As political rhetoric, Bruni’s version of Florentine superiority was magnificent and no doubt effective. It inspired the Florentines to hold out against Milanese aggression and to reshape their identity as the seat of “the rebirth of letters” and the champions of freedom; but, as a theory of political culture, this “civic humanism,” as Hans Baron has called it, represented the ideal rather than the reality of 15th-century communal history. Even in Florence, where after 1434 the Medici family held a grip on the city’s republican government, opportunities for the active life began to fade. The emphasis in thought began to shift from civic humanism to Neoplatonist idealism and to the kind of utopian mysticism represented by Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. At the end of the century, Florentines briefly put themselves into the hands of the millennialist Dominican preacher Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who envisioned the city as the “New Jerusalem” rather than as a reincarnation of ancient Rome. Still, even Savonarola borrowed from the civic tradition of the humanists for his political reforms (and for his idea of Florentine superiority) and in so doing created a bridge between the republican past and the crisis years of the early 16th century. Machiavelli got his first job in the Florentine chancellery in 1498, the year of Savonarola’s fall from power. Dismissing the friar as one of history’s “unarmed prophets” who are bound to fail, Machiavelli was convinced that the precepts of Christianity had helped make the Italian states sluggish and weak. He regarded religion as an indispensable component of human life, but statecraft as a discipline based on its own rules and no more to be subordinated to Christianity than were jurisprudence or medicine. The simplest example of the difference between Christian and political morality is provided by warfare, where the use of deception, so detestable in every other kind of action, is necessary, praiseworthy, even glorious. In the Discourses, Machiavelli commented upon a Roman defeat:
Savonarola, painting by Fra Bartolomeo; in the Museo di S. Marco, FlorenceAlinari/Art Resource, New York
This is worth noting by every citizen who is called upon to give counsel to his country, for when the very safety of the country is at stake there should be no question of justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of honour or disgrace, but putting every other consideration aside, that course should be followed which will save her life and liberty.
Machiavelli’s own country was Florence; when he wrote that he loved his country more than he loved his soul, he was consciously forsaking Christian ethics for the morality of civic virtue. His friend and countryman Francesco Guicciardini shared his political morality and his concern for politics but lacked his faith that a knowledge of ancient political wisdom would redeem the liberty of Italy. Guicciardini was an upper-class Florentine who chose a career in public administration and devoted his leisure to writing history and reflecting on politics. He was steeped in the humanist traditions of Florence and was a dedicated republican, notwithstanding the fact—or perhaps because of it—that he spent his entire career in the service of the Medici and rose to high positions under them. But Guicciardini, more skeptical and aristocratic than Machiavelli, was also half a generation younger, and he was schooled in an age that was already witnessing the decline of Italian autonomy.
In 1527 Florence revolted against the Medici a second time and established a republic. As a confidant of the Medici, Guicciardini was passed over for public office and retired to his estate. One of the fruits of this enforced leisure was the so-called Cose fiorentine (Florentine Affairs), an unfinished manuscript on Florentine history. While it generally follows the classic form of humanist civic history, the fragment contains some significant departures from this tradition. No longer is the history of the city treated in isolation; Guicciardini was becoming aware that the political fortunes of Florence were interwoven with those of Italy as a whole and that the French invasion of Italy in 1494 was a turning point in Italian history. He returned to public life with the restoration of the Medici in 1530 and was involved in the events leading to the tightening of the imperial grip upon Italy, the humbling of the papacy, and the final transformation of the republic of Florence into a hereditary Medici dukedom. Frustrated in his efforts to influence the rulers of Florence, he again retired to his villa to write; but, instead of taking up the unfinished manuscript on Florentine history, he chose a subject commensurate with his changed perspective on Italian affairs. The result was his History of Italy. Though still in the humanist form and style, it was in substance a fulfillment of the new tendencies already evident in the earlier work—criticism of sources, great attention to detail, avoidance of moral generalizations, shrewd analysis of character and motive.
The History of Italy has rightly been called a tragedy by the American historian Felix Gilbert, for it demonstrates how, out of stupidity and weakness, people make mistakes that gradually narrow the range of their freedom to choose alternative courses and thus to influence events until, finally, they are trapped in the web of fortune. This view of history was already far from the world of Machiavelli, not to mention that of the civic humanists. Where Machiavelli believed that virtù—bold and intelligent initiative—could shape, if not totally control, fortuna—the play of external forces—Guicciardini was skeptical about men’s ability to learn from the past and pessimistic about the individual’s power to shape the course of events. All that was left, he believed, was to understand. Guicciardini wrote his histories of Florence and of Italy to show what people were like and to explain how they had reached their present circumstances. Human dignity, then, consisted not in the exercise of will to shape destiny but in the use of reason to contemplate and perhaps to tolerate fate. In taking a new, hard look at the human condition, Guicciardini represents the decline of humanist optimism. The northern Renaissance Political, economic, and social background
In 1494 King Charles VIII of France led an army southward over the Alps, seeking the Neapolitan crown and glory. Many believed that this barely literate gnome of a man, hunched over his horse, was the Second Charlemagne, whose coming had been long predicted by French and Italian prophets. Apparently, Charles himself believed this; it is recorded that, when he was chastised by Savonarola for delaying his divine mission of reform and crusade in Florence, the king burst into tears and soon went on his way. He found the Kingdom of Naples easy to take and impossible to hold; frightened by local uprisings, by a new Italian coalition, and by the massing of Spanish troops in Sicily, he left Naples in the spring of 1495, bound not for the Holy Land, as the prophecies had predicted, but for home, never to return to Italy. In 1498 Savonarola was tortured, hanged, and burned as a false prophet for predicting that Charles would complete his mission. Conceived amid dreams of chivalric glory and crusade, the Italian expedition of Charles VIII was the venture of a medieval king—romantic, poorly planned, and totally irrelevant to the real needs of his subjects.