When Machiavelli sent this Life of Castruccio to his friends Alamanni and Buondelmonti, they accepted it very much in the spirit of a rehearsal for the large-scale historical work that Machiavelli was by then hoping to write. Replying in a letter of September 1520, Buondelmonti spoke of the Life as ‘a model for your history’ and added that for this reason he thought it best to comment on the manuscript ‘mainly from the point of view of language and style’. He reserved his highest praise for its rhetorical flights, saying that he enjoyed the invented deathbed oration ‘more than anything else’. And he told Machiavelli what he must have wanted most of all to hear as he prepared to venture into this new literary field: ‘it seems to all of us that you ought now to set to work to write your History with all diligence’ (C 394–5).
When Machiavelli duly settled down to compose his History a few months later, these stylistic devices were elaborately put to work. The book is conceived in his most aphoristic and antithetical manner, with all the major themes of his political theory reappearing in rhetorical dress. In Book II, for example, one of the signori is made to confront the duke of Athens with a passionate oration on ‘the name of liberty, which no force crushes, no time wears away, and no gain counterbalances’ (1124). In the next book one of the ordinary citizens declaims an equally lofty speech to the signori on the theme of virtú and corruption, and on the obligation of every citizen to serve the public interest at all times (1145–8). And in Book V Rinaldo degli Albizzi attempts to enlist the help of the duke of Milan against the growing power of the Medici with a further declamation on virtú, corruption, and the patriotic duty to offer one’s allegiance to a city that ‘loves all her people equally’, and not to one that, ‘neglecting all the others, bows down before a very few of them’ (1242).
The most important precept the humanists learned from their classical authorities was that historians must focus their attention on the finest achievements of our ancestors, thereby encouraging us to emulate their noblest and most glorious deeds. Although the great Roman historians had tended to be pessimistic in outlook, and had frequently dilated on the growing corruption of the world, this had usually prompted them to insist all the more vehemently on the historian’s obligation to recall us to better days. As Sallust explains in The War with Jugurtha, it is only by keeping alive ‘the memory of great deeds’ that we can hope to kindle ‘in the breasts of noble men’ the kind of ambition ‘that cannot be quelled until they by their own virtus have equalled the fame and glory of their forefathers’ (IV.6). Moreover, it was this feeling for the panegyric quality of the historian’s task that the humanists of the Renaissance chiefly carried away from their study of Livy, Sallust, and their contemporaries. This can clearly be seen, for example, in the account of the purpose of history that appears in the Dedication to the History of the Florentine People which the chancellor Poggio Bracciolini completed in the 1450s. This affirms that ‘the great usefulness of a really truthful history’ lies in the fact that ‘we are able to observe what can be achieved by the virtus of the most outstanding men’. We see how they come to be activated by a desire ‘for glory, for their country’s liberty, for the good of their children, the gods and all humane things’. And we find ourselves ‘so greatly roused up’ by their wonderful example that ‘it is as if they spur us on’ to rival their greatness.[7]
There is no doubt that Machiavelli was fully aware of this further aspect of humanist historiography, for he even refers admiringly to Poggio’s work in the Preface to his own History (1031). But at this point — after following the humanist approach with such exactitude — he suddenly shatters the expectations he has built up. At the beginning of Book V, when he turns to examine the history of Florence over the preceding century, he announces that ‘the things done by our princes, abroad and at home, cannot, like those of the ancients, be read of with wonder because of their virtú and greatness’. It is simply not possible to ‘tell of the bravery of soldiers or the virtú of generals or the love of citizens for their country’. We can only tell of an increasingly corrupt world in which we see ‘with what tricks and schemes the princes, the soldiers, the heads of the republics, in order to keep that reputation which they did not deserve, carried on their affairs’. Machiavelli thus engineers a complete reversal of prevailing assumptions about the purpose of history: instead of recounting a story that ‘kindles free spirits to imitation’, he hopes to ‘kindle such spirits to avoid and get rid of present abuses’ (1233).
The entire History of Florence is thus organized around the theme of decline and fall. Book I describes the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west and the coming of the barbarians to Italy. The end of Book I and the beginning of Book II relate how ‘new cities and new dominions born among the Roman ruins showed such virtú’ that ‘they freed Italy and defended her from the barbarians’ (1233). But after this brief period of modest success, Machiavelli presents the rest of his narrative — from the middle of Book II to the end of Book VIII, where he brings the story to a close in the 1490s — as a history of progressive corruption and collapse. The nadir is reached in 1494, when the ultimate humiliation occurred: Italy ‘put herself back into slavery’ under the barbarians she had originally succeeded in driving out (1233).
The overriding theme of the History of Florence is corruption. Machiavelli describes how its malign influence seized hold of Florence, strangled its liberty, and finally brought it to tyranny and disgrace. As in the Discourses — which he follows closely — he sees two principal areas in which the spirit of corruption is prone to arise, and after drawing a distinction between them in the Preface he employs it to organize the whole of his account. First there is a perennial danger of corruption in the handling of ‘external’ policies, the main symptom of which will be a tendency for military affairs to be conducted with increasing indecision and cowardice. And secondly, there is a similar danger in relation to ‘the things done at home’, where the growth of corruption will mainly be reflected in the form of ‘civil strife and internal hostilities’ (1030–1).
Machiavelli takes up the first of these issues in Books V and VI, in which he chiefly deals with the history of Florence’s external affairs. However, he does not undertake — as he had done in the Discourses — to provide a detailed analysis of the city’s strategic miscalculations and mistakes. He contents himself with offering a series of mocking illustrations of Florentine military incompetence. This enables him to preserve the accepted format of humanist histories — in which there were always elaborate accounts of notable battles — while at the same time parodying their contents. The point of Machiavelli’s military set pieces is that all the engagements he describes are wholly ridiculous, not martial or glorious at all. When, for example, he writes about the great battle of Zagonara, which was fought in 1424 at the start of the war against Milan, he first observes that this was regarded at the time as a massive defeat for Florence, and was ‘reported everywhere in Italy’. He then adds that nobody died in the action except three Florentines who, ‘falling from their horses, were drowned in the mud’ (1193). Later he accords the same satirical treatment to the famous victory won by the Florentines at Anghiari in 1440. Throughout this long fight, he remarks, ‘not more than one man died, and he perished not from wounds or any honourable blow, but by falling from his horse and being trampled on’ (1280).
7
Poggio Bracciolini, ‘Historiae Florentini Populi’ in