CHAPTER IX

GIANNOTTI AND CONTARINI

Venice as Concept and as Myth

[I]

DONATO GIANNOTTI (1492-1573) is known, if at all, to readers of English as “the most excellent describer of the commonwealth of Venice” (the phrase is Harrington’s 1656)1 and by less specific statements to the effect that he was the intellectual heir of Machiavelli and the last major thinker in the Florentine republican tradition. No detailed study of his thought has yet been written in English,² but we have gone far enough in the present analysis to have uncovered an anomaly in his received reputation: it is odd, on the face of it, that the same man should have been at once an admirer of Venice and an admirer of Machiavelli. And the oddity grows as we look deeper, for Giannotti proves to have employed his detailed knowledge of Venetian procedures to construct a model of Florentine government which was both markedly popular and founded upon a citizen militia; both concepts very far removed from the aristocratic città disarmata discerned by Machiavelli and Guicciardini. The fact is, as already indicated, that his conception of Venice is rather instrumental than ideal; he does not set up the serenissima republica as a model to be imitated, but treats it as a source of conceptual and constitutional machinery which can be adapted for use in the very difficult circumstances of Florentine popolare politics. He is aided to do this by the fact that the Aristotelian-Polybian model of mixed government, which Venice exemplifies, can be given either an aristocratic or a democratic bias without losing its essential shape. Giannotti, who specifically acknowledges his indebtedness to Aristotle and Polybius, as well as to Machiavelli, may be thought of, from our point of view, as a contributor of originality, if not of direct influence, to the theory of mixed government; he is the first author we shall meet of certain general assertions which were to recur in the history of this branch of republican thought. At the same time we may see him as continuing a tendency whereby Machiavelli’s thought was reabsorbed into the tradition of Aristotelian republicanism and the edges of its drastic originality softened and blurred. On neither innovazione, virtù, nor even milizia is Giannotti’s thinking as abrasive or as creative as that of his older friend. But the more we discount the legend of the “wicked Machiavel,” the harder it becomes to see just how Machiavelli’s true intentions were imparted to European tradition. As later Western republicanism grew, at all events, his image became progressively more orthodox and moral.

As already indicated by his habit of citing his authorities, Giannotti is a more formally academic thinker than either Machiavelli or Guicciardini; his political commitment is real, but his thought does not grow out of the tormenting experience of citizenship in the same way that theirs did. As a young man he frequented the Orti Oricellari and was friendly with Machiavelli while the latter was writing his history of Florence. From 1520 to 1525 he taught (and it is highly probable from the tone of his later writings that at some time he taught political theory) at the university of Pisa. In 1525-1527 he spent much of his time in Padua and Venice, and it was during this time that he wrote most of his Libro della Repubblica de’ Vineziani, the work by which he is best known to posterity.3 He returned to Florence after the fall of the Medici—he seems to have regarded his absence hitherto as an exile—and during the Great Siege of 1528-1530 held Machiavelli’s old post as secretary to the Ten of War and like him was involved in the organization of a civic militia. Expelled from the city in 1530, he suffered the longevity of the exile; and his second major work, the Della Repubblica Fiorentina, is an expatriate’s vision of a Florentine popular republic which was never to come into being. The work was not even printed until 1721, and though the study of Venice was published in 1540 and had an extensive reputation, we do not study Giannotti as one whose thought greatly affected the mind of his age. He was not a genius, as Machiavelli and Guicciardini both were; but his writings are those of a very intelligent man, in which we see what could be done with Aristotelian, humanist, Venetian, and Machiavellian concepts under significant and revealing circumstances. They further contain some new departures in thought concerning the politics of time.

Although Felix Gilbert has assembled evidence connecting Giannotti’s composition of his work on Venice with the fall of the Medici in May 1527—which he and his friends eagerly anticipated while he was writing his first draft4—it would probably not be inappropriate to consider the Repubblica de’ Vineziani as a fact-finding service which Giannotti intended to perform for his contemporaries. The Venetian model had been endlessly talked about since 1494; there existed a great deal of disseminated information about its workings; but the only written work of reference on the structure of Venetian government, that of Marcantonio Sabellico, was in Giannotti’s view so unmethodical as to be uncritical. If the Medici regime were to fall, the popolare optimates among whom he moved must resume their struggle to erect a government in which their leadership would be combined with liberty, and Venice was paradigmatic for such a program. Giannotti therefore set out to inform them of the facts. He envisaged a tripartite study,⁵ in which one book would outline the general governmental structure (l’amministrazione universale), a second would deal with the various magistracies in detail (particolarmente), and a third with la forma e composizione di essa Repubblica—a phrase suggesting theoretical analysis. But he had completed only the first section when revolution did break out at Florence and he returned, to serve under both the moderate regime of Niccolò Capponi and the much more radical government of the Siege, to experience (it may be) a greater degree of commitment to popular government than he anticipated in 1526-1527, and to suffer exile. Long afterwards, in 1538, he began preparing (but not revising) his incomplete work for the printer.⁶ He may by then have completed the manuscript of his blueprint for a popular government at Florence; if so, it would be interesting to know why he did not publish the latter, but we should know why he did not complete the former. His theoretical work was done, and had been devoted to a different subject.

This being so, we are not to expect too much theoretical structure from the essentially incomplete Repubblica de’ Vineziani. The first section is all that we have, and it suffers from almost the same inadequacies as those ascribed to Sabellico; for what his work lacked, we are told, was any account of la forma, la composizione, il temperamento di questa Repubblica7—precisely the themes which Giannotti himself was reserving for the third section which he never wrote. Even when it is laid down that the first section will deal with universal topics, leaving particulars to be treated later on, for the reason that universals are easier to understand, this does not mean that the essential principles of the republic’s structure are to be expounded first and their specific applications followed up later; for the defense offered of this procedure is that painters begin by sketching in their outlines and sculptors by roughing out their marble, so that one can see what part of the block is going to be the head before the actual shape emerges. The cose universali are the general characteristics of the natural object which make it fit for the shape or form which it afterward assumes, and this is why the geographical site of Venice—itself, of course, an extraordinary phenomenon—is to be described before even the governmental structure.⁸ In going from universale to particolare, then, we are not traveling from the principle to its application, so much as examining the matter before we study its form; and even then the scholastic image may be less appropriate than the artistic, for we are told that

each republic is like a natural body, or rather it would be better to say that it is a body produced by nature in the first place and afterwards polished by art. When nature makes a man, she intends to make a universal whole, a communion. Since each republic is like a natural body, it must have its members; and since there is a proportion and relationship between the members of each body, who knows not this proportion and relationship knows not how the body is made. This is where Sabellico falls short.⁹

But if—to simplify the argument a little—nature supplies the matter of a republic and art the form, it follows that the principles of political harmony are not the work of nature and cannot be intuitively known; they can only be discovered once we see how the political artist has shaped his material. Sabellico merely described the various magistracies of Venice and did not consider the relationships between them which compose the form of the state. But this is all that Giannotti found time to do; Sabellico’s deficiencies were to be made good only in the third section. We have not his theoretical analysis of Venetian government, and can only draw conclusions from the language of what we have, and its intimations, as to what that might have been. It is certainly significant, for instance, in the light of various doctrines which he was to develop in the book on Florentine government, that Sabellico should be blamed for failure to show how each magistracy is linked with and dependent upon every other, so that the composizione of the republic could be seen in its perfection.10

The Repubblica de’ Vineziani would not have been a humanist work if it had not contained some consideration of the place of the individual in political time. The book is in dialogue form, and the principal speaker—the Venetian scholar Trifone Gabriello or Gabriele—is compared, in his leisurely retirement at Padua, with the Roman Pomponius Atticus. He acknowledges the compliment, but proceeds to draw a distinction. Pomponius Atticus lived when his republic was far gone in corruption, and withdrew into philosophic privacy because he could not save it and was unwilling to perish with it. But Venice is not corrupt, rather more perfect than ever before, and his retirement is that of a man free to choose between action and contemplation.¹¹ The tranquillity of Venice, favorably compared with the military glory of Rome,12 is further contrasted with the present miserable state of Italy. Trifone says he does not know whether the present should be compared with the times when the Caesars were destroying Roman liberty, or with those when the barbarians were overrunning Italy; nor does it much matter, since the Caesars were the cause of the barbarian invasions and they in their turn the cause of the present calamities.¹³ Giannotti’s sense of history is notably causal and linear. Nevertheless it is the happiness of Venice to have escaped history, and this she has clearly done through her success in retaining inner stability and civic virtù. We look at this point for an account, Aristotelian or Polybian, of how stability may be retained through time by some harmony or mixture of the different elements composing a political society. The language is in many ways suggestive of such doctrine, and yet, as Gilbert has pointed out, the term “mixed government” and the apparatus of Polybian thought nowhere appear in the Repubblica de’ Vineziani. They do appear in the Repubblica Fiorentina, and yet we cannot say for certain what principles of composizione and proporzione Giannotti would have educed from the functioning of Venetian magistracies if he had written his third section.

So far as our evidence goes, there is no indication that he would have presented Venice as a Polybian balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Certainly we are told that the republic consists of a Consiglio Grande, a Consiglio de’ Pregati, a Collegio, and a Doge; and of these the first, second, and fourth obviously correspond to the classical many, few, and one, while the Collegio is an executive presidium of serving magistrates which renders more efficient the aristocratic element of the pregati. But there is far less indication than there was in Guicciardini that the four members balance or check one another. We may suspect that Giannotti would in the end have put forward some such theory, but the fact remains that his study of the Venetian constitutional structure is developed in a double context, that of a historical account of how Venice came to be a closed aristocracy and that of a detailed investigation of Venetian voting procedures, neither of which has any obvious connection with the principles of Polybian balance.

When he wrote about Florentine politics, Giannotti as we shall see advocated a vivere popolare; he wished to extend membership in the Consiglio Grande to all who paid taxes, not merely to those whose ancestry qualified them to hold magistracies. How far these sympathies were developed when he was writing about Venice in 1525-1527 is not quite clear,14 but there is evidence that he was aware of the problem raised by the law of 1297, which had limited membership in the Venetian Consiglio to the descendants of those who sat in it at that date. In Florence the constitution of 1494, consciously modeled on that of Venice, was almost archetypically the popular constitution because it was based on a Consiglio Grande open to all qualified citizens; so long as there was no such provision as the Venetian law of 1297, there was bound to be tension within this image. Giannotti does not adopt Guicciardini’s view that Florence is as aristocratic as Venice and Venice as democratic as Florence, since in either case there is a finite citizen body and the terms “aristocratic” and “democratic” have meaning only in relation to the distribution of power within that body. He points out, as he is to do again in the case of Florence, that in Venice there are poor, middling, and elite persons, popolari, cittadini, and gentiluomini. The first are those whose callings are too ignoble and whose poverty too great to qualify them for any kind of civic membership; the second are those whose descent and occupations give them standing and wealth enough to rank as sons of the patria; and the third are those who are truly of the city and the state.¹⁵ When Giannotti writes as a Florentine advocating popular rule, he wishes to admit the second category to membership of the Consiglio, if not to magistracy itself;16 but it is the characteristic of Venice that there is a Consiglio Grande, but that the law of 1297 limits it forever to persons in the last and highest grade. Once again, if we had Giannotti’s final reflections upon the government of Venice, we might know how he thought this closed council contributed to Venetian stability; but it is noteworthy that in what we have, a first sketch in which the shape of the republic is roughed out (dirozzato),¹⁷ the dialogue takes the form of a discussion of the history of the Venetian Consiglio and of the cause (cagione) and occasion (occasione)¹⁸ of each form which it has assumed. It is noteworthy also that, though to a humanist writing history the cause of political innovation would normally be the perception by reforming legislators of some principle on which government should be modeled, Giannotti is unwilling to go too far in ascribing such perceptions to the ancestral Venetians; a caution which reveals a number of things about the problems which Venice presented to the political intellect.

In Venetian constitutional history he sees two critical moments: one occurring about 1170, when a Consiglio Grande was established, the other in 1297, when its membership was closed.¹⁹ Both are moments in the institutionalization of a citizen body on a footing of proportionate equality among its increasingly finite membership. The Venetians constitute a civic aristocracy, and it is the characteristic of such an aristocracy—we know by now that it was hard to define the civic ethos in other than aristocratic terms—that its members pursue glory (Giannotti’s term is chiarezza) in the public service. In this way individuals become renowned and their families preserve the memory of their deeds. This, Trifone explains, is why we know relatively little of Venetian history before 1170. Since there was no Consiglio, there was no institutionalized pursuit of chiarezza; there were no families constituted by the chiarezza of their ancestors and impelled to preserve records of past deeds and lineal continuities. The condition of Venice was not unlike that of Rome under the kings; in both cases only the advent of a civic aristocracy led to the institution of historic memory, and in the case of Venice it may be added that the term gentiluomo, before 1170, probably meant only what it means in other cities—an individual outstanding for his birth or for some other reason—and had not the precise civic and political significance it acquired with the development of the Consiglio.²⁰

Giannotti is grappling with several problems in Venetian studies. One is the general paucity of historical information, and the circumstance that more is preserved in private archives than in public chronicles. Another is a problem of considerable importance in constitutional theory, already familiar to us from Machiavelli’s Discorsi: since Venice claimed no hero-legislator and retained the memory of no great political crisis, it was difficult to explain how a citizen body could have perfected itself, especially since Giannotti does not spend much time on the possibility that the whole apparatus of perfection had existed since the beginning. When his interlocutors discuss the innovation of 1170, they face the question of how the Venetians could have thought of organizing themselves into a Consiglio Grande, seeing that no such institution existed anywhere in the world at that time. Very few men, they agree, are capable of political invention, and citizen bodies never approve proposals which have not been tested by experience, either their own or that of others. Innovation is almost always imitation; even Romulus is said to have borrowed from the Greeks, and Florence, after imitating the Venetian Consiglio in 1494 and the perpetual Dogeship in 1502, might have been saved from disaster if she had imitated what goes with them. It would therefore have been a miracle (cosa miracolosa) if the Venetians of 1170 had been able to excogitate the form of a Consiglio Grande without imitating it from somebody else, since it is this which has not only kept them free but raised them to unparalleled heights of grandeur. But we need not suppose that any such miracle occurred. Apart from a few hints in the scanty historical materials, it is reasonable to believe that some sort of Council was maintained by the Doges before 1170, so that those are right who maintain that the Council is of highest antiquity, so long as they do not mean the Consiglio Grande as established in that year.21 In a passage faintly recalling Machiavelli’s views on early Roman history, Giannotti suggests that reformers in 1170, wishing to strip the Doge of certain powers, resolved to transfer them to the Council, but realizing that there would be dangers and tensions if they were conferred upon a few, decided to transfer them to the citizens as a whole (while retaining a special degree of authority for themselves) and devised an annually elected Consiglio Grande to be truly representative of the whole.22 No miraculous legislator is thus called for; Venetian history proceeds through pragmatic reflection on past experience and, far from hitting upon some miraculous recombination of elements, merely displays in 1170 a political sagacity exceeding that of the Roman patricians after the expulsion of the kings.

In the civic humanist perspective, a Consiglio Grande—whether Venetian or Florentine—was the foundation of all libertà in a vivere civile, because it brought together all citizens, on a footing of equality, in a competition for office and in virtù. Its appearance at Venice, then, could not as we have seen be left unexplained. But the closing of the Venetian Consiglio in 1297, so that membership became hereditary and new gentiluomini were next to never created, was a phenomenon of a different order. Giannotti writes that nothing can be learned of it from publicly commissioned histories, so that if one did not read the private records of noble houses one would remain almost wholly ignorant; and even in these sources nothing whatever is known about the cagione or the occasione of that law. From experience and history one recognizes that changes on this scale do not occur unless there has been some major emergency; but he has been unable to find out what this was, and he specifically says that he can see no imperfection in the Consiglio as established in 1170 which could have necessitated the variazione of 1297. It is possible, as he has earlier suggested, that all natives of good family were by now included in the Consiglio and that the closure was applied in order to keep out foreign merchants and preserve purity of lineage. But all this is mere conjecture, and nothing is known for certain.23 It seems clear that Giannotti had encountered a double difficulty. He had really been unable to find any traditional or historical account of the closing of the Council; and, no less significantly, he could not deal with it by supposing that civic experience had led to the discovery of some political principle, because he could not imagine any principle which it exemplified. His attitude toward the closure is not free from ambiguity. When he first discusses it he asserts that Venetian chiarezza mounted higher than ever after 1297, and that few families of note already resident in Venice were excluded from power by the change; but in his subsequent treatment, while insisting that it was a change for the better, he concedes that some were excluded and embittered and allows the suggestion to be made that these declined in nobility and vanished from the historic record in consequence of their exclusion. Possibly the last word may be found in something that he writes in another context—admittedly with reference to a particolarità of much less importance than the great measure of 1297:

You are to understand that in every republic there are many institutions (costituzioni) for which one can give no probable reason, let alone the true one. And this is to be found not only in those cities where the form of government has changed, but in those which have long been ruled and governed by the same laws. For although the usages have been kept up, their causes are none the less lost in antiquity.²⁴

There are political phenomena which usage may justify, but cannot explain. If we know neither the occasion, the cause nor the principle on which the Council was closed in 1297, that measure is dangerously close to being one of them.

Giannotti’s Venice, then, does not seem to have effected her escape from history through the divine intelligence of the legislator, or through achieving some Polybian or even Aristotelian combination of principles. If we now ask what are the salient features of Venetian government as he roughs them out in this initial sketch, the answer seems to emerge in two ways. In the first place there is what Giannotti’s introductory remarks have prepared us to encounter: a description of the various councils and officers making up the Venetian pyramid, which ought at least to prepare the way for the never-written account of how they are linked together to compose la forma di essa Repubblica. It is a safe assumption that this account would have dealt both with the distribution of functions among the various magistracies and with the ways in which the Doge, the Collegio, and the Pregati came to be elected; for it was a characteristic of Aristotelian political science that the functions performed by public officials were not differentiated from the function of electing those officials, and that membership in the ekklesia or consiglio where magistrates were chosen was considered in itself a species of magistracy. This point is borne out when Giannotti, like Guicciardini a few years earlier, enumerates in more or less classic terms the principal powers of government. “It is said that there are four things which constitute the directive force (il nervo) of every republic: the creation of magistrates, the determination of peace and war, the making of laws and the hearing of appeals.”25

Magistracies, or forms of power, are rendered interdependent by the ways in which they share these four modes of authority; but in that case the election of magistrates must itself be a kind of magistracy and enter into the complex distributions of authority. What rendered both Florence and Venice, in the eyes of both Giannotti and Guicciardini, governments of the popolo and of libertà, was the fact that in both (at least during Florence’s republican interludes) there existed a Consiglio Grande in which all magistracies were distributed. The further problem, at least to minds trained on Aristotelian and humanist presumptions, was whether the Consiglio, as the assembly of all citizens, should have any other function than that of election. On the one hand it was possible, though as we know not very easy, to attribute to undifferentiated citizens species of intelligence which rendered them capable of other forms of decision. On the other it was possible to deny them any independent intelligence, to suppose that any specific type of decision needed a corresponding elite group or “few” to take it, and to reduce the role of the Consiglio Grande to that of ensuring that the election of these elite groups, which may now be termed “magistracies,” took place under conditions of equality and impersonality. The latter we have seen to be the thrust of Guicciardini’s argument; Giannotti, when writing some years later about Florentine government as one committed to some kind of popular supremacy, had to decide whether control of elections was a sufficient guarantee of this, or whether the Consiglio Grande must intervene also, to some degree, in the exercise of the other three powers making up the nervo della repubblica.

But when he wrote his description of Venice such problems did not demand his attention. The limited size of the Venetian citizen body precluded any division into ottimati and popolo, and he was able to ignore what would in a Florentine context have been the strongly elitist implications of the circumstance that the Consiglio discharged no functions other than the electoral, none at least that need detain his readers. In observing that new legislative proposals are dealt with by the Pregati, he remarks quite casually that some laws are also laid before the Consiglio Grande for its approval, if the initiating magistrate thinks they need the maggior riputazione which this brings.26 Focussing his attention exclusively on the electoral organization of the Venetian Consiglio, he is able to deal at length²⁷ with a major constituent of the “myth of Venice” of which we have so far said little: the complex and fascinating routinization of nominating, voting and ballotting which visitors to the republic delighted to observe and describe. By a series of physical devices—the benches on which men took their seats at random, but rose up in a fixed order to cast their votes; the containers from which names and numbers were drawn at random, but in which positive or negative votes might be placed in secrecy—the Venetians were held, so to speak, to have mechanized virtù. That is, they had blended the elements of chance and choice in such a way as to present each voter with a clear set of alternatives, and to liberate him from every pressure and every temptation which might cause him to vote to please somebody else instead of stating his rational choice of the better candidate. If one thought of virtù, as one might, as the taking of decisions directed at the public good, and if one thought of the sala del consiglio grande as an enormous physical device for eliminating extraneous pressures and ensuring—almost enforcing—rationality in choosing for the public good, then one thought of Venetian government in a way for which such a phrase as “the mechanization of virtù,” though anachronistic, is not inappropriate. No less than the image of a Polybian perfection of equilibrium, the belief that the Venetians had achieved this was a potent element of the mito di Venezia.

Giannotti’s account of Venetian voting procedures was the first written and printed by a Florentine for Florentines, but their general nature had of course been known at Florence for a long time.28 Guicciardini, we recall, did not believe in their efficacy; private interests and relationships could not be eliminated from what electors did in secret, and it would be better to have them declare their choices in public where their fellow-citizens could observe and respond to what they were doing. Mechanized secrecy of choice, in his view, was at once too oligarchic and not elitist enough. Guicciardini’s criticism carries the very important implication that decision and virtù, in the last analysis, exist in the web of interactions between men; that what matters is less the rationality with which I choose what is for the public good than the concern for that good which I communicate to others in the act of choosing; and James Harrington, who admired the Venetian system, was to admit the force of the criticism that in these routinized and ritualized procedures, men did not learn to know each other.²⁹ In a secret ballot, each man chooses between alternatives that have been found for him and, even if his choice can be made perfectly rational, he does not have opportunity to declare his reasons to his fellows. If the Venetian Consiglio did nothing but choose magistrates and officers in this way, it would represent an extreme development of the principle that the many had no function but to ensure equality and impersonality in the choice of the governing elites. Giannotti does not comment on these problems, but it is possible to see from his subsequent writings that Venetian procedures reinforced in his mind the idea of a political activity which consisted purely in a silent and rational choice between alternatives found and presented by others. To understand the full range of his political thought, one must turn to those works in which he applied Venetian and other ideas to the problem of devising a popular government for Florence.

[II]

We have two short treatises which he wrote during the period of the last Florentine republic and the Great Siege (1527-1530). The first of these is a discorso on reordering the government, of familiar type, which, according to an appended letter of later date, Giannotti wrote at the request of the Gonfaloniere Niccolò Capponi, shortly before he fell from power and was replaced by a more radical ruling group. Assuming that this Letter to Capponi30 retains the original text and was not revised in the light of later experience, Giannotti’s thinking at this time (say late 1528) was so markedly aristocratic in character that it is hard to distinguish from that of Guicciardini’s Dialogo, and Felix Gilbert has defined it as typical of the liberal ottimati who wanted to maintain elite rule within a popular system. Giannotti begins by laying down that the citizens of any republic are of diverse natures, and that the aspirations of all must be satisfied if the republic is to survive (an Aristotelian maxim). There are those who desire only liberty, and these are the many; there are those who seek that honor (onore) which is the reward of greater prudence (prudenza), and these are fewer; and there are those who seek the highest position of all, which can be enjoyed by only one man at a time. This variant of the traditional onefew-many differentiation was something of a Florentine cliché; Guicciardini, Machiavelli, and Lodovico Alamanni had used it already; but it was not a formula which had been found necessary by the student of Venetian affairs. There the citizen body was so homogeneous that it could be treated as consisting of equals; but in the sharply divided city of Florence, where an elite and a non-elite confronted each other (so it was thought) within the citizen body, it was far more necessary to categorize the different types of citizen and plan a mixed government as a combination of the one, few and many which the categories employed inevitably suggested. Though Giannotti does not use the language of governo misto when writing directly about Venice, the city begins to appear in that light as soon as its principles and methods are applied to the ordering of Florence.

The Consiglio Grande had been restored as soon as the Medici collapsed in 1527, and Gilbert presents Giannotti’s discorso as one of a number of proposals to lessen its power in favor of the optimate cerchio.31 So no doubt it is, but we should observe that Giannotti’s criticisms of the existing system are directed at its over-narrow and over-restrictive character. The Gonfaloniere has too much influence over the Signoria; the Ten of War (to whom he was secretary) have too much power in matters of peace and war, and their procedure is so disorderly that decisions are often made by one or two men. All this is strettissimo and violento. Like the Guicciardini of the Dialogo, Giannotti argued that aristocratic leadership could function only on a footing of equality among aristocrats, and that this could be secured only by a regime of libertà, guaranteed by a Consiglio Grande. His threefold classification of citizens necessitated a four-step pyramid of government, exactly following that he had observed in Venice. The many who desired liberty were to be represented (the term is in the original Italian) by a Consiglio Grande; the few who pursued onore by a senate elected for life. The role of the One was obviously to be played by a Gonfaloniere a vita, but since there would always be more than one seeking the supreme glory which could formally be vested in only one man at a time, he was to be assisted by a council of procuratori, like the collegio at Venice, consisting of the most experienced magistrates of all, sharing his preeminence and aspiring legitimately to his office should it fall vacant. Though election to the senate, the procuratori and the gonfalonierate was to be for life, the essence of libertà was to be retained by keeping all elections in the hands of the Consiglio. In this way, competition for elite membership was to be open, and men would owe their preeminence to public and not private favor. Giannotti no doubt assumed that there would be a sufficient turnover through death to satisfy the aspirations of the young to office.

It appears at this stage that the Consiglio Grande has been confined to the single function of preserving liberty through rendering public and political the emergence of elites. But Giannotti introduces the further principle that every public action is divisible into three phases, which he calls consultazione, deliberazione, and esecuzione.³² If we place the first two beside Guicciardini’s deliberazione and approvazione, some apparent confusion may arise; but the distinction being drawn in either case is that between the activity of proposing alternative courses of action and the activity of choosing between such alternatives. We know that it had already been used by Guicciardini, and it might have been suggested by many, though it corresponds exactly with none, of the distinctions between different modes of political activity drawn in Aristotle’s Politics. In a Renaissance setting, it must necessarily have to do with the distinctions which the age observed between different modes of political understanding; and Giannotti proceeds to say that consultazione must be left to the few, since only a few possess the faculty of invention (invenzione) and these do not need the counsel of others33 (though presumably they take counsel among themselves). To Florentines interested in Venetian procedures, the idea of a silent, routinized, rational choice implicit in the mechanisms of the ballot might well have heightened the sense of a distinction between invention and selection; but when Giannotti proceeds to lodge deliberazione in the many, it is characteristic of the way Florentine thought seems to have been developing that he says nothing about the intellectual or moral faculties which render the many capable of choosing where they cannot initiate. The reason why they should have this function is that if the few choose, or if consultazione and deliberazione are in the same hands, the temptations of power will pervert their reason; their choice will be determined by private ambitions, and in consequence consultazione will be exercised not by the few qualified, but by the even fewer ambitious. Here, once again, we are looking at the origins of the doctrine of the separation of powers, and it should be observed both how far these origins lay in the fear of corruption, and how little a role was played by any clear theory of a democratic mode of understanding.

If consultazione is left to the few, rationality is assured; if deliberazione is left to the many, “liberty will be secured, and those who have authority will have it by virtue (virtù) of the republic and not through their own presumption and importunity.”³⁴ Execution may be left to the few, and it is not unfitting that those who proposed a policy should have responsibility for carrying it out. But as we examine what Giannotti is saying on these matters, we make two further discoveries. The first is that the composition of a public action by consultazione, deliberazione and esecuzione is depicted as occurring primarily within the senate, which is the organ of the few and rappresenta lo stato degli ottimati. When we read that deliberazione is carried out “by the many, that is, by the senate,”³⁵ we realize that the few in this case are the procuratori or the Ten of War, and that the numerical few-many distinction does not after all coincide with the qualitative distinction between the many who seek liberty through the Consiglio and the few who seek honor through the senate; it is internal to the latter. But we next discover a further reason for this. The analysis of action has so far been conducted solely with reference to the determination of questions of peace and war, which Giannotti like Guicciardini regarded as the most important single function of government once internal liberty was secured (if it was not more important even than that). These questions were to go no further than the senate. When he deals with the procuratori as initiators of new legislation,36 however, Giannotti makes it clear that the final deliberazione must take place in the Consiglio Grande. He makes more specific provision for this than he had described as existing in Venice, and the reason may well have been the acute awareness possessed by Florentines that a new law could easily affect the distribution of political power—a thing assumed not to occur at Venice. But the legislative power ranks in importance after the power of peace and war, and the feeling that the latter was a matter of prudenza, and prudenza the characteristic of the few,³⁷ was to drag Giannotti’s thought in an aristocratic direction even after he was much more openly committed to popular government than he was when he wrote the Letter to Capponi.

It was probably the siege of 1528-1530 that brought about an undeniable change in Giannotti’s thinking. After the fall of Capponi he remained in Florence to the end and seems, not unlike Guicciardini, to have had ambivalent feelings toward the radical leaders, at once condemning their recklessness and admiring their courage. He had no good opinion of their Savonarolan religiosity or of the way they conducted the government of the city, but even before Capponi’s removal from the scene, the defense of Florence was raising a political issue which may have formed the bridge between Giannotti’s earlier philo-Venetian and his later popolare writings. This was the question of the militia. Machiavelli and Guicciardini had agreed in contrasting Venice, as an aristocratic città disarmata, with Rome as an armed, popular, turbulent, and expanding state; and in the Repubblica de’ Veneziani Giannotti had allowed Trifone to contrast Roman military glory with Venetian peace and stability, to the latter’s apparent advantage. Nevertheless, there was the militia tradition at Florence; there were Machiavelli’s writings, with which Giannotti was acquainted; and before as well as after Capponi’s overthrow, the republic set about organizing a militia which was held to have performed great deeds during the siege and became part of the legend cherished by Giannotti and other exiles in subsequent years. As secretary to the Ten, he was involved in organizing this force, and we have a discorso on the subject which is accepted as his work and seems to belong to the latter part of 1528.38 It forms part of a substantial contemporary literature of the revived militia, with which it should be read; but in the context of Giannotti’s own thinking, it can be seen working a change.

Giannotti opens by refuting various arguments against the establishment of a militia, the chief of which is that arms are contrary to the nature of the Florentines, since this has been so long formed by mercantile pursuits that it will be too difficult to accustom them to military exercises.³⁹ His reply is an appeal from second to first nature: there is an absolute necessity for the city to be armed, since it is the nature of every creature to defend itself and a city must not lack the virtù which is given it in order to do so.⁴⁰ The fact that some men never develop their intellect does not alter the fact that men are endowed with intellect by nature; and as for the argument that the Florentines have grown used to other pursuits, this can be dealt with by saying that since use (assuefazione) is so mighty a power that it can operate even against nature, it can do even more when operating with nature on its side.⁴¹ The revival of the militia, then, will restore the Florentines to what they are by the universal nature of all men, and this is a sufficient refutation of those who see it as somehow incompatible with civic life. If it is natural to men to bear arms, Giannotti means, and if it is natural to them to follow citizenship, there can be no incongruency between the two, and this is much more than a formal reconciliation: Giannotti goes on to argue that the militia is a powerful, indeed an indispensable, socializing, and politicizing agency. Military service makes men equal, in the sense that all who serve are equally subject to the public authority, and the private loyalties and affiliations which may disfigure and corrupt civic life have no place there and are eliminated.42 Because men in arms defend the same things without distinction, they come to have the same values; because they are all disciplined to accept the same authority, they are all obedient to the res publica; because the public authority monopolizes force, there can be no subjection of one private citizen to another, so that liberty and authority are strengthened and guaranteed simultaneously.

But there is a dynamic involved in the view that the militia makes men citizens, as the military discipline imposed by Romulus made Romans out of a random collection of bandits;⁴³ it is that the more men we arm, the more citizens we must make. The inhabitants of Florence, Giannotti proceeds, are of three kinds: those capable of membership in the Consiglio, those capable only of paying taxes and those capable of neither. He now states the case for enrolling the second category in the militia as well as the first. The beneficiati—as in his later writings he calls the first class—are too few in numbers; the second class have the same material and emotional interests (fatherland, property, and families) as the first, and must be given the same opportunity to defend them. Once you give some men the right to defend their property with their own persons, to deny it to others who have the same property is to render them worse than slaves; the city would become a collection of masters and servants, and the latter would be lower than the dwellers in the subject cities and the countryside.⁴⁴ To leave them unarmed would divide the city, to arm them would unite it. Giannotti goes on from this point to state the case against excluding from the militia those suspected of collaboration with the Medici, and argues that to give them arms will be to reunite them with the city of which they are members. He does not put it into words at this stage, but it is clear that arms and a full equipment of civic rights are inseparable: on the one hand, to deny men arms which are allowed to others is an intolerable denial of freedom; on the other, those who bear arms in the militia become morally capable of a citizenship which it would be equally impossible to deny them. In the Repubblica Fiorentina, written a few years later, he followed a similar logic and contended that membership in the Consiglio Grande should be conceded to all who paid taxes, whether their ancestors had held magistracies or not.

We have returned to the point where it is seen that the armed state must be the popular state. Machiavelli had opted for Rome and against Venice on these grounds, and there is one moment in Giannotti’s Venetian dialogue where the Florentine interlocutor asks how many men in Venice there are capable of bearing arms and how many gentiluomini enjoying the rights of citizenship.45 The answer reveals a disproportion of 40,000 to 3,000, but no comment is made either on the meaning of this for Venetian political stability or on Venice’s reliance on mercenary soldiers. In general, the case for the restricted size of the Venetian citizen body must rest on the assumption that those who are not gentiluomini are either resident aliens or plebeians of too base a calling to rank as political animals at all; neither claim could be made in the case of Florence. Even more than Machiavelli, Giannotti was driven by Florentine realities toward the ideal of the armed popular state, and he specifically applies the idea to Florentine conditions in a way that Machiavelli’s Discorsi do not. We know from the Repubblica Fiorentina that he recognized Machiavelli as an authority on the military and civic role of the militia, but it should be observed that the theory set forth in the militia discourse of 1528 is much more overtly Aristotelian than is Machiavelli’s. It is natural to man to defend his own, and it is natural to him to pursue common goods in citizenship. To restore him his power to do the former contributes to the restoration of his power to do the latter; both restorations constitute riformazione in the Aristotelian sense, the return of man to his prime nature. This is why militia service is an agency transforming men into citizens.

There was another dimension which thought on this subject could easily assume. In Giannotti’s proposals for organizing the militia there is provision for a solemn ceremony on the feast-day of San Giovanni, at which the citizens in arms, mustered by their officers, shall hear mass, take an oath of obedience at the altar, and listen to an oration making clear the religious as well as civic meaning of their duties.46 Such ceremonies were actually held, and we have the texts of several orations delivered to the militia by figures of the post-Capponi regime.⁴⁷ All of them strike a note essentially Savonarolan, in the sense that the Aristotelian idea of a riformazione of man as citizen is extended into the sphere of personal holiness and proclaimed with religious exaltation as a rinnovazione. Florence has been chosen by God to restore libertà,⁴⁸ and to exhibit men living socially according to the values of Christianity; “vivere a popolo,” says one of them, “non è altro che vivere da cristiano.”⁴⁹ Since militia service teaches men to be citizens,⁵⁰ it is part of this process of eschatological restoration; it is itself holy and miraculous, and arms are more than once spoken of as a “garment”—sacratissima veste, incorruttibile veste dell’ arme.⁵¹ The idea that the citizenin-arms dedicates himself to the public good is of course dominant, and he is many times told why he should not fear death in doing so; but there is one significant passage in which the austerity and discipline of the soldier’s life is equated with the Christian ideal of poverty, and we are told that poverty is the origin of every art, profession and study known to man, and that only the lovers of poverty have pursued liberty, founded republics and overthrown tyrants.52 Poverty—we are looking here at the heritage of the radical Franciscans—is the ideal which impels the citizen to sacrifice his private satisfactions to the common good, and the warrior, the citizen, and the Christian have here become one; but as is usually the case in Christian thought, it is the will to sacrifice goods, not the nonpossession of goods, which is being praised. There is no contradiction between utterances such as these and those in which we are introduced once again to the Aristotelian doctrine that a city is supported by its mediocri—those who are neither too poor to be citizens nor so rich that they are tempted to self-regard.⁵³ Poverty is the virtue of the mediocri rather than the poveri.

Giannotti’s thought nowhere follows this path, or extends Aristotelian citizenship into a realm of radical saintliness and eschatological vision, unless it be in the remark, made more than once in the Repubblica Fiorentina that the republic and the militia were restored and succeeded “contrary to the opinion of the wise”⁵⁴—and Guicciardini, making the same point, had come close to equating faith with madness. But if he did not think with Savonarola that the citizen must be one in whom Christian ideals were realized, he did not think with Machiavelli that Christian and civic values were ultimately incompatible. His doctrine that military and civic life alike realized and “reformed” man’s true nature precludes anything so radical as the latter; and in a sense it was his continued use of the Venetian model which indicated his separation from the former. If we think of the fall of Niccolò Capponi as the moment at which the radical Savonarolans broke finally with the liberal ottimati like Guicciardini, it would also be the moment at which the eschatological and “Venetian” projections of the republican image, introduced jointly by Savonarola and Paolantonio Soderini in 1494, split apart. Giannotti, a liberal optimate who remained with the republic to the end, had nothing of the Savonarolan about him, and was left by default to express the ideals of 1494 in Venetian terms.

It was not impossible to reconcile Venetian paradigms with the idea of the supreme importance of a Consiglio Grande; the significant tensions in Giannotti’s thought lay elsewhere. The revival of the militia had convinced him of the need for popolare government; but the theory which asserted that such a form of rule must rest on a warrior citizenry, though it could be stated in Aristotelian and even Savonarolan terms, could not escape a strongly Machiavellian coloring in the mind of one who, like Giannotti, had read the Arte della Guerra and known its author. The whole tradition of debate in the Orti Oricellari, to which Machiavelli and Giannotti both belonged—and to which Guicciardini must in some way be related—posed an antithesis between Venice and armed popular government as typified in Rome. Machiavelli’s treatment of innovazione and virtù contains a latent dynamism hard to reconcile with Aristotelian theory of the civic life as fulfilling a static human nature; yet the Repubblica Fiorentina, Machiavellian though it is at many points, explicitly declares its debt to Aristotle, “from whom, as from a superabundant spring that has spread through all the world overflowing streams of doctrine, I have taken all the fundamentals of my brief discourse,”55 and this is in no way an empty compliment. When we add the variations that were beginning to appear within the Venetian model, between the idea of Polybian balance, the idea of a mechanized virtue, the idea of fundamental powers of government and the idea of differentiation between the component parts of a political act, and reflect that these concepts must now be applied to the theory of a government popolare in a sense in which that of Venice could never be defined, it becomes plain that the Repubblica Fiorentina, the wishful fantasy of an exile forever divorced from political action, is nevertheless a remarkable case study in the history of political conceptualization.

The aim of the work, we are told in language by now familiar, is to devise a durable if not a perpetual form of government for Florence.56 No general theory of cities and their characteristics need be constructed, since the basic characteristics (qualità) of Florence have already been determined by those who live there. But the form of government is to the character of a city as the soul to the body, and if a human soul were to be placed in a bestial body, or vice versa, the two would corrupt and destroy one another—a use of the term corruzione differing somewhat from its technical employment. We must therefore consider what is the best form of government, but ask whether Florence has those characteristics which render a city capable of such a form, and how this can be imposed without altering Florentine manners and customs too greatly. Where the choice of a concrete and specific context drove Guicciardini to employ the analogy of the physician treating a sick man, Giannotti employs that of an architect rebuilding a house upon foundations already laid; the difference indicates the comparative radicalism and compulsive optimism of the refugee hoping to return.⁵⁷

He proceeds to a theoretical disquisition purely Aristotelian and Polybian, in which the latter’s Book VI is cited by name⁵⁸ for the first time among the writers we have studied. There are in principle three types of government, and which should obtain ought to be determined by the location of virtù in the one, the few, or the many. He does not specify what is meant by virtù, but the context shows it to have the standard ethical meanings, with the interesting modification that the concentration of virtù in the many “is found in those cities which have military virtue, which is the property belonging to the multitude.”⁵⁹

If virtù in the one or the few means the ability to govern with regard to the good of all, it would be valuable to know if Giannotti shared Machiavelli’s reasons for holding that this ability can only exist among the many if it takes a military form. However, he does not clarify his remark, but goes on to explain that each of the three types can exist only in ideality. There is no difference between the good and the bad form of each except the virtue or corruption of the ruling group; and it follows, first, that nothing prevents the degeneration of each type except the rulers’ ability to escape the moral corruption which is rooted in their natures,60 and second, that it would be morally impossible to establish any of the three pure types in the actual world, where we must presuppose that men are corrupt already.⁶¹ Nothing is said about fortuna, and, despite his acknowledged debt to Polybius, Giannotti employs neither the idea of the cycle as a determinate order of succession of the forms nor the concept that each pure type is corrupted by the excessive power of its own special virtue; but we are clearly in that Christian world in which history is the dimension of the Fall of man, to which all these concepts could be rhetorically appropriate.

A theory of mixed government (governo misto or stato misto) now makes its appearance, in a form markedly more Aristotelian than Polybian, and Christian rather than Hellenic in the sense that it is intended for fallen and imperfectly rational men. In every city there are different types of citizens with different desires. There are the rich and great who desire to command; these are necessarily few in number, and the differentiation of the “one” from the “few” appears only because there are degrees of authority and preeminence which only one man can enjoy at a time. There are the many poor, who do not wish to command, or to be commanded by any authority less universal than that of the laws; and there are the mediocri, who as well as desiring libertà in the sense just defined have sufficient fortune to desire onore—plainly meaning a share in command—in addition.62 It is the latter who fulfill Aristotle’s definition of the citizen as one who rules and is ruled, and if only for this reason it would be erroneous to assign them the role of the “few.” The grandi clearly possess many “oligarchical” characteristics, and it emerges a little later, in the true Aristotelian tradition, that it is possible for the mediocri to be so numerous that they absorb the category of the “many poor” altogether; Giannotti’s numerical and his qualitative categories do not, as they need not, perfectly coincide. What is important at this stage is that we are studying men’s desires, not their virtues. These desideri are also called umori, a term which carries nonrational connotations; they are irrational because they are incompatible, there being no way of combining, without modifying, the desire of some to command with the desire of others to be commanded by none. Formally, it might seem, this could be done by establishing a rule of laws, or by incorporating all citizens within the category of mediocri who both command and are commanded; but whether as a Christian, an Aristotelian, or a Machiavellian, it is important that Giannotti was convinced that the umori could never wholly be abolished and consequently that no mixed government could ever be a perfect blend.⁶³

Governo misto is, initially at least, a beneficent deception practiced on irrational men. It is possible to introduce a modo di vivere—in fact, if we look closely, this is the only way in which a modo di vivere can be introduced—in which men are given part of what they want, or are given it conditionally, in such a shape that they believe they have been given the whole of it, or have been given it absolutely.64 The incompatibility of their desires is an incompatibility arising from the nature of power; some men cannot command all while others are free from command by any; and therefore the beneficent deception consists in the fact that the former receive authority and the latter liberty, in such a way that each party’s enjoyment of its desire is conditional upon the will of the other.

In the form of government we are seeking it is necessary that one man be prince, but that his principate is not dependent on himself alone; that the great command, but that their authority does not originate with themselves; that the multitude be free, but that their liberty involves some dependence; and finally that the mediocri, as well as being free, can attain to honours (onori—the word in the plural has the secondary meaning of “offices”), but in such a way as is not placed entirely at their will …⁶⁵

But the deception may lead men beyond the point of illusion. Assuming that it is the property of man as a rational political animal to rule with an eye to the common good, and assuming that this state of mutual political dependence will compel men so to rule whether they intend to or not, such a distribution of functions (Giannotti calls it amministrazione) will make men rational; umori will become virtù. But the agency precipitating them from unreason into reason is a structure of powers, arranged so that they depend upon and condition one another. Once these powers are exercised rationally, they become faculties in the individual whereby he acts rationally and politically and governs the actions of others (as they govern his) so that they act in the same way. That is, powers too have become virtù; and it is characteristic of the active connotations which this word always bore that Giannotti is able on occasion to use it interchangeably with terms like forze and potestà. The polity, once again, is a contrivance of human intelligence for the institutionalization of virtù: for assigning men functions which will require them to act in such a way that their natures are reformed and are once again what they are, instead of what they have become.

Such a contrivance depends on the existence of mediocri, the only people capable of governing and being governed, and therefore of substituting rational behavior for the irrationalism of those who can only command or only obey. If there were a city consisting wholly of mediocri, it could be a democracy of the pure type—we know that the virtù of the mediocri would be military—but there is none.66 Where the mediocri are stronger than, or equal to, the grandi and poveri in combination, or where they hold the balance of strength between the two, a governo misto is possible and indeed necessary, if the city is not to suffer that corruption which comes when the soul is disproportionate to the body. It remains to be shown that Florence satisfies these conditions and Giannotti proceeds to do so, in the form of a history of the city which indicates how his Aristotelian grounding had given him a more subtle and sanguine grasp of historical causation, and delivered him further from the grip of fortuna, than a merely Polybian theory of cycles could have done. His thought will also be found strikingly anticipatory of that of James Harrington in the next century.

Giannotti contends that Florence used to be a city of grandi and poveri, and has in the last century become increasingly one of mediocri. To understand this, he claims, is to understand Florentine history both before and after the Medicean regime of 1434-1494. Had he employed the scheme of Polybius’s sixth book to this end, it would have suggested that rule by the few (grandi) had given place to rule by the many (poveri) and then to rule by a tyrant (Cosimo) and so round the clock again; each form would have existed in its purity, decayed through spontaneous inner degeneration and collapsed through some combination of circumstances precipitated by unpredictable fortuna. But such a scheme was unlikely to satisfy Florentines of the 1530s, whether historically or philosophically; they knew too much about the past by way of data, and demanded too much by way of explanation. Giannotti lays it down that in considering every event (azione), one must examine the general cause (cagione), the precipitating cause (occasione), and the immediate cause (principio). In the case of the fall of the Florentine republic in 1512, the cagione was the discontent of certain ambitious oligarchs with the form of government, the occasione was the war between Pope Julius and the king of France, and the principio was the attack of the Spanish army on Prato and Florence. Cagione is a disposition of things, which makes itself felt when occasione offers, and very frequently it is also the cause why occasione appears.67

In the case of Florentine politics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we are concerned with an unstable alternation between the stati of grandi and popolo—Giannotti is clearly not thinking of it as a cycle—and the cagione or disposizione was the rough equality between the forces (forze) of the two. The monopoly of qualità by the one was answered by the ascendancy of quantity in the other, so that neither could prevail or destroy its adversary—Giannotti would have agreed with Machiavelli’s further contention that neither could devise a system of government acceptable to the other—and the victory of either party was the result of occasione, which might at some future date, and generally did, prove propitious to the other.⁶⁸ In this case cagione was all, and it is clearly of no importance what the various occasioni may have been. It is useful to contrast Machiavelli’s use of occasione in Il Principe, where it signified the extreme irrationality and unpredictability of the particular event in a world of fortuna. Machiavelli knew far more about historical causation than that, but the contrast is still worth drawing. Giannotti’s occasione is still the random unpredictable which turns the wheel and overthrows power systems, but the instability of politics is now caused rather than inherent. Grandi and poveri, quality and quantity, authority and liberty, constitute an unstable equilibrium from which most men cannot escape, being what they are; but one can see why their natures constitute instability, and consequently one can see how stability might replace it. Fortuna consequently plays little role in his system, and the word is hardly used. He relies instead on an Aristotelian theory of causation, and an Aristotelian theory of social forces.

Harrington, constructing in the next century an account of English history along comparable lines, ascribed to the king and barons of medieval England a role very like that of Giannotti’s grandi and poveri; they were locked in an unstable equilibrium until the Tudors undermined baronial power by raising up a landowning people, whose advent proved no less ruinous to a monarchy that could no longer govern them.69 A similar role is allotted by Giannotti to the Medici of the fifteenth century, who, by advancing poor men to office and depriving the aristocrats of any chance to display generosità and grandezza except at the nod of the ruling family, depressed some and exalted others to form a new and growing class of mediocri, who now hold the balance of power and make a stable governo misto possible in Florence.⁷⁰ Since 1530 the Medici have ruled with the support of a few grandi who owe them their advancement and a few more whom the excesses of the siege have alienat [i] dal vivere universale e politico, but their tyranny is self-abolishing; it deprives all men of what they desire and increases the number of mediocri whose presence alone can ensure that they achieve their various ends.⁷¹ Like Harrington, Giannotti was a poor prophet but a successful enricher of the conceptual vocabulary; both men developed schemes of causation which wrongly predicted political stabilization and an end to historical turbulence, but increased the extent to which sequences of political change could be talked about in terms, concrete and social, which were not those of the irrational particularities of fortuna. One is tempted to say that both offered ways out of the Polybian cycle and into the rotating spheres of ordered government; but in fact their causal vocabularies were so rich that they never had recourse to the Polybian model at all. The vocabulary of Aristotle was less stilted, and it is this that Giannotti is using.

The apparatus of political analysis which it is possible to bring to bear on the city’s problems continues to be a crucial question in Book II of the Repubblica Fiorentina, which is devoted to a criticism of the republican constitutions of 1494-1502-1512 and 1527-1530. Reforming legislators, Giannotti begins, like Numa and Lycurgus, have a harder task than those who found cities where none have existed before (we should remember that Machiavelli in the Discorsi, though not in Il Principe, had on the whole treated Lycurgus as belonging to this class). The latter have only to know what is good and may be fairly sure of the support of the unformed matter whom they lead and mold; but the former have to know what has been wrongly managed in previous constitutions, and there are familiar difficulties about this. In the first place there are always those who are used (assuefatti) to the previous order and will change only with difficulty; this is why Numa had to feign divine assistance and Lycurgus to use violence72 (we recall the armed prophet of Il Principe). In the second place constitutional defects belong in the category of cose particolari, which are hard to understand by any means over and above mere experience; and in the third place no man is so free from human affections that he can always see clearly defects in which he has himself been involved.⁷³ Savonarola, both as a foreigner and as a friar, could hardly be expected to know much about the workings of Florentine institutions; nevertheless, the Consiglio Grande which he helped introduce would have reformed itself by degrees, if given time and if the treachery of certain grandi had not brought back the Medici.⁷⁴

It is therefore of great importance to know if we can develop a political science by which the deficiencies of previous constitutions can be exposed and corrected. Giannotti proceeds to a critique of both republican constitutions, in which he argues that although the Consiglio Grande was nominally the foundation of the system, in practice the various magistracies—including the Ten and in some respects the Gonfaloniere—exercised so much irresponsible power that effective authority was in the hands of a few.75 This disguised oligarchy should not be confused with a disguised aristocracy; Giannotti’s links with the liberal ottimati are still strong enough to make him stress that this state of things alienated them from the government so much that their hostility grew worse under the gonfalonierate for life of 1502-1512, of which he otherwise approves, and that one’s detestation of their treachery should not blind one to its causes (cagioni, not occasioni).⁷⁶ In these chapters he is essentially resuming and reworking the themes of the Letter to Capponi, and two lines of constitutional analysis are reappearing. In the first place it is evident that the irresponsibility of the various magistracies arose from a failure to separate powers: they could do as they liked because they had deliberazione as well as consultazione. When Giannotti reverts, as he does some chapters later, to the recommendation of Venetian voting procedures, it is because these decisively separate the function of resolving from the function of proposing. But in the second place—and this is less unambiguously Venetian—there is the thought that the irresponsibility of the magistrates meant that their power was not, as it should have been, dependent on the power of some authority outside themselves. The structure of mutual interdependence which was the essence of governo misto must at some stage be worked out in full. But at this moment Giannotti strikes a new note, indicative of the movement of his ideas toward popular supremacy, by saying that the familiar four powers—election of magistrates, peace and war, hearing of appeals, and legislation—which constitute the vigore (formerly the nervo) of government, must be in the control of whoever is to be signore of the city. If the many are to rule they must possess the four powers, or such a city will not be truly free.77 Clearly the problem is where the four powers are to be located in a governo misto, but all Giannotti has to say at the moment is that it was insufficient to vest the election of magistrates in the Consiglio Grande—even though in that respect the city might be termed free—if peace and war were to remain in the irresponsible control of the Ten.⁷⁸ This rendered the right of appeal against magistrates’ decisions virtually meaningless; while as for legislation, though it was nominally determined by the Consiglio, it was for all practical purposes in the hands of a few men. That election of magistrates alone is insufficient is shown by the practice of the Medici, who always controlled the appointment of those who managed the three remaining powers and left the election of others entirely free. The master of the three, not the four, powers is master of all.⁷⁹

Giannotti is on the point of breaking new ground, which will lead his thought away from a simple mixture of three elements or a simple institutionalization of virtù. But for the present he has finished his analysis of the remedial knowledge which a reforming legislator of Florence must possess, and has now to blend it with the universal principles on which such a figure must proceed. The aim of the legislator, we read at the beginning of Book III, is to erect a state which will last; states fall either through internal dissension or through external assault; a buon governo provides against the former danger, a buona milizia against the latter—though it may also be considered part of buon governo and functioning to the former end. We now enter upon the Machiavellian problem of deciding whether civil or military organization should come first, and the figure of Romulus makes his appearance. But whereas it was Lycurgus who attended to governo and milizia simultaneously, before Romulus gave a thought to either he devoted himself to acts of violence against his neighbors and to the aggrandizement of his people’s empire. It might seem that this choice was conducive to, if not identical with, military organization; but it appears to have been the Rape of the Sabines that Giannotti had principally in mind, and he comments that behavior of this kind can only have originated in the lust for domination, since Romulus had enough men to make a city and there were, after all, other ways of procuring women for them.80 A little later Romulus is stated to have attended to civil before military organization; so that the effect of Giannotti’s analysis is to separate him sharply from Machiavelli’s view that because Rome was from the beginning organized for expansion, she was developed along military and therefore along popular lines. This initial repudiation of the Roman model, to be carried further in later chapters, assists in the reintroduction of Venetian concepts; and it rests in part on the implication that the function of the militia is preservative rather than aggressive. Venice, preferring stability to empire, went so far as to have no civic militia at all; but Giannotti, with the experience of the Siege behind him, is clear that the function of the militia is defensive. Rome was held by Bruni and Machiavelli to have destroyed republican virtù in the rest of the world and to have lost her own in consequence; but a nonaggressive militia may remain a means of inculcating virtù in the citizens. Men defended the republic of 1527-1530 where that of 1512 fell without a struggle, and the main reason was that a citizen militia existed at the later date but not at the earlier (Machiavelli’s had been a militia of contadini and Giannotti was aware of the theoretical difference). The ideal Florence is to be armed and popular like Rome, but stable and peaceable like Venice; and Giannotti has moved decisively away from the restless dynamism of Machiavelli. The militia in its politicizing aspects is only a part of the apparatus of buon governo, and he now gives the latter so great a priority that for the rest of the book he lays, on the whole, less stress on the militia’s power to make men virtuous than he had in 1528.81

Since what he is designing for Florence is a governo misto and not a pure democracy, we have to understand the role in a governo misto both of a militia—we have been told that military virtue is a democratic characteristic—and of the four powers of government, since their location determines who shall be signore of a city and we do not yet know the place of such a signore in a mixed government. Giannotti proceeds to develop a critical analysis of the idea of mixed government. This can mean, he says, either that the three parts (one, few, and many; grandi, mediocri, popolari) exercise powers equal to one another, or that some one of them exercises power (forze, potenza) greater than either of the other two; the aim in each case is to produce an equilibrium. If we think carefully, we shall see that the former is bound to be defective. The reason is that a mixture of political elements is not like a mixture of natural elements, in which each component (semplice) loses its distinctive virtù and the compound acquires a virtù of its own. A political mixture is made up of men, of grandi, mediocri and popolari, each of whom remains after mixture what he was before (unless, presumably, all have become mediocri, in which case we are not constructing a mixed government at all). Each retains his distinctive characteristic, which Giannotti is now calling virtù, not umore or (as he might have done) fantasia; and these virtù consist of desires and the power to pursue them, which we merely institutionalize in the construction of a polity. It is therefore impossible to “temper a state so perfectly that the virtù—let us call it power—of each part is not apparent,” and if these are equal, then the oppositions and resistances between them will be equal, and the republic will be full of dissensions which will bring about its ruin.⁸² Giannotti has analyzed the term virtù in such a way as to bring about the substitution of a mechanistic for a pseudo-organic model in political analogy; Guicciardini’s cook, stirring a mound of pasta, has disappeared.

It further follows that Polybius was wrong in seeing the Roman republic as the model of mixed government. He declares that ambassadors to Rome, when dealing with the consuls, thought they were in a kingdom; when with the senate, in an aristocracy; when with the populus, in a democracy. But this indicates that the power of each was equal to and uncontrolled by that of each other, and if this was so it is small wonder that the republic was prey to civil dissensions. Had it been well-ordered, ambassadors would have sensed in dealing with the consuls their dependence on the senate and the people, with the senate their dependence on the consuls and the people, and with the people their dependence on the consuls and the senate; and the virtù of each would have been temperata by the others. This should have been attended to by Brutus and his colleagues at the expulsion of the kings, and it can be argued that they tried to vest superiority in the senate; but assuming that Polybius is right in his facts, the equality of power between the three organs of government exposed Rome to that instability and strife which destroyed her in the end.83

The repudiation of Polybius carries to a further stage Giannotti’s repudiation of Machiavelli on the subject of Rome. He has already implicitly rejected Machiavelli’s contention that the armed popular state must be one organized for expansion; he now rejects his contention that Roman civil strife was a sign of health because it led to the institution of the tribunate (of which Giannotti has very little to say). The more Rome is eliminated from paradigmatic stature, the more fascinating becomes his evident intention of employing Venetian forms and concepts for the organization of an armed popular state. The crucial point, however, is Giannotti’s drastic remodeling of the concept of governo misto, not least because this anticipates so much in English and American constitutional thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His contention at the moment is that you cannot construct a balance of equal and independent forces because the pressures and counterpressures between them will be equal and there will be no resolution of the contest. But we know that political authority is of so many kinds and can be distributed in so many combinations that it is possible to render three agents mutually dependent, and it may seem theoretically possible to erect a system of three equal yet interdependent parts. Giannotti does not examine this possibility; he assumes that interdependence requires inequality, to the extent that one part must enjoy a preponderance over the other two (la repubblica deve inclinare in una parte). A principal reason seems to be that one must institutionalize conflict; there will always be competition among the powers, and if all are theoretically equal a loser may blame a victor for his loss and pursue internecine strife instead of the common good, whereas if the loser’s inferiority is built into the structure of the republic it will be accepted as legitimate. Giannotti stresses that he does not mean the preponderant part to enjoy an imperio from which the others are excluded, but merely that it shall be less dependent on them than they on it. He has yet to make clear what is the relevance to all this of his doctrine that the four powers of government must belong to the signore or padrone, and whether indeed such terms are applicable to that part to which la repubblica inclina.84

The next step is to consider whether the preponderant part should be the grandi or the popolo (that it might be the one on whom the few and the many depend he does not consider a contemporary possibility, though he holds that this provided a stable government in prerepublican Rome). Giannotti argues the case for the people at considerable length, much as Machiavelli had, and not all his arguments need detain us. The indictment of Roman institutions is resumed, but in a way revealing some significant tensions. We are told that if the people feel themselves oppressed by a particular individual, they rush to his house and revenge themselves by burning it down—such at least is the way of Florence—whereas if they feel that their wrongs are the result of the maldistribution of public authority they agitate for legal and institutional reforms which will assure them of greater justice and a greater share of power; and this explains why the struggle between the orders at Rome was relatively bloodless until the time of the Gracchi and brought the plebeians increasing participation in authority.85 This point clearly owes much to Machiavelli’s argument concerning the beneficent effects of strife at Rome, which Giannotti otherwise wished to reject. Elsewhere we read that if at the expulsion of the Tarquins the senate had been made dependent on the people instead of the reverse, the people would have been free from injuries and the senate weaker than the people, and Rome would as a result have been more tranquil and escaped the dissensions which ultimately destroyed her; the republic would have been eternal and her empire stabilissimo.⁸⁶ Rome, a popular state to Machiavelli, is to Giannotti as to Guicciardini a rather unstable optimacy. There are some, he adds—though Machiavelli is plainly meant here—who argue that Rome could not have expanded (crescesse) without these civil dissensions, but that is true only of Rome as she was organized and it can be held that she would have expanded much more efficiently without them if organized on a popular basis.⁸⁷ But Giannotti has already indicated that imperial expansion is not a necessary mark of the armed popular state. One is left feeling that he had considerable difficulty in getting out of Machiavelli’s shadow, if only because he aimed at establishing positions so like and yet unlike his—the armed popular state without Rome, Venice without her aristocracy or mercenaries.

He is happier developing Aristotelian and Machiavellian arguments for the superiority of the popolo. These are, in general,⁸⁸ that the few desire to command, an impulse easily destructive of the common good, where that libertà which the many desire to preserve—that condition in which each enjoys his own under law—is close to being the common good itself. Furthermore, the few command and the many obey—i.e., they obey the laws, rather than the few—and it is easier for one who knows how to obey the laws to learn how to give commands than for one whose aim is always to command to subject his will to law. The habit of obeying a wide variety of laws gives the many a certain prudence, which the few often lack since their passions know fewer restraints; practical experience and book-learning, the sources of prudence considered as information, are as accessible to popolari as to grandi;89 and since the former outnumber the latter, “it can be said with probability that they make up a greater aggregate of prudence.”⁹⁰

Giannotti puts forward a democratic theory of prudenza. Instead of being the reward of the elite who thrust themselves into public service in pursuit of onore, it is the reward of those who obey the laws, pool their experience, suffer injuries rather than inflict them and react by the collective pursuit of public remedies rather than by the aristocratic pursuit of revenge on particular enemies. The many’s interest in libertà means that they are better politicized, more apt to accept public authority as legitimate, than the ambitious few. Last and strongest argument of all, in a city where there are many popolari or mediocri, it would be violenza to subject them to the authority of the grandi.⁹¹

The rest of Book III is taken up with the anatomy of an ideal constitution. We know that this is to be a governo misto, owing much of its detail to Venice, and satisfying the aspirations, by combining the powers, of those who desire grandezza, onore, and libertà. The powers of each group are to be interdependent, but there is to be one—the power of those whose aim is libertà, namely the people—which pre-ponderates, at least in the sense of being less dependent on the other two than they are on it; but there has also been mention of four powers or functions which constitute the vigore or nervo of government and belong to whatever individual or group is to be signore. To modern readers, this signore sounds very like a sovereign, and a sovereign does not seem to fit into the balanced distribution of powers which constitutes a governo misto, even of the weighted kind which Giannotti has in view. We have a problem, therefore, and perhaps Giannotti had too, in relating these concepts to one another.

Giannotti begins by declaring that the republic is to be composed of three principal members, but that, just as in Venice, there is to be a fourth, called the Collegio, to go between the senate and the gonfaloniere (or prince) and satisfy the aspirations of those who seek grandezza by associating them as closely as possible with the supreme authority which only one man can exercise.92 The members of this Collegio are to be magistrates rather than counselors, in the sense that specialized functions in regard of war (the Ten), justice (the procuratori), and so on, are to be assigned to each of them; and it is assumed that they excel in respect not only of ambition, but also of intellectual qualities, perhaps including experience, but certainly extending to originality, initiative, and the ability to propose policies. If at this end of the scale there is to be overlap between the one and the few, between grandezza and onore, at the other end the Consiglio Grande, though its function is to preserve libertà and therefore to represent the popolari who look no higher, is to be open to all citizens, whether grandi, mediocri, or popolari, whether (we may add) they seek grandezza, onore, or libertà. It is in fact to be composed of citizens reckoned as equals and by number. Giannotti goes on to explain why there will be a category of plebei who find no place in the Consiglio because they are not members of the city; their trades are vile and they are foreigners with homes to go to (he may have in mind peasants from the surrounding villages). But he insists at some length that those who pay taxes, but are not eligible for magistracies, must be members of the Consiglio Grande.⁹³ Since it seems to have been the experience of the militia of 1528-1530 which convinced him of the need to treat these non-beneficiati as citizens, it is interesting, and possibly significant of the way his thought was turning, that the arguments he now deploys are stressed as being operative when the city is not armed, no less than when it is. If the non-beneficiati—he is now calling them popolari—are not admitted to onori (membership of the Consiglio is plainly an onore), they will not love the republic or voluntarily contribute to or defend it; they will be liable to follow particular leaders; and these dangers will be exacerbated in time of arms. Aristotle would certainly condemn both Venice and Florence for failure to mobilize this class in citizenship;94 and Giannotti is plainly aware that not membership in the Consiglio alone, but all forms of magistracy and onore, should be open to them, though he concedes that this may not be practicable as things are. There is no one who is not ambitious of exaltation and glory, he says, unless repressed and debased as the French have been; and the arming of a city serves to bring this truth to the surface.⁹⁵ At this stage the class of those, once called popolari, who desire libertà alone would seem to have disappeared, but perhaps it would be truer to say that it has become open-ended: it is a category to which all men may, and to some extent do, belong, but this is in no way incompatible with the existence of a constant competition in virtù, from which governing elites emerge and in which all citizens may take part. Giannotti is as hostile as Guicciardini to the imposition of qualifications of wealth or birth for membership in the higher magistracies.

He now explicitly declares that the Consiglio Grande is to be signore of the city and consequently must exercise those “functions which are sovereign in the republic and embrace all the power of the state.”⁹⁶ We ask ourselves how such a monopoly can be reconciled with a mere lessening of dependence in a structure of interdependence. The functions or powers in question, we recall, are the election of magistrates, the determination of peace and war, the hearing of appeals and the approval and promulgation of new laws. Giannotti is able to explain a modified version of Venetian procedure whereby the Consiglio elects all magistrates, from the senate up through the Collegio to the Gonfaloniere. The last is to be elected for life, but the senate, he decides after consideration—and contrary to his opinion in the Letter to Capponi—is to be reelected every year, with no bar to the serving of successive terms; this will ensure a stable elite, in which it will however be possible to lose one’s place.97 But

the determination of peace and war must terminate in the senate … and though it cannot pass to the Consiglio, it will nevertheless depend upon the latter since this is where the senate in which it terminates is elected. It might perhaps be well, when a new war is proposed for the first time, to refer the decision to the Consiglio Grande, as did the Romans, who used to ask the people if it was their will and command that war be made on this or that prince or republic; but all consequent decisions (accidenti) must terminate in the senate.⁹⁸

Similarly the power of hearing appeals must terminate in a specialized body of magistrates, imitated from the Venetians, called the Quarantie. Giannotti subsequently remarks that the signore of a state or city, whose proprietà this power rightfully is, often finds that it takes up too much of his time to exercise it in person (one suspects that it was also the problem of time which made Giannotti withhold the accidenti of war from the Consiglio), and for this reason the Consiglio Grande which is signore of Venice has set up the Quarantie, and the king of France has deputed his judicial power to four parlements.⁹⁹ It is arguable, then, that the power of election safeguards the dependenza of the judicial as of the military power upon the Consiglio. The difficulty is the vigor with which Giannotti earlier contended that a city might be free—i.e., that its Consiglio might be supreme—in respect of the election of magistrates but unfree in respect of the way those magistrates exercised their power, and that it was precisely this, in relation to military and judicial matters, which had made the republics of 1494 and 1527 violent and unfree governments. It was insufficient to keep—as Giannotti’s plan continues to keep—the final approval of legislation in the power of the Consiglio, since legislation was not thought of as regulating the military and judicial functions.

It is possible to modify what seems a theoretical failure on Giannotti’s part by pointing out that the former magistrates’ irresponsibility had consisted in his view not only in their independence of control by the Consiglio Grande, but also in the fact that the same men proposed, resolved upon, and executed policies.100 This alone had sufficed to make them closed cliques of the self-seeking, and he now takes up again his earlier proposals to separate consultazione and deliberazione and in this way to make men functionally responsible to each other. He effected this by detailing the relations between the senate and the various boards composing the Collegio, and he is able (as in the Letter to Capponi) to use the terms “few” to denote the body, e.g., the Ten, which exercises consultazione, and “many” to denote the senate which resolves on their proposals.¹⁰¹ Yet as long as military and judicial matters do not reach the Consiglio, the term “many” cannot carry its usual meaning, and as long as the election of magistrates is thought of as one among four powers, and not as a prior and separate determinant of the other three, such a Consiglio cannot qualify as a signore exercising all four; but that is the only definition of signore which we have. It can of course be argued—and this is much more plausible—that if the Consiglio elects the senate, the Collegio, and the Gonfaloniere, it exercises indirect control over those two of the four powers which do not remain under its immediate authority, and is therefore very much less dependent on the one and the few than they are on it. But the problem throughout has been the relation between the concept of lesser dependenza and that of signore, and the two cannot be said to have been reconciled, much less identified. If we take Giannotti’s theory of the signore and its four powers as a primitive attempt at a theory of sovereignty, we may add that the linguistic confusions which arose when one spoke of sovereignty in a context of mixed government, and vice versa, were to bedevil political discourse to the American Revolution and beyond.

Giannotti’s mind was independent, forceful, and original, but lacked the unpredictable creativity of genius which we find in Machiavelli; and for this reason it may be taken as displaying in some detail the bent and the limitations of humanist political thought. His chief originality consists in his perception that virtù in a mixed government was a kind of power, and in his consequent attempt to define the four functions of government whose location determined the signore. But he failed to concentrate these functions and was obliged to distribute them instead; and the ultimate reason was that humanist political thought was overmasteringly concerned with the ideal of civic virtue as an attribute of the personality, and in the last resort always turned from the establishment of institutionalized authority to the establishment of conditions, termed libertà, in which virtue might have free play and escape corruption. Our analysis of the Repubblica Fiorentina, like that of the Discorsi, should close with its distinctive contribution to the theory of corruption: Giannotti condemns the way in which, under the Savonarolan regime of 1529-1530, the brethren of San Marco became involved in politics and ambitious politicians sought conspicuous association with them as a means to enhanced authority with the citizens. This, he says, was no less corruption than was the open bribery of voters at Rome—it was, so to speak, an attempt to buy authority with coin other than that existing for the purpose—and to make things worse, bribery was at least acknowledged to be an evil, whereas if you attacked hypocrisy you were taken for an enemy of Jesus Christ.102 Humanist political thought excelled at this sort of analysis, and subordinated the consideration of power to it; liberty, virtue, and corruption, rather than the location of authority, were its prime concerns.

It is not even certain that Machiavelli was an exception. As we complete this study of the last phase of Florentine political theory, the most vivid impression remaining should be that of the continuity of a basically Aristotelian republicanism from which Machiavelli did not seem to his friends (who were each other’s enemies) to have greatly departed. Certainly we can discover areas of his thought where he seems to have radically departed from the medieval concept of a teleo-logically determined human nature, though equally there are moments at which he seems to be using, if he does not formally reason from, the idea that men are formed to be citizens and that the reformation of their natures in that direction may be corrupted but cannot be reversed; the prince cannot make them anything else. But it is of some significance that the revolutionary aspects of his thinking—those in which man appears most dynamic and least natural—did not arrest the attention of his friends. Guicciardini’s concept of citizenship remains a concept of virtù, loaded in the midst of its realism with Aristotelian language and assumptions, and in Giannotti the principle that man’s nature is that of a citizen is explicitly stated, explicitly Aristotelian, and stops short only of becoming Savonarolan. It was in the Aristotelian and civic humanist channel that the stream of republican tradition was to flow, and Machiavelli as a historical figure, to whom theorists like Harrington and Adams referred, was to swim quite successfully in that channel. And the tradition to which the Florentines belonged was to be supported rather than impeded by their tough-mindedness in retaining a basically moralist concern with liberty and corruption; it continued to present politics as the erection of conditions under which men might freely exercise active virtue.

Giannotti also reveals to us the high capacity of Aristotelian political science, as an analytical and explicatory system, to absorb theories put forward as variations on its basic ideas. The Polybian theory of cycles, Machiavelli’s doctrine of the militia, the model (rather than the myth) of Venice—all these are alluded to, explored, but finally used rather than followed; and they are used in the service of a basically Aristotelian method of categorizing the elements composing a city and showing how their interactions lead to stability, instability, or change in the polity. The classical republicanism to which John Adams still adhered was basically a Renaissance rephrasing of the political science set forth in Aristotle’s Politics, and it possessed a high degree of capacity for dealing with the social phenomena of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Giannotti, however, perhaps its main importance was its ability to provide causal explanations of particular happenings and particular characteristics of cities; the Repubblica Fiorentina, is after all, a partially successful attempt to show how Venetian procedures and their underlying principles can be used in devising a different style of government for the very different conditions obtaining at Florence; and we have seen how, using Aristotelian categories both of causation and political composition, he was able to construct historical explanations and predictions concerning Florentine conditions which may have been misleading, but nevertheless dispelled much of the sense of mystery surrounding the particular. He is less dependent on concepts of usage, providence, or fortuna, when it comes to explaining how Florence has come to be as she is or what she may expect in the future, than either Savonarola or Machiavelli; he does not expect a miracle, like the former or his epigoni in 1529-1530—he has seen what their faith could and could not do—and he has less than the latter’s sense of the desperate difficulty of creative action in the face of fortuna, or the almost miraculous qualities required for its success. This no doubt has much to do with his choice of a rational Venice, rather than a dynamic Rome, as the source of his principles of organization.103 His theory is highly articulated and he is relatively confident of its applicability in practice.

Guicciardini, had he ever read the Repubblica Fiorentina, would have acidly remarked that its author had never had to put his theories into effect; and certainly it is sad, as one reads Giannotti’s demonstrations that the regime of the early 1530s cannot possibly last, to reflect that this intelligent man had forty more years of life in which to see himself proved wrong (Guicciardini was just as wrong about the same regime in his own way). But in the present study we are concerned less with the predictive capacity of ideas than with their capacity to enlarge the paradigmatic vocabulary of a civilization; in this sense, an unsuccessful prophecy can be reused. Giannotti found Aristotelian political analysis complex and plausible enough to give him confidence that he understood something of the way things happened in time, and for this reason his thought is not focused on apocalyptic expectation, like Savonarola’s, or on innovazione and occasione like Machiavelli’s. Time is not in the foreground. The work concludes—as do Il Principe and the Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze—with what we can now see as an almost conventional section¹⁰⁴ on the problems of actualization. Like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Giannotti reviews the occasions on which, and the personalities by whom, republics may be securely founded; but his thought is directed toward Florentine actuality, and the fact that he writes as an exile in time of tyranny leaves him, as he recognizes, very little to say. Only a liberator (like Andrea Doria at Genoa) can be legislator for Florence, and concerning a liberator we can say only that either he will come or he will not. Others—presumably including Machiavelli—have written so well on the theory of conjurations and conspiracies as to teach him all he can learn about the occasione of the overthrow of governments; our part is to study the theory of establishing them, since it is better that we should complain of Fortune that she never sent us a liberator, than she of us that we did not know what to do when he came.105 In these concluding words of his treatise, Giannotti accepts the role of the theorist in exile, and indicates once more that his attitude to time and fortuna is realistic. He is not naive about the difficulties of action, neither does he think them capable only of a miraculous solution (Machiavelli, who has been accused of the former, is nearer to the latter position). When he acknowledges the primacy of fortuna, he means only that there are always things beyond our control.

If this is largely the reason why Giannotti prefers Venice to Rome, and does not adopt Machiavelli’s concept of a dynamic virtù, it is also a reason why he does not present Venice as a miracle or a myth. The problem of time was not, to his mind, such that only a Venetian miracle could solve it. He accepted the view that the purpose of legislation—and of his own planning for Florence—was to found constitutions that would endure, and he profoundly admired Venice’s success in achieving near-perpetual stability. But the components of the mito di Venezia were the belief that only miraculous wisdom could bring such stability, and the belief that Venice had achieved a miracle by the art and contrivance of many; and since Giannotti did not adopt the former position, he presented neither a Polybian balance nor the mysteries of Venetian electoral machinery as constituting a miraculous solution to the problem of duration. He was obliged to see Venice’s success as the product of many causes, simply by the circumstance that he was applying Venetian paradigms to the problem of achieving the same success in the very different conditions of Florence, and his mainly Aristotelian vocabulary gave him so many ways of differentiating conditions and causes that he could not see the problem as apocalyptic or its solution as miraculous or simple. The problem of legislation for durability was capable of complex solutions, and these could be built up over time. In both Giannotti’s major works, his account of Venetian history, while serving as a kind of antithesis to Machiavelli’s history of Rome, is equally an account of a complex historical process.

But we have seen that republican theory is in essence Aristotelian political science, selectively simplified by a drastic emphasis on the problem of time. It was possible to move away from such an emphasis, into a conceptual world so rich in its vocabulary that the potentialities of action increased and the problem of time grew less. But it was equally possible to move in the reverse direction, toward a position where only divine grace, the heroic action of a Lycurgus, or the attainment of a miraculous equilibrium seemed to offer solutions to the problem. The Renaissance obsession with time and fortune ensured that, since Venice was the paradigm of the solution last mentioned, the mito di Venezia would endure; and if Giannotti’s nonmythical account became one of the standard books in the literature of the mito, it is valuable to study the contemporary and no less widely read treatise of Gasparo Contarini, in which the mythical element is far more pronounced.

[III]

Contarini, a Venetian aristocrat and churchman, wrote his De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum at an uncertain time106 during the twenties and thirties of the sixteenth century, and it was printed only in 1543, after which it became a book of European reputation and was many times reprinted. Though its renown exceeded that of Giannotti’s Repubblica de’ Veneziani, it is a work of rather less intensive and technical character as far as its treatment of the Venetian magistracies and their history is concerned; but it is completed where Giannotti’s treatise is incomplete, and Contarini has found space to state his philosophy of government as relevant to the Venetian theme. Since his book had a traceable impact in many countries, it is of some value to quote it in the English of its Elizabethan translation, the work of Lewes Lewkenor, which appeared in 1599.

Contarini’s language is panegyrical from the start: he states that Venice appears, both physically and politically, “rather framed by the hands of the immortal Gods, than any way by the arte, industry or inuention of men.”¹⁰⁷ But it is a crucial point with him that Venice is the work of human art and above all of human virtue. Following a line of thought opened up by the Florentines, but becoming usual with Venetian writers, he states that virtue may appear in either a civil or a military form, but that although the latter is glorious and necessary it must exist only for the sake of the former. He is in the mainstream of Aristotelian and Christian thought in insisting that the end of war must be peace, but as an Italian writing in the civic humanist tradition he has also to explain how it is that Venetian virtù involves the employment of mercenaries while the citizens remain unarmed themselves. To Lewkenor, who furnished his own commentary by way of introduction, this paradox—and it seemed one to him no less than to a Florentine—was part of the generally miraculous way in which Venetian political procedures controlled, both rationally and morally, all departments of civic life.

Besides, what is there that can carrie a greater disproportion with common rules of experience, the that unweaponed men in gownes should with such happinesse of successe give direction & law to many mightie and warlike armies … and long robed citizens to bee serued, yea and sued unto for entertainment by the greatest princes and peers of Italy; amidst which infinit affluence of glorie, and unmeasurable mightinesse of power, of which there are in soueraignty partakers aboue 3000 gentlemen, yet is there not one among them to bee found that doth aspire to any greater appellation of honour.…108

Contarini does not go quite as far as his translator, though he does explain later that, because the civil constitution of Venice grew up under conditions of separation from the terra firma and therefore from military life—like most writers on these questions, he does not regard maritime power as posing any problems for civil organization—when the city finally became a land power, it was thought better not to let citizens exercise military commands for fear that

this their continual frequentation of the continent, and diuorcement as it were from the ciuile life, would without doubt haue brought forth a kinde of faction different and disioyned from the other peaceable Citizens, which parcialitie and dominion would in time have bred ciuile warres and dissentions within the City.… To exclude therefore out of our estate the danger or occasion of any such ambitious enterprises, our auncestors held it a better course to defend their dominions vppon the continent, with forreign mercenarie souldiers, than with their homeborn citizens, & to assigne them their pay & stipende out of the tributes and receipts of the Prouince, wherein they remayned.…109

But he does not mean that military and civic virtue are necessarily incompatible, or that it is the mechanized routine of decision at Venice which keeps the former subordinate to the latter. This is the work of virtue, and of a virtue which Contarini depicts as inherent in the Venetian aristocracy as a whole. In a passage which a knowledge of Florentine thought greatly illuminates, he bases this assertion on the familiar themes that Venice has never had a legislator, that a legislator has a difficult task with those less virtuous than himself, and that there is little historical evidence preserved concerning the city’s early history. Giannotti had been puzzled to account for the creation of stable orders by the early Venetians’ unaided intelligence, but to Contarini the mystery is to be proudly affirmed rather than explained.

There were in Athens, Lacedaemon and Rome, in sundry seasons sundry rare and vertuous men of excellent desert and singular pietie towards their country, but so fewe, that being ouerruled by the multitude they were not able much to profit the same. But our auncestors, from whome wee have receyued so flourishing a commonwealth, all in one did vnite themselues in a consenting desire to establish, honour and amplifie their country, without hauing in a manner any the least regarde of their owne priuate glorie or commodity. And this any man may easily coniecture … in regarde that there are in Venice to bee found none, or very few monuments of our auncestors, though both at home and abroad many things were by them gloriously atchieued, and they of passing and singular desert towards their countrie. There are no stately tombes erected, no military statues remaining, no stemmes of ships, no ensignes, no standards taken from their enemies, after the victory of many and mighty battailes.…¹¹⁰

With this then exceeding vertue of mind did our auncestors plant and settle this such a commonwealth, that since the memory of man, whosoeuer shal go about to make compare between the same & the noblest of the ancients, shal scarcely find any such: but rather I dare affirme, that in the discourses of those great Philosophers, which fashioned and forged commonwealths according to the desires of the mind, there is not any to be founde so well fayned and framed.…111

To Florentine theorists it was evident that ambition and the pursuit of onore and chiarezza motivated any civic aristocracy, and that a problem in government was to prevent this thirst from corrupting itself. Giannotti considered the need to give it the appearance of satisfaction, while rendering that satisfaction dependent on the concurrence of others, one of the necessities that kept governo misto a second best, appropriate to an imperfect world. But if Contarini is prepared to endow the Venetians with virtue in the full sense of a disregard of all except the public good, then the governo misto of Venice must be much less a contrivance against corruption, much more an expression of its absence. When he proceeds to state his philosophy of government, it involves the usual case against the simple rule of the one, the few or the many, but on grounds less close to Polybius than to the main lines of Christian Aristotelian politics. As beasts are governed by men, so should men be governed by that which is higher than man. God does not govern commonwealths directly, but there is in man an element of the divine, which is “the mind, pure and devoid of perturbation”; a long way from Giannotti’s conception of virtù. Since there are also in man “inferior and brutish powers,” we cannot ensure the rule of the mind by entrusting government to any man, group or combination of groups of men, but “by a certaine diuine counsell when by other meanes it might not, mankinde through the inuention of lawes seemeth to have attained this point, that the office of gouerning assemblings of men should be giuen to the mind and reason onely.…”¹¹²

If laws can attain the status of pure reason—the apocryphal authority of Aristotle is given for the view “that God was the same in the vniuersity of things, as an ancient lawe in a civill company”113—then laws must rule and not men; the participation of individuals and groups in government is subordinate to this. But the argument is in danger of becoming circular: laws ensure that reason rules and not particular passions, but they are invented and maintained by men and can prevail only when men are guided by reason to the public good and not by passion to private ends. The laws must maintain themselves, then, by regulating the behavior of the men who maintain them; and in “assemblings of men,” in cities, that is to say, where men regularly meet face to face to enforce and make laws and to transact public business, the term “laws” must have the principal meaning of a set of orders and regulations for the conduct of assemblies and the framing of decisions. Such laws must have the effect of directing men’s energies solely toward the public good, which is to say solely in the paths of pure reason. The mito di Venezia consists in the assertion that Venice possesses a set of regulations for decision-making which ensure the complete rationality of every decision and the complete virtue of every decision-maker. Venetians are not inherently more virtuous than other men, but they possess institutions which make them so.

An individual in whom pure mind always reigned, without the need for external controls or assistance, would as we know be an angel rather than a man. As Hobbes’s Leviathan was an “artificial man” and a “mortal god,” so Contarini’s Venice, it may be suggested, was an artificial angel: men who were not wholly rational functioned as members of an institutional framework which was. Lewkenor seems to have sensed this:

beholde their great Councell, consisting at the least of 3000 Gentlemen, whereupon the highest strength and mightinesse of the estate absolutely relyeth, notwithstanding which number all thinges are ordered with so diuine a peaceableness, and so without all tumult and confusion, that it rather seemeth to bee an assembly of Angels, then of men.

… their penall Lawes most unpardonably executed; their encouragements to vertue infinite; especially by their distribution of offices and dignities, which is ordered in such a secrete, straunge, and intricate sort, that it utterly ouerreacheth the subtiltie of all ambitious practises, neuer falling upon any but upon such as are by the whole assembly allowed for greatest wisedome, vertue and integritie of life.

… there are sundry other so maruellous and miraculous considerations, and in their owne exceeding singularitie, beyond all resemblance or comparison with any other Commonwealth so unspeakeablie straunge, that their wonderfull rarenesse being verified, maketh the straungest impossibilities not seeme altogether incredible.…114

To an Elizabethan mind, Venice could appear a phenomenon of political science fiction: a series of marvelous devices for keeping men virtuous, where in other states this was left to individual reason or divine grace. Contarini, who was after all a churchman, does not press the language of mystery and miracle so far, but he has endowed his Venetians with exceptional virtue by whose means they have evolved political procedures which maintain it. Inevitably, the theoretical language he adopts obliges him to present virtue as the maintenance of a balance between the one, the few, and the many; these are the categories into which persons fall and which must consequently be transcended if an impersonal government is to be maintained. But in his ideal constitution it is the laws which rule, and the distribution of authority between one, few, and many is a means of keeping all three subject to law and reason:

yet is the multitude of itselfe unapt to governe, unlesse the same be in some sort combined together; for there cannot bee a multitude without the same bee in some vnitie contayned; so that the ciuill society (which consisteth in a certain vnity) will bee dissolued, if the multitude become not one by some meane of reason.…¹¹⁵

The language reveals that older philosophical traditions are directing and binding the simpler formulae of mixed government. We do indeed read, shortly after this, that Venice has combined the princely, noble, and popular forms of authority “so that the formes of them all seeme to be equally balanced, as it were with a paire of weights …,”116 but it is not a question of distinguishing political functions as distinct modes of power, and ascribing them to the one, few, and many so as to form a balance. This raised, as we have seen, the problem of explaining just how one mode of power could be said to “balance” another; Giannotti had decided that the question could not be resolved in those terms and would have to be rephrased (a task in which he had not been very successful), but Contarini, writing apparently without knowledge of the Florentine’s work,¹¹⁷ may be found at one point repudiating the very language in which Giannotti had restated it.

there cannot happen to a commonwealth a more daungerous or pestilent contagion, then the ouerweighing of one parte or faction aboue the other: for where the ballance of iustice standeth not euen, it is vnpossible that there should bee a friendly societie and firme agreement among the citizens: which alwaies happeneth where many offices of the commonwealth meete together in one. For as every mixture dissolueth, if any one of the elementes (of which the mixed body consisteth) ouercome the other: and as in musicke the tune is marred where one string keepeth a greater noyse than hee should doe: so by the like reason, if you will haue your commonwealth perfect and enduring, let not one part bee mightier than the other, but let them all (in as much as may bee) have equall share in the publique authoritie.¹¹⁸

Read in conjunction with Giannotti, this may seem a simple recession to the theory of Polybian balance; but there is rather more to it than that. The context in which it occurs is that of a provision which forbids more than three members of a family holding office in the senate at any one time, so that the “partes or factions” which must not overbalance one another are not merely the traditional Polybian three, but might include any grouping whatever into which the citizens might fall. Polybian theory, we remember yet again, was a paradigmatic simplification of Aristotelian political science, and Aristotle had known well enough that the one, few, and many were categories which it was convenient and necessary to employ. A durable constitution must satisfy all social groups; a one-few-many analysis was merely an operationally satisfactory means of ascertaining whether it was doing so.

But Contarini, far more than Giannotti, is self-consciously a philosopher in politics; and where the Florentine developed the concept of virtù in the direction of power, the Venetian retained it primarily with the connotation of rationality. Government was an act of wisdom directed at the common good, so that “equall share in the publique authoritie” meant, among other things, “equal share in the exercise of public intelligence.” But a body politic in which every conceivable part or category exercised the mode of intelligence appropriate to it would be one whose rationality was perfect, and participation in its public intelligence would also be perfect. It is not insignificant that from the beginnings of the mito, Venetian mixed government had been idealized by equation less with Polybius’s Book VI than with Plato’s Laws.119 The “artificial angel” was miraculously, because rationally, stable, perfect, and timeless, relatively free from the shadows of ambiguity and ultimate doom that overhung Polybius’s Rome or Machiavelli’s Florence. Where Giannotti, knowing that his own city’s history was one of instability, had first asked questions about Venetian history which he left unanswered,¹²⁰ and had later felt obliged to devise means of analyzing instability and providing for stability that carried him away from all three of his masters—Aristotle, Polybius, and Machiavelli—Contarini needed to take neither of these steps. Nor did he follow Savonarola in presenting his republic as playing a messianic role at an apocalyptic moment.

Yet we must avoid dismissing Venetian republican thought as the mere projection into myth of a Platonic self-image. In a most magisterial treatment of the subject, William J. Bouwsma has shown that Venetian thought did not stand still with Contarini but developed during the next eighty years, first with Paruta and afterwards with Sarpi, a sense of the particularity and moral autonomy of history which was founded on a series of assertions of Venice’s unique individuality against the universalist claims of the Counter-Reformation papacy.¹²¹ And just as for Florence, the republican vision of history carried with it shadows as well as lights; Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent is as disenchanted a record of human failure and frailty as anything in Guicciardini.122 The timeless myth and the history that lacked finality were, we must recollect, two responses to the same problem: the republic’s struggle to attain self-sufficient virtue and stability in a context of particularity, time, and change. It might escape from history by a self-constituent act of timeless rationality; it might seek to tame history by combining in a grand synthesis all the elements of instability, identified and interwoven; or it might confess that the problem could not be solved and that the pitfalls of history remained forever open. Contarini is nearer to the first position than to the second; Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Sarpi nearer to the third than to the second. Giannotti’s significance lies in the originality of his contributions to the second, to the science that pursued stability.

He has appeared in these pages, it is true, as a thinker who to some extent sought to draw Machiavelli’s fangs, reconciling Rome with Venice, transcending both models, and presenting the armed popular republic as devoted to its own virtue rather than to conquest and expansion—thus seeming to free it from the Ragnarok of the “universal wolf.” Partly because he was less interested in war than was Machiavelli, and more interested in the theory of constitutional equilibrium, he was able to carry the science of mixed government to points not reached by other Florentine analysts; but while on the one hand this means that fortune’s role in his thought is restricted by the wealth of his explanatory devices, his failure to develop a theory of sovereignty resting on the legislative power meant that he had not escaped from the world in which Contarinian myth and Machiavellian or Guicciardinian realism were the confining alternatives, since a republic which could not legislate itself must be restricted to the struggle to maintain prima forma. It reverted to being the political form in which was attained the universal good, which meant that there was no political activity other than the maintenance of form. If Machiavelli and Guicciardini did not, with all their brilliance, succeed in seeing political activity as creative, but only in showing just how difficult, or impossible, the maintenance of republican order really was, we are obliged to think of cinquecento civic realism, even at its height, as a kind of negative capability of the Aristotelian mind. Its awareness of the qualitative character and even the irreversibility of historical change was arrived at by recombining the categories of Aristotelian thought, and its concern with fortuna varied inversely as these categories could suggest new conceptual means of controlling her. It can be suggested also that these limitations were in part imposed upon Machiavellian thought by its obstinately durable moralism.

Aristotelian republicanism was exclusively concerned with the citizen, and there was no need for Florentine and Venetian theorists to abandon it so long as they too were concerned only with him and his chances of escaping corruption; indeed, within its traditions they found it possible greatly to enlarge their vocabulary for discussing his problems. But for all the tough-mindedness of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the fact remains that the weakness of the Aristotelian and humanist tradition was the insufficiency of its means for discussing the positive, as opposed to the preservative, exercise of power. We earlier considered the possibility that some political agency might acquire so developed a capacity for dealing with particular and changing problems as they arose that society’s institutional means of dealing with such problems were in constant change and capable of changing themselves. It is evident that such an agency would be government in the modern sense, that it would be legislating in the modern sense, and that such a political society would be a modern administrative state possessed of a dimension of historical change and adaptation. But a body of political theory exclusively concerned with how the citizen is to develop his human capacities by participating in decisions aimed at the subjection of private to public goods is unlikely to develop a concern for, or a vocabulary for dealing with, government as a positive or creative activity. Under sixteenth-century conditions, it tended to reduce politics to the structure within which the individual asserted his moral autonomy, and legislation to the purely formal activity of establishing and restoring such a structure, so that any but a destructive innovation in time became virtually impossible. We have also seen that a view of politics which confined it to the assertion of values, or virtues, by individuals in public acts discouraged, every time that it encouraged, any attempt to treat it as the concurrent exercise of different kinds of power. Giannotti took a first step in that direction, but was unable to take a second; and the Polybian concept of a balance between different agencies exercising power seems so far to have been acutely self-limiting. We may say that all this reveals the deficiencies of Aristotelian theory, but it is possible also—though debatable—that power in a face-to-face polis must be so far dispersed and personal as to render difficult the growth of theory about the several specialized ways of exercising it. The next step will be to study the development of humanist and Machiavellian thought in a society made up of several institutionalized agencies exercising different kinds of power: post-Tudor England, with its king, its law, its parliament, and its church. But we shall find that each of these agencies secreted and disseminated its own ideology, its own modes of defining political society and the political individual; with the consequence that it was only with difficulty, and in a variety of very special senses, that the English realm could be defined as a civic community or republic, in which politicized individuals pursued a vivere civile. We shall have to study how it happened that Englishmen could begin to project an image of themselves and their society in Machiavellian terms; but we shall find that this process involved a restatement of civil history in terms both positive and negative, which defined government as modern in the act of rebelling against its modernity. Exported to the Atlantic’s western shores, this contributed powerfully to the complexity of American values.

1 At the beginning of the Preliminaries to Oceana; see Toland, ed., p. 35 (above, ch. I, n. 28).

² For his life and career, see Roberto Ridolfi, Opuscoli di Storia Letteraria e di Erudizione (Florence: Libr. Bibliopolis, 1942); Randolph Starns, Donato Giannotti and his Epistolae (Geneva: Libr. Droz, 1968); and the publication by Felix Gilbert described in the next note. R. von Albertini (op.cit.) devotes pp. 14-66 to a study of his thought, as does Starns in “Ante Machiavel: Machiavelli and Giannotti” (Gilmore, ed., Studies on Machiavelli) and there is a short account, which seeks to relate him to English thought of the Shakespearean age, in C. C. Huffman, Coriolanus in Context (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972), pp. 17-20.

³ Felix Gilbert, “The Date of the Composition of Contarini’s and Giannotti’s Books on Venice,” in Studies in the Renaissance, XIV (New York: The Renaissance Society of America, 1967), pp. 172-84.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 178-79.

⁵ Donato Giannotti, Opere (3 vols., ed. G. Rosini, Pisa, 1819), I, 9: “E perché nel primo ragionamento fu disputato dell’amministrazione universale della repubblica; nel secondo particolarmente di tutti i magistrati; nel terzo della forma e composizione di essa repubblica, noi dal primo penderemo il principio nostro, non solamente perché naturalmente le cose universali sono di piú facile intelligenza, ma perché ancora del primo ragionamento il secondo, il terzo dall’uno e dall’altro depende.”

⁶ Gilbert, “Date and Composition,” pp. 180-82.

⁷ Opere, I, 20.

⁸ Opere, I, 34-35: “I dipintori, e scultori, se drittamente riguardiamo, seguitano nello loro arti i precetti dei filosofi; perciocché ancora essi le loro opere dalle cose universali cominciano. I dipintori, prima che particolarmente alcuna imagine dipingano, tirano certe linee, per le quali essa figura universalmente si dimostra; dopo questo le danno la sua particolare perfezione. Gli scultori ancora osservano nelle loro statue il medesimo; tanto che chi vedesse alcuno dei loro marmi dirozzato, direbbe piú tosto questa parte debbe servire per la testa, questa per lo braccio, questa la gamba: tanto la natura ci costringe, non solamente nel conoscere ed intendere, ma eziandio nell’operare, a pigliar il principio dalle cose universali! Per questa cagione io incominciai dalla descrizione del sito di Venezia, come cosa piú che l’altre universale.”

⁹ Opere, I, 21: “Perciocché ciascuna repubblica è simile ad un corpo naturale, anzi per meglio dire, è un corpo dalla natura principalmente prodotto, dopo questo dall’arte limato. Perciocché quando la natura fece l’uomo, ella intese fare una università, una comunione. Essendo adunque ciascuna repubblica come un’altro corpo naturale, dove ancora i suoi membri avere. E perché tra loro è sempre certa proporzione e convenienza, siccome tra i membri di ciascuno altro corpo, chi non conosce questa proporzione e convenienza, che è tra l’un membro e l’altro, non può come fatto sia quel corpo comprendere. Ora questo è quello dove manca il Sabellico.”

¹⁰ Ibid.: “… non dichiara come l’uno sia collegato con l’altro, che dependenza abbia questo da quello, tal che perfettamente la composizione della repubblica raccoglier se ne possa.”

¹¹ Opere, I, 16-17: “… Pomponio considerando che la repubblica sua era corrottissima, e non conoscendo in sé facoltà di poterle la sanità restituire, si ritrasse da lei per non essere costretto con essa a rovinare. Perciocché la repubblica, quando è corrotta, è simile al mare agitato dalla tempesta, nel quale chi allora si mette, non si può a sua porta ritrarre. Io già non mi son ritratto dalle cure civili per questa cagione, perciocché la mia repubblica non è corrotta, anzi (se io non m’inganno) è piú perfetta ch’ella mai in alcun tempo fosse …”

¹² Opere, I, 17: “E quantunque i Romani possedessero tanto maggiore imperio quanto è noto a ciascuno, non però giudico la repubblica nostra meno beata e felice. Perciocché la felicità d’una repubblica non consiste nella grandezza dell’imperio, ma si ben nel vivere con tranquillità e pace universale. Nella qual cosa se io dicessi che la nostra repubblica fosse alla romana superiore, credo certo che niuno mi potrebbe giustamente riprendere.”

¹³ Opere, I, 15: “… due tempi mi pare che tra gli altri siano da ricordare: Uno, nel quale fu il principio della ruina sua [i.e., Italy’s] e dello imperio Romano, e questo fu quando Roma dalle armi Cesariane fu oppressa: l’altro, nel quale fu il colmo del male italiano; e questo fu quando l’Italia dagli Unni, Goti, Vandali, Longobardi fu discorsa e saccheggiata. E se bene si considerano gli accidenti che da poco tempo in qua, cosí in Oriente come in Occidente, sono avvenuti, agevolmente si può vedere che a quelli che oggi vivono in Italia soprasta uno di quelli due tempi. Ma quel di loro piú si debba avere in orrore non so io già discernere: perciocché dal primo si può dire nascesse il secondo, e dal secondo tutta quella variazione, che ha fatto pigliare al mondo quella faccia, che ancora gli veggiamo a’ tempi nostri, e lasciar del tutto quella che al tempo de’ Romani aveva …”

¹⁴ But see I, 42: “… non è dubbio alcuno che gli uomini, dove eglino non si trovano a trattar cose pubbliche, non solamente non accrescono la nobiltà loro, ma perdono ancora quella che hanno e divengono peggio che animali, essendo costretti viver senza alcun pensiero avere che in alto sia levato.”

¹⁵ Opere, I, 35-36: “… per popolari io intendo quelli che altramente possiamo chiamare plebei. E son quelli, i quali esercitano arti vilissime per sostentare la vita loro, e nella città non hanno grado alcuno. Per cittadini, tutti quelli i quali per essere nati eglino, i padri e gli avoli loro nella città nostra, e per avere esercitate arti piú onorate, hanno acquistato qualche splendore, e sono saliti in grado tal che ancora essi si possono in un certo modo figluoli di questa patria chiamare. I gentiluomini sono quelli che sono della città, e di tutto lo stato, di mare o di terra, padroni e signori.”

¹⁶ See below, nn. 93-95; cf. Guicciardini in 1512, above, ch. V, n. 29.

¹⁷ E.g., p. 50.

¹⁸ E.g., p. 77.

¹⁹ Opere, I, 42-43.

²⁰ Opere, I, 61-62, 63-64: “Ma poscia che il consiglio fu ordinato, e che l’autorité de’ dogi fu co’ magistrati e coi consigli temperata, allora i cittadini, adoperandosi nelle faccende, acquistarono gloria e riputazione. Ed è accaduto alla nostra città quel medesimo che avenne a Roma.… E da questo, credo, che nasca che noi non abbiamo molta notizia dell’antichità delle famiglie de’ gentiluomini innanzi a Sebastiano Ziani … e … che in tutte le nostre memorie non trovo menzione alcuna di questo nome gentiluomo, eccetto che nella vita di Pietro Ziani doge XLII, figliuolo del sopradetto Sebastiano.

“… e non credo che questo nome gentiluomo significasse quello che oggi significa … ma che … s’intendesse quello che oggi nell’altre città significa, cioè chiunque o per antichità, o per ricchezze o per autorità piú che gli altri risplende.”

²¹ Opere, I, 66-68: “Ma quello che piú mi stringe è che gran cosa saria stata, che i nostri maggiori senza esempio alcuno avessero trovato si bell’ordine, si bel modo di distribuire i carichi e le onoranze della città, cioè il gran consiglio. Perciocché egli non è dubbio alcuno che quando questo consiglio fu trovato, non era simile forma di vivere in luogo alcuno di mondo, di che s’abbia notizia. E le cose, le quali senza esempio alcuno s’hanno ad introdurre, hanno sempre tante difficoltà, che come impossibile sono le piú volte abbandonate. Il che nasce perché gli uomini nel azioni umane non approvano quegli ordini, l’utilità de’ quali non hanno né per la propria, né per l’altrui esperienza, conosciuta; e pochissimi sono sempre stati e sono quelli che sappiamo cose nuove trovare e persuaderle. E perciò nelle innovazioni degli ordini si vanno imitando i vecchi cosí proprii come gli altrui.… Saria stata adunque cosa miracolosa, che i nostri maggiori senza averne esempio alcuno, avessero, nel riordinare la nostra repubblica, saputo trovare ed introdurre sì bella, sì civile, sì utile ordinazione come è questa del gran consiglio, la quale senza dubbio è quella che non ha solamente mantenuto libera la nostra patria, ma eziandio, procedendo di bene in meglio, l’ha fatta salire in quella grandezza d’imperio e riputazione, alla quale voi essere pervenuta la vedete. È adunque credibile per le due dette ragioni, oltre a quelle poche memorie che ce ne sono, che innanzi a Sebastiano Ziani fosse qualche forma di consiglio.… Quegli adunque i quali dicono che il consiglio è antichissimo, se non intendo quel consiglio che s’ordino per distribuire i magistrati, forse non s’ingannano; ma se intendono questo altro, senza dubbio sono in errore.”

²² Opere, I, 72-74.

²³ Opere, I, 77: “… dico che io nell’antiche nostre memorie non ho trovato mai che si fossa cagione di far serrare il consiglio; come voi dite, non par da credere che un ordine tanto nuovo potesse nascere senza qualche grande occasione. Di che noi potremmo addurre infiniti esempii, non solamente di quelle repubbliche che hanno variato in meglio, tra le quali è la nostra, siccome io stimo, ma di quelle che sono in peggio trascorse. Ma le variazioni della nostra repubblica medesima, se bene le considerate, vi possono dare di quello che diciamo certissima testimonianza. Nondimeno io non ho letto mai, né inteso, che cagione e che occasione facesse il consiglio serrare. Né da me stesso posso pensare che da quella forma del consiglio potesse nascere disordine alcuno, che avesse ad essere cagione della sua variazione; tanto che io credo che coloro che furono autori di tal mutazione … vedendo nella città nostra concorrere quantità grandissima di forestieri per conto di faccende mercantili.… Ma questa è tutta congettura; perciocché, come ho detto, non ne ho certezza alcuna.”

²⁴ Opere, I, 116: “Ed avete ad intendere che in ogni repubblica sono assai costituzioni, delle quali non si può assegnare alcuna probabile non che vera ragione. E questo non solamente avviene in quelle città che hanno il loro governo variato, ma in quelle ancora le quali con le medesime leggi si sono lungo tempo rette e governate. Perciocché quantunque l’usanze si siano mantenute, nondimeno le cagioni di quelle sono dall’antichità oscurate.”

²⁵ Opere, I, 51: “Dicono adunque che quattro sono le cose nelle quali consiste il nervo d’ogni repubblica. La creazione de’ magistrati; le deliberazioni della pace e della guerra; le introduzione delle leggi; e le provocazioni.” Cf. p. 86.

²⁶ Opere, I, 125-26: “Usano ancora i nostri fare confermare alcune leggi non solamente nel consiglio dei pregati, ma ancora nel grande; la qual cosa, credo che sia in potestà di quel magistrato che principalmente le introduce. E credo che questo s’usi fare, accioché a questo modo s’acquisti a quella legge maggior riputazione …”

²⁷ Opere, I, 91-117.

²⁸ Gilbert, “Venetian Constitution,” pp. 463-500 (above, ch. IV, n. 26).

²⁹ See the speech of Epimonus de Garrula in Oceana (Works, ed. Toland, 1771; p. 110): “The truth is, they have nothing to say to their acquaintance; or men that are in council sure would have tongues; for a council, and not a word spoken in it, is a contradiction.… But in the parliament of Oceana, you had no balls or dancing, but sober conversation; a man might know and be known, shows his parts and improve ’em.”

³⁰ Discorso al … Gonfaloniere … Niccolò Capponi sopra i modi di ordinare la Repubblica Fiorentina; Opere, III, 27-48.

³¹ Gilbert, “Venetian Constitution,” p. 498 and n.

³² Opere, III, 32-33.

³³ III, 32: “Tutti quelli che consigliano è necessario che sieno valenti, e di quel primo ordine, che scrive Esiodo, nel quale sono connumerati quelli che hanno invenzione per loro medesimi, e non hanno bisogno di consiglio d’altri.”

³⁴ III, 41: “Il consiglio saria in pochi, cioè nei valenti; la deliberazione in molti; e perciò la libertà saria sicura, e quelli che avrebbero la autorità, l’avrebbero per virtù della repubblica, e non per loro presunzione e importunità.”

³⁵ Ibid.: “… essendo le cose determinate da molti, cioè dal senato …”

³⁶ Opere, III, 30: “Vorrei dare a costori una cura speciale di considerar sempre le cose della città, e i primi pensieri d’introdurre nuove leggi e correggere le vecchie, secondo che ricerca la varietà de’ tempi.”

³⁷ Opere, III, 28: the ottimati are “quelli che il piú delle volte hanno prudenza, il premio della quale pare che sia l’onore come testimonio d’essa.”

³⁸ Archivio Storico Italiano (hereafter A.S.I.), ser. 5, vol. 8 (1891), G. R. Sanesi (ed.), “Un discorso sconosciuto di Donato Giannotti intorno alla milizia,” pp. 2-27.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 14: “… non tanto perché da natura non hanno questa inclinazione, quanto perché, essendo la città lungo tempo vivuta tra gli esercizii mercantili, difficilmente si potria assuefare a uno esercizio tanto diverso e contrario.”

⁴⁰ Ibid.: “… dico che assolutamente la città si debbe armare: perché lo essere disarmato repugnia alla natura, ed alla autorità di tutti quelli che hanno trattato delli governi delle città. Repugnia alla natura, perché noi vediamo in ogni uomo particulare, essere d’appetito naturale di potersi difendere; ed a qualunche non sopliscano le forze di poterlo fare, pare che sia imperfetto, per mancare di quella virtù: la quale è ordinata dalla natura per conservazione di sé stesso.”

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 16: “E chi dicie che lo essersi assuefatto ad altri esercizii impediscie tale ordinazione, si inganna interamente: perché, essendo di tanta forza la assuefazione, che ella puote operare contro alla natura, tanto piú facilmente potrà in una cosa che è secondo la natura, cioè l’esercizio delle armi.”

⁴² Ibid., p. 17: “Ma vuol dire regolare gli uomini, e rendergli atti al potere difendere la patria da gli assalti esterni e dalle alterazioni intrinseche, e porre freno a’ licenziosi: li quali è necessario che ancora essi si regolino, vedendo per virtù della ordinanza ridotti gli uomini alla equalità, né essere autorità in persona, fuori che in quelli a chi è dato dalle leggi.… Non è adunque da omettere di introdurre tale ordinanza: la quale, oltre alle predette cose, toglie ogni autorità a chi per ambizione estraordinariamente cercassi riputazione; perché, sapiendo ciascuno chi egli abbia a ubbidire, non si può destinare alla ubbidientia di persona.”

⁴³ Ibid., p. 20: “… Romulo, il quale messe l’ordinanza in quella sua turba sciellerata ed assuefatta a ogni male: il che poi che ebbe fatto, tutti quelli uomini diventorno buoni; e quello furore che usavano nel male operare, lo convertirono in far bene.” Note how arms serve to convert habit, and how virtù is a reversed furore.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 18: “Sono alcuni che dicono che le armi non si dovriano dare se non a quelli che sono abili al consiglio, dubitando se elle si dessino a quelli altri che sono a graveza, essendo maggior numero, non rovinassino lo stato. Chi seguitassi tale oppinione, primamente armerebbe poco numero di uomini, e lasciando gli altri, che sono a graveza, disarmati, saria necessario che restassino mal contenti, e conseguentemente nimici della repubblica; talché quelli pochi che sarebbono armati, a poco altro servirebbono che a guardia dello stato contro a quelli, che rimanessino disarmati.… A’ quali se si togliessi anche il potere difendere le cose sue con la persona propria, sarebbano peggio che stiavi; di modo che la città sarebbe uno agregato di padroni e servi; e sarebbano in peggiore grado, che i sudditi e contadini.”

⁴⁵ Opere, I, 45-46.

⁴⁶ A.S.I. (1891), pp. 26-27.

⁴⁷ A.S.I., vol. 15 (1851), “Documenti per servire alla storia della Milizia Italiana … raccolti … e preceduti da un discorso di Giuseppe Canestrini,” pp. 342-76 (orations of Luigi Alamanni and Pier Filippo Pandolfini); R. von Albertini, op.cit., pp. 404-11 (oration of Piero Vettori).

⁴⁸ A.S.I. (1851), p. 355 (Pandolfini): “… questa libertà non è opera umana, tanti anno sono che la fu predetta, et vedesi nata et data a questo popolo miracolosamente …”

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 356.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 354: “Chi exaerita il corpo, lo dispone ad ubbidire al consiglio, e fa l’appetito obbediente alla ragione; et cosí l’uomo diventa facile a sopportare il dolore, et disporsi a disprezzare la morte. L’obbedienza è necessaria in ogni cosa, et maxime in una republica. A buon cittadino niente piú si conviene, che sapere comandare et ubbidire.”

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 345 (Alamanni): “… et allor tutti insieme parimente si vestiron l’arme, et dieron forma a questa militar disciplina; alla quale oggi noi, dalla divina grazia illuminati, darem principio …” P. 347: “Nessuno sia, non volendo offendere Dio, le leggi, la libertà et se medesimo, che si cinga questa sacratissima veste dell’arme con altra privata speranza che con quella di salvare la sua patria et i suoi cittadini.” Albertini, p. 409: “… per salvatione et libertà di voi medesimi vi siate cinta questa incorruttibil veste dell’arme …”

⁵² Ibid., p. 344 (Alamanni): “Oh! se fusse, o popolo mio Fiorentino, ben conosciuta da te quello che ella vale, et quanto sia da essere onorata la povertà, come ti faresti lieto di ritrovarti al presente in questo stato! Quanti pensieri, quante fatiche, quanti affanni si prendon gli uomini indarno, che si lascerieno indietro! Guarda pure quale arte, quale esercizio, quale studio lodevole oggi o mai furono in terra, et gli vedrai fabbricati tutti et messi avanti dalla povertà, unica inventrice di tutti i beni.”

⁵³ Ibid., pp. 358-59 (Pandolfini): “… la mediocrità et il mezzo sendo ottimi in ogni cosa, manifesta cosa è che la mediocre possessione della fortuna è ottima [note that fortune here can be possessed]; imperocché questi tali felicissimamente obbediscono alla ragione: ma se eccedono il modo in una o altra parte … è difficile obbedischino alla ragione.… Cosi si fa una città di servi et padroni, non di uomini liberi.… Adunque la città vuol essere di pari et simili quanto piú si può, et da questi la città è ben governata, et questi si conservano nella città; perché non desiderano le cose d’altri, né i loro beni son desiderati da altri.… Per la qual cosa è manifesta che la società e ottima, che si mantiene per uomini mediocri; et quelle città son ben governate, nelle quali son molti mediocri et possono assai.” Pandolfini’s discorso throughout is an interesting document of revolutionary Aristotelianism.

⁵⁴ Giannotti, Opere, II, 37, 46, 98, 141.

⁵⁵ Opere, II, 12: “Aristotile, dal quale io come da uno abbondantissimo fonte, che ha sparso per tutto’l mondo abbondantissimi fiumi di dottrina, ho preso tutti i fondamenti di questo mio breve discorso …”

⁵⁶ Opere, II, 2: “… ho deliberato ragionare in che modo si possa in Firenze temperare un’amministrazione che non si possa alterare senza extrema forza estrinseca.”

⁵⁷ Opere, II, 9-10: “È adunque il subietto nostro la città di Firenze tale quale ella è, nella quale vogliamo introdurre una forma di repubblica conveniente alla sue qualità, perché non ogni forma conviene a ciascheduna città, ma solamente quella la quale puote in tal città lungo tempo durare. Perciocché siccome il corpo prende vita dall’anima, così la città dalla forma della repubblica, tal che se non è conveniente tra loro, è ragionevole che l’una e l’altra si corrompa e guasti, siccome avverrebbe se un’anima umana fusse con un corpo di bestia congiunta, o un’animo di bestia con un corpo umano; perche l’uno darebbe impedimento all’altro, di che seguirebbe la corruzione … siccome anco fanno i prudenti architettori, i quali chiamati a disegnare un palazzo per edificare sopra i fondamenti gettati per l’addietro, non alterano in cosa alcuna i trovati fondamenti; ma secondo le qualità loro disegnano un edifìcio conveniente a quegli; e se hanno a racconciare una casa, non la rovinano tutta, ma solo quelle parti che hanno difetto; ed all’altre lassate intere si vanno accomodando.”

⁵⁸ Opere, II, 17.

⁵⁹ Opere, II, 13-14: “Queste tre specie di reggimento nascono da questo, perché in ciascuna città o egli si trova uno che è virtuosissimo, o pochi o molti virtuosi.… Ma dove i molti sono di virtù ornati, quivi nasce quella terza specie di governo chiamata repubblica, la quale amministrazione si è trovato in quelle città, che hanno virtù militare, la quale è propria della moltitudine.”

⁶⁰ Opere, II, 16: “… bene è vero, che nelle tre rette, quelli che ubbidiscono stanno subietti volontariamente; nelle tre corrotte, stanno paziente per forza; e perciò si pùo dire che le buone siano dalle corrotte in quello differenti.… Nondimeno a me pare … che questa differenza non sia propria, ma piuttosta accidentale, perché può essere che i subietti nella tirannide volontariamente ubbidiscano, essendo corrotti dal tiranno con largizioni ed altre cose, che si fanno per tenere gli uomini tranquilli e riposati. Non essendo adunque altra differenza tra i buoni e tra i corrotti governi che quella che è generata dal fine da loro inteso e seguitato, seguita che i buoni senza alcuna difficoltà, cioè senza intrinseca o estrinseca alterazione, si possono corrompere e divenir malvagii.”

⁶¹ Opere, II, 18: “… tale introduzione è impossibile, perché essendo gli uomini piú malvagii che buoni, e curandosi molto piú de’ privati comodi che del pubblico, credo fermamente che nei tempi nostri non si trovi subietto che le possa ricevere, perché in ciascuna di quelle tre sorte si presuppongono gli uomini buoni: tal che avendo i subietti a ubbidire volontariamente a quello, se è uno, o a quelli, se son pochi o molti virtuosi, non saria mai possibile indurre a ciò gli uomini non buoni, i quali per natura loro sono invidiosi, rapaci e ambiziosi, e vogliono sempre piú che alle sua natura non conviene … Per la qual cosa non si potendo le buone repubbliche, e le malvagie non essendo convenevole introdurre, è necessario trovare un modo e una forma di governo, che si possa o sia onesto introdurre: questo modo e questa forma per questa via, si potrà agevolmente trovare.”

⁶² Opere, II, 18-19: “… i grandi, perché eccedono gli altri in nobiltà e ricchezze, vogliono comandare non ciascuno da per sé, ma tutti insieme, perciò vorriano una forma di governo nella quale essi solo tenessero l’imperio; e tra loro ancora sempre alcuno si trova che aspira al principato e vorrebbe comandar solo. I poveri non si curano di comandare, ma temendo l’insolenza de’ grandi, non vorriano ubbidire se non a chi senza distinzione a tutti comanda, cioè alle leggi, e però basta loro esser liberi, essendo quegli libero che solamente alle leggi ubbidisce. I mediocri hanno il medesimo desiderio de’ poveri, perché ancora essi appetiscono la libertà; ma perché la fortuna loro è alquanto piú rilevata, perciò oltre alla libertà, desiderano ancora onore. Possiamo adunque dire che in ogni città sia chi desidera libertà, e chi oltre alla libertà onore, e chi grandezza, o solo o accompagnato.”

⁶³ Opere, II, 19-20: “A volere adunque istituire un governo in una città, dove siano tali umori, bisogna pensare di ordinarlo in modo che ciascuna di quelle parti ottenga il desiderio suo; e quelle repubbliche che sono cosí ordinate si può dire che sono perfette, perché, possedendo in esse gli uomini le cose desiderate, non hanno cagione di far tumulto, e perciò simili stati si possono quasi eterni reputare. A’ desiderii di queste parti similmente non si può soddisfare, perché bisogneria introdurre in una città un regno, uno stato di pochi ed un governo di molti, il che non si può immaginare, non che mettere in atto, salvo che in Genova, dove innanzi che Messer Andrea Doria le avesse con grandissima sua gloria renduta la libertà, si vedeva una repubblica ed una tirannide.”

⁶⁴ Opere, II, 20: “Possonsi bene detti desiderii ingannare, cioè si può introdurre un modo di vivere nel quale a ciascuna di quelle parti paja ottenere il desiderio suo, quantunque pienamente non l’ottenga.”

⁶⁵ Ibid.: “Onde in questo governo che cerchiamo bisogna che uno sia principe, ma che il suo principato non dependa da lui; bisogna che i grandi comandino, ma che tale autorità non abbia origine da loro; bisogna che la moltitudine sia libera, ma che tal libertà abbia dependenza; e finalmente che i mediocri, oltre all’esser liberi, possano ottenere onori, ma che tal facoltà non sia nel loro arbitrio collocata …”

⁶⁶ Opere, II, 24.

⁶⁷ Opere, II, 37-38: “Ed è da notare che in tutte le azioni sono da considerare tre cose, la cagione, l’occasione e il principio. Sono molti che pigliano l’occasione per la cagione, e della cagione non fanno conto, come saria se alcuno (poniamo) dicesse che la cagione della rovina dello stato di Firenze nel MDXII fosse la differenza che nacque tra Papa Giulio ed il re di Francia, e l’aver perduto il re di Francia Milano; la qual cosa non fu la cagione, ma l’occasione, e la cagione fu la mala contentezza d’alcuni cittadini malvagii ed ambiziosi; il principio poi fu la venuta ed assalto degli Spagnuoli per rimettere i Medici. Non è adunque la cagione altro che una disposizione, la quale si risente qualche volta l’occasione si scopre, e molto spesso è tanto potente la cagione, che non aspetta, anzi fa nascere l’occasione.”

⁶⁸ Opere, II, 39: “… era necessario che le parti tumultuassero, e quando reggesse l’uno, e quando l’altro; e se alcuno domandasse qual sia stata l’occasione, perché i grandi non prevalessero mai tanto al popolo, né il popolo ai grandi, che l’una parte e l’altra potesse lo stato suo fermare, dico che la cagione di tal cosa era perché le forze del popolo e de’ grandi erano uguali, e però l’una non poteva abbassare mai l’altra intieramente; e quando l’una prevaleva all’altra nasceva dall’occasioni, che erano ora a questa parte, ora a quell’altra conformi, e non era possibile, quando l’una prevaleva all’altra, che interamente si assicurasse …” Cf. pp. 42-43 for the contrast between quantity in the popolo and qualità—“nobilità, ricchezze e favori, dignità, disciplina e simili cose … reputazione, ricchezze, clientele, favori, cosí esterni come domestici”—in the nobili.

⁶⁹ See below, pp. 388-89.

⁷⁰ See, at length, Opere, II, 45-48.

⁷¹ Opere, II, 47-48: “È succeduto poi il secondo ritorno de’ Medici nel MDXXX con quella violenza che è nota a tutto’l mondo, e perché nella resistenza grande che s’è fatta loro, sono stati offesi molti cittadini di gran qualità, è necessario che abbiano l’animo alienato dal vivere universale e politico, parendo loro essere stati da quello maltrattati; la qual cosa pare che generi quella stessa difHcultà all’introduzione d’un vivere civile che saria se la città, cosí come già era, fusse piena di grandi, e mancasse di mediocri, come di sopra discorremmo. Ma questa difficultà a poco a poco manca, per il violento modo di vivere che al presente si osserva, nel quale tutti i cittadini, di qualunque grado, appariscono concultati ed abbietti, senza onore, e senza reputazione, e senza autorità. Talché è necessario che ciascuno, deposti gli odii particolari ed unite le volontà, viva con desiderio grande di pacifico e quiete vivere, ed aspetti l’occasione di ricuperarlo.”

⁷² Opere, II, 52-53.

⁷³ Opere, II, 53: “A che si aggiugne che la considerazione de’ difetti, nei quali hanno di bisogno di reformazione, è molto malagevole, non solamente perché in cose particolari consistono, le quali con difficoltà si possono altrimenti che per esperienza conoscere, ma perché ancora niuno mai si trovò che tanto fosse libero dalle umane affezioni che in ogni cosa il difetto e mancamento suo potesse vedere …”

⁷⁴ Opere, II, 54-55: “Non conobbe adunque Fra Girolamo questi particolari mancamenti, né è da maravigliarsene molto; perché essendo forestiero e religioso, non poteva trovarsi nelle pubbliche amministrazioni; talché veduti egli i modo del procedere in esse, avesse potuto far giudizio di quello che era bene o male ordinato …”

⁷⁵ Opere, II, 59: “In Firenze adunque nei due passati governi, la creazione de’ magistrati senza dubbio era in potere degli assai, perché tutta la città dependeva dal gran consiglio, e però in questa parte la città era libera; la deliberazione della pace e guerra era in potere del magistrato dei dieci, i quali di quelle due cose, e conseguentemente di tutto lo stato della città potevano disponere; di che seguitava che i pochi e non gli assai fossero signori dello stato della città: e dove tal cosa avviene, quivi non può esser vera e sincera libertà.”

⁷⁶ Opere, II, 81-82: “… talché costretti da questa mala contentezza, consentirono alla rovina di quello stato, ed a rimettere i Medici; benché questi tali non meritino laude alcuna, anzi biasimo e vituperio, non è però che quel modo di procedere sia da biasimere e da correggere, per tor via le cagioni di quelle male contentezze.…”

⁷⁷ The first occurrence of this thought is at Opere, II, 58-59: “Ma è da notare che quattro sono le cose nelle le quali consiste il vigore di tutta la repubblica; l’elezione de’ magistrati; la deliberazione della pace e guerra; e provocazioni; e l’introduzione delle leggi; le quali quattro cose sempre devono essere in potere di chi è signore della città. Per la qual cosa in quei governi, dove gli assai reggono, è necessario che sieno in potestà degli assai, altrimenti in quella città, dove sieno tali amministrazioni, non sarebbe libertà.”

⁷⁸ Cf. the Letter to Capponi, above, and nn. 32, 75.

⁷⁹ Opere, II, 59-60: “Veniva adunque la città quanto alla creazione de’ magistrati ad esser libera, ma quanto all’altre tre cose, che non sono di minore importanza, non era libera ma all’arbitrio e podestà di pochi soggetta. Che le tre ultime cose non fossero di minor momento che la creazione de’ magistrati è manifesto, se non per altra, perché chi è stato padrone delle tirannidi passato non si è curato dell’elezione de’ magistrati, eccetto quelli ne’ quali era posto l’autorità delle tre dette cose, parendo loro che chi è signore di quelle sia signore di tutto; e senza dubbio, chi può deliberare della pace e guerra, introdurre leggi ed ha il ricorso de’ magistrati, è padrone d’ogni cosa.”

⁸⁰ Opere, II, 96-97: “Pensò adunque Romulo a fare violenza, e d’avere a vincere, e per conseguente al propagare l’imperio, e far grande la sua repubblica. La cagione ancora, che l’indusse a far tal violenza, non fu altro che la cupidità dell’imperio, perché se non voleva quello accrescere, non gli era necessario usare tal violenza; perciocché aveva tanti uomini, che facevano conveniente corpo d’una città non ambiziosa, la quale si voglia solamente mantenere, e non desideri accrescimento; e delle donne per gli uomini suoi avrebbe trovato in spazio di tempo, senza che quelle d’Alba non gli sariano mai mancate.”

⁸¹ Opere, II, 98-99: “Ma se noi consideriamo bene, è di maggiore importanza introdurre una buona forma di repubblica, perché dietro a questa agevolmente s’introdurrà buona milizia: ma dove fosse la milizia introdotta, non saria forse cosí agevolmente introdurre buona ordinazione; perché naturalmente gli uomini militari sono meno che gli altri trattabile. E perciò Romulo primieramente introdusse gli ordini civili, e poi gli ordini militari; e potette costui in brevissimo tempo ogni cosa condurre, perché essendo principe assoluto non aveva che contradicesse.… In Firenze adunque, essendo di maggiore importanza introdurre un buon governo che una buona milizia (perché invero la città ne’ tempi passati ha piuttosto patito per mancamento di governo che di milizia, forse per le qualità dell’armi e de’ tempi) tratteremo prima di quella parte …”

⁸² Opere, II, 99-100: “… il primo modo, secondo il quale le forze di ciascuna parte sono eguali a quelle dell’altra, senza dubbio è difettivo e non si debbe seguitare, perché non è possibile temperare uno stato tanto perfettamente che la virtù (vogliamo dire potestà di ciascuna parte) non apparisca; perciocché in tal mistione avviene il contrario che nella mistione delle cose naturali, nella quale le virtù particolari delle cose di che si fa mistione non rimangono nel misto apparenti, ma di tutte se ne fa una sole; la qual cosa non può nel temperare una repubblica avvenire; perché bisogneria pestare e tritare in modo gli uomini, che dei grandi, popolari e mediocri se ne facesse una sol cosa diversa in tutto da quelle tre fazioni; la qual cosa senza dubbio è impossibile. Rimanendo adunque le virtù di ciascuna parte apparenti nella mistione, è necessario che essendo l’opposizioni e resistenze eguali, non manchino le repubbliche in tal modo temperate di civili dissensioni, le quali aprano la via alla rovina loro.”

⁸³ Opere, II, 101-103.

⁸⁴ Opere, II, 103: “… quella parte dove la repubblica inclina, viene ad esser più potente che l’altra; e però facilmente può opprimere gli insulti che le fossero fatti; e perché quella potenza che ha nasce dalla forma della repubblica, però se la parte contraria si reputa ingiuriata, non l’imputa alla fazione avversa ma alla forma della repubblica. E perché la repubblica è temperata in modo che non vi è adito a rovinarla, però è necessato che viva quieta; onde in tale repubblica non può nascere alterazione alcuna. È ben da notare che quando io dico che la repubblica deve inclinare in una parte, non dico che quella parte abbia sola l’imperio, e l’altra sia esclusa dall’amministrazione, ma che l’una abbia poca dependenza e l’altra assai.… Concludendo adunque dico che è necessario che una repubblica inclina ad una parte, a volere che sia diuturna e viva sempre senza alterazioni civili.”

⁸⁵ Opere, II, 107-108: “… se possono apporre la cagione delle ingiurie ricevute a qualche particolare, subito li corrono a casa, e coll’ armi e col fuoco si vendicano, siccome in Firenze molte volte si trova essere avvenuto. Ma se tali cagioni nascono dall’ordinazione della repubblica, talché a nessuno particolare si possano applicare, allora i popolari, non avendo contro a chi voltare l’ira sua, si separano da’ grandi, e chieggono o legge o magistrato per lo quale si possano difendere ed ottenere la loro ragione; e questo fu grandissima cagione che ne’ tumulti del popolo Romano contro al senato, non si venne mai al sangue de’ cittadini, insino ai Gracchi; perché le ingiurie che pativano i popolari non da’ privati cittadini, ma dalla forma della repubblica nascevano, e perciò l’ingiuriati non de’ cittadini ma dell’ordine della repubblica si potevano lamentare; onde avveniva che nelle sovversioni non chiedeva altro che qualche legge o qualche magistrato, per virtù della quale si difendesse, e la potenza de’ pochi si venisse ad abbassare, ed essi piú della repubblica partecipassero.”

⁸⁶ Opere, II, 114-15.

⁸⁷ Opere, pp. 115-16.

⁸⁸ Opere, II, 104-16.

⁸⁹ Opere, II, 110: “Quanto al leggerle, cosí le può leggere un popolare come un grande; e la pratica non veggio maggiore nell’una parte che nell’altra …”

⁹⁰ Opere, II, 111: “… perché i popolari fanno molto maggiore numero che i grandi, si può probabilmente dire che facciano maggiore aggregato di prudenza …”

⁹¹ Opere, II, 116.

⁹² Opere, II, 117: “Per il consiglio adunque si soddisfa al desiderio della libertà; per il senato all’appetito dell’onore; per il principe al desiderio del principato. Resta di trovar modo di soddisfare a chi appetisce grandezza, non potendo piú che uno ottenere il principato. Bisogna adunque collocare un membro tra il senato ed il principe, e questo sarà un aggregato d’alcuni magistrati, i quali col principe consiglieranno, ed eseguiranno le faccende grandi dello stato e della città … e questo membro si può chiamare, se vogliamo imitare i Veneziani, il collegio.”

⁹³ Opere, II, 118: “Il consiglio grande essere un aggregato composto di quei tre membri, i quali noi di sopra descriveremmo, cioè grandi, mediocri e popolari; de’ plebei non occorre far menzione, come ancora di sopra dicemmo, essendo gente forestiera che vengono alla città per valersi delle fatiche corporali, e ne vanno a casa loro, qualunque volta torna loro a proposito. Quelli che io chiamai popolari (cioè quelli che sono a gravezza, ma non sono abili a’ magistrati) è necessario connumerare in detto consiglio, perché sono poco meno che principal membro della città per fare grandissimo numero, e per non potere la città senza quelli stare, e per mantenere la sua grandezza.”

⁹⁴ Opere, II, 119-20: “… di qui nasce che i popolari amano piú molte volte un privato che la repubblica, e per lui prendere l’armi contro alla patria, sperando avere ad esse da quello arricchiti ed onorati.… Appresso, se Aristotile, il quale ha trattato con tanta dottrina e sapienza de’ governi di tutte le repubbliche, entrasse in Venezia o in Firenze, dove vedesse d’una gran moltitudine d’uomini non esser tenuto conto alcuno, salvo che ne’ bisogni della città, senza dubbio si riderebbe di tali ordinazioni, avendo nel settimo libro della sua Politica distribuiti gli ufficii della città convenienti a tutte le qualità degli abitanti della medesima.”

⁹⁵ Opere, II, 120-21: “E se alcuno dicesse che questi popolari non sono ambiziosi … questo curarsi (poco?) de’ magistrati non è naturale, ma accidente, perche non è uomo si misero che non desideri essere esaltato. Ma perché questi popolari sono stati tenuti bassi dalla superbia dei grandi, perciò son divenuti non ambiziosi, siccome ancora ne’ tempi nostri sono i Franzesi, i quali per essere stati sbattuti dalla nobiltà loro, sono divenuti vilissimi. Non essendo adunque naturale tal viltà di animo in questi popolari, non è da privarli de’ magistrati, e massimamente perché armandosi la città, diverriano subito desiderosi di gloria come gli altri …”

⁹⁶ Opere, II, 122: “… azioni le quali sono principali nella repubblica ed abbracciano tutta la forza dello stato.”

⁹⁷ Opere, II, 129-30.

⁹⁸ Opere, II, 123: “Le deliberazioni della pace e guerra abbiano a terminare nel senato … e quantunque elle non passino nel consiglio, avranno pure da lui la dependenza, essendo da quello il senato, dove l’hanno a terminare, eletto … Saria forse bene, quando si ha a muovere una guerra di nuovo, vincere questa prima deliberazione nel consiglio grande (siccome facevano i Romani, i quali domandavano il popolo, se volevano e comandavano che si movesse guerra a questo ed a quello altro principe o repubblica); dipoi tutti gli accidenti di essa avessero a terminare nel senato.”

⁹⁹ Opere, II, 157: “… è da notare che questo atto dell’ascoltare le provocazioni pare che sia proprietà di quello che è signore dello stato e della città: ma perché chi è signore, o egli non vuole, o egli non può se non con difficoltà tal cosa eseguire, perciò vediamo tale uffizio essere attribuito ad un altro giudizio dagli altri separato. Laonde perchè in Francia il re non vuole, ed anco con difficoltà potrià occuparsi in tal faccenda, sono ordinati quattro parlamenti, i quali odono e giudicano le provocazioni di tutto il regno. In Venezia, perché il consiglio grande, che è signore di tutta la repubblica, non può fare tale effetto, perché bisogneria che stesse tutto l’anno occupato in tal materia (il che saria impossibile rispetto alle faccende private) sono ordinate tre quarantie …”

¹⁰⁰ See his criticisms of the arrangements made in 1502, 1512, and 1527 at pp. 140-41.

¹⁰¹ See generally pp. 139-47, and particularly 144-45.

¹⁰² Opere, II, 194-99; especially p. 196: “Questo modo di vivere che tengono questi che fanno professione di religione, conversando coi frati di San Marco e continuando simulatamente l’orazione e la comunione, senza dubbio è pessimo nella nostra città; perché egli fa il medesimo effetto che facevano in Roma le largizioni. Ma questi è ancora molto peggiore, perché dove le largizioni si potevano in qualche modo correggere, a questa cosí fatta vita con difficoltà si trova rimedio; perché chi ragionasse di proibire questi modi di vivere, parrebbe che volesse vietare agli uomini il bene operare, e sarebbe ributtato non altrimenti che un pessimo nemico nella fede di Cristo.”

¹⁰³ But cf. Opere, II, 255-56: “Conchiudendo adunque dico che tal forma di repubblica della nostra città non potrebbe patire alcuna intrinseca alterazione: e per virtù della milizia nel sopradetto modo ordinata, si difenderebbe dagli assalti esterni, e se la fortuna concedesse a questa repubblica colle sue armi armata una sola vittoria, acquisterebbe la nostra città sola tanta gloria e reputazione che toccherebbe il cielo; e non saria maraviglia alcuna se Firenze diventasse un’altra Roma, essendo il subbietto per la frequenza e natura degli abitatori, e fortezza del sito, d’un imperio grandissimo capace.” At this point Giannotti is drawing nearer to both the Savonarolan and the Machiavellian modes of thinking.

¹⁰⁴ Book III, ch. 8 (the last); pp. 258-69.

¹⁰⁵ Opere, II, 269: “Saria ben necessario esser accorto nel prender l’occasione; perché questa è quella che ha le bilance delle faccende umane e tutte quelli che in tal cosa non usano prudenza grandissima sono costretti a rovinare. Ma di questa materia non è da parlare, perché appartiene delle congiure, la quale è stata da altri prudentissimamente trattata.

“Conchiudendo adunque dico che questi sono i modi per i quali alcun cittadino potrià recare si gran benefìzio alla nostra città; e benché la malignità della fortuna abbia oppressati quelli che hanno questi modi seguitati, non è però da disperare … acciocché la città nostra s’abbia piú tosto a lamentare della fortuna per non avere mostrato mai alcuna intera occasione, che ella della città, per non v’essere stato chi l’abbia saputa conoscere e pigliare.”

¹⁰⁶ Perhaps 1522-25. See Gilbert, “Date of the Composition,” loc. cit. (above, n. 3).

¹⁰⁷ Lewkenor, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Written by the Cardinall Gasper Contareno and translated out of Italian into English by Lewes Lewkenor (London, 1599), p. 2. The Latin text runs (Contarini, De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum, Paris, 1543, p. 1): “… deorum immortalium potius quam hominum opus atque inuentü fuisse …”

¹⁰⁸ Lewkenor, sig. A3.

¹⁰⁹ Lewkenor, p. 130. Contarini, pp. 100-101: “Haec vero frequens consuetudo cōtinentis, ac intermissio urbanae, factione quandam ciuium paritura facile fuerat ab aliis ciuibus disiuncta: quapropter proculdubio res Veneta breui ad factiones et ad bella ciuilia deducta fuisset.… Ne ergo huiusmodi quispiam morbus in Venetam ciuitatem obreperet, satius esse maiores statuerunt, ut continentis imperium externo ac conducto milite quam Veneto defenderetur. Stipendïū uero illi statuit ex uectigalibus totius prouinciae. Aequū enim erat eius regionis impensis militem uiuere, qui ad earn tuendam accersitus fuerat…”

¹¹⁰ Lewkenor, p. 6. Contarini, pp. 5-6: “Fuere Athenis, Lacedaemone, ac Romae nonulli ciues uitae probitate, atq: in Rempub. pietate insignes uiri, sed adeo pauci, ut multitudine obruti, non multum patriae rei profuerint. At maiores nostri, a quibus tam praeclaram Rempub. accepimus, omnes ad unum consensere in studio patriae rei firmandae et amplificandae, nulla prope priuati commodi et honoris habita ratione. Huiusce rei coniecturam facere quiuis facile poterit … q: nulla, aut admodu pauca antiquoru monumēta Venetiis extent: alioquin domi forisq: praeclarissimorum hominū, et qui de Rep. bene meriti fuerint, non sepulchra, nō equestres aut pedestres statua, nō rostra nauiū, aut uexilla ab hostibus direpta, ingentibus praeliis superatis.”

¹¹¹ Lewkenor, p. 7. Contarini, p. 6: “Hac ergo incredibili uirtute animi maiores nostri hanc Remp. instituere, qualē post hominù memoriam nullam extitisse, si quis hàc nostram cum celeberrimis antiquorum cōferar, meridiana luce clarius intuebitur. Quin adfìrmare ausim, neq: monumentis insignium philosophorum, qui prò animi uoto Reip. formas effinxere, tam recte formatam atq: effictam ullam contineri.”

¹¹² Lewkenor, p. 11. Contarini, pp. 8-9: “… menti purae, ac motionum animi immuni id munus conferendum est. Quamobrem diuino quodam consilio, cum alia ratione id fieri non posset, inuentibus legibus hoc assecutum humanum genus uidetur, ut menti tantum ac rationi nullis perturbantibus obnoxiae, hoc regendi hominum coetus officium demandatum sit …”

¹¹³ Lewkenor, p. 12. Contarmi, pp. 9-10: “Aristoteles philosophorum facile princeps, in eo libello quē de mundo ad Alexandrum regem Macedonum scripsit, nihil aliud reperit cui similem deum optimum faceret, praeter antiquam legem in ciuitate recte instituta: ut id propemodum tam magni philosophi sententia sit deus in hac rerum universitate, quod antiqua lex in ciuili societate.”

¹¹⁴ Lewkenor, sig. A IV.-3.

¹¹⁵ Lewkenor, p. 13. Contarini, p. 11: “Ac equidem multitudo omnis est per se inepta gubernationi, nisi in unum quodammodo coalescat: quandoquidem neque esse ulla multitudo queat, nisi unitate aliqua contineatur. Qua de re ciuilis quoque societas dissipabitur, quae unitate quadam cōstat, nisi quapiam ratione multitudo unum efiiciatur.”

¹¹⁶ Lewkenor, p. 15. Contarini, p. 13: “… adeo ut omnium formas pari quadam librameto commiscuisse uideatur …”

¹¹⁷ Gilbert, “Date of the Composition,” pp. 172-74, 182.

¹¹⁸ Lewkenor, p. 67. Contarini, p. 53: “Nam nulla perniciosior pestis in Rempublicam obrepserit, q[uam] si quaepiā eius pars caeteris praeualuerit. Sic nanque (?) quoniam ius non seruatur, impossibile est societatem inter ciues consistere. Quod usu euenire solet ubicunque plura in unum conueniunt. Sic soluitur mixtum, si quodpiā elementorū ex quibus constat, alia superauerit. Sic omnis consonantia dissonans sit, si fidem seu uocem una plus intenderis quam par sit. Non dispari ratione si ciuitatem aut Rempublicam constare uolueris, necesse est id in primis seruari, ne qua pars aliis efficiatur potentior, sed omnes, quoad fieri possit, participes fiat publicae potestatis.”

¹¹⁹ Gilbert, “Venetian Constitution,” pp. 468-70.

¹²⁰ Above, nn. 23, 24.

¹²¹ William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).

¹²² Bouwsma, ch. X.