Machiavelli and Political Conspiracies

The Struggle for Power in the Italian Renaissance

Alessandro Campi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429865435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

The theme of conspiracy is central to Machiavelli's writing. His work offers observations and analysis of conspiracy as part of the armoury of the Renaissance politician. Surprisingly, the theme has not yet received the attention it merits. This volume corrects an interpretation which reduces Machiavelli's position to one of censorious observer of conspiracies. Quite to the contrary, as Campi demonstrates, Machiavelli developed an anatomy of conspiracy and provided a practical manual for coup d'état" and violent seizure of power.

Part I

Machiavelli and Political Conspiracies

Introduction

Machiavelli, Theorist of Conspiracies

Alessandro Campi

Machiavelli’s writings, especially his diplomatic-administrative correspondence and the Florentine Histories, contain frequent accounts and descriptions of conspiracies, intrigues and secret machinations. But it is in the Discourses—in the famous chapter 6 of Book III¹—that Machiavelli addresses the conspiracy theme in a systematic manner. The chapter offers all of the following: an ample number of case studies (taken from ancient history as well as Italian history, closer to his own time); a broad classification; a conceptual elaboration; and a detailed technical analysis.

Machiavelli’s opinion on this particular and extreme form of political struggle can already be found, in a severe and apparently definitive form, at the opening of the text, where he says of conspiracies that there is no ‘more dangerous or more foolhardy enterprise [than] this one, because it is difficult and extremely dangerous at every one of its stages, which results in the fact that many conspiracies are attempted but very few reach their desired goal’ (III, 6, 4).

Similar words of admonition appear in The Prince: ‘the difficulties on the side of the conspirators are infinite. And one sees from experience that there have been many conspiracies, but few have had a good end’ (XIX, 11), and, with slightly minimal (but meaningful) variations, in the Florentine Histories: ‘such undertakings [conspiracies], if there is some shadow of glory in thinking of them, have almost always very certain loss in their execution’ (VI, 29, 14). Based on these passages, many scholars and readers of the Florentine have tended to exaggerate Machiavelli’s distaste for conspiracy as an instrument of political struggle and a means of gaining access to power.² Machiavelli was wary of conspiracies, advising against them on practical grounds and blaming the conspirators even when animated by noble ideals. There were many reasons for this negative view of conspiracies: a) their frequently baneful outcomes, ruinous for their promoters—as certified by a multitude of historic examples; b) their inability to achieve stable, and not merely new, political alignments; c) the risk of the new institutional order being overthrown in turn, in a similarly dramatic manner; d) the difficulty of building any sort of popular support or consensus around a violent practice, whose conception and realization were always an affair of socially restricted groups and exclusionary oligarchies detached from the larger body politic and operating inside the closed circle of princely power (and it is well known that Machiavelli considered popular good will towards the prince to be crucial to maintaining a solid government in any political community); e) and, finally, his own personal experience, on at least one occasion, of the risks to which one can be exposed (starting from the supreme risk of losing one’s life) when one allows oneself to become directly or indirectly involved in such endeavors, as vile as they are reckless.

One might reasonably assume that such a pronounced aversion to conspiracies, a tactic to be shunned personally and politically, should have pushed Machiavelli to dismiss them as a pathology alien to his way of conceiving the dynamics of power and politics, to ignore them or relegate them to a subordinate role. Quite to the contrary, however, his aversion to conspiracies did not prevent him from devoting to them a profound historical examination, distinguished by its analytical and conceptual rigor. Indeed, Machiavelli’s reflections on the theme cannot be reduced to a generalized warning to guard against conspiracies or to a well-argued condemnation of an inauspicious practice, for either of which a few lines would have been sufficient. Instead, they are an attempt, and an ambitious one at that, to construct a sort of general theory of conspiracy, that is, to conduct a systematic exposition of the topic—a practice or form of political struggle with its own intrinsic specificity—not only from a theoretical or historico-political point of view, but also from a practical-technical standpoint. This attempt was elicited, clearly, by the importance that conspiracies had assumed in Florence and in Italy during the period immediately prior to Machiavelli’s time (not surprisingly re-baptized in much of 20th-century historiography as ‘the age of conspiracies’).³ In his own time, moreover, conspiracies continued to enjoy an ongoing currency—albeit in a phase of transformation for the civil systems then governing the peninsula—when the institutional arrangements that would later characterize the modern state were just coming into their own.

There are also several other factors that could have induced Machiavelli to undertake such an extensive and thoroughly articulated treatment of conspiracy. First of all, there is the ‘classical nature’ of the topic. In Greek and Roman historical literature, which Machiavelli so assiduously frequented (though not always through primary sources [cf. Ridley, 1983; Martelli, 1998]), conspiracy was, to say the least, recurrent and an explanatory key in many pages of ancient history (cf. Pagán, 2004; Roisman, 2006). Another consideration is that conspiracy constitutes, as it were, the dark and shadowy side of politics, its imponderable aspect, not easily reducible to a calculus of interests and advantages, something that an author so inclined to rationalism, but also aware of the role played in history by good fortune, contingency, and human passion, inevitably found intriguing. Furthermore, and especially if we take as valid the myth of Machiavelli the fervent republican (cf. Baron, 1961; Pocock, 1975; Skinner, 1981), he may have drawn inspiration from many ancient and modern conspiracies that were arguably motivated or inspired by a desire for freedom and an aversion to tyranny, occasionally carried to the point of self-immolation. This was certainly a theme to which Machiavelli, despite all the doubts he may have harbored concerning the positive outcomes of conspiratorial intrigues, could not remain indifferent (unless, of course, ‘the myth’ of Machiavelli the fervent republican is truly a myth). Finally, we must not forget that conspiracy, because of the dynamics set in motion from its ideation to its execution, remains an instrument of power (that is to say a means, albeit a violent one, of attaining it). Conspiracy is a course of action that must be planned, fine-tuned, and executed in a timely fashion and in accordance with a rigorously prepared logical procedure. Machiavelli was sensitive—if only by virtue of his long professional experience in the ranks of Florentine bureaucracy—to the practical-operational factors, the executive and pragmatic aspects of political struggle.

There were, therefore, from Machiavelli’s point of view, many well-founded reasons to put himself to work on a more than occasional consideration of the topic of conspiracy. His reflection turns out to be not only deep and articulated, despite being presented in a scattered and fragmentary fashion throughout his works, but also original and quite innovative compared to the historical-intellectual tradition in which he was trained.⁴ Two aspects in particular strike the attentive reader as especially original compared to what was at the time the usual way of reasoning about conspiracies, whether classical or ancient or contemporary.

The first concerns his approach to the phenomenon, which departs from the canon, at once dramatizing, introspective, and moralistic, defined and established by Sallust (Osmond, 1995). For centuries, this approach was the rule in the narration of such events: the study of the personality and psychology of the conspirators. One paradigmatic example is the interpretation of the Pazzi conspiracy by Poliziano (2012), his almost exclusive focus on the criminal mind and moral abjection of the perpetrators, his moralistic slant and his complaints about the decay of social mores and his theatrical narration of the events. Machiavelli replaces all this with an interpretation that aims to insert each conspiracy within its historical context and to provide as far as possible a political interpretation of the conspiracy. He is not satisfied with using, as a measure of explanation, the spirit of revenge, mere self-interest, personal resentment or individual cruelty. To be sure, these are all elements associated with the carrying out of a conspiracy, but for Machiavelli, they do not explain its actual underlying causes.

The second element of Machiavelli’s originality concerns his refusal to limit himself, as was the case with previous historical literature, to providing a chronicle—more or less cut and dry, more or less adorned with colorful and horrifying details, more or less biased by hagiographic objectives or defamatory intentions—of single criminal episodes. On the contrary, he elaborates a reflection on conspiracies with the idea of distilling the sum total of all of them into a uniform vision or representation. He aims to develop a model, from which to deduce rules of conduct and criteria for action which are as far as possible uniform and universal, valid alike for past and present, and observable in the most diverse historical contexts. All of this—as has been rightly observed by Harvey C. Mansfield in his commentary on the Discourses⁵—amounts to an undeniable innovation with respect to the tradition of political thought before Machiavelli. Conspiracy in the general sense is not only distinct from tyrannicide or from the simple (and occasional) power-hungry assassination (Turchetti, 2013), but in Machiavelli becomes a political category or concept, of which it is possible to trace—on the basis of the various historical cases or examples—a sort of phenomenology.

In the following pages, we will try to elucidate Machiavelli’s particular reading of the phenomenon—complex and not without contradictions but taken altogether original and innovative. We will start by recalling some events—the Pazzi conspiracy (1478), the so-called Magione conspiracy (1502), the Boscoli and Capponi conspiracy against Giuliano de’ Medici (1513), and the plot to assassinate Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1522). Machiavelli’s having been involved in them as an observer, a direct witness, perhaps even as a participant, must have had no little influence on his thinking. The teachings and reflections that he drew from them were probably different, more articulated, and less peremptory than the ones which have been attributed to him by a vast literature.

It is true that Machiavelli was personally opposed to conspiracies. In his professional role as Secretary of the Chancery he was, it could be said, a man of order. He observed political things from the point of view of power that was growing more and more centralized in its institutional articulations and command structures and that before too long would become sovereign and exclusive, the single legitimate power of the modern state. Conspiracies, on the contrary, both products and producers of chaos, are the fruit of internecine civil struggles, which they tend to perpetuate rather than resolve. Even when they aim to create or restore a more law-abiding and harmonious system, they usually end up, whether they succeed or fail, producing a more unfair and absolutist system. As a man of government, could Machiavelli have been attracted by practices of this nature?

As a writer of political texts, moreover, Machiavelli worked in the unhappy condition of exile; and exile, being sent away from the city and from public life was the destiny, as he well knew, that awaited those who had survived the failure of a conspiracy. His proscription in 1512 had different causes: the political defeat of the republican regime of which he was the ideologue and the most eminent functionary, and the return to power of the Medici with their princely ambitions. But this psychological condition alone, his condition as an exiled and banished citizen, comparable to that of a fugitive conspirator or an outlaw, would be enough to explain his aversion to conspiratorial actions.

All of this notwithstanding, and despite all the distaste and hostility he might have felt toward them on an intellectual and practical level, Machiavelli applied to conspiracies his talents as a theorist and analyst in the conviction—matured through both study and experience⁶—that they constitute one of the principal ways through which, in all times, the struggle for power has been conducted. He believed, therefore, that they deserve, with all due respect for their diversity and singularity, to be given an overarching framework, to be granted consideration as a whole, an approach which highlights their common traits and similarities. It is not only that the psychology of the conspirator, as Sallust had already sketched it, would always be the same: that is to say, a mixture of blind ambition and fierce determination, of inclination to violence and a taste for secrecy, of passion for power and disposition to personal risk. There are also recurrences and similarities in the way of operating and acting of all conspirators. In all such machinations there exist rules to be observed and difficulties and dangers that present themselves in the same way on every occasion. There are recurring peculiarities and modalities to be observed. Finally, they have their own general historico-political significance that the analyst of power cannot disregard and that goes beyond the outcome, successful or not, of the individual plot.

Conspiracy, in sum, is a dangerous practice,⁷ difficult to manage, perhaps better avoided. However, it is also—as Machiavelli would write in his most important historical work⁸—‘something that requires much consideration’ (Florentine Histories, VIII, 1, 2) and not a ‘matter that could be passed over with brevity’ (Florentine Histories, VIII, 1, 1). Conspiracy, in other words, is an entirely political phenomenon which must be addressed, must be known in its intrinsic dynamics, contextualized historically, and interpreted conceptually in all its various aspects. Just how Machiavelli did this is what should emerge from the pages that follow and from the careful reading of his main writings on the subject (On Conspiracies; Description of the Methods adopted by the Duke Valentino when murdering Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, the Signor Pagolo, and the Duke di Gravina Orsini; and The Pazzi and the Conspiracy against the Medici), which we have brought together as though they formed an organic text, a text conceived by their author in a unitary way. Taken together, they constitute that book On Conspiracies, which Machiavelli never actually wrote, but which he probably thought about many times over the course of his life.

Notes

1On the editorial success and circulation of this chapter, cf. the Note on the Texts.

2On this topic, critics are mostly unanimous: from Oreste Tommasini to Gennaro Sasso. As to the former, ‘Conspiracies as a matter of principle repel him; his experience had shown them as useless and detrimental’ (Tommasini, 1999: 68). As to the latter, equally blunt, conspiracy is ‘an endeavor that he explicitly abhorred’ (Sasso, 1993: 467).

3The mandatory reference is the classic work by J. Burckhardt (1860). Many useful considerations on 15th-century conspiracies, part of the deep institutional transformations of a political-jurisdictional and political-diplomatic nature, which swept through the regimes, monarchies, and principalities present in Italy during the 15th century, can be found in Fubini (1994).

4Elena Fasano Guarini in her study (1996) tries to interpret Machiavell...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Machiavelli and Political Conspiracies
• Part II On Conspiracies
• Bibliography
• Index