Machiavelli

Robert Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317699576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Machiavelli is history's most startling political commentator. Recent interpreters have minimised his originality, but this book restores his radicalism. Robert Black shows a clear development in Machiavelli's thought. In his most subversive works The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, The Ass and Mandragola he rejected the moral and political values inherited by the Renaissance from antiquity and the middle ages. These outrageous compositions were all written in mid-life, when Machiavelli was a political outcast in his native Florence. Later he was reconciled with the Florentine establishment, and as a result his final compositions including his famous Florentine Histories represent a return to more conventional norms.

This lucid work is perfect for students of Medieval and Early Modern History, Renaissance Studies and Italian Literature, or anyone keen to learn more about one of history's most potent, influential and arresting writers.

Part One
Machiavelli and Florence

Chapter 1
Florence and the Machiavelli family

The Italian city-states were, in their early days, self-governing communes, in which leading citizens shared power; in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many – particularly in north Italy – succumbed to one-man rule or lost their independence to neighbouring, more powerful towns. Florence suffered neither of these fates, retaining both its communal, i.e. republican, constitution and its independence from rival powers. Like other Italian towns, Florence was constantly rent by internal conflict – among the elite families, and among social classes. In Florence, the feudal nobility was weak, losing importance by the later thirteenth century. Social conflict occurred mainly between an elite consisting of rich, large-scale merchants, bankers, industrialists and land-owners, and a middle class, comprised of families involved in similar occupations but on a more modest scale. The urban proletariat occasionally tried to gain a political voice, but such attempts were regularly suppressed by the middle and upper classes. The dominant magistracy in Florence was the Signoria, consisting at first of six and then of eight priors, besides a head, the Gonfalonier (standard-bearer) of Justice.

The Machiavelli had been a second-rank elite family in later thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Florence.¹ Particularly prominent was Buoninsegna di Agnolo, Dante’s contemporary, who served twelve times on the Florentine Signoria, including one term as Gonfalonier of Justice. The two principal branches of the Machiavelli family in the fifteenth century – including Niccolò’s own – both descended from Buoninsegna di Agnolo. Throughout the fourteenth century, the Machiavelli continued to play a noticeable role in Florentine politics as subordinate members of the elite.²

It has been frequently suggested that the Machiavelli family originated in the area between the rivers Greve and Pesa to the south of Florence, near Giogoli, a few miles from the city walls.³ By the later fourteenth century they were substantial landowners in and round Sant’Andrea in Percussina, near the Greve. It is possible that the family descended from minor feudal nobility of the Val di Pesa; according to family tradition, they shared a common ancestry in the twelfth century with lesser local feudatories, the Castellani from Montespertoli. Part of this inheritance at Montespertoli was still enjoyed, although much depreciated in value, by Niccolò Machiavelli’s father, Bernardo, in the late fifteenth century.⁴

As early as 1269, the Machiavelli seem to have owned property in the Florentine parish of S. Felicita on the south side of the Arno (the so-called Oltrarno) near the Ponte Vecchio.⁵ By the end of the thirteenth century, they were perhaps already living on the Via Romana (today Via Guicciardini).⁶ It was in the cluster of family dwellings known as the Palazzo Machiavelli that Bernardo di Niccolò di Buoninsegna Machiavelli lived and that his own son Niccolò was born.⁷ Niccolò di Buoninsegna, Bernardo’s father and Niccolò’s grandfather, gave his age as forty-two in the Florentine Catasto (tax return) of 1427. In 1429, he was listed as qualified for communal office. By 1430, however, he had died, tax returns indicating Bernardo was born sometime between July 1427 and 1431.

Suggestions that Bernardo might have been illegitimate are inconclu-sive.⁸ The fact that he received inheritances from other family members provides some indication of legitimate birth.⁹ But in December 1509, Niccolò di messer Bernardo’s qualification to hold public office was challenged on the grounds of his paternity.¹⁰ The contemporary chronicler Bartolomeo Cerretani wrote too, ‘Niccolò Machiavelli, chancellor, son of a bastard of the Machiavellis.’¹¹ Bernardo and his son Niccolò did not belong to the Great Council, although Bernardo should have been qualified owing to his great-grandfather Buoninsegna’s membership of the Signoria: illegitimate birth would have disqualified both Bernardo and Niccolò.¹² It has been suggested, however, that allegations of disqualification raised against Niccolò did not allude to his father’s illegitimacy but were motivated by political malice against Machiavelli.¹³ According to this theory, disqualification was due to Bernardo’s inability to hold office owing to unpaid tax arrears.¹⁴ Indeed, Bernardo had been continually on the communal debtors’ list (specchio) from 1458, with new debts accruing annually.¹⁵ Bernardo’s mother, Costanza (from an unknown family), was not living in his father Niccolò’s household in 1427, a fact which seems to indicate they were not then married, although it is remotely possible that they could have been living separately. In 1457, she was listed as seventy years old, living with her unmarried son, Bernardo, so that she would have been born in 1387 and have been about forty at Bernardo’s birth.¹⁶

Bernardo was raised not by his widowed mother but by his uncle, Giovanni di Buoninsegna (b. 1388). It was normal Florentine custom for an orphaned child to remain with the father’s family and for the widowed mother to return to her own family, in order to be in a position to reclaim her dowry and so become eligible for remarriage.¹⁷ In Bernardo’s case, this arrangement was all the more appropriate, as Bernardo, his own father Niccolò’s legitimate or legitimised heir, was living in the household headed by Giovanni di Buoninsegna, but which had remained in the common ownership of his father Niccolò and the latter’s brother Giovanni: Bernardo was actually raised in the household of which he was joint proprietor by inheritance.

Giovanni di Buoninsegna died, evidently without male heirs, in 1439.¹⁸ Bernardo seems to have been his principal beneficiary, inheriting not only property in Sant’Andrea in Percussina but also Giovanni’s considerable debts, possibly including repayment of his wife’s dowry. Bernardo had also inherited his own father Niccolò’s estate, including more property at Sant’Andrea, as well as his substantial creditors, even more numerous than his uncle Giovanni’s. In 1445, Bernardo was named as heir to another uncle, Totto di Buoninsegna Machiavelli – an inheritance that Bernardo duly accepted on 11 September 1459.¹⁹

In 1427, Bernardo’s father, Niccolò di Buoninsegna, possessed taxable wealth of about 1,500 florins or slightly less – assets placing him among the richest 200 Florentines in the quarter of S. Spirito.²⁰ The combined wealth from his father and his two uncles should have given Bernardo the makings of a comfortable or even prosperous lifestyle in Florence. Nevertheless, Bernardo was, in the end, by no means rich: by 1480 he was worth only 1,583 florins, his being the poorest of the five Machiavelli households listed among leading families in that year’s Catasto.²¹ His gross annual income has been estimated at a meagre 110 florins,²² derived entirely from agricultural holdings, which were becoming increasingly unprofitable.²³ Further evidence of Bernardo’s modest circumstances comes from the dowry provided to his elder daughter, Primavera, born in 1465.²⁴ By the second half of the fifteenth century, normal custom among elite Florentine families was to provide dowries of up to 2,000 florins, or even more.²⁵ For Primavera in 1483, Bernardo Machiavelli managed to scrape together a barely acceptable²⁶ 1,000 florins.²⁷ He was relieved to get away with the humble wedding supper to which he invited not a single relative beyond his immediate family.²⁸ The only servant included in his household was a young housemaid.²⁹ It is no wonder that his son Niccolò wrote in March 1513, ‘I was born poor, and I learned to know want before enjoyment.’³⁰

Florence was constitutionally a republic when Bernardo Machiavelli was born; it had become an oligarchy by the late fourteenth century, with most of the citizenry excluded from effective power. Soon political contraction was to go one step further, with the city dominated by the Medici family, who would control Florence through patronage and especially by manipulating the electoral process. The first Medici to achieve leadership was Cosimo, whose ascendancy lasted from 1434 to 1464, when he was succeeded by his son Piero. From 1469 to 1492 the head of the family and Florence’s effective despot was Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Bernardo’s original ambition had been to supplement his modest assets with a profession. In the fifteenth century, the Machiavelli family had numbered two prominent lawyers. A cousin, Francesco di Lorenzo di Filippo (d. 1428), had been a noted canonist in Florence, a teacher at the University of Florence³¹ and the author of a text on canon law. He enjoyed a good legal practice in Florence as well as a political role there, serving as a legal consultant to the commune.³² Even more prominent was Girolamo di Agnolo (b. 1415), Francesco di Lorenzo’s nephew.³³ He taught at the University of Florence,³⁴ besides belonging to the Florentine college of law examiners.³⁵ In addition to serving the government as a legal consultant,³⁶ Girolamo became a political figure in Florence, holding the highest political offices and serving as a Florentine ambassador. At first he enjoyed a prominent place in the Medici regime,³⁷ speaking frequently at important consultative meetings in the decade from 1448 to 1458.³⁸ Bernardo, the famous Niccolò’s father, followed in the footsteps of his two prominent relatives when he began studying for the legal profession as early as 1447 at the age of about twenty.³⁹ There is no record of his doctorate in law, of his matriculation into the Florentine guild of lawyers and notaries, nor of any professional activity as a lawyer in Florence or elsewhere. His declaration to the Florentine tax officials in 1480 states that ‘Messer Bernardo [aged] 52 does not exercise any gainful activity’.⁴⁰ But in his will of 1483 he was referred to as ‘skilled in civil law’,⁴¹ and in the Dialogue on Law and Legal Judgements by his friend Bartolomeo Scala, his legal expertise was repeatedly emphasised. In Bernardo’s case, there is no reason to doubt he gained a doctorate: although the examination fees were high, nevertheless Florentines of lesser wealth often became doctors of law. Bernardo’s failure actively to pursue the legal profession had another, more dramatic cause.

On 3 August 1458, Bernardo’s cousin, the lawyer Girolamo Machiavelli, was arrested. The ostensible charge was that he had instigated a councillor to vote against a bill, but in fact he had forsaken the Medici regime and gone over to the opposition – those who had been excluded from effective power since the triumph of the elitist oligarchy at the end of the fourteenth century. This group (known in contemporary parlance as the ‘people’ or popolo) had been dismantling the Medicean edifice of political control over the past four years. Girolamo was tortured for several days, then, on 18 August, condemned and exiled to Avignon for twenty-five years. He was declared a rebel on 29 November 1459, when his property, as well as that of his wife and children, became subject to confiscation. The following summer he was captured after continuing to conspire against the regime and imprisoned in Florence, where he died in July 1460 as a result of maltreatment or torture.⁴² One of his brothers had also been exiled in August 1458; another was imprisoned and then beheaded in 1459.⁴³

Almost as cataclysmic for Bernardo was the role in these events of the Benizi family, neighbours of the Machiavelli. In 1457, Bartolomea, the sixteen-year-old daughter⁴⁴ of the Florentine Stefano de’ Nelli, had been widowed from her husband, Niccolò di Girolamo Benizi. In 1458 she was remarried to Bernardo Machiavelli.⁴⁵ Unfortunately for the latter, the Benizi too were heavily involved in the anti-Medicean conspiracy that summer. No fewer than four members of this family were exiled together with Girolamo, having been Medici opponents in the lead-up to 1434.⁴⁶ So for Bernardo Machiavelli, 1458 spelled both a personal fami...