CHAPTER V

THE MEDICEAN RESTORATION

Guicciardini and the Lesser Ottimati, 1512-1516

[I]

IT HAS BEEN THE ARGUMENT of this study so far that late medieval thought was limited by an epistemology of the particular event, decision, institution, or tradition, which defined the means which men at that time believed themselves to possess of rendering intelligible secular phenomena as they existed in time. So sharply limited were these means that it was possible to feel that the temporal flux evaded men’s conceptual control: that it was under the dominion of an inscrutable power, which manifested itself as providence to men of faith and as fortune to men of none. After the advent of civic humanism, it was possible in addition for the individual to feel that only as citizen, as political animal involved in a vivere civile with his fellows, could he fulfill his nature, achieve virtue, and find his world rational; while at the same time it might be that his conceptual means of understanding the particular and controlling the temporal, on which his ability to function as a citizen depended, had not increased to a degree commensurate with the new demands made upon them. The secret of Savonarola—scholastic, prophet, and citizen in that order—seems to be that he felt that the civic life involved a degree of virtue which could only be given by grace, and consequently that it could be achieved only in an eschatological context of prophecies fulfilled and the world renewed. His failure therefore administered a traumatic shock to the ideological structure of Florentine life, one felt by both the simple and the sophisticated.

I was present when this protocol was read [wrote the diarist Landucci of the confession to false prophecy extorted from Savonarola in 1498] and I marvelled, feeling utterly dumbfounded with surprise. My heart was grieved to see such an edifice fall to the ground on account of having been founded on a lie. Florence had been expecting a new Jerusalem, from which would issue just laws and splendour and an example of righteous life, and to see the renovation of the church, the conversion of unbelievers and the consolation of the righteous; and I felt that everything was exactly contrary, and had to resign myself with the thought: In voluntate tua Domine omnia sunt posita.1

How the more sophisticated might react we shall see when we examine the role of Savonarola in the thought of those who were theorists of civic life. It is already clear, however, that a less pious man than Landucci might feel at Savonarola’s downfall that all things were in the hand of Fortune rather than God, and that only the restitution of citizenship could save men from the reign of irrational forces. But if Savonarola had failed to ground citizenship upon prophecy, what other basis might be found? The spread of civic humanism had been accompanied by certain extensions of the accepted range of political knowledge, increasing it somewhat beyond the conceptual apparatus of reason, experience, prudence, and faith with which the tradition represented by Fortescue had confronted the challenge of the particular. In the first place it was now believed that men in the present might hold conversation with the men of antiquity and learn from them direct what they had done in the historical situations confronting them. This belief might result in a naive insistence on the repetitiveness of history, or in an increasing subtlety of historicist awareness; but in either case it seemed to speed up the citizen’s acquisition of knowledge and his ability to respond to the exigencies of policy with the appropriate decision. In the second place—and forming part of the wisdom to be learned from antiquity—there was that Aristotelian and Polybian philosophy of citizenship, of which an analysis was conducted in a previous chapter. Its strength as constitutional theory lay precisely in the fact that it was less a comparative study of institutions than a science of virtue. It offered, that is to say, a means of associating the particular virtues of men composing the political society in such a way that they would not be corrupted by their particularity but would become parts of a common pursuit of universal good; and in consequence it offered powerful incentives to consideration both of what types and categories of men, displaying what characteristic virtues and limitations, made up the political society, and of the means by which it was proposed to associate them in a common pursuit. Since this association was to be effected through the distribution of roles in decision-making, the incentive offered here pointed toward analysis of the decision-making process itself, of the roles and functions, institutionalized and otherwise, into which it might be broken down, and of the ways in which these might be distributed among the different moral types composing society. The foundations of both Greek and Renaissance political science are in ethical theory coupled with the strategy of decision.

If the Aristotelian categories could be used to help stabilize a republic in Florence, the science of virtue would have succeeded where the prophet Savonarola had failed. It would have helped to reconcile the particular with the universal, to equate political activity with the practice of virtue and to make the flow of political and particular events intelligible and justifiable. The political thought stemming from the restoration of the vivere civile in 1494 is therefore profoundly Aristotelian, and consists largely in efforts to define how the essentials of the Aristotelian politeia may be established under Florentine conditions. But it has a further dimension which accounts for a great part of its enduring fascination. The alternative to the establishment of citizenship and the republic was the empire of Fortune, that experience of reality in which nothing was stable, legitimate or rational: questa ci esalta, questa ci disface, senza pietà, senza legge o ragione.2 Both the actual history of the Florentines before and after 1494, and the conceptual apparatus which they used in trying to understand it, encouraged their thought to exist in the dialectic between these extremes: between the incorruptible serenity of the republic and the shifting empire of the uncentered wheel. Even before theorists were directly acquainted with Polybius, they were well aware that the aim of political science was to combine particular virtues in one universal good, and that until this was done particular virtues were unstable and liable to self-destruction; nor was it necessary to have read Polybius on the anakuklōsis to employ the imagery of wheels and cycles. Their thought was consequently geared to the consideration of virtues as they decayed, political systems as they dissolved, and human experience as it entered the domain of the unstable, the irrational, and the amoral. The stability of the republic, at one extreme, was not more fascinating or more familiar to them than its disruption at the other. In addition, a long-recognized crux of civic humanist thought—the particularity of the republic, its finite extent in space and time, and its consequent non-identity with the laws governing its environment—was brought into high relief by the terror of history after 1494, as Italy became increasingly dominated by non-Italian powers and both Florence and Venice seemed to have lost control over their external relations. If the republic attained serenity internally, might it not lose it if it remained prey to Fortune externally? Could there be so great a difference between the laws governing the politics of internal and external relations? If Aristotelian science provided the means of understanding the former, what was the appropriate language for exploring the latter? And if none could be found, must we not have recourse to the rhetoric of Fortune? In 1512, and again in 1527-1530, the inability of the Florentine republic to control what was happening in the power world of Italy coincided with failure to harmonize its internal civic relationships and brought about the collapse of the vivere civile and the restoration of Medicean rule—on the second occasion permanently. Each of these failures can be shown—due in part to the presence on the scene of men of genius—to have touched off a complex crisis in thought; and in each crisis it is possible to study what was happening in contemporary minds as they sought to employ the epistemology of the particular, the ethical-political categories of Aristotelian citizenship and the radically new terminology which some thinkers were developing in order to understand political behavior at its least legitimated and rational. The era of Machiavelli and Guicciardini shows us thought aimed at the constitution and stabilization of civic bodies in intimate tension with thought aimed at the understanding of rapid and unpredictable change.

[II]

From 1494 to 1512 the constitutional problems of the Florentine republic revolved around the differentiation of functions between differing political groups. In an illuminating analysis, Felix Gilbert has worked out3 both the institutional structure of this regime and the conceptual vocabulary which was employed by those actually participant in it—not only in works of theory, but in speeches, resolutions, and public documents—and the following conclusions seem to emerge. The crucial step taken after the flight of the Medici in 1494 was the adoption of what was generally described as the Venetian constitution (il governo veneziano or alla viniziana). This as we have already seen consisted at Florence practically in a Consiglio Grande, a Signoria, and a Gonfaloniere, and ideally in a perfect harmony of the many, the few, and the one, such as Venice was supposed to have achieved. Yet in practice the perceived bias of the 1494 constitution was toward the many. It was universally agreed that its most essential institution was the Consiglio, in which an indefinitely large number (though by no means all) of the citizens had the right to participate, and that the existence of the Consiglio gave the regime the character of a governo largo. When it was pointed out that the membership of the Consiglio Maggiore—the analogous institution at Venice—had been confined to a specific number of families by a decree already two centuries old, and that this surely gave Venice the character of a governo stretto, the reply most frequently given was that the closing of the Council had merely defined the Venetian citizen body, rather than confining political rights to a limited number among the citizens, and that those excluded from the Council and from citizenship were either aliens or men of base and servile occupation, by definition incapable of civic life.4 Apart from introducing us to one of the basic ambiguities in Aristotelian categorization, this dispute reveals a number of interesting things. One is the implication of such a term as governo largo as opposed to governo stretto: the former clearly does not mean a constitution which extends citizenship to all, or even to the popolo or “many” as a defined social group—the constitution of 1494 did not explicitly do that—but rather one which, by refusing to confine citizenship to an exactly defined (stretto) group among the inhabitants, acknowledges that civic participation is a good, something that men aim at, that develops men toward goodness, that it is desirable to extend to as many men as possible. Governo, the word most closely corresponding to our “constitution,” is in the Florentine vocabulary almost interchangeable with modo di vivere or simply vivere; and it is observable that it is always governo largo, not stretto, which is indicated by the phrase vivere civile. To acknowledge civic participation as a good in itself was to acknowledge that it should be widely extended; but not all men thought it a supreme or an indispensable good that as many as possible should take part in public decisions, and this problem too was discussible in Aristotelian terms.

A further noteworthy point is the determination of those who defended the governo largo to retain the Venetian paradigm by denying that Venice was a closed aristocracy. A crucial moment in the history of Florentine ideas was the decision of 1494 to introduce widespread membership in the Consiglio Grande under the form of imitating the Venetian constitution.⁵ We do not know exactly who made this decision or what was in their minds, but the consequence was that Venice continued to symbolize for most writers a constitution with an element of popular participation, one based on harmony between the participant non-elite and elite, the many, the few, and also possibly the one; and the theorists most intent on following the Venetian model are those who hold that the ottimati—that inner circle of influential Florentine families who considered themselves an elite and identified themselves with the few in the Aristotelian scheme—cannot exercise their natural function of leadership, or develop the virtues pertaining to it, unless there is a participant non-elite or many for them to lead. The ottimati, in this image or self-image of their role, are a civic aristocracy; their qualities exist and are displayed in their relations with other citizens.

It is therefore permissible to ask whether the “Venetian” formulation of the measures of 1494 was not the work of ottimati who considered that a governo largo would suit them better than a stretto. But the background to the debate over the real character of Venice, and the form of government best suited to Florence, was the increasing inability of the Consiglio Grande to govern in a way satisfactory to the ottimati as a class. At Venice the secret of government lay in the relations between the Consiglio Maggiore and the complex of magistracies and committees known collectively as the Senate,6 and it was in the elaborate machinery of the latter’s deliberations that political initiative was located. But the corresponding relationship at Florence—that between the Consiglio Grande and the group of executive committees with the Signoria as their center—worked less well, and a principal source of tension was the strong sense of a distinct identity possessed by those who ranked as ottimati. These distrusted the Consiglio as the unwieldy organ of an overweening popolo and did not find in the Signoria or the other executive bodies—whose members were appointed, usually for short terms of office, by a mixture of lottery and elective procedures in the Consiglio—an effective institutionalization of that principle of aristocracy which the ottimati considered they represented. The families to which they belonged had generally supported Medicean rule from 1434 to 1494, and they held that the Medici regime had rested on their cooperation and had fallen only when the last of Cosimo’s line had forfeited their support by mismanagement and bad manners. Thereafter, they felt themselves to have been precipitated into a dangerous experiment in cooperation with the popolo, which had been sweetened for them only by the proclamation that it was to be conducted along Venetian lines. Now, as tensions between the elite and the non-elite grew worse, and the Consiglio Grande and Signoria proved increasingly incapable of conducting the republic’s external affairs, it became more and more the complaint of the ottimati that the promise of a Venetian style of government was not being properly carried out.

Felix Gilbert has explored both the institutional and the ideological programs of the aristocratic movement against the constitution of 1494. A leading figure of the ideological counteroffensive is Bernardo Rucellai,7 a connection of the Medici by marriage who stood for all those who had supported the 1494 revolt less because they disliked Medicean rule as such than because they felt that Piero had become politically impossible. Their vision of the old regime depicted the Medici line as working with the inner ring of ottimati in the role of primus inter pares, and when bereft of the Medici they turned to the organization of direct rule by the inner circle. By 1500-1502 (it seems probable), Bernardo Rucellai was the center of a group of aristocratic intellectuals who met at the Orti Oricellari to criticize the regime by humanist means. These included the idealization of Lorenzo de’ Medici (the “Magnificent”) as the leader who had known best how to work with the aristocratic families in fellowship; the reevaluation of Venice as a closed aristocracy and the implication that such a governo stretto was best suited to Florentine needs; and systematic research into Roman history in order to ensure that the right lessons were drawn from the past for the government of affairs in the present. Gilbert sees in this program a decisive break with the style of earlier thinking and has even spoken of it as marking “the origin of modern political thought.” Previously, he argues, all proposals for institutional reform at Florence had had to be cast in the form of a return to some pattern of things existing in the city’s remote and mythical past, but since the Rucellai group were arguing for something unprecedented—a continuation of some features of an informal and dubiously legitimate regime of the preceding century—they had to adopt new techniques of argument and pioneered research into the past in search of the principles of government. The antithesis between old and new styles of argument may be a little strained, but the adoption of the Venetian paradigm in 1494 and its continuing importance are evidence that new methods of legitimation were felt to be needed. It seems clear that the Rucellai and aristocratic critique of the 1494 constitution intensified both the comparative study of Florentine, Venetian, and Roman institutions of government and the elaboration of Aristotelian categories of citizenship in the attempt to determine what the parts of a political society were and what virtues and functions were appropriate to each. The critique of the Consiglio Grande, as we shall see, rests almost wholly upon the Aristotelian concept of differentiation of function.

Bernardo Rucellai suffered a political disappointment in 1502. The agitation he had helped to promote had called, if not for the abolition of the Consiglio, at least for the transfer of most of its powers to a senate of leading citizens chosen for life; but what came about, in circumstances that remain obscure, was the erection of the chief magistracy of the republic into a Gonfalonierate for life—a post immediately filled by Machiavelli’s patron Piero Soderini. This measure, a clear imitation of the Venetian Dogeship, was presumably taken in the hope that relations between the few and the many would be stabilized by the addition of a properly functioning one, something which Savonarola had considered unsuited to Florentine conditions. Rucellai, who had worked for it initially, tells us8 that he was unable to support it since it was not accompanied by the abolition of the Consiglio out-right, but that most of his friends thought it worth trying to operate the tripartite system, even without an effective senate. A significant group of ottimati, we may conclude, were still interested in trying to find a role for aristocracy within a vivere civile, and the next phase in the development of Florentine political thought consists of an attempt to define the politeia in those terms.

The first writer of whom we require to take detailed notice is Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540), a younger contemporary of Machiavelli (1469-1527)—whose great political writings were still to come—and, in the end, by general consent (including Machiavelli’s) the only political intellect of a stature approaching his. The son of a “gray” or cautiously pro-Savonarolan optimate, this young and exceedingly ambitious man had, we know, begun about 1508 the composition of a history of Florence under Medicean rule,⁹ which is distinguished from the line of thought emanating from the Orti Oricellari by its pronounced hostility to Lorenzo. Both Felix Gilbert and Vittorio De Caprariis,¹⁰ the most valuable modern students of Guicciardini’s thought, have observed that this attitude was to be progressively modified in his later discourses and histories;¹¹ but it is important that to condemn Lorenzo with the young Guicciardini and to idealize him with Rucellai and the older Guicciardini were two sides of the same medal. The ottimati admired the Medici for collaborating with them and hated the Medici for treating them as inferiors; on which side of the divide Lorenzo was placed might be little more than a matter of family tradition or rhetorical convenience. The strength of Guicciardini’s thought and that of one or two of his fellows lay in their endeavors to grapple with the ambivalences of the optimate position and bring out the implications. As we shall see, the ultimate problem was whether the ottimati were to continue to define themselves as citizens or to accept the role of servants of something neither a vivere civile nor a governo stretto.

Little of this, however, appears in Guicciardini’s first formal treatise on politics, the so-called Discorso di Logrogno, published in the modern edition of his works under a title which means “On the right way of ordering our popular government.”12 Guicciardini wrote this in Spain, where he had gone as Florentine ambassador to Ferdinand of Aragon, and had perhaps not completed it¹³ when he heard of the fall of the Soderini regime, which was swiftly followed by the return of the Medici in 1512. The work therefore coincides with the end of the ottimati’s efforts to adapt the restored republic to their purposes, and it is significant that the last practical measure they undertook before the Medici resumed power was the installation of a senate which took over from the Consiglio Grande nearly all functions except that of electing the Gonfaloniere, no longer for life but for a one-year term.¹⁴ The problem at that stage was still one of reconciling aristocratic predominance with the principle of vivere civile; and it is of this that the Discorso di Logrogno is a theoretical treatment, which we may study as much for its conceptual vocabulary as for its concrete recommendations.

Guicciardini opens by declaring that the vivere civile has fallen into grave disorder; all men aspire indiscriminately to attain all honors and offices, and to meddle in all public affairs of whatever importance; there is no order.¹⁵ In the terms of classical theory, which Guicciardini does not use but which are never far from his mind, this is a chaos of the appetites and a general disorder of the means by which social men pursue value and virtue. If the disorder is as general as he says, and if the appetites are undergoing Platonic degeneration from the pursuit of honor to the pursuit of riches, what is needed is a correspondingly universal reform of human behavior, and we look for a definition of the intellectual means by which it is to be carried out. Here Guicciardini has recourse to analogy with other human arts, and in particular to the art of medicine, a device capable of being used in many ways and almost always worth scrutinizing carefully. If a man making pasta, he says, does not succeed with his mixture the first time, he makes a new heap of all his materials and stirs them together again; and if doctors find themselves dealing with a body afflicted by so many diseases that they cannot operate with a single goal, they attempt by medication to bring the whole body into a new disposition, which though very difficult is not impossible.16 But the analogy is shifting ground; the human body is not the same as a mound of flour and water, and the intelligence which could deal in any total manner with all the value-oriented intelligent activities making up the life of men in society would be superhuman if not divine. At once we find Guicciardini admitting that procedures such as he describes are governed by circumstances beyond their control; doctors find the reordering of the whole body easier with a young patient than with an old one, and the city of Florence is already old.¹⁷ He refuses to despair, but goes on to concede that a total reordering of the city’s health would mean doing more things than the public could be brought to accept. The city is already male abituata:¹⁸ we may gloss this as meaning that the “second nature” of use and acceptance has brought about that adjustment of human life to morally imperfect conditions which is the political equivalent of the “old Adam,” but which there is no longer (since Savonarola) any rebirth of man to burn away. If we are right in uncovering this last implication, we have brought to light the Savonarolan streak which some scholars have detected in Guicciardini; overtly, however, he says merely that we must be content to do what we can, and that if we could establish a good beginning (dare principio) in the city’s affairs, the process of time and the course of years might do more than we could ever hope for at that beginning itself.19 But he leaves it unclear what is the nature of that knowledge by which men who have not the superhuman wisdom of the legislator are enabled to make a beginning at the legislator’s task.

It is of interest that the first question which he turns to consider is that of the employment of citizen or mercenary troops. The writing of the Discorso di Logrogno coincided fairly closely with the tragic culmination of Soderini’s and Machiavelli’s attempts to defend the republic by organizing a militia, an experience which was to lead Machiavelli in later years to weave his theories of military organization more and more closely into his theories of citizenship and civic virtue; and we know that the relations of military and political structure at Rome, Venice, and elsewhere were much discussed in the Orti Oricellari both before and after 1512. Guicciardini in this Discorso shares both Machiavelli’s general mistrust of mercenaries and his specific point that you must go on providing for them after the war is over, whereas citizens can be disbanded and sent home; citizens, furthermore, are easier to replace after a defeat. He makes the further point—to prove vital in Machiavellian theory—that since citizens will fight well only if the city is in good order, to commit yourself to a citizen army is to commit yourself to good laws and una buona giustizia, something easier to ordain than to maintain, as he will demonstrate in greater detail.²⁰ But though his work is based on this commitment, it is typical of Guicciardini that he clearly recognizes the function of an army as both internal and external; it exists to expand, as well as to defend, the dominions of the republic, and in the former sphere of action there is neither law nor justice. He makes here the striking but easily misunderstood remark that political power is nothing but an act of violence committed on those subject to it, sometimes palliated by some apparent justification but only to be maintained by armed force—which must be one’s own and not another’s.21 It is clear that the words used here to denote political power (lo stato e l’imperio) refer to external power, the power of the city over those not of the city, such as the Florentines sought over the stubbornly resisting Pisans. The implication is not that the authority exercised by Florentines over Florentines is a species of violence, but rather that it is or may be the only sort of authority which is not;²² and yet there is an intimate relationship between the internal zone, where justice may obtain, and the external zone where there can be nothing but violence. A citizen army, which necessitates una buona giustizia within the city, is the best means of keeping one’s conquests, the only alternative to relying upon the power of another in the amoral world of external relationships. Through relying upon a condottiere the Venetians nearly lost their libertà.²³ The word here means, as it often does in Renaissance Italian, the city’s independence from external control; yet so closely connected are the external and internal zones that Guicciardini turns immediately²⁴ to a consideration of liberty in a context of governo di drento or the relationships between citizens.

There is no need, he says, to consider whether government by one, few, or many is ideally the best. The facts are that liberty is natural and proper to the city of Florence, that Florentines are born under it, have inherited it from their forefathers and are consequently obliged to defend it with their lives.²⁵ His language recalls Savonarola’s rejection of Thomist ideality in favor of the particular character of the Florentines which makes them the fit instruments of regeneration. It could also—given what we know of Guicciardini’s cast of mind—be read as having a conservative coloration, recalling the Burkean justification of the Revolution of 1688 on the grounds that liberty is an inherited trust which we are obliged to pass on intact, or even as an utterance of skeptical traditionalism on the lines of the famous Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna—“Sparta is your portion; make the most of this.” But in the Discorso di Logrogno, Guicciardini defines liberty in terms which, while providing him with a flexible instrument of political analysis, at the same time carry the full universalism of the Aristotelian and civic humanist tradition. Liberty, he says, consists in the ascendancy of public laws and decisions over the appetites of particular men.26 That is, it is that state in which my individual will is not subject to the will of any other identifiable individual or group; no other can bind me and carry me whither I would not. But the laws and decrees of the city can do this; in the Renaissance as in the Greek polis, public regulation of individual life could be meticulous and stringent. What matters in the unfree condition is not that I may be bound, but that I may be bound by another’s particular will, acting in pursuit of his private interest (appetito). I then approach the condition which Aristotle defined as that of the slave, the instrument by which another’s ends are achieved; ends which, incidentally, become baser as they are achieved through control of a slave, since such can only be private appetites and not the pursuit of a universal good. The latter can be pursued only through joining with one’s equals in the exercise of public authority. Slave-masters can be free only in their relations with each other, since only there is public authority to be found.

The problem of liberty, then, to solving which Florentines stand committed by their civic inheritance (which is also their nature), is that of constituting a citizen body capable of exercising public authority; the antithesis of freedom is a state of affairs wherein authority which should be public is in fact exercised by particular men. As Guicciardini develops the first implications of a definition of liberty as non-dependence upon the particular, he reveals to us the concrete significance which this theory had in the conditions of post-1494 Florence. Laws, he says, do not enforce themselves; they must be executed by magistrates; and if we are to live under laws rather than men, the first necessity is that the magistrates should not owe their authority to particular men or find their wills swayed in exercising that authority by particular men’s wishes.²⁷ There is here a very strong implicit reference to the conditions of Medicean rule before 1494, in which the heads of that family had governed the city by a technique of informally manipulating both the elections of magistrates and their subsequent exercise of their offices. It was this system about which the ottimati in 1512 still felt deeply ambivalent: on the one hand it had guaranteed them a monopoly of office, on the other hand it had made them feel that their offices were not truly theirs. They were experimenting with the republic in the hope that it would prove a better device for legitimating aristocratic ascendancy in office. This is certainly Guicciardini’s position; his bias in favor of a political elite is always explicit; but it is important to note that here, as elsewhere in his writings, there is an equally strong rejection, whether implicit or explicit, of formally closed oligarchy. He says that the magistrates must not recognize one or a few as the source of their authority, or feel constrained to govern in accord with other men’s wills, so that consequently the foundation of liberty is popular government. A small group of oligarchs—he seems to be thinking—sharing out magistracies among themselves in a smoke-filled room (as Cavalcanti had suspected was what went on), would not satisfy the essential condition of liberty, since they would always know to whom they owed their offices. If authority is to be free it must be public; if it is to be public it must be impersonal; if it is to be impersonal the group conferring it must be over a certain size. In his own words, if the foundation of liberty is popular government, at Florence the foundation of popular government is the distribution of magistracies and dignities by the Consiglio Grande.28

In another constitutional tradition, the distribution of magistracies was to be considered among the attributes of sovereignty. But here, in the Aristotelian and civic humanist mode, the distribution of magistracies by the many was intended not to endow them with a sovereign will, but to free the magistrates from dependence on anyone’s will: to free the will that allocated authority from any taint of particularity by depersonalizing and universalizing it to the point where it ceased to be a will at all, or ceased at the moment of the magistrate’s election. Yet the many in the Consiglio Grande consisted of individuals exercising their individual wills and intelligences, and the problem is to see how Guicciardini intended to convert these into members of a public body. The clue lies in the differentiation of political function. Under the 1494 constitution, membership in the Consiglio was supposed to extend to all those capable of being elected to office themselves; and Guicciardini proposes as a reform that it should be extended further, to take in a sizable number of persons not so qualified. The trouble with the present system, he says, is that every man involved in electing officeholders thinks himself capable of office and aspires to hold it. Consequently his personal ambitions and preferences interfere with his choice, and more errors are committed at this point in the political process than at any other. If the function of choosing magistrates were entrusted to those not capable of exercising magistracy themselves, they would think only of the claims of those to be elected and not of their own ambitions, since it is the natural inclination of all men to follow the good if not distracted by their particular ends.29

At this point in the civic theory of Renaissance Aristotelianism, we are well placed to observe the origins of the doctrine of the separation of powers, and to note that the foundations of that doctrine are—as they were for John Adams—ethical rather than institutional. The elective and executive functions are to be separated in order to diminish the danger of the individual’s being personally interested in the outcome of his choice for the public good, to prevent him from being judge in his own cause. The theory of the polity remains what we saw it to be earlier, a science of virtue. But Guicciardini’s analysis further presupposes assumptions which have to do with epistemology and the theory of knowledge. Persons adjudged incapable of exercising magistracy are adjudged capable of choosing those best able to exercise it; by what process of cognition do they do this? He extends his account of the Consiglio Grande’s functions from the election of magistrates to the establishment of laws, and remarks that though nobody supposes the Council capable of debating and formulating a law from the first proposal to the last, there is a question whether laws discussed and agreed upon in smaller deliberative bodies—presumably more highly qualified—should be submitted to the Council for its assent. This is an important matter, both because laws affect all men without exception and—we learn elsewhere—because they are capable of suddenly altering the form of government;30 and the decision Guicciardini reaches is that though the Consiglio Grande should not debate the laws proposed to it—this has been done already—it should have the function of giving or withholding final assent. There seem to be two sets of reasons for this. In the first place, since laws bind all it must be impossible to say that they owe their being to a few, and this can be prevented by ensuring that they have the consent of all. In the second place, ratification by the Council will ensure that no law alters the form of government or has any other pernicious effect; and to this end, though there is to be no public debate, it would be well to publish the laws proposed a few days in advance, so that the members may know what they are to decide and may have talked about them among themselves.³¹

It seems fairly clear that Guicciardini’s theory as regards both election and legislation rests upon an Aristotelian conception of decision-making by the many. Though not themselves capable of magistracy, they can recognize this capacity in others; though not themselves capable of framing or even debating a law, they are competent judges of the draft proposals of others. By excluding them from the functions they are to evaluate, the principle of impersonalization is secured; but it is still not clear what intellectual capacities they exercise in evaluation. Aristotle’s doctrine—in essence a doctrine of experience—had been that each non-elite individual knew enough of how a particular man in office, or a particular law in operation, was likely to affect him to make the sum of many such judgments a more reliable prediction of the outcome than could be reached by individual wisdom. But as we have seen in chapter 1 of this study, the collective wisdom of the severally less wise was cumulative in character, and its efficacy decreased as the complexity of the particular decision to be faced increased the speed with which it must be understood, made, and put into effect. In a system of custom, the many were asked only to decide whether their former responses should be repeated in what appeared to be a recurring situation, and their decision emerged gradually, through action and memory rather than thought, as former usages were retained or abandoned; but in the popular assembly of a city-state decisions were more highly individualized and the pressure on their time was greater—Guicciardini’s use of words like occorrere and giornalmente clearly reflects this.32 Once it became a matter of deciding whether a particular individual was fit for office, a particular law fit to be made universally binding, the many must acquire and process their data at a speed far greater than that required for the formation of custom. It is significant that Guicciardini does not seem to have dealt with this problem by ascribing to the many a prudence, or ability to predict the outcome of actions, differing from that of the few, but rather through the ethically based strategy of arguing that since the many’s decisions were undistracted by personal ambitions—and we have seen how he meant to secure that—it knew what was good more exactly than did any smaller deliberative body. At another time than that of composing the Discorso di Logrogno, but also in analysis of the constitution of 1494, he wrote two speeches³³ stating the cases for electing magistrates in the assembly either by majority vote or by casting lots, and caused the proponent of the vote—with whom his preferences lie—to say:

A man’s merits should not be judged by particular persons but by the people, which has better judgment than any of us, because it is prince and is without passion.… It knows each of us better than we know ourselves, and has no other end than to distribute things to those who are seen to deserve them.

And further, I do not mean to deny that the people sometimes votes erroneously, since it cannot always know the quality of every citizen; but I affirm that these errors are incomparably less than those committed in any other way of proceeding, and that every day they will be corrected and grow fewer, because the longer we go on in our present way the better will it be known what each man is worth, since this man’s actions can be observed today and that man’s tomorrow; and now that the people has begun to get down to business in this Council and knows that the government is its own, it will pay more attention to each man’s actions and character than ever it did before, so that every day it will become a better judge of men’s merits and will not be prevented from giving them what they deserve.³⁴

Here the perpetual assembly has taken the place of the customary community; day-to-day participation in political life has increased the speed at which relevant experience and knowledge are acquired; but still it is to be noted that popular decision is basically a matter of discerning the characters of individuals to compose a decision-making elite. The people choose men, and are praised for their ability to choose good men. The men chosen resolve on laws and policies, and the people have a final voice in accepting or rejecting their proposals. But we do not hear so much about their ability to discern good policies from bad—the most so far allowed them is the ability to know when a proposal will alter the form of government—and there is no hint whatever of their having any capacity to initiate policies, let alone reforms or innovations. They can perceive men’s characters, but not the shape of events or the structure of society.

In the Discorso di Logrogno, Guicciardini’s ideas about the moral character and powers of perception required, or likely to appear, in a decision-making elite first emerge in his consideration of the office of gonfaloniere, where the central question is whether the supreme magistrate should be appointed for a limited term or for life. The case for life appointment—which Guicciardini favors—is initially stated35 in terms of the acquisition of information and the resultant making of decisions. Because the gonfaloniere is irremovable, he will not have to worry about keeping his office or about what may happen to him when his term is up, considerations which often produce lukewarmness (freddezza) in magistrates; nothing will distract him from learning how to deal with events as they occur and how to understand the nature of the people with whom he has to deal. It is evident how easily this argument can be transposed into ethical terms: the life appointee is undistracted by private considerations both from acquiring the information and skills necessary to his office and from concerning himself exclusively with the public good. Having been appointed for life to the highest post the city has to offer, he has no motive for seeking to please particular interest groups, and very little for seeking to extend his authority beyond the limits set to it. But at this point the argument takes a new and interesting turn. The case for having an office of this kind, exalted above all private distractions and personal considerations—free even from the ancient check of having to answer for one’s tenure of office at the expiry of its term—is that citizens may lawfully aspire to a reward elevated above all others, to the point where it becomes virtually impossible to exercise it to any end except the public good. This is the moment at which Guicciardini makes the observation—often quoted as proof of his optimate bias—that all republics, without recorded exception, are and have been governed (retto) by the very few who are rendered capable of glorious deeds by the spur of ambition, the appetite for greatness, and the desire to rise to the highest pinnacle;36 and that the gonfalonierate for life seems on the whole the best means of giving this appetite lawful satisfaction.³⁷

The remarkable thing about this passage is not its elitism. The Aristotelian tradition unequivocally differentiated citizens into the many, with neither the motive nor the knowledge to look far beyond their own affairs, and the few who sought, and had the capacity to exercise, a greater share in the control of affairs; it indicated that the few would always exercise power disproportionate to their numbers, and that the problem was to devise an institutional framework—the politeia—which would prevent this disproportion from running to excess and ensure that the preponderant minority governed with an eye to the good of others beside themselves. Guicciardini is plainly no exception here: on the one hand he insists that the highly participant few can function only in the context of a less participant (but still participant) many, and on the other he is constantly proposing devices to prevent decision-makers at all three levels from being distracted by the pursuit of their private ends. His thought is formally aristocratic, but never oligarchic. His originality lies in his insistence that as the many are differentiated from the few by their capacity to judge of others’ fitness for offices they do not themselves seek, the few are differentiated from the many by their propensity to seek office; and that the virtù—a term he explicitly employs—which makes them seek it is not wisdom or goodness or any other moral quality which renders them fit for office, not even love for the city—though they must have that too—but, quite simply, ambition and the thirst for glory. Nor does he present this virtù as in any way nonmoral; on the contrary, he qualifies it with adjectives such as generosa and onesta.

Ambition was not among the Christian virtues; “by that sin fell the angels.” Guicciardini’s concern with the subject arises, so his biographers tell us, in part from a certain moral honesty; he was intensely aware of his own intense ambition and obsession with personal and family honor. But the role of ambition, honor, and the search for glory in his political theory must be further investigated. The feudal ethos of course centered upon honor, together with fidelity, and the literature of knightly ethics records many attempts to bring it into line with Christian morals; there is a lingering ambiguity in the words of Shakespeare’s Henry V: “if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.”38 The problem of civilizing the warrior ethos was no new theme in European thought. We should be careful, however, about attributing a feudal code of values to the Florentine aristocracy; the ottimati with whom Guicciardini identified himself were merchants, bankers, and jurists—not to mention politicians—and it is not clear how great an impact knightly ethics made upon them. Perhaps the true point is that honor was preeminently the virtue of the political individual, the particulare—to use (and use as he spelled it) the central and most ambiguous term of Guicciardini’s political thought. On the one hand the particulare was a deadly danger so long as he sought his private and particular good; ambition was what impelled him to do that, and the search for a position of preeminence in which one could satisfy one’s appetites was something that individuals would pursue in defiance of all laws and public morality. On the other hand, glory was public; it consisted in the recognition accorded one by one’s fellows; being pagan rather than Christian, it brought fame, rather than salvation, in and after life; and if the particulare could be made to conduct his search in a civic setting, where everyone was by definition engaged in making decisions aimed at a mutual and public good, his glory would consist in the recognition by his fellows of his preeminence in this activity. His need for glory would drive him to attempt more than his fellows and to expose himself to public scrutiny; he would be under constant examination by the few and the many, who would know him better than he knew himself; and once his honor became a matter of recognized concern for the public good, his inward concern for the ideal of purely individual integrity which the notion expresses would make him disdainful of lesser satisfactions. In these circumstances, it would prove wise to have politicized his ambition with the offer of supreme and irremovable power, so long as that power functioned in a context of incessant public scrutiny and judgment; and the one and the few would be free to acquire the knowledge and experience needed for their tasks.

But having made ambition the distinguishing characteristic of the political elite, Guicciardini knew well enough what ambition must look like if the political structure failed to discipline it. In one passage of the Discorso di Logrogno,39 he remarks that a set of arrangements which make constitutional change easy to propose, but hard to carry through, looks like an oligarchical device to keep existing groups in power; it would probably be better if such changes could be proposed only in committees difficult of access but rapidly submitted to the judgment of the many. And in the second of the two discorsi on methods of election in the Consiglio Grande, the critique of the ottimati’s oligarchic proclivities is carried further and in a new direction. Here the speaker in favor of election by lot—anciently considered a more democratic procedure than selection by voting—declares that the argument that the many necessarily choose the best man is vitiated by the presence of a hard core of ottimati who call themselves uomini da bene, consider that they have an inherited and inherent right to office, and invariably vote for one another in exclusion of those not of the inner ring; so that the only choice of strategies remaining to the non-elite is either to vote invariably against ottimato candidates—thus falsifying the whole rationale—or to abandon voting altogether in favor of sortition. He goes on to declare that the self-styled uomini da bene base their claim to elite status on the supposed superiority of their prudence, wisdom, and virtue; but in fact they occupy this status either because they have acquired or inherited wealth, or because their ancestors held high office—very often for reasons which will not bear much examination. Riches and ancestry, he adds, come one’s way by fortune; and the case against the Florentine political aristocracy is that it owes its being to fortune rather than virtue,⁴⁰ which is why, in the last analysis, it pursues private, not public ends. Guicciardini did not intend his readers to be convinced by this speech, to which he gives an unpleasant demagogic tone; we can be sure that he favored election by vote for more or less elitist reasons. But he knew the strength of the case that could be made against the Florentine elite. It was oligarchic because it was the child of fortune; and ambition, the virtue he had singled out as eminently capable of politicization, was what had made its members or their progenitors seek their fortunes. It was, at once and for the same reasons, potentially a civic aristocracy and potentially a self-seeking intelligenza—the Florentine word for clique or racket—of oligarchs. An extraordinary passage at the close of the Discorso di Logrogno bears witness to the importance which Guicciardini still attached to the systematic elimination of private satisfactions and appetites.

This is nothing less than a polemic against luxury, concluding with what is almost a Savonarolan proposal to “burn the vanities.” Luxury corrupts men; it gives them an increasing appetite for wealth and display and everything antithetical to true glory and virtue. Corruption of this sort is not new in the world; ancient writers inveigh against it, and partial remedies will not serve against an evil “so universal, so old and so deeply rooted in the minds of men.”41 It is, in short, the “old Adam” which Savonarola had hoped to burn away in the fires of spiritual reformation; but Guicciardini’s language is civic and classical where his predecessor’s was apocalyptic. To cut out the evil, he says, one would need the scalpel (coltello) of Lycurgus, who eliminated all luxury from Sparta in a day, dividing up all property and prohibiting the use of money and personal adornment. A miraculous austerity and devotion to the public good at once overcame the Spartans, and it is the glory of Lycurgus’s name that he had grazia—grace? good fortune?—to execute so durable a reform. Great philosophers were denied this, and it is no wonder that Lycurgus was thought to have had the aid of Apollo; for to reform a city is a work rather divine than human.⁴²

Reformation, to Savonarola, had borne the precisely Aristotelian meaning of the imposition of form upon matter, the restoration of matter—the inhabitants of a city were the “material cause” of its being—to pursuit of its original end, which was why he had preferred to call it rinnovazione. But as a Christian, he had seen that end as the sanctified life; the prima forma was the gift of grace, and in consequence reformation could occur only in an apocalyptic context provided by the workings of grace in history. To burn away the “second nature” established in man by the pursuit of unsanctified goods, such as the “vanities,” was a necessary part of restoration. It is of considerable significance to note Guicciardini’s transmutation of these themes into a different and less specifically Christian rhetoric. He does not spell out the language of form and matter, or point out that it is the work of virtù to impose form upon fortuna; but his legislator achieves the superhuman success of reforming a city so that his laws and its virtues last for ages. The word grazia is used in connection with his doing this; it is a divine work that brings him the reputation if not the reality of divine assistance; and he carries it out by means of a systematic elimination of the pursuit of luxury, an evil anciently rooted in the minds of men. The parallels are as important as the divergences. On the one hand, where Savonarola had seen luxuries and vanities as distracting the soul from the pursuit of grace, Guicciardini sees them as distracting the citizen from the pursuit of the public good; Lycurgus accordingly takes the place of Jeremiah, and his reformation is an act of legislation rather than a summons to repentance. But it is an act performed directly upon the moral personalities of the citizens, and it has the effect of restoring them to their natural propensity, or “first nature,” to seek the general good if not distracted by the pursuit of particular satisfactions. When we are told that men are by nature good, this is what is meant; the doctrine that men have a corrupted “second nature,” which leads them to go whoring after private satisfactions whenever the opportunity offers, makes it possible, in the appropriate rhetorical context, to add without real contradiction that men are by nature bad.43 What the legislator does is to eliminate the second nature (which is old) by a mixture of moral charisma and institutional provision, and leave the way free for the restoration of the first nature (which is primal). This is divine work even if viewed in the light of the Christian concept of grace; but since it is performed wholly in and for a civic context of political decision and institution, the appropriate rhetoric in which to describe it is that of Greco-Roman politics, where the legislator regularly appears as receiving the aid of the Hellenic gods. What should be stressed here is less the secular divergence between the Christian and civic traditions than the extent to which they found common ground in an ideal of austerity and self-denial; there were civic humanist grounds for erecting this ideal after there were monastic and before there were Calvinist grounds.

But the task that the legislator performs is miraculous, and where Savonarola had believed that miracles were at hand, Guicciardini did not. For ourselves, he adds, it is illegitimate to hope or even desire to do the legislator’s work; we must recognize ourselves for what we are, beings so far corrupted that only marginal adjustments of our moral character can be performed. If the city could be trained in the use of arms—the militia tradition emerging once more—and if magistrates could be elected for no other reason than public approbation of their good character, riches and luxuries would be less esteemed and it might even be possible to enact effective sumptuary laws to keep them permanently in check.44 But we have in essence returned to the analogy of the doctor with which the Discorso began, and can now see clearly the difference between the doctor and the cook. It would be the legislator who stirred the whole materia of the city together, in the manner of the man making pasta, and imposed form on it anew. The doctor, faced with an organism of greater complexity, assumes it to be already diseased and hopes to control the course of the malady rather than eliminate it altogether. But this means that the materia on which he operates is already inherently unstable; he is exposed to the unpredictabilities of fortune. Guicciardini’s ambivalence about designating the ottimati the class of those ambitious for honor can now be fully appreciated. On the one hand he was convinced that ambition was the quality which must be politicized and legitimized if the politeia were to have the elite it needed to take the initiative in particular decisions; on the other hand he was well aware that ambition might already have created an environment too unstable to permit of its own politicization, and might be already too corrupt to be capable of serving civic ends.

[III]

The role of ambition in determining the behavior of a civic elite remained of central concern to optimate thought in the years following the restoration of the Medici in 1512. Probably the principal fact in determining the character of the restored government was the election, in 1513, of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici as Pope Leo X. This transformed the situation by absorbing Medicean rule at Florence into a wider political context. The family had been brought back by foreign arms, brutally underlining Florentine inability to control the external environment, but when Leo X reigned in the place of Julius II he assumed the role of a leading moderator of Italian politics, one who might possibly build a system which would lessen the domination of the non-Italian powers. In addition to this and to the reflected glory which the city derived from the enthronement of a Florentine pope, his election meant that the stability of Medicean rule depended neither on foreign arms nor on the ability of the ruling family to enter into political relationships satisfactory to the major political groups within Florence, but was underwritten by the legitimacy and durability still attaching to any system of papal politics. Leo’s ascent thus gave a breathing space to the Medici and to those Florentines who had to decide whether to accept them and what terms would be exacted on either side as the price of acceptance. At the same time it removed from Florence the most able-seeming member of the family and left citizens with an unpleasant sensation of provinciality, of being no longer at the center where their fate was determined; and it made the whole Medicean system dependent, first on Leo’s tenure of life (he reigned for eight years), and second on what the junior members of his house, who held power at Florence in his absence, might attempt to do in the context of a Medicean politics no longer confined to Florentine civic relationships. To optimate thinkers, already ambivalent in their feelings about the relationships between their circle and the Medici rulers before 1494, all this presented a new set of problems. Coinciding with each fresh crisis in affairs—with the election of Leo in 1513, with the death in 1516 of Giuliano de’ Medici, who ran things for the family in Florence, with the death in 1519 of Lorenzo, his successor, who involved Florence in his attempt to capture the Duchy of Urbino—we find a recrudescence45 of optimate writings, of which the point for our purposes is their endeavor to apply Aristotelian and humanist paradigms defining the civic aristocracy to a situation which the writers recognize as unprecedented. It follows that an equal degree of interest attaches to the terms in which they endeavor to state that the situation is unprecedented and what is unprecedented about it.

Guicciardini was one of these authors, but it is characteristic of him, his class, and the whole period that we should not think of him as involved in a sort of perpetual confrontation between the Florentine civic aristocracy and the Medici denying them the power which they sought. After his return from his Spanish embassy he practiced law at Florence and observed with optimate disapproval the increasing disinclination of Giuliano and Lorenzo to share power with anyone but their intimates; at the time of Giuliano’s death in 1516, however, he accepted from the papacy the governorship of Modena and subsequently pursued under both Medici popes a career in the administration and defense of the papal territories in north-central Italy. Like the other optimate writers, and like Machiavelli, he was happy to serve the Medici if he could do so in ways consonant with his idea of himself; but at Florence that idea involved his membership in a civic aristocracy—a classic Few—whom the Medici must recognize as their peers and fellow citizens. If Giuliano and Lorenzo would not do that, he would not work with them and looked with foreboding on the future of a regime which could not adjust its relationships with the civic elite. At Modena and other papal cities, however, the issue of citizenship did not arise. As governor there, he was the lieutenant of an absent but lawful prince; in the terminology which James Harrington was to use in the next century, his empire was provincial, not domestic; and it would be legitimate to feel that he was exercising it over people so little politicized that citizenship was beyond them and subjection to monarchical authority—as Machiavelli was to observe—the only alternative. Guicciardini’s life from 1516 to 1527, therefore, affords valuable insight into the relationships of theory to practice.⁴⁶ While living as the servant of a monarchy, he thought and wrote about the role (a limited one) of aristocracy in a polity; had he remained at Florence, he would have been directly involved—as he was to be after 1527—in the dilemma of his class, the choice between insisting on an elite role in a “proportionate equality” of citizenship, or accepting the role of servants and courtiers of what was becoming increasingly a monarchy but could not be legitimized as such in Florentine terms. This is the choice with which, and with whose conceptual implications, optimate thought was increasingly concerned after 1512.

Soon after his return from Spain, and continuing the thought of the Discorso di Logrogno and the historical work he had written earlier, Guicciardini composed a short treatise “concerning the government of Florence after the restoration of the Medici in 1512.”47 This work breaks off abruptly and may well be incomplete, but contains language of much significance. If we look, to begin with, at the rhetorical exordium, we note that the familiar figures of the steersman and the doctor are present, but that of the cook-legislator is lacking. The implicit reason is stated in the second paragraph: a city is a body composed of an infinite diversity of individuals, and the accidents and difficulties that can arise in managing them are infinite likewise. Therefore the ruling virtue of steersman, doctor, and statesman alike is circumspection, prudence, diligence. This enables the steersman to hold his course and bring his ship to port; doctors employ it to apprehend the nature of the disease and all its accidents, and without it their prescriptions would be “disproportionate” to the disease and contrary to the “complexion” of the patient.⁴⁸ There is no question here of restoring the matter to its primary form; the word materia first appears in connection with the word difficile; the analogy with medicine presupposes that the body is sick and the ship in a storm. When speaking of a popular government, in which the many as well as the few were to be associated in political participation, it was appropriate to adopt a relatively sanguine note and speak in terms of the legislator and his divine power to operate on all parts of the body politic at once; but in this discorso Guicciardini was restricting himself to the point of view of the ottimati and the problem of reordering their relations with the Medici, and since they were a part only—although the most prudent and experienced part—of the whole body, it would not have been proper for them to attempt to bring to bear on the whole body qualities over and above their prudence and experience. And where in his previous work he had been able to stress the legitimate ambition of the few and the contribution which their thirst for honor might make to the perfection of the whole, the note here is correspondingly more circumspect. Good medicine may keep a sick man alive, but bad will kill him; good government may conserve that civil association and accord than which nothing is more precious and unique (singulare) in the life of man, but from bad government we may predict ruina, destruzione, esterminio.49 Even in the most Aristotelian context Guicciardini can here provide, the summum bonum is little more than the absence of the summum malum.

Further reasons for this disenchanted tone soon appear. He says—evidently on the grounds that a city is composed of an infinite diversity of humors and conditions—that it is useless to speak of government abstractly and in general; one must take into account the individual character (natura) of both the people and the area (luogo, sito) to be governed. Guicciardini is moving toward the standard characterization of the Florentines as a people unfitted by second nature and history for anything except liberty, but before doing so he lays down a set of categories which arrest the reader’s eye and profoundly affect the remainder of his argument. There is, he says, one mode of government to be exercised by a king or signore naturale, another by one whose rule is founded in violence and usurpation; one to be exercised over a city used to subjection, another over one used to govern itself and dominate others. What catches the eye is that these are, as we shall see, important organizing categories of Machiavelli’s Il Principe (there seems to be no trace of contact between the two men in 1512-1513, when this discorso and Il Principe were both being written), but that where Machiavelli employs them to isolate the “new prince”—the usurper of power over a city—as an ideal type, and to define the class of political phenomena to which that type belongs, Guicciardini, declaring that an exhaustive analysis of the field would take too long, employs them to no other purpose than to define the character and problems of the government of the restored Medici.50 He does this, of course, because he assumes himself to be closer to power and to practical questions than Machiavelli could; but at the same time, his analysis takes the form of a comparison between Medicean rule after 1434 and after 1512—it is a restatement of history—and has the effect of leaving it uncertain how far the restored Medici belong to the class of “new princes” and to what sources of stability and legitimation they may look.

The city of Florence, he proceeds, is anciently free and given to the exercise of dominion in Italy. This is due partly to its geographical location, but also to the character of its inhabitants, a restless and mobile people given to the acquisition of riches and power, and so—most important of all—addicted to concerning themselves with public business. The central fact of Florentine life is the existence of a large number of citizens accustomed to demand and exercise political participation (participazione), which has led to a built-in preference for the vivere libero e populare and to a hatred of deriving one’s political status from powerful individuals (particulari).⁵¹ Concerning this fact we know Guicciardini’s feelings to be mixed; he acknowledged widespread participation to be a prerequisite of liberty, but distrusted the actual exercise of participatory initiative by the many. Consequently, it is not surprising to find that he asserted liberty, in these terms, to be ancient and ineradicable in the Florentine personality, but did not hold it to be sacred, especially legitimate, or even an unvarying norm. It could fail from time to time. However, since 1494, and again since 1502, it had been an institutionalized norm by reason of the Consiglio Grande,52 and it was this which established an inescapable difference between the rule of the old and the restored Medici. In 1434 there was no vivere populare; the city was divided into factions and a struggle for power went on between their chiefs, so that when Cosimo de’ Medici acquired control, it did not seem that he had taken it from the popolo or universale, but “from one Messer Rinaldo degli Albizzi, one Messer Palla Strozzi, and other such particular men.” The popolo, to whom the factions had denied effective power, did not increase their political participation under Cosimo, but by the fall of the faction leaders experienced a lessening of relative deprivation. Furthermore, the Medici avoided seeming to control everything directly, but shared power with a circle of intimates, who were not their equals but nevertheless enjoyed a measure of participazione; so that even Lorenzo il Magnifico, who (Guicciardini is still implying) possessed too much power over the inner circle, acquired it piecemeal over the years.⁵³

But in 1512 none of these conditions obtain. For eighteen years the Consiglio Grande has afforded a wide measure of political participation to a large number of citizens, whose appetite for it has not left them and cannot be expected to do so. The Medici acquired power direct from the universale, and did it suddenly and brutally, so that there has been no opportunity for the latter to forget the experience of citizenship; and having many enemies and few friends, the members of the restored family are constrained to exercise power directly and openly, thus exacerbating the differences between the present and the recent remembered past.54 The many and the few, the popolo and the ottimati, are alike alienated from the regime, and since power can hardly be shared with the many, the crucial problem confronting the Medici is that of their relations with the few.

In this analysis, Guicciardini is combining the doctrine that political participation is a thing desired by men for its own sake with the thought that innovation and mutation are dangerous, because swift and sudden changes do not leave men time in which to grow accustomed to their new circumstances. The Medici of the first line found power in nobody’s hands, and acquired it by degrees; but in 1494 a sudden revolution brought about widespread political participation, which another in 1512 as suddenly took away. The restored Medici are, in two senses at least, “new princes”: the innovation which brought them back has been so sudden that nobody is accustomed to their rule, and this alone is a reason why they cannot govern in an accustomed way; in addition, the circumstances of the city are radically altered from what they were before 1494, because eighteen years of vivere populare have given the universale an appetite for political participation—or rather, have given them back their normal appetite for it, which under Cosimo and his heirs was temporarily in abeyance. The natures of men, or at least their social and political dispositions, can be changed; but the only two forces recognized as capable of working such a change are custom and use on the one hand, which work slowly, and political participation on the other, which quickly works effects that it takes time to undo.

Innovation, then, has made the restored Medici insecure, by giving them many enemies who are unlikely to grow accustomed and resigned to their loss of participazione; but it is necessary to distinguish between the categories into which these enemies are divided. The enmity of the universale is irremediable, less because of its intensity than because it could not be appeased short of restoring the Consiglio Grande, by overthrowing which the Medici returned to power. That of the various elite groups is another matter, and it is with them that Guicciardini is principally concerned. In the relatively ideal world of the Discorso di Logrogno, we recall, the Few had been distinguished as the class of those ambitious for glory, the pursuit of which rendered them capable of exceptional service to the res publica; the treatment here is very different. He begins by discounting certain groups of irreconcilables: hereditary enemies of the Medici family, and those whose ambition and restlessness makes them incapable of serving under any superior.55 There next appears a definition of the ottimati proper: those whose nobility of descent or whose reputation (essere tenuti, avere fama) for goodness or prudence brought them eminence in the 1494 regime and would probably ensure them elite status in any system of government. From these there ought in principle to be nothing to fear, for men whose prudence and wisdom brings them social distinction have something to gain from any government and something to lose by its fall. As Lodovico Alamanni was to put it more brutally a few years later, “there is nothing to fear from the wise, for wise men never innovate.”⁵⁶ But since men are not all wise, and even the wise may be deceived where their own interests are concerned, Guicciardini says he would rather not predict the behavior of most of them.⁵⁷

His tone concerning the ottimati has discernibly changed. Instead of stressing their ambition and love of honor, he is concerned here with their prudence or lack of it. Prudence is, after all, the second virtue of civic aristocracies; it is that ability to act in the present while looking ahead, that exceptional knowledge of affairs possessed by those who have had exceptional opportunities of acquiring it. But what has happened is less that Guicciardini now wishes to recommend a different virtue than that the situation determining the ottimati’s role has altered. Ambition was the virtue of those who enjoyed elite status in a vivere populare and acted conspicuously before an admiring yet critical audience of their fellow citizens. But now ottimati and universale have suffered loss in the extent of their civic participation, and the question under discussion is essentially whether the former are going to be able to resume leading roles under Medici auspices. But since the Medici monopolize power, there is tension between them and the excluded ottimati; and since the universale are not going to resume power, they will be no friendly audience to the ottimati’s readmission to it. Because there has been innovation, there has been a general loss of security; men are become one another’s enemies. Guicciardini’s stress on the need for prudence rather than ambition—the prudence which teaches what course the ship should steer—occurs in, and is explained by, the same context as his characterization of the elite as distinguished by descent and reputation, which comes close to making them creatures of fortune.

He proceeds to consider a question which, significantly, he sees as one for the Medici rather than the ottimati to determine. Is the best strategy for the restored regime one of ingratiating itself with the universale, distributing honors and offices as nearly as possible as they would be distributed under a popular government, and making itself the protector of personal liberty against oppression by the great; or one of repressing all attempts at popular initiative and ruling by the aid of a small number of partisans to whom the distribution of honors is confined?58 Behind the first alternative lies the question whether peace, order, and justice will reconcile the many to their loss of participazione; behind the second, the problem whether the ottimati can retain their elite status at a price less than that of becoming permanent dependents of the ruling family. In the rest of this discorso, Guicciardini rehearses the arguments in favor of the former strategy. For the universale, good government is no substitute for self-government; they will be content with no government, however just or liberal in its distribution of office, which does not give them back the dolcezza of participation in the Consiglio Grande, and if this cannot be given them their aspirations must be suppressed.⁵⁹ But the Medici cannot do this without enlisting a band of devoted adherents, and these must be recruited from the ranks of the ambitious, to whom shall be granted a monopoly of office in such a way as to make it clear that their monopoly depends on the Medici and would fall with them. Ambition will unite with self-interest to make these persons enthusiastic partisans instead of half-hearted friends. But at this point Guicciardini breaks off the treatise of 1513 with the remark that he is altogether opposed to these arguments.60

He may have thought it less than prudent for the ottimati to align themselves with the Medici in open hostility to the popolo, or less than honorable for them to acknowledge a condition so far short of freedom as open dependence on the Medici for their position. His immediate personal solution to the problem we know; but as a theoretical analyst he was employing a scheme which made it very hard to see how Medicean rule could lose the innovatory character that had made it enemies, or the aristocracy avoid a choice between the Medici and dependence, or citizenship and the Consiglio Grande. Guicciardini had contemporaries who were prepared to give advice even more ruthless than that he rejected. One of them, Paolo Vettori, had written in 1512 a memorandum for Cardinal de’ Medici on his departure for Rome and the papal election. “Your ancestors,” he told the head of the family, “held this city by management (industria) rather than force; you, however, must hold it by force. The reason is that since 1502 the city has been very well governed, and the memory of this will always make war on you; you have too many enemies to hold power through any combination you could possibly form within the walls. But the subject countryside—the contado—has been thoroughly badly governed, and if you arm it and place it under your direct patronage, in six months you will be safer than if you had an army of Spaniards to protect you.”⁶¹ Vettori was proposing a reversal of Machiavelli’s policy of organizing the contadini as a civic militia, and his point was, of course, that since the contadini lacked civic rights they had shown no wish to defend the city against the Spaniards,62 but would be glad to help the Medici hold down a city that exploited them. But this would not make citizens of them. Vettori was predicting what would in fact be a feature of Medicean rule under the ducal system which developed after 1530, when the contado was favored if not actually armed; by that time, however, all pretense that the Medici ruled as citizens among other citizens had been given up.

But the nature of the optimate dilemma has now been plainly stated. Their sense of being an exclusive elite was strong enough to make them welcome the suppression of the Consiglio Grande and the prospect of exercising a governo stretto together with the Medici; but at the same time it made them anxious to remain a civic aristocracy, depending on no superior and exercising among themselves an equality which left the Medici no acceptable role other than that of primus inter pares. Both Guicciardini and Vettori, however, and there are others, display a clear awareness that if this was possible under the conditions of 1434-1494, it may not be so now: the fall of Piero, the rise and fall of the Consiglio, have changed too much. The idealization of Lorenzo il Magnifico had clearly something that was nostalgic about it: the myth of a golden moment in which the ideal of primus inter pares, of an Augustan principate, was for once realized. But the hard cutting edge of Florentine political analysis is felt whenever it is pointed out that the many as well as the few enjoyed participazione under the Savonarolan constitution and feel its recent loss, so that whenever the ottimati are thought of as bringing pressure to bear on the Medici to take them into a partnership of equality, the jealous desire of the popolo for rights which are not to be restored to them must be thought of as exerting its own pressure: as making it desirable on the one hand for the Medici to make concessions to the ottimati, but on the other as rendering the ottimati so much the dependents of the Medici as to cancel out much of the first effect. Guicciardini at this stage may be thought of as representing those who doubted if the ottimati could survive as a civic aristocracy except in a context of civic freedom, and so leaned (though increasingly as a theoretical exercise) toward some restoration of participazione to the many, picturing the Medici at the head of something like a Venetian constitution. Vettori speaks for those who were prepared to safeguard optimate ascendancy by becoming the associates of the Medici in a form of rule which was not exercised through primacy among equals at all, even if this meant winding up the whole experiment in classical citizenship at Florence. What is most striking is the employment by both men of the view that the Medici are innovators, that their rule is “new” both in the sense that people are unaccustomed to it and in the sense that it is the product of changed conditions. It is innovation—meaning less the many’s acquisition of participazione in 1494 than their loss of it in 1512—that is making the exercise of citizenship by any significant number difficult if not impossible; and either former conditions must be restored, or the city must resign itself to new and non-civic political relationships.

This pattern of ideas is found restated in certain writings of the year 1516—by which date, it should be observed, there may have been time for the content of Machiavelli’s Il Principe to become known in some Florentine circles, though it was only about then that he completed the dedication of that work to Lorenzo de’ Medici, duke of Urbino. The occasion of that dedication was the growing illness of Giuliano and his death in March 1516, and the increasing military activity of Lorenzo and his acquisition of the duchy for which he was now named. Since, as we shall see, it is doubtful whether Machiavelli, insofar as he had the Medici in mind when he wrote his study of “new princes,” was thinking of their role in Florentine politics, rather than their acquisition of new lordships and territories in central Italy, it is interesting that the parallels with his thought are especially plain in Guicciardini’s discorso on “how to assure the government to the house of Medici,”63 written to survey the situation after three years of the pontificate of Leo X. That pope’s election, Guicciardini observes, brought about a marvelous access of confidence in the rule of the family at Florence, but its main effect has been to encourage his kinsmen to neglect consolidating their position there in pursuit of power elsewhere in Italy. The rashness of this course is obvious. In places such as Urbino their power is new and resentment of its acquisition still vivid, and it depends so largely on one man’s tenure of life and papacy⁶⁴ that Guicciardini is led to draw what to any reader of Il Principe is the obvious parallel: that with Cesare Borgia, whose power was gambled on his father’s papacy and perished with him. More remarkable still, he goes on to analyze the case of Francesco Sforza, who acquired power over a Milan already long used to the rule of the Visconti family and, by marrying the natural daughter of the last Visconti duke, was able to appear as their legitimate inheritor.65 But the Medici are not hereditary rulers at Urbino, where their rule is analogous to that of Borgia; while at Florence they are not signori naturali either, but legitimized by their descent from citizens whose primacy was exercised civilmente e privatamente.⁶⁶ As wise steersmen and navigators make use of a calm to overhaul the ship’s timbers and equipment, so they must make use of Leo’s lifetime to consolidate at Florence the only basis on which their power can outlive him. This basis is, of course, that of civic relationships within the city—and it is noteworthy how the analogy of the steersman slides, almost in mid-sentence, into that of the doctor dealing with a sick man whose malady can be remedied if it cannot be wholly cured.⁶⁷

The sickness in question is still that analysed in 1513: the Medici propensity to believe that they must take all business openly into their own hands, trust nobody but regard all as potential rivals, and act swiftly to repress anyone whose rivalry looks like becoming actual.68 This, Guicciardini sees plainly, is reducing their power to a base of support so narrow as to be increasingly insecure; and the pity of it is that this generalized mistrust is largely unnecessary. The aristocracy, he insists, have no longer any choice but to support the Medici. They connived at, and were identified with, the destruction of the Consiglio Grande in 1512 to such an extent that the populace now identifies them with the restoration of the Medici. There can be no repetition of the conditions of 1494, when the Medici were driven out but the ottimati left in a position of leadership in the regime that resulted; any popular revolt now would involve the destruction of their elite position (as Guicciardini was to see happen in 1529-1530).⁶⁹ Therefore the ottimati present no threat to the ruling family, which has everything to gain from seeking their friendship, allowing them liberty of action and strengthening its position by the aid, counsel, and affection which would then be given it.

In this discorso Guicciardini seems more than usually identified with the group for whom he is writing—the first person plural is constantly used—and there is an audible note of desperation. It may be wondered whether his arguments do not destroy the basis of the aristocracy’s claim to be treated as equals, and leave their role one of deference and dependence. There is another discorso, dated later in 1516, on the consolidation of Medicean rule, in which the policy advocated is more drastic, because more subtle, even than that proposed by Paolo Vettori. The author of this, Lodovico Alamanni,⁷⁰ concurs with Guicciardini in holding that the insecurity of Lorenzo’s Italian position, as dependent upon the life of Leo X, renders it all the more necessary to consolidate a permanent tenure of power at Florence,71 but differs from him radically in his views on how this may be done. He agrees that the widespread desire among citizens for a share in power constitutes a permanent challenge to the retention of power in a few men’s hands, but claims to know of ways in which this desire may be converted into something else. This is not to be achieved by terrorism, which if indiscriminate must destroy friends as well as enemies and if discriminating must wait for enemies to show their hands, by exiling citizens to form groups of irreconcilable conspirators, or by killing men without trial, which creates new tensions as well as disgracing oneself. The Roman proscriptions were possible only because there was no center of power left in the world outside Rome, while Agathocles of Syracuse and Oliverotto da Fermo were criminals of such desperation that they hardly cared what were the consequences of their acts.⁷² Alamanni was an acquaintance of Machiavelli’s and it does sound as if he had been reading Il Principe, where Agathocles and Oliverotto appear as types of pure criminality. But the analysis develops in a direction where neither Machiavelli nor Guicciardini could be said to follow. Alamanni knew, with everyone else, that the Medici of 1434-1494 had ruled by creating a group of citizens who owed office and status to them, and followed their wishes in discharging their public duties. It was the essence of both the optimate and the republican analyses that even if this had not been a source of instability before 1494, it would be impossible to resume it in the changed conditions after 1512. Alamanni denied this contention at considerable length,⁷³ by arguments which culminated in his denying the Savonarolan and Guicciardinian thesis that the addiction of the Florentines to civic participazione was unalterable.

There were, he argued in a recension of familiar language,⁷⁴ three levels of ambition discernible in a body of citizens. Some were ambitious to the point of desiring admission to the highest councils of government; others desired only to be the recipients of honors and offices; others again had little ambition beyond being left alone and unvexed in their private pursuits. These last, of course, were Aristotle’s many, and it is easy to see how the limitations which an Aristotelian sociology of knowledge imposed on their political understanding could be used to reduce their participazione to near vanishing point. Alamanni had little difficulty in indicating how the Medici might manage both this and the second class. It was in dealing with the third—the elite of the honorably ambitious described by Guicciardini in the Discorso di Logrogno—that he achieved originality as a political thinker within the limits of the language of his time. Men were what they were, he agreed with a host of predecessors, because of the usages which had become second nature with them, and after a certain age or stage, this nature could not be altered by ordinary means. Among the highly ambitious of Florence, the older men were so deeply inured to seeking public honors through the pursuit of a citizen’s career that they would never be reconciled to a regime which must deny them the chance of open competition and unlimited rewards. But the younger men were another matter, and there existed an alternative form of political culture which might be used to divert them from citizenship (civilità). This was the pursuit of honor alii costumi cortesani,75 the courtier’s life, in no way less honorable or—its devotees might assert—less free than the citizen’s, of which Castiglione’s classic study, completed in 1518, had as its setting that Urbino where Lorenzo’s ambitions were fixed, and introduced Giuliano as a speaker in the dialogue. In serving his prince, the young aristocrat found a way of life; and Alamanni, drily and with none of Castiglione’s devotion, outlined its features: the intimacy of the prince, command in the prince’s guards, missions in the prince’s diplomatic interests, the modes of dress specifically opposed to those of a civic patriciate—Guicciardini’s interest in sumptuary legislation travestied and turned against him—by which an intelligent ruler might draw the young men to him, refute in advance the reproach that their way of life lacked liberty, and transform their usages, values, and personalities until the tension between authority and participazione lost all meaning.76 The Grand Duchy of Tuscany, whose foundation by another Cosimo de’ Medici lay two decades in the future as Alamanni wrote, was to be based on just such a political culture, whether or not he had correctly predicted the effects on the Florentine personality of replacing the citizen with the courtier ideal.

Alamanni, it may seem as we pursue the next stage of this study, had solved a problem which eluded Machiavelli if he did not evade it: that of showing how the “new prince” might reinforce his position by getting the stabilizing effects of custom on his side; and he had done so by utilizing the precept that “use is another nature” in the light of the existence of an alternative political culture to which Machiavelli and Guicciardini remained totally indifferent. But what concerns us immediately is the problem in whose context all these Florentines worked: that of innovation. Guicciardini, Vettori, and Alamanni all analyzed the position of the restored Medici in the light of what was unfamiliar and unprecedented about it, and examined the new to see what difficulties it had thrown in the path of the ottimati’s enjoyment of their chosen, and allegedly traditional, function of civic leadership. The more conservative and humanist among them (notably the circle of the Orti Oricellari, of whom more later) moved in a direction which led toward idealization of Venice on Aristotelian and Polybian grounds; the more radical and deraciné toward abandonment of the civic for the courtly ideal. But the central theme was innovation and the new prince. In this setting, Machiavelli’s Il Principe, written for the most part in 1512-1513, takes on a new aspect, that of the greatest of all theoretical explorations of the politics of innovation. Machiavelli’s lack of optimate status—he belonged to the second of Alamanni’s three classes—set him free from optimate concerns; he could never be either a senator or a courtier, and his mind was liberated to explore the absorbing topic of the new prince’s relations with his environment. It is this which gives Il Principe the standing of an act of intellectual revolution: a breakthrough into new fields of theoretic relevance.

1 Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516, trans. Jarvis (London: J. M. Dent, and New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927), p. 139.

² Machiavelli, Capitolo di Fortuna, lines 38-39.

³ Machiavelli and Guicciardini, chs. 1 and 2.

⁴ Gilbert, “Venetian Constitution,” p. 488; for governo largo and stretto, see Machiavelli and Guicciardini, p. 60.

⁵ Machiavelli and Guicciardini, pp. 9-11.

⁶ For the Florentine use of this model, see Gilbert, “Venetian Constitution,” p. 485.

⁷ Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, pp. 80-81, 112-13, and “Bernardo Rucellai and the Orti Oricellari” (above, ch. IV, n. 27), for the character of Rucellai’s political thought.

⁸ Gilbert, “Bernardo Rucellai,” pp. 106-109, quoting Bernardo’s De urbe Roma.

⁹ Now available in translation by Mario Domandi, The History of Florence (New York, Evanston and London: Harper and Row, 1970). For a biography see Roberto Ridolfi, Life of Francesco Guicciardini (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967).

¹⁰ V. De Caprariis, Francesco Guicciardini: dalla politica alla storia (Bari: Laterza, 1950).

¹¹ Machiavelli and Guicciardini, pp. 106-23.

¹² “Del modo di ordinare il governo popolare.” Published in Dialogo e discorsi del Reggimento di Firenze, ed. Roberto Palmarocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1932)—hereafter referred to as D. e D.—pp. 218-59.

¹³ A note at the end says so, but may perhaps be a literary embellishment.

¹⁴ Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, pp. 76-77.

¹⁵ D. e D., pp. 218-19: “… el vivere nostro civile è molto difforme da uno ordinato vivere di una buona republica, cosí nelle cose che concernono la forma del governo, come nelli altri costumi e modi nostri: una amministrazione che porta pericolo o di non diventare tirannide, o di non declinare in una dissoluzione populare; una licenzia universale di fare male con poco respetto e timore delle legge e magistrati; non essere aperta via agli uomini virtuosi e valenti di mostrare ed esercitare la virtù loro, non proposti premi a quegli che facessino buone opere per la republica; una ambizione universale in ognuno a tutti li onori, ed una presunzione di volersi ingerire in tutte le cose publiche di qualunque importanzia; gli animi degli uomini effeminati ed enervati e volti a uno vivere delicato e, respetto alle facilità nostre, suntuoso; poco amore della gloria ed onore vero, assai alle ricchezze e danari …”

¹⁶ D. e D., p. 219: “Non veggo già che una legge o dua particulare possino fare frutto, ma saria necessario fare uno cumulo di ogni cosa e ridurre tutta questa massa in una materia, e di poi riformarla e ridistinguerla tutta a uso di chi fa cose da mangiare di pasta: che se la prima bozza non viene bene, fa uno monte di tutto e riducela in una forma nuova; a esemplo ancora de’ buoni medici, e’ quali quando truovono uno corpo pieno di molte malattie ed in modo che non lo possono reggere con una intenzione particulare, attendono con medicine a resolvere tutte le male cause e fare una disposizione nuova di tutto el corpo, il che se bene è difficile ed ha bisogno di buono medico, pure non è impossibile.” See above, ch. IV, n. 52, for Savonarola’s depiction of Christ as just such a physician.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ D. e D., p. 220.

¹⁹ Ibid.: “E non sarebbe poco condurre la città di luogo tanto infirmo, almeno a una disposizione mediocre, anzi saria assai darli principio, perché lo essere una volta aperta la via ed el processo del tempo farebbono forse cogli anni maggiore successo che non paressi potersi sperare di uno principio tale.”

²⁰ D. e D., p. 221: “Né è el dare l’arme a’ sua cittadini cosa aliena da uno vivere di republica e populare, perché quando vi si da una giustizia buona ed ordinata legge, quelle arme non si adoperano in pernizia ma in utilità della patria.” P. 223: “È vero che, acciò che la città ed el paese non si empressi di fazione e discordie, sarebbe necessario tenerli con una buona giustizia, la quale nelle legge è facile a ordinare, ma è difficile nelle osservazione, come di sotto si dirà piú largamente.”

²¹ D. e D., p. 222: “Non è altro lo stato e lo imperio che una violenzia sopra e’ sudditi palliata in alcuni con qualche titulo di onestà; volerlo conservare sanza arme e sanza forze proprie ma collo aiuto di altri, non è altro che volere fare uno esercizio sanza li instrumenti che a quello mestiere si appartengono. In somma male si può prevalere sopra altri, male si può difendere dalli inimici chi non vive armato.”

²² Cf. Ricordi, C, 48 (Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi: edizione critica a cura di Raffaele Spongano, Florence: Sansoni, 1951, p. 57): “Non si può tenere stati secondo conscienza, perché—chi considera la origine loro—tutti sono violenti, da quelli delle republiche nella patria propria in fuora, e non altrove …”

²³ D. e D., p. 222.

²⁴ Immediately following the words quoted in n. 20 above: “… piú largamente. Ordinato questo capo, piú importante di tutti, non merita poco considerazione el governo nostro di drento.”

²⁵ D. e D., p. 223: “… né accade disputare quale sia migliore amministrazione o di uno o di pochi o di molti, perché la libertà è propria e naturale della città nostra. In quella sono vivuti e’ passati nostri, in quella siamo nutriti noi; né solo ci è suto dato dalli antichi nostri per ricordo che noi viviamo con quella volentieri, ma che bisognando la defendiamo e colle facultà e colla vita propria.”

²⁶ Ibid., following immediately: “Né è altro la libertà che uno prevalere le legge ed ordini publici allo appetito delli uomini particulari….”

²⁷ Ibid., following immediately: “… e perché le legge non hanno vita né si possono fare osservare da sé medesimo, ma hanno bisogno di ministri, cioè de’ magistri che le faccino eseguire, è necessario a volere vivere sotto le legge, non sotto particulari, che e’ magistrati non abbino a temere alcuno particulare, non a ricognoscere l’onore loro da uno o da pochi, acciò che non sieno constretti a governare la città secondo la voluntà di altri.”

²⁸ Ibid., following immediately: “E però per fondamento della libertà bisogna el vivere populare, del quale è spirito e basa el consiglio grande, che ebbi a distribuire e’ magistrati e degnità della città.”

²⁹ D. e D., pp. 224-25: “Fu adunche bene ordinato el consiglio grande in farlo generale a tutti quegli che participavano dello stato; ed io ho qualche volta considerato se e fussi bene che nella creazione de’ magistrati intervenissino in consiglio non solo tutti quelli che oggi vi sono abili, ma ancora uno numero grande di quegli che non possono participare del governo, perché noi abbiamo veduto per esperienzia che la piú parte delli errori che fa el consiglio nello eleggere li ufici, nasche da uno appetito del distribuirli si larghi che ognuno di chi squittina, possi sperare di aggiugnervi. La quale ragione cesserebbe in quelli che non ne fussino capaci, perché non avendo speranza che alcuna larghezza ve li potessi tirare, non arebbono causa di conferirli se non in quelli che a iudicio loro li meritassino.… ed andrà drieto in questo alla inclinazione naturale di tutti li uomini, che è di seguitare el bene, se e’ respetti propri non ritirano.”

³⁰ D. e D., p. 244.

³¹ D. e D., pp. 230-31.

³² Ibid.: “El modo che si usa nelle legge e provisione che occorrono di farsi giornalmente in una republica è molto stretto, sendo necessario che le sieno prima proposte da’ signori, approvate da’ fermatori, deliberate di nuovo da’ signori, vinte di poi da loro e da’ collegi, avendo a passare nelli ottanta ed ultimamente venire per tanti vagli e mezzi al consiglio grande.”

³³ D. e D., pp. 175-95: “Del modo di eleggere gli uffici nel consiglio grande.”

³⁴ D. e. D., pp. 178-79: “… se uno merita, non s’ha a stare a giudicio de’ particulari ma del popolo, el quale ha migliore giudicio che nessuno altro, perché è el principe ed è sanza passione.… Lui cognosce meglio ognuno di noi che non facciamo noi stessi, nè ha altro fine se non di distribuire le cose in chi gli pare che meriti.

“Ma piú oltre, io non voglio negare che anche el popolo faccia qualche volta, con le piú fave, degli errori, perché non può sempre bene cognoscere la qualità di tutti e’ suoi cittadini; ma dico che sono sanza comparazione minori che non saranno quegli che si faranno in qualunque altro modo, e che alla giornata sempre si limeranno e se ne farà manco, perche quanto si andrà piú in là, sarà ogni dì piú cognosciuto quello che pesa ognuno, perché si vedranno oggi le azione di questo, e domani di quello, ed el popolo che ha cominciato a porsi a bottega a questo consiglio, e cognoscere che el governo è suo, porrà piú mente agli andamenti e costumi di ognuno che non faceva prima, in modo che ogni dì sarà migliore giudice di quello che meritino gli uomini e non arà impedimento a dare a chi merita.”

³⁵ D. e D., p. 237.

³⁶ D. e D., pp. 238-39: “E se bene questo è pasto da infiammare pochi, non è però questo infiammarli inutile, perché in ogni republica bene ordinata ed in ogni tempo si è sempre veduto che la virtù di pochi cittadini e quella che ha retto e regge le republiche, e le opere gloriose ed effetti grande sono sempre nati da pochi e per mano di pochi, perché a volere guidare cose grande ed essere capi del governo in una città libera, bisogna moltissime parte e virtù che in pochissimi si coniungono. E’ quali oltre a avere amore alla città, è bene, acciò che li operino piú ardentemente, che abbino uno sprone di ambizione, uno appetito di grandezza e di condursi in qualche summo grado; la quale quando e’ cercano e desiderano di acquistare non col prevalere alle legge né per via di sette, ma collo essere reputati cittadini buoni e prudenti e col fare bene alla patria, chi può dubitare che questa ambizione è laudabile ed utilissima? La quale chi non sente è in una certa fredezza e li manca uno certo stimolo di gloria, che da lui non esce mai cose generose ed eccelse.”

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Henry V, IV, 3, 28-29.

³⁹ D. e D., pp. 245-46.

⁴⁰ D. e D., pp. 189-92.

⁴¹ D. e D., pp. 257-58: “Né incomincia questa corruttela oggi nel mondo, ma è durate gìa molti e molti secoli, di che fanno fede li scrittori antichi che tanto detestano ed esclamano contro a’ vizi delle età loro.

“Rimedi ci sono forse qualcuni per potere un poco moderare questi mali, ma non gìa tanti che e’ faccino effetto notabile in una malattia si universale, si vecchia e tanto radicata nelle menti delli uomini.”

⁴² Ibid.: “… felicissimo certo e glorioso che avessi grazia di ordinare si bene la sua republica, e molto piú felice di averla acconcia in modo che li ordine e le legge sue durassino molte centinaia di anni ed in tal maniera che, mentre visse sotto quelle, fu molte volte di potenzia e forze capo della Grecia, ma sempremai di gloria ed opinione di virtù apresso alle nazione forestiere la prima. Fulli piú facile a ridurle in atto che non fu facile a Platone, a Cicerone ed a molti uomini dottissimi e prudentissimi metterle in scrittura; in modo che non sanza causa fu opinione ne’ tempi sua che fussi aiutato del consiglio di Apolline Delfico, e ragionevolmente, perché riformare una città disordinata e riformarla in modi tanto laudabili è piú tosto opera divina che umana.”

⁴³ Perhaps it may be observed at this point that failure to grasp this has been the cause of much misunderstanding of both Guicciardini and Machiavelli.

⁴⁴ D. e D., p. 258: “A noi è rimasto el poterci maravigliare ed esclamare di cosa tanto notabile, ma di ridurla in atto non ci è lecito non che sperarlo a pena desiderarlo; e però ritornando alle cose che sono in facuità nostra, io dico che questa malattia è tanto difficile che gli è impossibile estirparla; bisognerebbe come fece lui, levare li usi per e’ quali le ricchezze si desiderano, e questo per la mollizie delli uomini non si può non che altro disegnare. Credo bene che dandosi la città alle arme ed essendo aperta la via di diventare glorioso con quelle, distribuendosi e’ magistrati con riguardo della buona fama e portamenti delli uomini, sendo facile el punire e’ delitti di chi errassi, che tutte queste cose insieme farieno e’ ricchi essere in meno estimazione che non sono oggi. Aggiungereci una cosa tentata spessissime volte ma male osservata, di limitare e moderare quanto fussi possibile li ornamenti e suntuosità del vestire …,” a long indictment of which follows.

⁴⁵ For this see Rudolph von Albertini, Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein im übergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1955), who prints the texts of the discorsi in his appendix.

⁴⁶ Roberto Ridolfi, Life of Francesco Guicciardini, chs. VIII-XVI.

⁴⁷ D. e D., pp. 260-66: “Del governo di Firenze dopo la restaurazione de’ Medici nel 1512.” This is the only one of this group of writings for which we are not dependent on Albertini.

⁴⁸ D. e D., pp. 260-61: “Veggiano e’ prudenti ed esperti medici in nessuna cosa usare piú esatta diligenzia che in conoscere quale sia la natura del male, e capituiare un tratto le qualità e tutti li accidenti sua per resolversi poi con questo fondamento quale abbi a essere el reggimento dello infermo, di che sorte ed in che tempo si abbino a dare le medicine; perché non fermando bene questo punto, ordinerebbono spesse volte una dieta, darebbono medicine non proporzionate alla malattia, contrarie alla complessione ed essere dello infermo; donde ne seguirebbe la totale ruina e morte del loro ammalato.

“Questa resoluzione se in cosa alcuna è laudabile e necessaria, bisogna sopra tutto in chi è principe e capo di governi di stati; poiche essendo una città uno capo [sic: corpo?] composto di infiniti uomini diversi di condizione, di appetiti e di ingegno, sono infiniti li accidenti, li umori, infinite le difficultà nel maneggiarli; e però è necessario in conoscerli a capitularli e pigliare lo ordine con che si abbino a governare, tanto piú cura e prudenzia quanto la materia è in sé piú difficile e quanto sono piú importanti li effetti che ne seguitano.”

⁴⁹ D. e D., p. 261: “Perché del buono governo ne seguita la salute e conservazione di infiniti uomini, e del contrario ne resulta la ruina ed esterminio delle città, di che nella vita delli uomini nessuna cosa è piú preziosa e singulare che questa congregazione e consorzio civile. E come dallo essere uno infermo bene curato da’ medici o no, si può pigliare potento argumento della salute o morte sua, così interviene nel governo di uno stato, perché essendo retto prudentemente e proporzionatamente, si può crederne e sperarne buoni effetti; essendo retto altrimenti e governato male, che si può crederne altro che la ruina e destruzione sua?”

⁵⁰ Ibid.: “… donde ne seguita che el parlare generalmente e con una medesima regola non basta, ma bisogna o parlare generalmente con tali distinzione che servino a tutti e’ casi, il che sarebbe di troppa lunghezza, overo ristrignersi a uno particulare solo, come farò io, che solo insisterò in queste cose che io giudicherei doversi fare per questi Medici, volendo tenere lo stato e governo della città di Firenze.…”

⁵¹ D. e D., pp. 261-62: “La città di Firenze da lunghissimi tempi in qua è stata in libertà; essi governata popularmente ed ha avuto imperio e signoria in molti luoghi di Toscana; ha avuto ne’ maneggi di Italia per el passato sempre piú reputazione e piú luogho tra li altri potentati, che non pareva convenirsi al dominio che ha; di che si può dare causa al sito dove la è posta, alla natura delli uomini che per essere inquieti hanno voluto travagliare, per essere industriosi lo hanno saputo fare, per essere suti danarosi hanno potuto fare. Queste condizioni hanno fatto che in Firenze e’ cittadini communemente appetiscono el vivere libero e populare, non vorrebbono ricognoscere da alcuno particulare el grado loro ed hanno esosa ogni grandezze o potenzia eccessiva di alcuno cittadino, ed è la inclinazione loro attendere e pensare alle cose delli stati e governi.” The word participazione first occurs on p. 263; see below, n. 53.

⁵² D. e D., p. 262: “E questo interviene piú oggi che mai, per essersi e’ cittadini nutriti ed avezzi del 1494 sino al 1512 a uno modo di governo popularissimo e liberissimo e nel quale parendo loro essere tutti equali, con piú difficultà si assettano a ricognoscere alcuno superiore, e massime vedendo uno solo tanto interamente assoluto arbitro e signore di ogni cosa.”

⁵³ D. e D., pp. 262-63: “Aggiugnevasi quello che importa assai, che la casa de’ Medici non successe a uno governo meramente populare, ma essendo la città divisa ed in mano di piú capi di fazione e fluttuata in simili modi lungo tempo … non parse che lo stato si togliessi allo universale, ma a’ capi di una altra parte; il che non dispiaceva alli uomini mediocri e populari, che con queste mutazioni non pareva diminuissono el grado loro ma piú tosto, per essere battuti e’ maggiori, miglioravano condizione. E cosí lo stato che nel 1434 venne in mano de’ Medici non parse tolto al populo, ma a uno messer Rinaldo degli Albizzi, a uno messer Palla Strozzi ed a altri simili particulari; ed anche e’ Medici non rimasono assolutamente padroni di ogni cosa ma con qualche compagno, li quali benché fussino inferiori a loro pure avevano qualche participazione [this is the first appearance of the word]; donde la grandezza che venne in Lorenzo non fu a un tratto in casa sua, ma venne a poco a poco col corso di molti anni.”

⁵⁴ D. e D., p. 263: “Oggi ogni cosa è diversa: a uno stato afatto populare e larghissimo è succeduta in uno momento la potenzia de’ Medici, e ridotta assolutamente la autorità e grandezza a uno; donde è nato che e lo stato si è tolto al populo ed a uno universale di una città, e questa mutazione si è fatta in una ora, e sanzo intervallo di tempo si è venuto da qual che era grato a’ piú, a quello che e’ piú avevono esoso. E però questa materia riesce per ogni conto piú difficile [cf. the usage in n. 48 above] avendo per inimici uno numero grande di cittadini, e’ quali oggi si può dire non abbino nulla ed in quello stato avevono qualche participazione; né solo sono inimici loro e’ cittadini di questa sorte, ma ancora sono molti altri a chi dispiace questo governo, e’ quale per conoscere meglio la natura di questo male e la complessione di questo corpo, è da distinguerli in piú spezie.”

⁵⁵ D. e D., pp. 263-64.

⁵⁶ Albertini, op.cit., p. 370: “Questa fantasia da’ vechi non si leverebbe mai, ma e’ sono savii et de’ savi non si de’ temere, perché non fanno mai novità.”

⁵⁷ D. e D., pp. 263-64: “… uomini adoperati da loro, e nondimeno che o per essere nobili e di parentado, o per essere tenuti buoni, o per avere fama di prudenti, ebbono condizione nello stato populare, e darebbe loro forse el cuore trovare luogo in ogni modo di vivere. Di costoro, perché hanno secondo li altri condizione ragionevole con questo stato, non è da temere che si mettessino a pericolo per travagliare lo stato … se gli hanno prudenzia o bontà doverrebbono desiderare che questo governo durassi.… Ma perché li uomini non sono tutti savi ed e’ piú si ingannano ne’ casi loro particulari, io non darei iudicio fermo dello animo di una grande parte di costoro.”

⁵⁸ D. e D., p. 265.

⁵⁹ D. e D., pp. 265-66: “Alleganne che el primo intento di chi regge e governi ha a essere di conservare sé e lo stato suo, ed avendo questo intento li bisogna tenere bassi e battuti quegli che li sono inimici e non si possono guadagnare per amici, e di questa sorte dicono essere non solo quelli che si sono scoperti particularmente inimici de’ Medici, ma in genere tutto lo universale della città, el quale non ha odio con loro per ingiurie e paure private, ne perché governino ingiustamente, ma solo perché avando gustata diciotto anni la dolcezza di quello vivere populare, vorrebbono ritornarvi ed ogni altra cosa dispiace loro. E però né co’ portamenti buoni, né col favorire la giustizia, né col distribuire largamente li onori e li utili si satisfaranno; anzi sempre desidereranno mutazione per ritornare a quello consiglio grande e travagliarsi nel governo ed amministrazione publica.”

⁶⁰ D. e D., p. 266: “… le quali benché paino colorate, io nondimeno ne sono in diversa opinione.” These are the discorso’s final words.

⁶¹ Albertini, p. 345: “Li antecessori vostri, cominciandosi da Cosimo e venendo infino a Piero, usorno in tenere questo Stato piú industria che forza. A voi è necessario usare piú forza che industria, perché voi ci avete piú nimici e manco ordine a saddisfarli.… Tenere appresso intelligentia drento, tenere le gente d’arme a vostro proposito; ma tutte queste forze non bastano, perché questa città è troppo grossa e ci sono troppi malcontenti … perché voi avete a intendere che li dieci anni passati la citta è stata benissimo, in modo che sempre la memoria di qual tempo vi farà guerra. Da l’altra parte, il contado e distretto vostro è stato malissimo, talmente che la città voi non ve la potete riguadagnare, ma sibene il contado. E se voi lo armate, e li armati intrattenete con il difenderli da’ rettori di fuori e da’ magistrati di dentro che li assassinono, e che voi in fatto diventiate loro patroni, e non passano sei mesi da oggi, che vi parrà essere piú securi in Firenze che se voi avessi un esercito di Spagnuoli a Prato in favore vostro.”

⁶² A point perhaps never recognized in Machiavelli’s own writings.

⁶³ D. e D., pp. 267-81: “Del modo di assicurare lo stato alla casa de’ Medici.”

⁶⁴ D. e D., p. 269: “… possono, vivente el pontefice, valersi assai della opportunità e potenzia di qui a acquistare stati e colorire e’ loro disegni; morto el pontefice, chi non vede quanto importerà questo braccio a mantenersi quello che aranno acquistato? Gli altri stati da loro medesimi saranno difficili anzi difficillimi a conservarli, perché saranno nuovi, aranno tutti opposizione potentissime o di vicini potenti o di chi vi pretenderà su diritto, o di pessime disposizione di populi; in questo, adattandocisi bene drento, non sarà difficile el mantenercisi, perché el governare loro questo stato non offende né toglie a persona se non a’ cittadini medesimi, a quali satisfare, come di sotto si dirà, non è difficile.”

⁶⁵ D. e D., pp. 270-71: “… abbiamo lo esemplo del Valentino e la ragione ci è manifesta; perché privati acquistare stati grandi è cosa ardua ma molto piú ardua conservarli, per infinite difficultà che si tira drieto uno principato nuovo, massime in uno principe nuovo. Riuscì solo a Francesco Sforza el conservarsi nello stato di Milano ma vi concorsono molti cagione.… Aggiunsesi che trovò uno stato che, benché avessi goduto libertà, era solito a essere signoreggiato da altri, ed a chi era tanto disforme la libertà quanto e disforme a’ populi liberi la servitù; tutte condizioni da fare facilità grandissima a conservare, e che rare volte si abattono a chi acquista nuovi domini, e’ quali el piú delle volte si tolgono a’ populi liberi o a’ signori naturali. Lui piú tosto si può dire che occupassi una eredità vacante, che togliessi nulla di quello di altri; anzi parve a qual populo avere beneficio grande che li pigliassi, vedendosi per quello modo trarre di bocca a’ viniziani, di chi naturalmente erano inimicissimi.” It would indeed be easy to believe that Guicciardini was acquainted with Il Principe when he wrote this passage.

⁶⁶ D. e D., p. 270: “… benché gli abbino uno papa, e’ non sono però signori naturali, anzi cittadini e discesi di padri che vissino benché fussino grandi, sempre civilmente e privatamente.”

⁶⁷ D. e D., p. 268: “E se bene la grandezza del papato non lascia conoscere questo danno, non è ragione sufficiente a sprezzarlo perché le qualità de’ tempi e felicità si mutono, ed è debole cosa essere tutto fondato in sulla vita di uno uomo solo, quale quando morissi, se vedrebbono li effetti di questi disordini.… E però come e’ marinai prudenti quando sono in porto o in bonaccia rassettano el loro legno e tutti li instrumenti di quello per potere resistere alla futura tempesta, cosí chi ha in mano el timone di questo stato doverrebbe in tanto ocio e commodità rassettare e disporre bene tutte le membre di questo corpo, per potere in ogni accidente che venissi, valersi di tutto el nervo e virtù sua. Il che certo chi considerassi bene le cause e le origine di questi mali, non doverrebbe diffidarsi di potere sanza difficultà grande condurre questo ammalato se non in ottima, almeno in buona disposizione.”

⁶⁸ D. e D., pp. 272-73.

⁶⁹ D. e D., p. 275: “… e nondimeno era uno zucchero a petto a quello che diventerebbe se si facessi nuova mutazione, perché a iudicio mio, della larghezza che era allora a quella che si introdurrebbe sarebbe tanta differenzia quanta è dalla strettezza che è oggi a quella che era a tempo di Lorenzo.

“Cosi causerebbono e’ sospetti, la rabbia e la ignoranzia degli uomini in chi verrebbe lo stato; ne sia alcuno che pensi che la fussi mutazione simile a quella del 94, dove li amici de’ Medici, che erano el fiore della città, furono conservati e doppo pochi mesi messi insieme con li altri in participazione del governo. Oggi sarebbe pericoloso non si facessi crudelmente … porterebbe pericolo di esilio, di perdita di beni e simili ruine.…”

⁷⁰ Albertini, pp. 362-71: “Discorso di Lodovico Alamanni sopra il fermare lo stato di Firenze nella devozione de’ Medici”—title given to the piece by Roberto Ridolfi. For Alamanni’s career, and the need to distinguish him from his republican brother, Luigi, see Albertini, pp. 43-45. See also G. Guidi, “La teoria delle ‘tre ambizioni’ nel pensiero politico fiorentino del primo Cinquecento,” in Il Pensiero Politico, vol. 5, pt. 2 (1972), pp. 241-59. An English translation of this discorso may be found on pp. 214-20 of Social and Economic Foundations of the Italian Renaissance, ed. Anthony Molho (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1969).

⁷¹ Albertini, p. 363.

⁷² Albertini, pp. 366-68.

⁷³ Albertini, p. 368: “… so che molti altri sono che contradicono col dire che per essere e’ tempi et le conditioni diverse, bisogna pensare ad diversi modi, perché quegli medesimi non servirebbono. Ma io dico che d’alhora in qua le difficultà son bene multiplicate, ma non già variate o cresciute. Et per quelle che son vechie et consuete, sono optime e’ vechi modi di Lorenzo vechio; et per queste che di novo ce si conoscono, sono ancora de’ remedii promptissimi et sicuri, in modo che cosí sia facile il tenere hora questo stato come se fussi alhora il tener quello. Et quando bene ad alcuni paressi il contrario, e’ quali affirmassino quelli tempi havere piú vantaggio che questi, alleghino quel che voglino, che a tucto responderà la ragione.”

⁷⁴ Albertini, pp. 368-69: “Diranno ancora che a tempo di Lorenzo non era stato un Consiglio grande come è questo, che tanto aliena stato le menti de’ cittadini: et io dico che questa difficultà non è si grande che la non si medichi agevolmente, perché infra e’ cittadini fiorentini sono di tre sorte di animi.…”

⁷⁵ Albertini, p. 370: “Ma e’ sono avezzi in una certa loro asineria piú presto che libertà, che in Fiorenza non degnano di fare reverenda a qualunche, bene la meritassi, si non a’ suoi magistrati, et a quegli per forza et con fatica. Et per questo sono tanto alieni da’ modi delle corte, che io credo che pochi altri sieno tanto; non dimeno, quando sono di fuori, non fanno cosí. Credo proceda da questo che nel principio dovea parere loro cosa troppo disadacta il cavarsi quel loro cappuccio; et questa loro infingardagine si ridusse in consuetudine, et di consuetudine in natura; et per quel che io lo credo, è che quando e’ sono fuor della loro terra et di quello habito, manco par loro fatica assai el conversare co’ principi. Questa fantasia da’ vechi non si leverebbe mai, ma e’ sono savii et de’ savi non si de’ [sic] temere, perché non fanno mai novità. E’ giovani facilmente si divezzarebbono da questa civilità et assuefarebbonsi alli costumi cortesani, se’l principe volessi.”

⁷⁶ Albertini, pp. 370-71: “Ultra questo, quel che piú è da stimare, gli divesserà da quella civilità che gli aliena sì da’ suoi costumi; perciò che a quegli che per Sua Ex.tia piglieranno la cappa et lasciaranno el cappuccio, interverrà come se si facessino frati, perché renuntiaranno alla republica et faranno professione all’ordine suo et mai piú poi potranno pretendere al grado civile o alla benivolentia del populo: et per questo tucta la loro ambizione si volgerà ad guadagnarsi el favore de Sua Ex.tia… Et correndo li anni, di mano in mano, se si terrà il medesimo ordine di eleggere et di chiamare ad sé quegli giovani che verranno su, e quali hora sono fanciulli, rimettendo al governo della città quegli che hora son giovani et alhora saranno vechi, allevati nondimeno nella sua scuola, ne nascerà che nella città nostra non si saprà vivere senza un principe che gl’intractenga dove hora pare tucto il contrario.”