The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
Italy. Florence was at the mercy of the confederates. The supreme moment had come.
By the expulsion of the French the object for which the Holy League had been really formed was accomplished, and it was necessary for the allied powers to readjust their policy and to determine their future movements. For this purpose they held a congress at Mantua in August, at which among other subjects the reconstitution of the Italian States was discussed. It was decided to restore the Medici at Florence. This had been the Pope’s avowed object since 1510, and he was not likely at this stage to see that it was, from his point of view, an impolitic blunder. The work was entrusted to Ramon de Cardona, who joined his army at Bologna and began to march southwards. He arrived without resistance at Barberino, about fifteen miles north of Florence. From there he sent to the city to demand the deposition of Soderini and the return of the Medici as private citizens. The Florentines refused to depose Soderini, though willing to receive the Medici on those terms. At the same time they sent a force of troops to garrison Prato. Ramon de Cardona therefore continued his advance; Prato was captured on August 30, and its inhabitants were with ruthless barbarity tortured, debauched and butchered. Further resistance was impossible. On September 1 Soderini was deposed, and on the same evening Giuliano de’ Medici entered Florence, to be followed on the 14th by Giovanni and other members of the family. Nothing remained but to fix the form of the new government. The Consiglio Grande and the Died di balia were abolished, as well as the Nove della milizia and the national militia; Accoppiatori were appointed to select the Signoria and Colleges a mano, and it was resolved that the Gonfaloniere should henceforth hold office for two months only. During the close of the year Florence settled down quietly under Medicean rule. The revolution was accomplished with more moderation than might have been expected; and even those who, like Machiavelli, had been zealous servants of Soderini, suffered as a rule no more than loss of official employment or temporary banishment.
These years, in which the fate of Florence was decided, while the Republic was dragged helpless in the chain of events, helpless to determine her own fortunes, were the period in which Machiavelli’s term of political activity was comprised.
Niccolò Machiavelli was born at Florence in 1469, and died, comparatively young, in 1527. For about fourteen years he was employed by the Florentine government in a subordinate official capacity, and even his intimate friends hardly recognised that he was a really great man. Although his position as Secretary to the Dieci kept him constantly in touch with political movements in Central Italy, and although he was employed almost without intermission from 1499 till 1512 upon diplomatic missions, he exerted hardly any influence upon the course of events; if he were known only by his official letters and despatches, there would be little in his career to arrest attention. It is only as an author that Machiavelli has any abiding place in the world’s history. He has a claim upon the attention of the modern world because, living at a time when the old political order in Europe was collapsing and new problems both in State and in society were arising with dazzling rapidity, he endeavoured to interpret the logical meaning of events, to forecast the inevitable issues, and to elicit and formulate the rules which, destined henceforth to dominate political action, were then taking shape among the fresh-forming conditions of national life.
His natural gifts marked him out as peculiarly fitted to be an intellectual pioneer. He has more in common with the political thinkers of later generations than with the bulk of his contemporaries, on whom still pressed the dead hand of medievalism. It is true, of course, that he did not stand alone; both in Italy and in France there were a few men who worked along the same lines and were approaching the same goal. Commines had nothing to learn from Machiavelli; and Guicciardini, his equal in ability and his superior in moral detachment, was harder and colder, and more logical. And there were men of lesser note, Vettori and Buonaccorsi and the long line of eminent historians from Nardi to Ammirato, who helped, each in one way or another, to break the fetters of tradition and to usher in the modern world. But there is no one among them all, except Machiavelli, who has won ecumenical renown. And the ultimate reason is that, although the area which he was able to observe was small, the horizon which he guessed was vast; he was able to overstep the narrow limits of Central Italy and Lombardy, to think upon a large scale, and to reach some real elevation of view. He made, it is true, many mistakes, and there is much in his writings that is indefensible; but, on the whole, later history has done much to justify him, and the view which is most essentially Machiavellian, that the art of government, like the art of navigation, is out of relation to morals, has hardly ever lacked authoritative support.
It was in 1513 that Machiavelli, then living in retirement near San Casciano, began the composition of those works which were to make his name famous. They are not intelligible except when considered in relation to the historical background of his life, and to the circumstances in which they were written. But for many generations the ideas which they contained were censured or defended by men who were at least partially ignorant of the epoch and of the country in which they arose, and were often mere controversialists or the accredited champions of some branch of the Church. As the doctrines of which Machiavelli was the earliest conscious exponent were so important and so comprehensive, it was inevitable that attempts should be made to appraise their absolute value; they appeared to involve not only an unfamiliar, if not wholly novel, conception of the State, but to imply also the substitution of some new standards of judgment and principles of action which, while overriding the traditional rules and the accepted authorities in the political order, might be understood to apply also to the conduct of society and to the ordinary affairs of men. The consideration of these ideas and the attempt to gauge their effects upon religion or morals or politics, and to elicit the conclusions to which they appeared to lead, engrossed attention so largely, that their historical origin was forgotten, their classical antecedents were ignored, and step by step, for more than a century, criticism drifted away from Machiavelli and concerned itself with an ill-defined and amorphous body of doctrine known loosely under the name of Machiavellism. No fair judgment of Machiavelli’s works is possible, unless they are separated from the literature and the controversies which have grown up around them. It is true that the accretions of later thinkers have an importance of their own, but they are of hardly any value in Machiavellian exegesis. All the necessary materials for judgment are to be found in the writings of Machiavelli and of his contemporaries.
The doctrines of Machiavelli are not systematically expounded or adequately justified in any one of his books. It is only by piecing together the scattered notices in different writings and by comparing the forms in which similar ideas are presented at different periods, that there emerges slowly a general conception of the character of the whole. Some of these ideas were not original, but as old as the beginnings of recorded thought. In certain cases they were part of the intellectual heritage transmitted by Greece and Rome, adapted to a new setting and transfused with a new potency and meaning. Sometimes they were common to other contemporary publicists. Often they were provisional solutions of primitive problems, claiming no universal or permanent validity. Often, again, they were the expression of beliefs which among any people and at any period would be regarded as innocuous and inoffensive and perhaps even as obvious. Efforts have often been made to summarise them all in a single phrase, or to compress them within one wide generalisation. Such attempts have been always unsatisfactory, because much that is essential cannot be included. Machiavelli himself is not rightly viewed as, in the strict sense, a doctrinaire; he had no systematic theories to press. There was at no time anything rigid or harshly exclusive in his views: they were formed after slow deliberation, as experience and study widened his range or quickened his insight. They embrace elements which come from many sources, and, though they are on the whole fairly consistent, his writings contain many indications of the diffident and tentative steps by which the conclusions were reached.
Portions of Machiavelli’s works were intended to form a contribution to general questions of politics and ethics: there are other portions which were more directly determined by the pressure of an unusual problem and of ephemeral conditions. In nearly all his writings the dispassionate, scientific temper of the historian or thinker who records and explains is combined with the earnestness and the eagerness of the advocate who is pleading a cause. Aspiration and emotion were not foreign to the genius of Machiavelli, and at appropriate moments found impassioned utterance. Discussions of general principles of history and of the art of government are everywhere applied and enforced by examples of contemporary failures or successes,