Machiavelli

A Biography

Miles J. Unger

• Editorial: Simon & Schuster
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781439193891
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Historical Biographies

He is the most infamous and influential political writer of all time. His name has become synonymous with cynical scheming and the selfish pursuit of power. Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine diplomat and civil servant, is the father of political science. His most notorious work, The Prince, is a primer on how to acquire and retain power without regard to scruple or conscience. His other masterpiece, The Discourses, offers a profound analysis of the workings of the civil state and a hardheaded assessment of human nature. Machiavelli's philosophy was shaped by the tumultuous age in which he lived, an age of towering geniuses and brutal tyrants. He was on intimate terms with Leonardo and Michelangelo. His first political mission was to spy on the fire-and-brimstone preacher Savonarola. As a diplomat, he matched wits with the corrupt and carnal Pope Alexander VI and his son, the notorious Cesare Borgia, whose violent career served as a model for The Prince. His insights were gleaned by closely studying men like Julius II, the "Warrior Pope, " and his successor, the vacillating Clement VII, as well as two kings of France and the Holy Roman Emperor. Analyzing their successes and failures, Machiavelli developed his revolutionary approach to power politics. Machiavelli was, above all, a student of human nature. In The Prince he wrote a practical guide to the aspiring politician that is based on the world as it is, not as it should be. He has been called cold and calculating, cynical and immoral. In reality, argues biographer Miles Unger, he was a deeply humane writer whose controversial theories were a response to the violence and corruption he saw around him. He was a psychologist with acute insight into human nature centuries before Freud. A brilliant and witty writer, he was not only a political theorist but also a poet and the author of La Mandragola, the finest comedy of the Italian Renaissance. He has been called the first modern man, unafraid to contemplate a world without God. Rising from modest beginnings on the strength of his own talents, he was able to see through the pious hypocrisy of the age in which he lived. Miles Unger has relied on original Italian sources as well as his own deep knowledge of Florence in writing this fascinating and authoritative account of a genius whose work remains as relevant today as when he wrote it.

I

BORN IN POVERTY

“I was born poor and learned early on to deny myself rather than to enjoy.”

—NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI TO FRANCESCO VETTORI, MARCH 18, 1513

AS HE CONTEMPLATED THE WRECKAGE OF HIS ONCE promising career, Machiavelli consoled himself with the thought that he was, after all, no worse off than he had been when he had come into this world. Only his dreams of something better had been shattered. “I was born poor and learned early on to deny myself rather than to enjoy,” he recalled, finding comfort in the thought that he had nothing left to lose.

At first glance Machiavelli’s characterization of his circumstances seems willfully misleading. The Machiavelli were an old and respected family and by most measures the particular branch into which Niccolò was born in the spring of 1469 was solidly middle-class.ⁱ Niccolò’s father, Bernardo, was a man of property. He owned a house near the Ponte Vecchio, one of a cluster of buildings occupied by various cousins, grouped about a small courtyard with a loggia known as the chorte di Machiavelli. This alone was enough to lift the family above the great majority of the urban poor, who owned little more than the ragged clothes on their back. Nor was this Bernardo’s only piece of real estate. Furnishing the city house with wine, oil, eggs, meat, and fresh vegetables was his farm in Sant’ Andrea in Percussina, situated some ten miles south of Florence along the road to Rome. Even in lean times the family could fall back on its own resources to feed and clothe itself.

The status of the Machiavelli in Florence was measured by more than material possessions. Bernardo could claim descent from the minor nobility (through the Castellani family), a connection that, while it brought little in the way of tangible profit, conveyed real benefits in the form of prestige. In the countryside Bernardo’s superiority to his neighbors was marked by quaint ceremonial gestures that carried a distant echo of once vital feudal obligations: every Saint Peter’s Day, a member of the parish of San Piero a Nebbiavole offered in tribute a half pound of candle wax, and when the priest of the local church of San Michele a Mogliano died, Bernardo, in recognition of his role as fatherly protector of the community, was among those consulted in naming his successor.

In the city the family was equally well established. For centuries the Machiavelli had belonged to Florence’s ruling elite. Niccolò’s ancestors had been prosperous bankers and merchants, dealing mostly in the lucrative wool and silk industries. Bernardo himself, though he never held elective office, was a friend of some of the most powerful and prominent men in the city. One of them, the Chancellor of Florence, Bartolomeo Scala (an intimate of Lorenzo de’ Medici himself), called Bernardo his “friend and familiar” and estemed his erudition so highly that he made him a principal character in his De Legibus, a philosophical dialogue on the origins of the law. Nothing indicates his high standing in the community as surely as this: Bernardo Machiavelli was someone in whose mouth Scala could place learned paraphrases of Plato and Cicero without fear that contemporaries would find the image ludicrous.

In other words Bernardo Machiavelli was an intellectual. He had earned a reputation as an amateur scholar and expert on legal matters, something confirmed by the honorific messer used by his peers when greeting him on the Ponte Vecchio or Piazza della Signoria. He was the prototypical scholarly dilettante. Years after his death, when it was brought to Niccolò’s attention that strangers had been mistakenly buried alongside his father in the Machiavelli family crypt in Santa Croce, he quipped: “Well, let them be, for my father was a great lover of conversation, and the more there are to keep him company, the better pleased he will be.” Bernardo had both the inclination and the leisure to cultivate his mind, secure in the knowledge that his various properties would provide sufficient income to support his family.

But despite this solidly bourgeois standing, Niccolò was not mistaken in characterizing his origins as less than promising. True, he never suffered the dire want of many of his neighbors for whom even a slight economic downturn meant hunger; nor did he ever have to endure the humiliation of begging charity from his richer relatives. But in the world of late-fifteenth-century Florence, both Bernardo and his son Niccolò lived uneasily on the margins of respectability. In fact the earliest surviving documents in Niccolò’s hand—two letters from 1497 written when he was twenty-eight years old—reflect a painful recognition of social insecurity. They involve a property dispute between his family and the powerful Pazzi clan. Hoping to counter the uneven odds, Niccolò put his case before the influential Cardinal Giovanni Lopez. In the first letter Machiavelli refers to his own kin as “pygmies . . . attacking giants.” In a follow-up letter to this same cardinal, he seems anxious to remind his correspondent that, despite appearances, the Machiavelli are at least as respectable as their more powerful rivals: “And whoever would wish justly to weigh the merits of our house against that of the Pazzi, all other things being equal, would declare ours the greater in liberality and manliness of spirit.” Of course, as Niccolò knew, the scales were never fairly weighted, and any contest between unequal combatants would favor the strong over the weak. As he remarks bitterly in his play La Mandragola, “a man who doesn’t have pull with the government of this city . . . can’t find a dog to bark at him, and we’re good for nothing but to go to funerals and to meetings about some marriage, or to sit all day dawdling on the Proconsul’s bench.” Surprisingly, at least for those who regard him as the preeminent exponent of ruthless power politics, Machiavelli’s natural point of view was that of the vulnerable. This marginality, the sense that he was on the outside looking in, was vital to Niccolò’s self-conception. This self-conception in turn was vital to the formation of his thought.

• • •

Niccolò Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, in the family house just south of the Ponte Vecchio. The modest residence stood on the Via Romana, which led from the city’s oldest and busiest bridge to the southern gates. From his bedroom window young Niccolò could watch not only the steady stream of farmers on their way to market, but also more exotic figures who were a reminder of the vast international reach of Florentine commerce: walking shoulder to shoulder with the humble peasants were long-distance merchants with their mules piled high with goods from Turkey, Arabia, and far-off India, as well as tourists—including numerous dukes, duchesses, cardinals, and even an occasional emperor or king—who had come to worship at the city’s many sacred shrines and delight in Florence’s unparalleled works of art and architecture.

The house in the heart of the Oltrarno—the section of Florence on the south bank of the Arno River that is still among the most charming in the city—no longer stands, but the surrounding urban fabric is largely intact. The neighborhood in which the young Machiavelli grew up, identified by the ancient heraldic symbol of the shell (Nicchio),ⁱⁱ is one of narrow streets and tiny, shaded squares, of small shops and unpretentious eateries. On summer days when the Arno became sluggish, a foul stench rose from the mud along the riverbank, a miasma made even worse by the dyers and tanners who used the waters to scrub away noxious liquids. It was then that plague-carrying rats multiplied, bringing contagion that ravaged the neighborhoods of rich and poor alike. Then, as now, it was not the most fashionable address in the city, but a few imposing palaces tucked in among more modest apartments were a reminder that powerful families lived among them. A few minutes’ walk from the main civic and religious centers, the Oltrarno was close enough to participate fully in the hustle and bustle of the thriving metropolis.

Within this busy urban neighborhood there was little to distinguish the Machiavelli home from dozens of others in the vicinity. By the late fifteenth century the most powerful families of Florence—like the Medici, whose palace on the widest street of the city, the Via Larga, set the standard for those that followed—advertised their wealth and status by constructing splendid homes that dwarfed their neighbors,’ but the Machiavelli residence would not have made much of an impression on the passersby. No architect had imposed his newfangled ideas of classical order on the rather haphazard collection of medieval buildings; the conglomeration was decidedly unostentatious, suggesting shabby respectability rather than vaunting ambition.

Like most Florentine families, the Machiavelli were unable to trace their origins back more than a couple of centuries, though, unlike some more pretentious or deluded lineages, they felt no need to invent fictitious pedigrees out of dragon slayers or Trojan heroes. In the centuries before Niccolò’s birth they had prospered as the city prospered, making a solid if not spectacular contribution to a metropolis that was becoming a center of trade, manufacturing, and finance.

The location of the city house, as well as the various properties scattered about the countryside in the hills just south of the city, indicates that the Machiavelli originated in the Val di Pesa, in the wine-making region of Chianti. As the population of Florence swelled in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, largely through immigration from the contado, the rural area just outside the city limits, families tended to settle in districts closest to the gates through which they had first entered. The less densely populated Oltrarno was a popular destination for new immigrants, particularly those from the region south of the city. It is almost certain, then, though there are no documents prior to the thirteenth century to prove this, that Niccolò’s distant ancestors were among those nameless tillers of the soil who, since before the days of the Roman Empire, cultivated grape and olive on the sloping, rocky hillsides that lie between Florence and Siena.

The insecure respectability that marked Niccolò’s life and that fueled much of his creative fire was the result of fortunate decisions made by long-dead ancestors and unwise choices made more recently. If Niccolò burned with ambition, it was due at least in part to the gap he perceived between the prestige of the Machiavelli name and the precariousness of current circumstances. In his dedication to The Prince he refers to himself as “a man of low and poor station,” a perspective that encouraged him to break with convention and propose startlingly new solutions to old problems. Had he been richer or more careful of his dignity, it is unlikely he would have made his career in the civil service, a form of employment too close to real work to be suitable for a gentleman and one that provided vital insight into the cruel economy of power. Equally important, the nagging sense that his family was in decline left him with a fierce ambition to make his mark.

The Machiavelli first enter history during the thirteenth century as adherents of the Guelph party, the group allied with the papacy in their often bitter quarrel with the Ghibellines, followers of the Holy Roman Emperor. Though these factions, which existed in most of the cities of northern and central Italy, ostensibly owed their allegiance to one or the other of the great universal lords of Europe, abstract geopolitical considerations often were less significant than the fact that party solidarity provided an opportunity to settle purely local scores. In the streets of Florence, as in Milan, Pistoia, and Siena, Guelphs and Ghibellines organized themselves into armed factions and slew each other with abandon as first one and then the other gained momentary advantage, burning down the houses of their enemies and driving the survivors through the city gates. Time and again the same bloody drama played itself out. While the victors celebrated, the exiles made their way to the nearest friendly city, where they plotted revenge on their insufferable compatriots. The most famous iteration of this familiar story involves the great Florentine Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti who, after the triumph of the Guelphs in 1250, headed to Siena, where the Emperor’s men still clung to power. Demonstrating that loyalty to party and family meant more than loyalty to country, Farinata led the armies of Siena against his hometown, defeating them at the battle of Montaperti and briefly reasserting Ghibelline ascendance in Florence.ⁱⁱⁱ

One of the earliest mentions of the Machiavelli family comes in the context of this Ghibelline triumph, when a contemporary chronicler listed them among the prominent Guelphs whose houses were plundered by their enemies. Fortunately for the Machiavelli and their allies, the quarrelsome and faction-ridden Ghibellines failed to consolidate their victory and by 1267 the Guelphs, the Machiavelli among them, had regained control. But the Guelphs proved equally belligerent, repeating the worst excesses of their ousted foes. This particular round of destruction was not entirely unproductive since the torching of the houses of the Ghibelline Uberti clan created much needed open space in the crowded heart of the city. The smoldering ruins of the Uberti towers were paved over and transformed into Florence’s main civic square, the Piazza della Signoria—a peculiar but effective bit of urban renewal.

The triumph of the Guelphs brought no peace to the city. The crumbs of the victory feast had barely been cleared when they themselves split into rival factions—the Blacks and the Whites—who now went about slaughtering each other with equal gusto.^iv The Machiavelli, once again fortunate in their loyalties, joined the victorious Blacks, the faction that, under the lead of the Donati family, banished Florence’s most famous citizen, the poet Dante Alighieri, who had the bad luck to belong to the Whites. As a bitter, rootless exile, Dante took his revenge on the city that had betrayed him by providing eyewitness testimony that “through Hell [Florence’s] name is spread abroad!”

Niccolò’s ancestors joined in the street battles that were a feature of daily life in medieval Florence, ransacking the houses of their neighbors when they were on top and suffering the same fate themselves when Fortune reversed herself. If Niccolò would one day become the world’s most famous cynic, given his own family history and that of his native city, it is a view he came by honestly. While the Machiavelli were not among the leaders of the victorious Black Guelphs, by the mid-fourteenth century they were named as one of the “notable” citizen families of the Oltrarno neighborhood. Equally significant, contemporary accounts list the Machiavelli as popolani—that is among those prosperous merchants who were slowly pushing aside the old feudal aristocracy as the ruling class of the city.

The annals of medieval Florence chronicle a tragic cycle of murder and arson that was one generation’s legacy to the next, but viewed from a distance a more constructive picture emerges. In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli admits that “if in any other republic there were ever notable divisions, those of Florence are most notable . . . . From such divisions came as many dead, as many exiles, and as many families destroyed as ever occurred in any city in memory.” But he perceived that her greatest fault revealed her greatest virtue, for “in my judgment no other instance appears to me to show so well the power of our city as the one derived from these divisions, which would have had the force to annihilate any great and very powerful city. Nevertheless ours, it appeared, became ever greater from them.” However violently and spasmodically, Florence was wrenching itself free from ancient feudal bonds and asserting its autonomy in defiance of both Pope and Emperor. By the end of the thirteenth century, despite periodic orgies of bloodletting, Florence had transformed itself into a vital and independent state, dominated by merchants and bankers grown prosperous on the revived trade between East and West that was an unintended by-product of the Crusades.

In the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, Florence established a government that reflected the new order; the right to vote and to hold office would no longer be the privilege of the landed aristocracy but would be based on membership in one of the city’s merchant or professional guilds.^v Flexing their newfound muscle, these merchants now sought to rein in the lawless magnates whose arrogance and violence had for so long disturbed the peace. Merchants and shopkeepers formed themselves into a citizen militia powerful enough to challenge the armored knights who were the source of...

Índice

• Cover
• Dedication
• Select Cast of Characters
• Maps
• Prologue: The Malice of Fate
• Chapter I: Born in Poverty
• Chapter II: A Sword Unsheathed
• Chapter III: The Civil Servant
• Chapter IV: Sir Nihil
• Chapter V: Exit the Dragon
• Chapter VI: Men of Low and Poor Station
• Chapter VII: The Stars Align
• Chapter VIII: Reversal of Fortune
• Chapter IX: Dismissed, Deprived, and Totally Removed
• Chapter X: The Prince
• Chapter XI: Vita Contemplativa
• Chapter XII: The Sage of the Garden
• Chapter XIII: Nightmare and Dream
• Chapter XIV: Finger of Satan
• Photographs
• About Miles J. Unger
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright