Chapter Twelve
Machiavelli1
In 1494, the French invasion turned Italy into the battleground of the new centralized monarchies and their professional mercenary armies. One by-blow of the invasion was the overthrow of the Medici at Florence and the temporary restoration of the republic. Niccolö Machiavelli, who served the republic in diplomatic and military affairs throughout its history, organized a communal militia based on infantry; but it proved no match for the Spanish professionals, who brought back the Medici in 1512 and put an end both to the republic and to Machiavelli’s political career. He devoted his retirement to the study of the classical authors—chiefly the Romans, though by his time most of the major Greek historians were available in Latin translation—and to the attempt to understand and reconstruct the classical art of war. There were two main aspects to Machiavelli’s achievement, both revolutionary. Firstly, he succeeded in reviving civic humanism. Without him, republicanism would have been an episode in the intellectual history of Florence, confined to one nostalgic generation. Machiavelli made it one of the enduring themes of European political thought. Secondly, he revived the classical principle of raison d’état, formulating it more lucidly and systematically than it ever had been by the classical authors.
Like the earlier Florentine humanists, he took the Roman republic for his ideal constitution but carried the glorification of warfare even further. He offered an original explanation for why republics are best suited for warfare: The democratic element in a republican constitution opens up resources of manpower and morale, which forces the state to conquer and expand. He thought an imperialistic popular government like that of the Roman republic was preferable to a stable oligarchy like Sparta’s or to the contemporary republic of Venice. It is true that democracy produces civil strife, but Machi-avelli thought that tolerable: Unlike any of his contemporaries and unlike any classical author whose work survives, he thought competition between social classes essential to liberty. This is perhaps his single most original notion.
If therefore you wish to make a people numerous and warlike, so as to create a great empire, you will have to constitute it in such manner as will cause you more difficulty in managing it; and if you keep it either small or unarmed, and you acquire other dominions, you will not be able to hold them, or you will become so feeble that you will fall a prey to whoever attacks you. And therefore in all our decisions we must consider well what presents the least inconveniences, and then choose the best, for we shall never find any course entirely free from objections. Rome then might, like Sparta, have created a king for life, and established a limited senate; but with her desire to become a great empire, she could not, like Sparta, limit the number of her citizens … If anyone therefore wishes to establish an entirely new republic, he will have to consider whether he wishes to have her expand in power and dominion like Rome, or whether he intends to confine her within narrow limits. In the first case, it will be necessary to organize her as Rome was, and to submit to dissensions and troubles as best he may; for without a great number of men, and these well armed, no republic can ever increase … I believe it therefore necessary rather to take the constitution of Rome as a model than that of any other republic (for I do not believe that a middle course between the two can be found), and to tolerate the differences that will arise between the Senate and the people as an unavoidable inconvenience in achieving greatness like that of Rome. (Discourses on Livy 1.6 [trans. Luigi Ricci])
In his Art of War published in 1521, he suggested that the Roman decline began after the Punic Wars, when the republic made the mistake of switching from a citizen army to mercenaries, a process completed under the Caesars.
But Machiavelli was pessimistic about the possibility of imitating the Roman republic, and he thought republics were rare in history. The very success of Rome had killed most of the ancient republics, and Christianity had killed the rest. Even the Florentine republic had been no more than a poor copy of the Roman. In The Art of War, the principal speaker in the dialogue concludes glumly: “For seeing that there is now such a proportion of virtù [military virtue] left among mankind that it has but little influence in the affairs of the world—and that all things seem to be governed by fortuna—they think it is better to follow her train than to contend with her for superiority” (Art of War 80 [trans. Ellis Farneworth]).
The author of The Prince knew that republicanism was an ideal and that he lived in a world of monarchies. He meant his military advice to be useful to princes as well as republics, and he advised princes also to avoid reliance upon mercenaries and to recruit armies from their numerous and loyal subjects (Discourses 1.21, 43; The Prince 12-13). Any state could thus imitate some of the advantages of the popular republican army, though not its unique dynamism.
If the interpretation of Roman history I advanced earlier is right, then Machiavelli exaggerated the democratic element in the Roman constitution. But he perceived correctly the reason for the military success of classical republics in general and explained it in institutional rather than the conventional moral terms. The effect was to strengthen the connection between republicanism and militarism.
Even more significant than Machiavelli’s revival of classical republicanism was his rediscovery of classical realism. The main sources of this “Machiavellian” philosophy seem to be Frontinus and Xenophon.
Frontinus suggested to Machiavelli the vision of politics as an amoral power struggle, in which ethical considerations, if they appear, are adopted for calculating reasons. Probably it was Frontinus, too, who suggested to him one of the most fruitful ideas to be found in the realistic historiographical tradition, namely that such calculations should be guided by the systematic study of historical examples. Frontinus may even have given him the notion of a commentary on Livy as a vehicle; as Wood pointed out, Frontinus drew more of his anecdotes from Livy than from any other source. Many of Frontinus’s stratagems are repeated in The Art of War (see also Discourses 3.20).
Another important source was the Latin translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia—in Machiavelli’s time the most widely read of all Greek historical works, judging from the number of editions and translations published in Latin Europe.2 Citing Xenophon as his authority, Machiavelli justified the practice of bad faith by comparing warfare to the hunting of beasts (.Discourses 2.13, 3.39). He qualifies this counsel by adding that it does not justify such perfidies as treaty breaking (3.40) but then qualifies that, concluding that anything is permissible where freedom is as stake (3.41-42), and refers the reader to the notorious eighteenth chapter of The Prince, “In What Way Princes Must Keep Faith.” There the reader learns that a prince must be both man and beast (again the imagery suggests Xenophon) and in his beast form must be both lion and fox; when it is necessary to play the fox, he will practice bad faith, while keeping up the pretense of good faith.
Xenophon had not gone so far, and Frontinus had been less candid. The originality of Machiavelli lay in his perception that good faith is a publicity device. He had laid bare the real world behind the moralisms of Livy. Disregarding totally the Roman historiographical tradition, he attributed to the Roman republic a deliberate strategy of conquest. He did not deny that the Romans always kept good faith, which is to say, observed the formalities; but he was convinced that behind that good faith there was bad faith, for the Romans cultivated allies for the purpose of reducing them to dependency and expanding their dominion. I think he misunderstood Roman religion, but he was correct about the expansionary nature of the Roman state. He did not blame the Romans, because the real world he had exposed was a world of constant struggle, in which the best bulwark against fortune was to organize the state for war and expansion like the Roman republic: “We see therefore that the Romans in the early beginning of their power already employed fraud, which it has ever been necessary for those to practise who from small beginnings wish to rise to the highest degree of power; and then it is less censurable the more it is concealed, as was that practised by the Romans” (.Discourses 2.13 [trans. Ricci]).
Machiavelli’s spokesman in the Art of War remarks at the end of the work that the inordinate thirst for dominion exhibited by Alexander and Caesar cannot be commended; but in fact, expansion is commended in many passages in that dialogue, as well as in Machiavelli’s other works. Preventive warfare is explicitly approved: “War is not to be avoided, and can be deferred only to the advantage of the other side” (Prince 3 [trans. Ricci]). Thus Rome fought the Hellenistic kings in Greece so as not to have to fight them in Italy. And one must always seek out decisive battles. Rome is especially praised for bringing all its wars to a quick conclusion.
When these indolent princes or effeminate republics [of modern times] send a general with an army into the field, the wisest order they think they can give him is never to risk a battle, and above all things to avoid a general action. In this they think they imitate the salutary prudence of Fabius Maximus, who by delaying battle saved the Roman republic; but they do not understand that in most cases such a commission is either impracticable or dangerous … A thousand examples attest the truth of what I have advanced. (Discourses 3.10 [trans. Ricci])
Through the fog of his sources, Machiavelli had grasped correctly the basic principles behind Greco-Roman military success: The disciplined army of heavy infantry, recruited from its own soil, is best used to seek decisive battle where its mass and morale can be used to best advantage; and it is the indispensable instrument to carry out what would soon be described in Italy as ragione di stato.
Holy War
Machiavelli was an aberration in an intellectual world where notions of imperialism and war were still dominated by theology. But the medieval theological synthesis was breaking apart in the early sixteenth century into several rival theories. The Reformation and the wars of religion produced for a time an extreme version of holy war doctrine based on the Old Testament. This was found in all denominations, but especially among Calvinists, because they rejected the canon law traditions that formed the basis of medieval just war doctrine and tried to return to the Scriptures, where the Old Testament had far more to say on this subject than the New. About 1640, a New England assembly is said to have adopted the following resolutions:
1. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Voted.
2. The Lord may give the earth or any part of it to his chosen people. Voted.
3. We are His chosen people. Voted.3
To people with this mentality, wars were not merely permitted by God as in medieval theology but commanded by God, not merely justifiable but “justified” in the Protestant sense. Such wars could only be fought for religious purposes and were free of the restraints of secular warfare: They were offensive almost by definition, since the usual purpose of this biblical rhetoric was to call for attack upon God’s enemies, as when English Puritan preachers demanded war against Spain for the defense of the true faith; and sometimes they rejected the jus in hello, demanding that holy war be prosecuted with the methods used by Joshua against the Canaanites. This was a phenomenon peculiar to the age of religious war. Most Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, did not accept this doctrine even then, and it disappeared totally, except in the minds of a few fanatics, with the end of the wars of religion in 1648. The tradition is of interest here chiefly because this was the only time in Christian history when the Old Testament idea of war broke completely free from the restraints of the classical tradition. The medieval crusade, as we have seen, was normally interpreted as a variant of just war.
Aristotle and Natural Slavery
At the same time, there appeared another doctrine of offensive warfare, based not on Deuteronomy but on Aristotle.4 The discovery of America had forced Europeans to confront the question of whether the medieval just war doctrine, with its easy assumptions about the universality of the law of nations, really applied to peoples as strange as the Aztecs and Incas. How could the Spanish conquests be justified, and how were the conquered Indian populations to be treated? Some scholars of the early sixteenth century revived Aristotle’s theory that barbarians, being slaves by nature, could be conquered and enslaved without further justification. In 1550, there was a famous disputation at Valladolid between the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas and the humanist jurist Juan Ginés de Sepulveda on the status of the Native Americans. Sepulveda argued that the Indians were natural slaves, as was proven by their human sacrifices and other crimes against nature. Therefore, they could not conduct just wars and were fair game for conquest and enforced servitude; and if they resisted this fate, they should be destroyed. He referred to the conquests of the Greeks and Romans as examples of this type of warfare (quite incorrectly in the case of the Romans, who had been little affected by Aristotle’s racial prejudices). Las Casas argued that there may have been natural slavery in Aristotle’s time, but if so, it had been replaced by Christian equality, and the Christian laws of war applied to all men. This debate continued for a long time in Spain and its empire. The racist doctrines of Sepulveda were often repeated, usually in a modified form. Some claimed that natural slavery applied to wild forest Indians but not to civilized peoples like the Incas. But in Europe as a whole, educated opinion generally accepted the basic humanity of the Americans, as defended by Las Casas and his influential order. One permanent effect of the debate was to cause the Spanish Dominicans and other theologians to refine the traditional notions of just warfare and the law of nations, as will be seen shortly.
Erasmus
The three theories summarized thus far were all attacks on the medieval idea of the just war, but they emanated from very different quarters. The doctrines of the Puritans and the Aristotelians were of limited scope, meant to apply only to certain types of war—the first to wars fought for religion, the second to the Spanish conquests in America—and had no permanent effect on what Europeans thought about normal European warfare. The doctrine of Machiavelli was to have permanent and corrosive effects, but it would be a long time before these became obvious.
Finally, a fourth critique of the just war appeared in the early sixteenth century. The northern humanist circles led by Desiderius Erasmus revived the ancient Stoic antiwar themes.5 As has been discussed, the Stoics had never denied the principle of the just war but had excoriated most real wars as examples of greed and folly. In works like The Praise of Folly (1511) and The Complaint of Peace (1517), Erasmus followed the same strategy but took it a step further. He did not deny the principle of just war, which would have been heresy—and he was accused of this—but he managed to suggest that for all practical purposes just wars were as rare as the Stoic wise man. In The Education of a Christian Prince (1516), he advises the future emperor Charles V that war causes “the shipwreck of all that is good”: “A good prince should never go to war at all unless, after trying every other means, he cannot possibly avoid it.” The prince should reflect on how evil war is “even if it is the most justifiable war—if there really is any war which can be called ‘just’” (Chap. 11 [trans. L. K. Born]). Augustine and other Fathers may approve of war in “one or two places,” but far more often speak of it with abhorrence, and the New Testament invariably condemns it.
We will not attempt to discuss whether war is ever just; but who does not think his own cause just? Among such great and changing vicissitudes of human events, among so many treaties and agreements which are now entered into, now rescinded, who can lack a pretext—if there is any real excuse—for going to war? … even if there are some [wars] which might be called “just,” yet as human affairs are now, I know not whether there could be found any of this sort—that is, the motive for which was not ambition, wrath, ferocity, lust, or greed. (Chap. 11 [trans. Born])
This is as close to pacifism as any writer had ever come, and probably as close as anyone could dare in the sixteenth century. But Erasmus could not challenge the assumptions of the just war doctrine. He does not deny the vindicative purpose of war, and though his language may suggest that wars should only be fought in self-defense, he does not explicitly say so. In the end, he can only urge the prince to examine his conscience carefully before going to war. He probably foresaw how much restraint that would place on the conduct of the emperor Charles V.
The Renaissance Just War Doctrine
All the critiques of the just war described here may be called reactions to the several crises that transformed European interstate relations in the early sixteenth century. Machiavelli and Erasmus were reacting, in opposite ways, to the new destructiveness of Renaissance warfare; Sepulveda, to the discovery and conquest of the New World; the holy war preachers, to the Reformation and the wars of religion. But the just war tradition survived all these attacks. It remained the central doctrine of European thought about interstate relations. In the early sixteenth century, the doctrine was systematized and revised by Catholic theologians, particularly by the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vittoria, to take account of the new developments I have sketched. What emerged was a doctrine less biblical and theological, more secularized, based more on natural than on divine law. The idea of holy war was now emphatically rejected. Vittoria denied that even the Old Testament wars had been ordered by God for religious purposes: He claimed that the wars of the Jews had been ordinary just wars, fought because heathens had refused them right of passage or committed other offenses recognized as just causes for war by the law of nature or the law of nations, still regarded as much the same thing. Warfare had to be explained in Aristotelian terms as an act arising from the nature of the human community. But one set of Aristotelian terms that Vittoria rejected just as emphatically as holy war was that of natural slavery: All human communities were equal, all were subject to the laws of nature and of nations in warfare. Those laws declared the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello. The distinction between just and unjust war was vigorously reasserted against both Erasmus and Machiavelli; and though their subversive influence continued to allure some, the principles summarized here commanded general assent in faculties of theology and law throughout Catholic and Protestant Europe.
The Early Modern Synthesis
I cannot attempt here to trace the entire history of the classical tradition, but it seems useful to continue this story a stage further. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the western European elite achieved widespread agreement on principles of warfare and interstate relations. There emerged what may be described as an early modern intellectual synthesis, comparable to the late medieval synthesis, whose influence lasted into the nineteenth century. It was a combination of the just war doctrine and Machiavellianism, a dialectic between humanity and necessity, all of it secularized and based upon the classical authors.6
In 1589 Giovanni Botero published a treatise called Ragione di Stato, which popularized this phrase in European languages. He tried to make Machiavelli, heretofore regarded throughout Europe as a diabolical villain, respectable and compatible with Christian values by distinguishing between a good and a bad type of raison d’état. The bad kind, which he blamed on Machiavelli, was exercised by tyrants for selfish motives; the good kind, which he preferred to associate with Tacitus to give it classical dignity, was used by monarchs for the good of their people. Political realism thus became one of the prerogatives of absolute monarchy. The civic militarism of Machiavelli was also adapted to absolute monarchy: Machiavelli’s preference for republics went unmentioned, but there was much emphasis on the value of war for promoting unity and virtue within a kingdom, and princes were advised to recruit and train disciplined and loyal national armies. Botero was widely translated and imitated, and his recommendations soon became commonplaces.
Botero and his school had suggested the outlines of a synthesis that might embrace everything that seemed useful in the Western tradition. The work was completed mostly by northern, humanistically trained jurists—the Frenchman Jean Bodin, the Fleming Justus Lipsius, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius. The most influential contribution was perhaps Lipsius’s Politics (1589), a collection of maxims from classical authors and anecdotes from ancient history intended as a commonplace book for princes. The doctrine of just war as systematized by sixteenth-century theology, the sanitized Machiavellianism or “Tacitism” then being popularized by Botero, and the need for national armies based on disciplined infantry—all were reiterated by Lipsius, supported with abundant classical references, and made to seem compatible with absolute monarchy. Like Machiavelli, Lipsius advised the prince to be both lion and fox. He insisted that the prince should never go to war without just cause and should keep faith with other princes; but the absolute sovereignty of the prince and his right to declare war in what he saw to be his own interest were taken for granted. Furthermore, the prince could practice deceit for the good of the realm. Lipsius even found a good word to say for Machiavelli, calling him “the Italian fault-writer (who poor soule is layde at of all hands)” (.Politics 4.13, trans. William Jones [London, 1594]). The prince, Lipsius maintained, should keep up an active diplomacy and meddle in the affairs of his neighbors—“trouble others, rather than undo thyself” (4.9). He should recruit and train a disciplined, patriotic national army consisting largely of infantry. Lipsius did recommend a cautious brand of Machiavellianism, for he was hesitant about the strategy of decisive battle and found much in his classical sources that favored Fabius over Caesar; it was obvious by his time that gunpowder created many more problems for the offensive than Machiavelli had foreseen. Lipsius was suspicious of preventive strikes and saw the fallacy in Cicero’s justification for Roman imperialism:
And this [the traditional just cause] is right and lawful defence: herein onely do thou persist, and neyther move hand nor foote under this couler and pretext, to seaze upon other men’s goods; which the flowre of Romane eloquence doth confesse the Romaines them selves have done, when he sayth “Our Nation in defending our confederates are become Lords of the whole earth.” I allow it not, neither do thou follow their example. (5.3 [trans. Jones])
Nevertheless, his concept of “right and lawful defence” is still vindicative and entirely in the hands of the prince.
Lipsius’s Politics became the bible of princely humanism. In 1625, Hugo Grotius presented substantially the same ideas fortified with more classical citations in The Laws of War and Peace, which became the universal authority in the Western world on the laws of warfare and diplomacy. Little was added to it during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, the neoclassical synthesis summarized herein survived essentially intact through that entire period, though thinkers of the Enlightenment propagated an increasingly critical attitude toward princes and their just wars and often preferred to say that the laws of war were based upon concepts like “humanity” or “civilization” rather than “nature.”
Notes
1. Felix Gilbert, “Machiavelli: The Renaissance of the Art of War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, ed. E. M. Earle (Princeton, 1943), 3-25 (reprinted in rev. ed., Peter Paret, 1986); Neal Wood, introduction to The Art of War (New York, 1965); Michael Mallet, “The Theory and Practice of Warfare in Machiavelli’s Republic,” and other papers in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge, 1990).
2. Peter Burke, “A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450-1700,” History and Theory 5 (1966), 135-152.
3. Quoted in Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Baltimore, 1965), 251.
4. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500—c. 1800 (New Haven, 1995). Only in Spain was there any prolonged controversy over the legitimacy of conquest. The English and French in North America cultivated a myth that they had settled an almost vacant continent with the consent of the natives. J. H. Parry, The Spanish Theory of Empire in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1940); Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study of Race Prejudice in the Modern World (London, 1959).
5. Ronald Musto, The Catholic Peace Tradition (Maryknoll, N. Y., 1986); R. P. Adams, The Better Part of Valor: More, Erasmus, Colet, and Vives on Humanism, War.; and Peace (Seattle, 1962).
6. On the school of Botero, Friedrich Meinecke’s Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven, 1957); on the school of Lipsius, Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, 1982); and on the revival of Tacitus, Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, ed. T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman (Princeton, 1993).