The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli

Roberto Ridolfi, Cecil Grayson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415555661
• eBook ISBN: 9781135026615
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This biography of Macchiavelli is widely regarded as Ridolfi's masterpiece and is based on much material drawn from private and public archives. It presents a fresh interpretation of Macchiavelli's career and writings and here, for example the dating of the composition of such famous works as the Prince and the Mandragola is established for the first time. This English translation, when originally published in 1963 included numerous correction and additions which brought it up to date with the most recent studies on Macchiavelli and his works.

Chapter 1

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

WHILE the Arno was still carrying away the remains of the pyre which had consumed the body of Savonarola, a revolution which had begun immediately after the Friar’s arrest, had quietly been accomplished in the Florentine Republic. The ‘piagnone’ magistrates had all been dismissed from their offices and replaced by men of the opposing faction. The first to be deposed were the Ten (Dieci), the Eight (Otto di guardia), and the Councils (Collegi della Signoria); then right down to the lowest officials of the commune, they had to give up their jobs to men who had had nothing to do with the Friar unless it were to oppose or harm him; and the more openly they had done so, the better for them.¹

Among the ‘piagnoni’ dismissed from the chanceries was, besides the humanist Ugolino Verino, author of the poem De illustratione urbis Florentiae, that Alessandro Bracci or Braccesi, head of the second chancery, who as the Republic’s envoy at the Papal Court had laboured until the end to avert the Pope’s anger from the city’s prophet while steering a difficult course between a Signoria hostile to Savonarola and a Council of Ten favourable to him. In place of Bracci, author of Italian poems in the manner of Burchiello and of good Latin verse,² an almost unknown young man was nominated: Niccolò di Bernardo Machiavelli.

His origins were not at all obscure, though the Machiavelli had never been among the most influential in the city. They had moved into the town from the Val di Pesa, where they owned a good deal of land; and whether or not it is true that they were related to the former lords of Montespertoli, they had soon become good middle-class citizens. They figure among the ‘middle-class, noted families’ of the district of Oltrarno, together with the Barbadori, Canigiani and Soderini, in Villani’s list of the most important Guelph families who had left Florence after the great defeat by the Ghibellines in 1260, and later returned from every quarter. They held many offices in the city, and provided twelve gonfaloniers and fifty-four priors; but the only one who made a name for himself in the history of Florence was a certain Girolamo, who suffered torture, exile and finally death in imprisonment for having expressed himself openly against government by oligarchy.³

Their decent prosperity as ‘popolani grassi’ (rich commoners) was supported less by trade than by the family properties in Val di Pesa. Less prosperous than the rest at that time was Bernardo di Niccolò di Buoninsegna, whose fortunes had fallen so low that he was generally thought to belong to some spurious branch of the family. Later on this gave rise to the belief, rightly or wrongly, that his must really have been an illegitimate branch.⁴ His fortunes improved slightly with an inheritance from Totto Machiavelli, but even with this help Bernardo would have had difficulty in maintaining his family without his own industrious efforts and the strictest economies. He was a doctor of law, and seems to have held the post of treasurer in the Marches,⁵ although we do not know when. In Florence he exercised his profession but seldom and with small profit, while he managed his other slender resources with the greatest of care.

A most valuable Libro di Ricordi, a kind of diary kept by Bernardo and unknown until a short time ago,⁶ reveals him as a somewhat miserly man, perhaps from necessity rather than by nature, meticulous and pernickety, but not without culture, giving much thought to money matters, but not insensible to the consolations of study. Messer Bernardo cannot afford luxuries, sometimes he lacks the wherewithal to maintain a standard of living verging rather on poverty than on modest prosperity, and yet from time to time he finds a few florins to buy books. It is his only vice, his one passion. Most of his books he buys loose and has them lovingly bound, sometimes illuminated. If he cannot buy, he borrows, and not only law books but books in Greek and Latin.⁷ When these memoirs of his begin, printing has been introduced into Florence only four months before, but unlike the rich and disdainful bibliophiles of his day he eagerly takes advantage of it. From one of the earliest Florentine printers Niccolò della Magna he received a volume of Livy to compile its index of place-names; and as a reward for his long labour, which took nine months and used up twelve quires of paper, he kept the book he longed to possess.⁸

Bernardo had first two daughters, Primavera and Margherita,⁹ and then Niccolò, who was born in Florence on the 3rd of May 1469.¹⁰ A second son was called Totto in memory of the uncle from whom Bernardo had received the inheritance. The mother of these children was Bartolomea de’ Nelli, to whom a later member of her family attributed some religious verses which have not come down to us.¹¹ But the fact of such attribution is enough to explain in the light of modern genetic theories on qualities inherited from the mother’s side, the source of the poetic gift which inspired the whole of Machiavelli’s life. From his father he derived by heredity or example a love of study. His father’s memoirs now tell us something of Niccolò’s early studies, of which hitherto nothing was known.

On the 6th of May 1476 Niccolò began to learn the ‘Donatello’, that is the first elements of Latin, from a certain maestro Matteo. He was then seven years old, which was just the right age for this beginning according to current educational precepts. The following year he was given a new teacher of grammar, one ser Battista da Poppi of the church of S. Benedetto.¹² Multa fecit tulitque puer … During this period of early studies he would go off to play in the woods at Sant’Andrea around his father’s modest villa, or on the ruined castle walls of Montebuiano in the Mugello, that surrounded a property belonging to his mother’s family. In 1480 he began to study arithmetic as well.¹³ In the same year messer Bernardo, who had been struck down by the plague the previous year and had miraculously survived when many had perished in Florence, among them two of his own relatives, declares his meagre income, and numbers among his diminished dependants: ‘Niccolò aged II, Totto aged 5, going to school.’¹⁴ In fact the following year we find the two boys being taught by a certain ser Paolo da Ronciglione. While Totto gets to grips with the ‘Donatello’, Niccolò ‘fa de’ latini’,¹⁵ that is writes short compositions in Latin. This gives the lie to Giovio (but he must be used to it by now!), who would have us believe that Niccolò learned Latin when old enough to be married.

On the other hand, proofs accumulate that he never learnt Greek.¹⁶ His father never intended to make him a learned man, nor did Machiavelli ever think to become one. Money was lacking perhaps as well as the thought. The authors he read were undoubtedly those on which every youth exercised himself in those days, learning a good part of them by heart. But one can imagine and understand that that ‘constant reading’ of histories, of which Machiavelli will write in later life, must have begun like all great vocations from those early years. Justin, the first history book that children read,^l7 was not among his father’s books, but Bernardo borrowed a copy and gave it back when Niccolò was twelve years old and already doing Latin compositions. He did possess the Decades of Biondo and, more important, those of Livy, which he sent to the binders in 1486, probably together with a manuscript copy of his painstaking index. Niccolò then aged seventeen went to collect that favourite book from the binders, and as his father was in the country, it was he who paid for the work with ‘three bottles of red wine and a bottle of vinegar’.¹⁸ Reading these paternal memoirs it is easier to understand the words Niccolò wrote later in life: ‘I was born poor, and I learned to know want before enjoyment.’

This, then, must have been the ‘constant reading of ancient events’ that nourished Machiavelli until the middle of his life. The other half was spent more in a ‘long experience of modern affairs’, through which the coming chapters will follow him. But first we must consider the events of which he was witness from the moment he opened his sharp eyes upon the world. He was later to remark that those things heard and seen in early years ‘cannot help but make an impression on a young man’, which will ‘guide his actions for the rest of his life.’¹⁹ It is likely that in setting down this universal truth he was thinking of his own experience.

Machiavelli was born just in time to know the ancient way of life of Florence both from what he saw himself and from the memory of it preserved by others. The government of the Ottimati founded in 1382, when the power of the lesser guilds was weakened, reformed in 1387, better organized and strengthened in 1393 by Maso degli Albizzi, had led the Republic to unprecedented happiness and greatness. If it were not as sober and decent as Dante pictured the commune at the time of Cacciaguida, the Florence of Niccolò da Uzzano and Maso degli Albizzi, before the Medici and the passing years brought corruption with them, was still a moral city. Abounding in wealth, in trade, in fine skills, and in clever and brilliant men, knowledge and well-being were there more evenly dstributed than elsewhere. There was no other ostentation than that of great buildings public and private, sacred and profane, even though the latter may have been built in order to place upon them the family arms, as Savonarola was later to remark with sarcasm. Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder said: ‘I know the temper of this city; we shall be thrown out before fifty years have passed, but these buildings will still remain.’ This sober wealth was refined by literature and the arts. Public ceremonies displayed a certain magnificence, but in private life the appearance was one of great civilization and propriety, greater than in any other city in Italy.

The ruling force was not the excellence of the laws but the virtues of the leaders. And although in political life many were elected to office, few to government, even injustice and usurpation of power were given such an appearance of justice, were done with such scruples, such care not to overstep the established forms, that few felt themselves aggrieved. Before they reached the Palazzo della Signoria, these difficult manœuvres in which men of government learned their craft, were conducted with the simplicity typical of this bourgeois city, in the shops and offices of the principal citizens, who were distinguished more by wisdom than by wealth—offices and shops to which men were not ashamed to return after performing the duties of the highest public positions, after the most grave deliberations, truly resembling in their austere simplicity ‘those ancient Romans’ to which one of them was compared by the biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci.²⁰ In fifteenth-century Florence where a contemporary poet praised its Roman liberty and culture, there appears more justification than elsewhere for the temptation to which Machiavelli so often gave way, to compare men and affairs with those of ancient Rome.

These leading Florentine citizens bore no resemblance to the nobles of the republic of Venice. They were plebeian nobles, deeply respectful of certain outward shows of popular sovereignty. The people regarded them almost as primi inter pares, and felt free beneath their rule, proud of their wisdom and happy to follow from the market-place, from stores and wine-shops the game of government going on in the Palazzo, which seemed the finer the more subtly it was conducted. Satisfied with its nominal sovereignty like a constitutional monarch of our own times, it left the business of government to the few.

The Medici too, in the first fifty years of their rule observed the complicated rules of this game, and the more closely they followed them the more successful they were. Thus the contentment and way of life which had been enjoyed under the government of an oligarchy, survived for some time even under the rule of one man, whether he were called Cosimo, Piero or Lorenzo. Rulers in fact and not by right, and armed only with constant vigilance, they remained in power not by force but by the common consent of those who were their fellow-citizens, not their subjects. The subtle means by which these popular princes maintained their rule included finding seats in the magistrature for their own favourites, and holding the balance of wealth and favours by marriages and gifts of offices. But even more important for them was the art of avoiding jealousies and suspicion, the careful study of affairs that enabled them to hold the city in their grasp almost man by man.

Machiavelli was born in the same year in which Piero de’ Medici died. He had followed Cosimo as ruler of the city, and this role was to pass after him to his sons Lorenzo and Giuliano. Machiavelli was too young to remember the cruel revenge and broken faith to rebel Volterra in 1472, but he was already studying his Latin authors when the Pazzi conspiracy occurred in 1478. He then saw the jealousy and resentment of certain principal citizens disguise themselves under the name of freedom, and conspire with the excessive greed of the nephews of Sixtus IV, who had given his consent to this attempt to overthrow the Medici. Among the conspirators were the Archbishop of Pisa and the young cardinal Riario. The place and time chosen for the slaughter was in the cathedral at the elevation of the Host. Giuliano was murdered, but Lorenzo escaped. The Archbishop and many of his accomplices were hanged from the windows of the Palazzo they had vainly attempted to make their own, and their bodies and those of others torn to pieces by the mob in the streets made a dreadful sight for many days.

The Pope sent his hypocritical condolences for the death of Giuliano, and then began his complaints, less on account of the Archbishop than on behalf of his young nephew the Cardinal who had been held prisoner. He was finally sent back by the Florentines, ‘and as a result the Pope attacked them without compunction with all his own forces and those of the King of Naples’, as Machiavelli was later to remark, drawing from this episode a machiavellian lesson.²¹. But be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Preface to the English Edition
• 1. Early Life and Education
• 2. Niccolò Machiavelli, Secretary
• 3. The First Commissions
• 4. The First Mission to France
• 5. The Rebellions of Subject States and the Campaigns of Caesar Borgia
• 6. The Mission to Caesar Borgia
• 7. The First Roman Legation
• 8. The Second Mission to France. The First ‘Decennale’. The Militia
• 9. The Florentine Histories. The Second Legation to Julius II
• 10. The German Legation. The War and the Retaking of Pisa
• 11. Mission to Mantua and Verona. The Third Mission to France
• 12. The Twelfth Hour
• 13. ‘Sorrowful Machiavelli’
• 14. The ‘Idleness’ of Sant’Andrea: The ‘Discourses’ and the ‘Prince’
• 15. Love and Suffering
• 16. Literary Diversions : ‘The Ass’; ‘Mandragola’; ‘Belfagor’
• 17. The ‘Life of Castruccio’ and the ‘Art of War’. Histories for Florins
• 18. The Legation to the Franciscans
• 19. Niccolò Machiavelli, Historian
• 20. Niccolò Machiavelli, Historian and Comedian
• 21. Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘Historian, Comic and Tragic Author’
• 22. ‘Sixty Years’
• 23. The End
• 24. The Unarmed Prophet
• Bibliographical Note
• Notes
• Index