France, and the Emperor did little but inflict misery upon the peasants whose fields were trampled and houses burned. After months filled with sound and fury, word arrived on June 6 of a grand bargain among the great powers proclaiming a three-year truce. Four days later, Machiavelli headed for home.
Having spent more than half a year at the court of the Emperor pursuing insubstantial rumors, Machiavelli was anxious to return to more manly pursuits. The months spent among the Swiss had only strengthened his conviction that he was on the right track with his citizen army. Now, with the Gonfaloniere’s backing, he increased the size and scope of his forces, adding cavalry to the already substantial infantry arm. Machiavelli was so intimately involved with every aspect of the project that those requiring his attention were more likely to find him in camp with the troops than at his desk at the Chancellery.
By the spring of 1509 the war against Pisa, which had dragged on for fifteen grueling years, was finally showing signs of progress. Advances were partly the result of the increased resources brought to bear after the creation of the militia, but also of a change in strategy. After numerous repulses at the walls of Pisa, the commanders reverted to the slow but sure method of starving the city into submission. While Machiavelli’s militias stripped the land bare, Genoese corsairs under Florentine command blockaded the sea routes, effectively isolating the beleaguered city. For the better part of the season Machiavelli and his militia were stationed near Lucca, which had earned Florence’s wrath by secretly funneling supplies to their Pisan allies. The militia was assigned the task of burning the crops of millet and oats that were finding their way to the hungry residents of the besieged city, and otherwise making life miserable for the civilian population. It was an unpleasant, if not very dangerous, mission that reflected the grim war of attrition now underway. Ever willing to suppress humane considerations when it came to the security of his country, Machiavelli had few qualms about the suffering his troops were inflicting on noncombatants. But he was not alone in harboring bitter resentment toward the enemy. Luca Landucci recounts one story that illustrates the deep-seated hatreds that fueled the war:
A woman of Pisa came out of the city with her two children and went before the [Florentine] commissary, saying that she was dying of hunger, and had left her mother in Pisa who was almost famished; and the commissary ordered that bread should be given her for herself and her mother and children. Going back into Pisa with the bread, she told her mother, who was ill from want of food, and on seeing the white bread, the old woman said: What bread is this? And when her daughter told her that she had had it outside, from the Florentines, the old woman cried: Take away the bread of the accursed Florentines; I would rather die!
Though Landucci shows a certain empathy for the plight of Florence’s enemies, his compassion extends only so far:
Oh, what grievous sin it is to command that there should be a war! Woe to him who is the cause of it! I pray God to forgive us; although this enterprise of ours is undertaken legitimately: think what is the sin of those who go to war without legitimate cause!
Machiavelli, like Landucci, was convinced that the stubborn Pisans had no one to blame but themselves. Though he admits the hardships of the civilian population of Pisa, he reserves his sympathy for his own troops, who “with great sufferings and much toil, and with much expense . . . starved her.” It is difficult today to feel much pity for troops whose job was to starve their Tuscan brothers and sisters, but from Machiavelli’s jingoistic perspective Pisa’s culpability was so self-evident that it was pointless to waste emotional energy on them. No doubt he would have agreed with General Sherman’s observation, made some three and a half centuries later: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Like Sherman, he believed that what followed from this truism was not that one should attempt to wage war more humanely—the concept of a humane war being a contradiction in terms—but rather that it ought to be prosecuted with sufficient ruthlessness to achieve a swift and decisive victory.
Though Machiavelli had no formal military training (as critics of his Art of War will later point out), his zeal for the cause and impatience with what he regarded as halfhearted efforts on the part of his colleagues meant he was ever more deeply engaged in day-to-day military operations. In March of 1509, for instance, he personally supervised the construction of a crossing over the Oseri River, boasting that the job was so well done that “even the horses of Xerxes might ford it.” This hands-on approach did not always sit well with those whose job it was to supervise the commanders in the field. Commissary-General Niccolò Capponi complained to the Ten that Machiavelli frequently overstepped his authority and failed to inform him of his movements. After Capponi lodged an official complaint with the Nine, Biagio Buonaccorsi advised Machiavelli to treat him with more circumspection. “[T]he more powerful must always be right,” he explained facetiously, “and it is necessary to treat them with respect. You should be patient and learn how to handle yourself in such circumstances.” Patience and tact were two qualities Machiavelli had a hard time summoning when that meant putting up with fools and idlers. But though he continued to step on the sensitive toes of powerful men, he had made himself indispensable to the one person who counted, Piero Soderini, who continued to shield Machiavelli from the barbs of his enemies, even as he reminded him “that the way of this world is to receive great ingratitude for great and good operations.” So deep did Machiavelli plunge into the weeds of military tactics that Buonaccorsi began to address him mockingly as “Captain General.”
As Pisa slowly crumbled from within, Machiavelli redoubled his efforts, determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past when confident predictions of victory were followed by embarrassing reverses. When the Ten ordered Machiavelli back from the front lines, he pleaded with them to let him stay: “[I]f I wished to avoid fatigue and danger, I should not have left Florence; therefore, I beg your Excellencies to permit me to stay among these camps, and labor with these Commissaries on necessary matters; for here I can be good for something, and there I should be good for nothing, and should die of despair.”
The relentless pressure was paying dividends. In March, Machiavelli was ordered to Piombino to meet with a Pisan delegation that had come to explore the possibility of peace. What terms, they asked, were the Florentines willing to offer? “[The Ten],” he told them, “desired obedience, [but] demanded neither their life, their property nor their honor, and would allow them reasonable liberty.” Encouraging as these words were, the delegation could not commit to anything. Still, it was becoming increasingly clear that the surrender of Pisa was just a matter of time. With the naval blockade now securely in place and with Machiavelli’s militia laying waste to the countryside, Pisa’s allies could no longer prolong the contest by resupplying the city. On May 24, Machiavelli and Alamanno Salviati escorted a second delegation of high-ranking Pisans to the Florentine suburb of San Miniato, where they were to meet with government officials to negotiate the terms of surrender. Machiavelli was present on June 1 when the official surrender was signed in the Palazzo della Signoria, affixing his name on the treaty next to that of the First Chancellor, Marcello Adriani. Anxious to be where the action was, Machiavelli hurried back to camp and was among those who watched as hundreds of emaciated citizens broke out of Pisa and entered Florentine lines, where they were fed and clothed.
While Pisan dignitaries finalized terms with their Florentine counterparts, Machiavelli was involved in discussions of his own that would determine exactly how and when the city would be handed over. Perhaps the most important conversation was with a man named Lattanzio Tedaldi, though his expertise was neither political nor military. He was, in fact, an astrologer, and at Machiavelli’s request he was charting the planetary orbits to determine the most auspicious moment. On June 5, Machiavelli received his answer. “I would like you,” Tedaldi told the Second Chancellor, “to instruct the commissioners that, having decided to take possession of Pisa on Thursday, they should under no circumstances enter before the 12th hour and a half in the morning, but if possible a little after the 13th,iv which will be a moment most auspicious for us.” Thus, after fifteen long years of blood and toil here on earth, the exact moment of Pisa’s fall would be determined by the serene procession of the heavenly bodies.
It might at first seem surprising that a hardheaded realist like Machiavelli should have succumbed to such superstitious nonsense. Though he saw through many of the pieties and prejudices that blinded his contemporaries, he did not free himself entirely from such mumbo jumbo. Astrology was something of an obsession in Renaissance Europe, and while not everyone was convinced—Savonarola condemned it and Pico della Mirandola offered a stinging indictment of the ancient art in his Disputations Against Astrology—belief was so widespread that no cornerstone was laid or battle fought without consulting a master of the inscrutable discipline. Even popes were not immune to the superstition, despite condemnation by many Church fathers, who saw astrology as little different from witchcraft. But Machiavelli was no superstitious peasant carrying amulets and chanting spells to ward off evil spirits. He subscribed to the conventional wisdom of the day that the arc of human life was influenced by cosmic forces, while insisting such forces were not determinative. To believe that our fates are sealed at birth would have made a mockery of his world-view, which was predicated on the notion that individuals could, through strength of will and clarity of mind, forge their own destiny. What point would there be in offering advice to the would-be prince if his fate, and the fate of his subjects, was indelibly written in the stars?
Machiavelli’s attitude is suggested by a letter he received from Bartolomeo Vespucci, a famous professor of astrology at the University of Padua, responding to one, now lost, from Machiavelli. “Suffice it that your opinion must be called absolutely correct,” Professor Vespucci answered, “since all the ancients proclaimed with one voice that the wise man himself is able to alter the influences of the stars.” This, in turn, is a paraphrase of a famous saying of Ptolemy, the ancient astronomer, who declared: “The wise man will control the stars.” Charting a middle course between fatalism, on the one hand, and the more acceptably Christian belief in free will was a common intellectual compromise for men of the Renaissance who cherished ancient teachings while still subscribing to the basic tenets of the Church. It was a compromise that appealed to Machiavelli as well since it allowed him to acknowledge the role of what we might call external factors, i.e., those aspects of life over which we have no control, without succumbing to the passivity such beliefs engendered.
In his own writing Machiavelli invokes Fortune, a capricious goddess who stands for the unpredictability of life. When he declares in The Prince that “fortune is a woman and in order to be mastered she must be jogged and beaten,” he is reiterating, in more colorful language, the point he made to Bartolomeo Vespucci: that powerful men make their own luck.v But they are the exception since “in the world most men let themselves be mastered by fortune.” Machiavelli’s larger point is that whatever invisible strings tug at us, we ought to live as if our fate were in our own hands. This is certainly the way he lived his own life, though when things didn’t work out he was apt to take at least a rhetorical swipe at the wicked goddess. On those occasions when things were looking up, however—as they surely were in the summer of 1509—he forgets about Fortuna and takes full credit for his success.vi
• • •
Having determined the exact moment with metaphysical precision, Machiavelli saw to the more mundane details that would guide the conquering army as it took possession of the city. Perhaps the most important provision he made was to ensure that the occupying troops were paid in advance so that they would not resort to the looting that victorious armies often regarded as a well-earned bonus after months of hard work.
Florentine forces entered Pisa on the morning of Thursday, June 7, marching in orderly arrays past the gaunt faces of their defeated foes. Riding alongside them was the Second Chancellor, proudly accompanied by members of the militia that owed its existence to his persistence, patriotism, and tireless devotion. It was a moment of triumph for Machiavelli, who had every right to bask in the glow of victory.
Indeed, he had more to be pleased with on that bright June morning than the fact that he had succeeded where others far better versed in the military arts had failed. Having prosecuted the war with utmost vigor, Machiavelli was equally determined to win the peace, and here his careful arrangements paid off as the troops maintained the discipline that would help reconcile the populace to its new situation. Among the Pisans the mood was a mixture of sullenness and relief. If they had been hurt in their pride, at least the immediate future promised to be much more pleasant than the recent past. As Machiavelli made clear to the Pisan delegation in March, Florence was willing to be magnanimous in victory. Property and civil liberties were guaranteed, and while some prominent families chose exile rather than remain in a city now under foreign domination, most adjusted to the new state of affairs.
In contrast to the rather sober mood in Pisa, forty miles to the east in Florence there were scenes of riot occasioned by an excess of high spirits. The arrival of a horseman falsely rumored to be carrying news of the surrender was sufficient to empty the churches as citizens gathered in the squares to share in the glorious moment, while in the cells of Le Stinche prisoners attacked their guards on the principle that the city’s good luck ought to extend to the least fortunate. In the end, according to one eyewitness, all the prisoners broke free and disappeared into the crowds of revelers.
With the official news, arriving the following day, celebrations were better controlled but equally exuberant. “At about 18 in the afternoon [2 P.M.],” recorded the apothecary Luca Landucci, “the horseman bearing the olive-branch arrived with the surrender of Pisa; there was a great festa, the shops being shut, and bonfires made, and illuminations placed on all the towers and on the Palagio.”
Landucci makes no mention of Machiavelli’s role in bringing about this joyous day, but his colleagues in the Chancery knew who deserved the victor’s laurels. That same day Agostino Vespucci wrote to the Second Chancellor: “If I did not think it would make you too proud, I should dare say that you with your battalions accomplished so much good work, in such a way that . . . you restored the affairs of Florence. I do not know what to say. I swear to God, so great is the exultation we are having that I would write a Ciceronian oration for you if I had time.” Another friend chimed in: “May a thousand good fortunes result to you from the grand gain of this noble city, for truly it may be said, that you personally have had a great share in the matter . . . . Each day I discover in you a greater prophet that the Jews or any generation ever possessed.”
This was heady stuff for Machiavelli, but he understood the character of his countrymen well enough to know that his current popularity was likely fleeting. As he often observed, Fortuna seemed to enjoy the prospect of bringing down those she had recently exalted, as if to make the sting of failure all the more bitter. Indeed this would prove to be the high point of Machiavelli’s career. But his downfall, coming close on the heels of his greatest triumph, was not attributable to some abstract property of the universe, but rather to a peculiarity of human nature. Years later he would write in the Discourses, “Whoever reads of the doings of republics will find in all of them some sort of ingratitude in the way in which they deal with their citizens,” something Machiavelli learned from hard experience. He was so obsessed with the topic that he devoted four chapters to discussing envy in all its Hydra-like deformity. The problem was particularly acute in Florence, where military success tended to be regarded with almost pathological suspicion—one reason its citizens so rarely achieved it. As Piero Soderini and his faithful assistant rode the crest of popular adulation, those who opposed the regime redoubled their efforts to bring it down.
But it was not only the uncertainty of his own prospects that made this moment less than an unadulterated triumph. As a careful student of history, Machiavelli had reason to believe that Florence would have difficulty holding on to what it had captured. Writing years later in The Prince, he offered a pessimistic analysis:
He who becomes master of a city accustomed to live in liberty, and who does not destroy it, can expect to be destroyed himself, because the city can always justify rebellion in the name of its ancient liberty and institutions. Neither the span of years nor the benefits received can make the citizens forget. Whatever actions are taken or provisions made, if the inhabitants are neither divided nor dispersed, they will long for what they have lost, and take advantage of every opportunity, as did Pisa after a hundred years of servitude under Florence.
Machiavelli worried that what he had achieved with Pisa was a classic example of that middle way he so despised. Florence had done more than enough to ensure the undying enmity of a people who had bled and starved in the cause of freedom, without actually depriving them of the means of exacting their revenge. Fifteen years of bitter struggle could not be erased from the minds of a conquered people by handing out a few loaves and allowing them a modicum of self-rule—however necessary these were to the immediate problem of pacification. The thirst for liberty was too strong and the memories of injustice too long, Machiavelli believed, to expect that the events of the summer would form the basis of a lasting peace.
Nor would he salve the conscience of his compatriots by telling them the Pisans were better off under the Florentine yoke. War was cruelty and peace hardly less so as the victors imposed their will upon the defeated. Resentment and fear were the most enduring monuments of such a campaign. Machiavelli offers a bleak epilogue in his Second Decennale, highlighting the despair of the loser rather than the triumph of the victor: “And though she was a stubborn enemy, yet, by necessity compelled and conquered, she went back weeping to her ancient chain.”
i Machiavelli’s First Decennale was published by his friend Agostino Vespucci at his own expense. Its popularity is suggested by the fact that it was immediately pirated by another printer, much to the chagrin of Vespucci, who stood to lose his investment. The fact that Machiavelli went to the trouble of composing it and having it published reveals that he had not abandoned his earlier literary ambitions.
ii It couldn’t have hurt that the vote was taken in the very room where Leonardo and Michelangelo had been hard at work depicting scenes of the republic’s past military glories.
iii Machiavelli lumped all the German-speaking regions of Europe under the heading of Germany. This region of central Europe, spreading from the North Sea to the Alps, consisted of innumerable principalities, duchies, and small kingdoms, some loosely confederated, others, like the Swiss cantons, independent.
iv About 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning, since the hours were counted from the previous sunset.
v This same idea is expressed by Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when he says, “Men at some time are masters of their fates; The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.”
vi Machiavelli, with his usual psychological insight, recognizes this as a basic human trait. In “On Fortune” he wrote, “Hence all the evil that comes upon mankind is charged to [Fortune]; but any good that befalls a man he believes he gets through his own worth” (Chief Works, II, 746).