Strangely enough, no one has noticed in the life of Niccolò Machiavelli a pattern of engagement with Franciscans. Machiavelli’s writings mark a significant shift in the development of Western ideas concerning happiness. It helps us better to understand this shift if we realize that an important part of what Machiavelli proposed was developed in opposition to teachings that were emphasized two centuries earlier by St. Francis of Assisi and that remained influential in Machiavelli’s own day.
On Beatings
We can perhaps best illustrate the manner in which Machiavelli responded to the poverello from Assisi by looking at a dramatic passage in the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, a popular collection of stories concerning Francis that was composed in the late fourteenth century and circulated widely in Machiavelli’s time – as it still does today. The author of the Little Flowers writes,
One day in winter, as St Francis was going with Brother Leo from Perugia to St Mary of the Angels, and was suffering greatly from the cold, he called to Brother Leo, who was walking on before him, and said to him: ‘Brother Leo, if it were to please God that the Friars Minor should give, in all lands, a great example of holiness and edification, write down, and note carefully, that this would not be perfect joy (letizia)’.
A little further on, St Francis called to him a second time: ‘O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor were to make the lame to walk, if they should make straight the crooked, chase away demons, give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and, what is even a far greater work, if they should raise the dead after four days, write that this would not be perfect joy’.
Shortly after, he cried out again: ‘O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor knew all languages; if they were versed in all science; if they could explain all Scripture; if they had the gift of prophecy, and could reveal, not only all future things, but likewise the secrets of all consciences and all souls, write that this would not be perfect joy’.
After proceeding a few steps farther, he cried out again with a loud voice: ‘O Brother Leo, thou little lamb of God! if the Friars Minor could speak with the tongues of angels; if they could explain the course of the stars; if they knew the virtues of all plants; if all the treasures of the earth were revealed to them; if they were acquainted with the various qualities of all birds, of all fish, of all animals, of men, of trees, of stones, of roots, and of waters – write that this would not be perfect joy’.
Shortly after, he cried out again: ‘O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor had the gift of preaching so as to convert all infidels to the faith of Christ, write that this would not be perfect joy’.
Now when this manner of discourse had lasted for the space of two miles, Brother Leo wondered much within himself; and, questioning the saint, he said: ‘Father, I pray thee teach me wherein is perfect joy’.
St Francis answered: ‘If, when we shall arrive at St Mary of the Angels, all drenched with rain and trembling with cold, all covered with mud and exhausted from hunger; if, when we knock at the convent-gate, the porter should come angrily and ask us who we are; if, after we have told him, “We are two of the brethren”, he should answer angrily, “What ye say is not the truth; ye are but two impostors going about to deceive the world, and take away the alms of the poor; begone I say”; if then he refuse to open to us, and leave us outside, exposed to the snow and rain, suffering from cold and hunger till nightfall – then, if we accept such injustice, such cruelty and such contempt with patience, without being ruffled and without murmuring, […] write down, O Brother Leo, that this is perfect joy. And if we knock again, and the porter come out in anger to drive us away with oaths and blows, as if we were vile impostors, saying, “Begone, miserable robbers! […] for here you shall neither eat nor sleep!” – and if we accept all this with patience, with joy, and with charity, O Brother Leo, write that this indeed is perfect joy. And if, urged by cold and hunger, we knock again, calling to the porter and entreating him with many tears to open to us and give us shelter, for the love of God, and if he come out more angry than before, exclaiming, “These are but importunate rascals, I will deal with them as they deserve”; and taking a knotted stick, he seize us by the hood, throwing us on the ground, rolling us in the snow, and shall beat and wound us with the knots in the stick – if we bear all these injuries with patience and joy, thinking of the sufferings of our Blessed Lord […], write, O Brother Leo, that here, finally, is perfect joy’. (Little Flowers, ch. 8)
Francis’s discovery of perfect joy in being beaten by the porter who ought to have welcomed him could not be further removed from what one encounters in the writings of Machiavelli, who thought administering beatings was preferable to receiving them. Thus in the last chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli lamented that Italy was ‘beaten, despoiled, torn, pillaged and [had] suffered ruin of every sort’. In the same work’s penultimate chapter he urged, infamously, that the prince take charge of his own destiny by treating Fortune like ‘a lady’, since ‘it is necessary, if one wants to have it off with her, to strike her and to toss her down’ (Machiavelli 2016, 118, 117). In his Discourses on Livy (II.2) Machiavelli compared Christianity with the religion of the ancient Romans and offered his most considered criticism of the former:
Our religion glorified humble and contemplative men more than active ones. It posited the highest good in humility, poverty, and contempt of things human […] And although our religion requests you to have fortitude, it wants you to be more ready to suffer than to do something strong. And so this manner of life appears to have rendered our world weak, and given it in prey to criminal men, who are able to manipulate it safely, since most men, in order to leave it for Heaven, think rather how to endure the world’s beatings than how to avenge them. (Machiavelli 1997, 333–34, my translation)
The root target of Machiavelli’s critique was of course the biblical injunction (Matthew 5:36):
Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’, but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
But more specifically, and more immediate to him, he surely had in mind the religious confraternities of his own day, encouraged by the Franciscans and the Dominicans, prominent in Florence and throughout Western Christendom, in which flagellants regularly whipped one another till they bled in imitation of the suffering of Christ (Henderson 1994). Machiavelli, as we shall see, was looking for a better way of securing happiness.
The Sceptical Machiavelli
The discovery of a Franciscan influence on Machiavelli – a negative influence to be sure – arrives in the context of a controversy of recent decades concerning Machiavelli’s views on Christianity. The claim that Machiavelli was a believer has been advanced in recent years by writers influenced by the assertion of the great Annaliste historian Lucien Febvre that it was not in the ‘mental toolkit’ (outillage mental) of a sixteenth-century European to be an atheist (de Grazia 1989; Viroli 2010; cf. Febvre 1947, 157). But a judicious reading of Machiavelli’s writing on Christianity – and of what he also wrote concerning paganism, Judaism and Islam – confirms the older view that Machiavelli was sceptical of revealed religion (Brown 2010, 68–87). While he was interested in religion, he approached it from a distant and ‘anthropological’ perspective that distinguished him from other merely anti-clerical writers (Najemy 1999; Brown 2010, 68–87).
In Discourses (III.2) Machiavelli discusses with a certain admiration the founders of the two mendicant orders, Saints Francis and Dominic, as men who returned Christianity to its original principles:
[A]s for religious sects, one sees again that these renewals are necessary from the example of our own religion, which, if it had not been pulled back toward its beginnings by Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, would have completely died out; for these men, with their poverty and the example of the life of Christ, restored it to the minds of men, where it had died out; and their new orders were so powerful that they are the reason that the dishonesty of the prelates and the heads of the religion did not ruin it. (Machiavelli 1997, 419, my translation)
The passage has sometimes been cited as evidence that Machiavelli was a ‘reformer’ who, on the model of these saints, wanted to take the church back to its origins (de Grazia 1989). The mention of Jesus – the only one to appear in Machiavelli’s formal writings, and strangely not listed in the indexes to two major Italian editions of his works (Machiavelli 1971, 1997) – is in line with a major Franciscan text of the late fourteenth century: the Book of Conformities (between Francis and Christ), written by Bartholomew of Pisa, which was widely diffused by multiple printings in the second half of the fifteenth century (Vauchez 2012, 208). Yet the remainder of the passage wickedly undercuts the deceptive praise of the first part:
Since [the friars] still live without property, and since they have such credit among the people as confessors, and since in their preaching they give them to understand that it is evil to speak evil of evil, and that it is well to live in obedience to the prelates, and, if these err, to let them be punished by God. And thus the prelates are as bad as can be, for they do not fear the punishment [i.e. damnation] that they cannot see and in which do not believe. It was such a renewal, therefore, that maintained and maintains our religion. (Machiavelli 1997, 419, my translation)
Thus, while Francis and Dominic were successful in restoring the faith to its first principles, the very principles constituted an invitation to corruption and abuse.
What we know of Machiavelli’s private life is consistent with the idea that he scoffed at religion to a degree unusual among his contemporaries. Thus a chancery colleague, in a humorous letter, jabbed at Machiavelli that, ‘you do not baptize’ – and the baptisms of his children that we know about were arranged by his wife and family members. Machiavelli’s good friend Francesco Vettori kidded him as someone who skipped mass; and Machiavelli, in a letter soon after written to Vettori described himself as not liking to listen to sermons. His two surviving testaments were drawn up in the chancery and the Merchants Court, not in a church, and they did not make the typical bequest of a gift for masses to be said for his soul, although they stipulated that his body should be buried with his ancestors in the church of Santa Croce. When he was on an embassy to the Friars Minor and the Florentine Wool Guild asked him to secure a Lenten preacher, another friend, Francesco Guicciardini, wrote that this was like sending a flaming homosexual to search for a beautiful bride for a friend (Machiavelli 1996a, 32, 91, 261, 267, 335). A small oration that Machiavelli composed for one religious confraternity (probably a confraternity of flagellants), titled An Exhortation to Penance, has sometimes been read as evidence of a sincere spirituality, but such things were often written for hire, and Machiavelli also wrote a salacious Epicurean satire on confraternities (Cutinelli-Rèndina 279–84). The Florentine Secretary’s reputation for impiety only increased after his death, thanks in part to a funny ‘Dream’ he related on his deathbed to his friends: shown first the suffering, ill-fed and noisome saints of the Church who were going to Heaven, and then the pagan statesmen of Antiquity residing in Hell, Machiavelli opted to join the latter (Sasso 1987).
The English Cardinal Reginald Pole, who visited Florence and knew some of Machiavelli’s friends and relatives, denounced him in fiery language as
a certain Florentine, entirely unworthy to have been born in that noble city […] [H]e wrote things which stink of Satan’s every wickedness. Among other works he composed The Prince (for this is the title he has given to one of his books), in which he portrays for us such a prince that, if Satan were to reign in the flesh, and if he were to have a son to whom he bequeathed sovereignty after his death, he would give him no other instructions than the ones found in this book. (Kraye 1997, 2:275)
It was to combat condemnations like this that members of Machiavelli’s immediate family forged a letter that purported to show that their late relative had received Christian last rites from a priest: one ‘Fra Matteo’ who has never been identified. The fact of the forgery might be thought to indicate that there was no last sacrament, but an independent account affirms that Machiavelli received last rites from a different priest, a ‘Frate Andrea Alamanni’. Since this Brother Andrea, unlike Brother Matthew, is identifiable in contemporary Florentine documents, it is indeed possible – and more likely – that Machiavelli received absolution from Andrea. Still, in all probability, the words and blessing meant more to Machiavelli’s family than to him (Procacci 1995, 423–31).
A ‘Franciscan’ Family
Although Machiavelli was sceptical concerning revealed Christianity, he was nonetheless engaged with ecclesiastical matters on a practical level to a degree that scholars have been slow to recognize. One recent study drew attention to a network of priestly benefices in rural Tuscany over which the Machiavelli family held patronage rights and it concluded on partial evidence that Niccolò was indifferent towards them (Brucker 2010). But a subsequent search in the archives for more complete documentation revealed that Niccolò himself, on behalf of his family, was the one who managed the appointment of the priests in these rural churches, employing sometimes complex manoeuvres to overcome prohibitions under canon law (Connell 2013). Property and family interest were at stake in these matters, however, not salvation.
An even more interesting result is the realization that Machiavelli was raised in a family with a traditional bond to the order of the Friars Minor – the conventual Franciscans. Much has been written concerning Machiavelli’s hostility (tinged with respect) towards the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, the author of Florence’s ‘bonfires of the vanities’ (Brown 1988, Colish 1999). The hostility was repaid, so that long after Savonarola’s demise and down to his own death Savonarola’s followers treated him as a persona non grata (Machiavelli 1996, 192–93; Busini 1860, 84). But the Franciscans were Savonarola’s most vocal enemies, and Machiavelli’s connection with them – one imagines it as a relationship of amiable disagreement – has so far gone unnoticed.
In the fourteenth century the Machiavelli family constructed a funeral chapel in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce. The mendicant orders, like the confraternities, attracted followers from all parts of the city, so there was nothing unusual in the fact that the family lived across the River Arno in the quarter of Santo Spirito, rather than the Santa Croce quarter. The chapel, later sold to the Salviati family, was where Machiavelli’s father Bernardo was buried in 1500, and where Niccolò himself was buried after his death in 1527 (Atkinson 2002, 64–65; Cambiagi 129).
We know from the diary kept by Bernardo that Santa Croce played an important role in the life of the family. Bernardo borrowed (and returned) books from Santa Croce’s substantial library. And in March 1480, during Lent, Bernardo sent the friars a half-barrel (22 litres) of wine (Machiavelli 1954, 106). Twice Bernardo had his will drawn up at the church: in 1477 and 1483 (Machiavelli 1954, 51–52, 186). Both wills were witnessed by the church’s librarian, a Franciscan professor of theology, maestro Antonio di Papi di Amerigo de’ Medici (a distant cousin of the ruling Medici family), who in 1484 became bishop of the small diocese of Marsia in Abruzzo. The second of these wills, whose text has been recovered, was witnessed by six other friars, in addition to Antonio, and the will provided that on Bernardo’s death one florin each should be given to the professor and the other six friars so that they might pray for his soul. In the event that Bernardo died without heirs, perhaps because the Franciscans were prohibited from accepting property, he appointed as substitute heir the Florentine Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, with the stipulation that the Hospital provide the Santa Croce Franciscans every August 24 staia (approximately 16 bushels) of wheat, and every October 10 barrels (approximately 450 litres) of wine (Atkinson, 64–65, 164–66). After Bernardo’s death Niccolò and his brother made regular payments to the friars at Santa Croce for masses to be said in Bernardo’s memory, although the payments ceased in 1513 after Niccolò lost his job in the Florentine chancery post (Brown 2010, 80–81; Machiavelli 1996, 110–11).
Turning to Niccolò’s correspondence it is again possible to follow a certain ‘Franciscan’ thread. A letter of 1513 to Vettori, for instance, describes the preaching of the hermit Francesco da Montepulciano:
In this city of ours – a magnet for all the world’s pitchmen – there is a friar of Saint Francis who is half hermit and who, to increase his standing as a preacher, professes to be a prophet; and yesterday morning in Santa Croce, where he preaches, he said ‘many things great and wonderful’ […] Our city would go up in flames and be sacked, the churches would be abandoned and would crumble, the priests dispersed, and we would have to do without divine services for three years […] That for eighteen years there has been a devil in a human body – and he has said mass. That well over two million devils were unleashed in order to supervise the above-mentioned activities. These activities demoralized me so much yesterday that I was supposed to go this morning to see La Riccia [a favorite prostitute], but I did not go. (Machiavelli 1996, 267)
The Dominican Savonarola had been described with real venom in a letter of Machiavelli’s written in 1498, but the mentions of Franciscans in these letters portray them with humorous resignation.
The 1521 mission to the Friars Minor in Carpi, remembered for the side-splitting letters that Machiavelli exchanged with Guicciardini, the governor of nearby Modena, was more important than is generally assumed. The jokes at the expense of the friars have been read correctly as evidence of Machiavelli’s irreligion, as has Guicciardini’s jibe, already noted, that asking Machiavelli to find a preacher was like sending the homosexual ‘Pachierotto’ on a bride-quest (Rebhorn 1983). But the purpose of the embassy was actually of some importance. The general chapter meeting of the Friars Minor offered an opportunity for Florence to argue for the creation of a separate Tuscan chapter of the Friars Minor. This was in accordance with a series of attempts by Florence, stretching back to the early fifteenth century, to establish ecclesiastical jurisdictions that coincided with its territorial state (Machiavelli 1964, 3:1396–403). One of the sticking points of the controversy over Savonarola 25 years earlier had been the attempt by Pope Alexander VI to rein in the Florentine Dominicans by uniting them with the Dominicans of Lombardy. The fact that the government sent Machiavelli on this mission to the Franciscans shows that the Florentines in charge believed, whatever his personal views, that their man was trusted by the Franciscans. That the Wool Guild then commissioned Machiavelli while he was in Carpi to hire one of these friars as a Lenten preacher further confirms that Machiavelli was considered someone in the good graces of the Friars Minor. Four years later, in 1525, Machiavelli was asked by a friar to write him a recommendation letter for a preaching post in Modena. A Florentine friend, ‘who knew your feelings about friars very well’, received the letter and doubted its sincerity, but the recommendation appears to have been genuine (Machiavelli 1996, 365).
Machiavelli’s familiarity and his easy relations with the Franciscans suggest a possible explanation for the appearance of the name ‘Fra Matteo’ in the forged letter about Machiavelli’s last rites that was mentioned above. To date no one has suggested an identity for this Fra Matteo who was supposedly at Machiavelli’s deathbed. But there was one Franciscan friar active in north-central Italy in the last decade of Machiavelli’s life, whose name, when the letter was forged several decades after Machiavelli died in 1527, would have gone a long way towards cleansing Machiavelli’s reputation by assuring contemporaries that, contrary to Machiavelli’s ‘Dream’, his soul had not gone to Hell but was presumably in Purgatory (and thereby Heaven-bound). Fra Matteo da Bascio, the co-founder and first Superior General of the Friars Minor Capuchins, joined the Friars Minor in 1512 at the age of 17 (Gotor 2008). He earned a reputation in the Apennines of the Marche on account of his apocalyptic preaching, and he allegedly won the attention of Pope Leo X. In 1525, Pope Clement VII (then Machiavelli’s employer) gave Fra Matteo permission to adopt a hooded habit modelled on the one worn by St. Francis and to preach independently of a friary. Matteo attracted followers and in 1528 a bull of Clement’s established the Capuchins as a new branch of the Friars Minor. In 1527 Matteo was active at Fabriano and it is improbable that he was in Florence when Machiavelli died in June of that year. Did Machiavelli meet Fra Matteo earlier? There is no way to confirm it, although it is possible. From the perspective of the forgers what will have mattered was Fra Matteo’s reputation as a holy man, a reputation that was substantial by the time the letter was forged. After his death in 1552, in order to promote his canonization, the Franciscans undertook an examination of the miracles alleged to have occurred at his tomb, although the process was blocked by persons close to the Inquisition.
The possible presence in Machiavelli’s biography of Franciscans such as these normally would be of little general interest but for the fact that on a crucial point in his formal writings Machiavelli appears to respond directly to the teachings of the saint from Assisi. For where St. Francis embraced poverty, Machiavelli endorsed acquisitiveness.
The Pursuit of Happiness
There is a shorthand way of explaining Machiavelli’s major contribution to the history of political thought. It runs something like this. Machiavelli expressed a dim view of human nature. For Machiavelli, people are greedy, untrustworthy (which is to say they lie) and cruel (Machiavelli 2016, 89, 92, 113). Unlike the ancients, who thought human beings would become better – more virtuous – under certain ideal regimes, Machiavelli believed striving towards an ideal is unrealistic, since it leaves a ruler and/or a people vulnerable to corruption from within and to defeat by external foes. Christianity, which projected its idealism into the afterlife while requiring virtuous behaviour in this life, was if anything more susceptible to internal corruption and to weakness in the face of enemies. In accepting the nature of mankind as sinful or ‘fallen’, Machiavelli came close to agreeing with his contemporary Martin Luther.
But consider how Machiavelli differed from Luther. Luther’s goal remained salvation in an afterlife; and he believed mankind’s sinfulness could be expunged through God’s intervention. Machiavelli, on the other hand, abandoned thought of salvation and attempted to work with human nature as it exists in this world. He supposed worst-case scenarios for human behaviour – but in order to build something positive and enduring. Here, really, is where the Enlightenment project in political thought begins. We can see this by examining the qualities of greed, untrustworthiness and cruelty.
Suppose, following Machiavelli, we accept that by nature people are greedy, but rather than prohibiting greed we allow them to be greedy, and in doing so call greed by the nobler-sounding and broader term ‘the pursuit of happiness’. If private property is guaranteed, so that one person’s greed doesn’t interfere with another’s, the result may be palatable, beneficial even.
People are untrustworthy. They change their minds, and, worse, they lie. But suppose we let them lie. Suppose we even give them a right to lie – although not on their tax returns or in a court of law – but we include it within the ‘freedom of speech’. Suddenly it doesn’t sound quite so awful.
As for cruelty, it is a bad thing for sure. People feel guilty about it. But there is a problem in that one person’s cruelty may seem another person’s justice. Moreover, the standard for what is acceptable punishment by the state has a way of changing over time. How about if the state abolishes ‘cruelty’, but leaves its definition open, so that it can change over time and according to circumstances? The extreme suffering of many, although not all – like the guilty feelings of many, although not all – will be relieved.
Machiavelli did not come up with these particular solutions, which were developed over the course of several hundred years, but he was the first to show the way. Most striking was his endorsement of ‘acquisition’, which, among the ways in which his thought anticipates modern thinking about capitalism, is certainly the most important (cf. Hirschmann 1977), and it is here that Machiavelli may be contrasted most strikingly with St. Francis.
Francis’s powerful commitment to poverty came at a time of increasing wealth due to commerce in the north Italian communes (Little 1978). Although doctrinal praise of poverty remained dominant in the two centuries that lay between Francis and Machiavelli, there were repeated attempts by preachers, theologians and humanists to justify the accumulation of wealth. The principal thrust of these efforts involves the promotion as a moral virtue of ‘magnificence’. The man who accumulated wealth, it was argued, was justified in doing, since it was he who could generously adorn his city with outstanding buildings, both public and private, with churches, and with other things as well (Howard 2012). It was Machiavelli who, shunning discussions of ‘virtue’ in this regard, argued simply that it should be accepted as natural for people to want to possess things (Connell 2001).
The idea that there is an ongoing argument with St. Francis throughout Machiavelli’s writings is captured nicely in the following juxtaposition. Machiavelli wrote famously in The Prince that
the principal foundations that all states must have […] are good laws and good arms. (Machiavelli 2016, 74)
Although the phrase is a topos probably derived from the preface of Justinian’s Institutes, it stands in perfect opposition to a discussion by Francis of arms and laws that appears in the Legend of the Three Companions. When Francis established his community at the Church of the Portiuncula, Bishop Guido of Assisi, who had been very supportive, urged Francis and his followers to abandon the principle of begging their livelihood and accepting no possessions, since he thought it was too severe. But St. Francis replied:
My Lord, if we possessed anything we should need arms to defend it. From possession spring lawsuits and disputes, both of which are opposed to the love of God and man. Therefore we wish to possess nothing in this world. (IX.35)
Not so Machiavelli, however, who declared (again in The Prince),
It is a thing truly very natural and ordinary to desire to acquire. When men who do it who are capable, they always will be praised or not criticized. But when they are not capable and want to do it anyway, here is the error and the blame. (Machiavelli 2016, 47)
The endorsement of acquisition is direct, without even an attempt at theological justification – not to mention the sort of psycho-theological double-reverse play that Max Weber identified as lying at the root of modern capitalism.
Machiavelli’s word for ‘happiness’, appearing throughout his writings, was felicità. The word, just as in its Latin form, felicitas, involves a certain element of chance or fortune. The happy person (Italian: felice; Latin: felix) is considered a ‘lucky’ person. Something similar is taking place in English, where the hap- in ‘happy’ is related to the -hap- in ‘perhaps’. Machiavelli all the same believed that there were ways of managing chance or ‘Fortune’ – not only by striking her and tossing her down (as above), but also by building ‘dikes and embankments’ so that when she becomes a raging river she can be safely channelled or diverted so as to do no harm (Machiavelli 2016, 115). Achieving happiness, for Machiavelli, involves a combination of effort and luck.
Interestingly, felicitas and felicità are not prominent in the early writings about St. Francis. A word that appears repeatedly, as in the quote with which this essay, is the somewhat different laetitia (Latin) or letizia (Italian), best translated as ‘joy’. Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations, wrote that laetitia ‘is said to be a certain exultation of the soul’ (4.7.14), and this suits Francis’s meaning quite well.
Again interestingly, Francis’s word letizia is not a presence in Machiavelli’s writings. Machiavelli joked about his soul. Francis did not. Francis’s ‘joy’ is a triumph of the soul over the body. Machiavelli’s ‘happiness’ is an affair of the body, experienced through the body’s senses. Machiavelli’s ‘happiness’ arrives with the satisfaction of desires, not with liberation from them.
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