The rest of the History is devoted to the miserable tale of Florence’s increasing corruption at home. When Machiavelli turns to this topic at the start of Book III, he first makes it clear that, in speaking of internal corruption, what he chiefly has in mind — as in the Discourses — is the tendency for civic laws and institutions to be ‘planned not for the common profit’ but rather for individual or sectarian advantage (1140). He criticizes his great predecessors, Bruni and Poggio, for failing to pay due attention to this danger in their histories of Florence (1031). And he justifies his own intense preoccupation with the theme by insisting that the enmities which arise when a community loses its virtú in this way ‘bring about all the evils that spring up in cities’ — as the sad case of Florence amply demonstrates (1140).
Machiavelli begins by conceding that there will always be ‘serious and natural enmities between the people and the nobles’ in any city, because of ‘the latter’s wish to rule and the former’s not to be enthralled’ (1140). As in the Discourses, he is far from supposing that all such hostilities are to be avoided. He repeats his previous contention that ‘some divisions harm republics and some divisions benefit them. Those do harm that are accompanied with factions and partisans; those bring benefit that are kept up without factions and partisans.’ So the aim of a prudent legislator should not be to ‘provide that there will be no enmities’; it should only be to ensure ‘that there will be no factions’ based on the enmities that inevitably arise (1336).
In Florence, however, the hostilities that have developed have always been ‘those of factions’ (1337). As a result, the city has been one of those unfortunate communities which have been condemned to oscillate between two equally ruinous poles, varying ‘not between liberty and slavery’ but rather ‘between slavery and licence’. The common people have been ‘the promoters of licence’ while the nobility have been ‘the promoters of slavery’. The helpless city has in consequence staggered ‘from the tyrannical form to the licentious, and from that back to the other’, both parties having such powerful enemies that neither has been able to impose stability for any length of time (1187).
To Machiavelli, the internal history of Florence since the thirteenth century thus appears as a series of hectic movements between these two extremes, in the course of which the city and its liberties have eventually been battered to pieces. Book II opens at the start of the fourteenth century with the nobles in power. This led directly to the tyranny of the duke of Athens in 1342, when the citizens ‘saw the majesty of their government ruined, her customs destroyed, her statutes annulled’ (1128). They accordingly turned against the tyrant and succeeded in setting up their own popular regime. But, as Machiavelli goes on to relate in Book III, this in turn degenerated into licence when the ‘unrestrained mob’ managed to seize control of the republic in 1378 (1161–3). Next the pendulum swung back to ‘the aristocrats of popular origin’, and by the middle of the fifteenth century they were seeking once again to curtail the liberties of the people, thereby encouraging a new form of tyrannical government (1188).
It is true that, when Machiavelli arrives at this final phase of his narrative in Books VII and VIII, he begins to present his argument in a more oblique and cautious style. His central topic is inescapably the rise of the Medici, and he clearly feels that some allowance must be made for the fact that the same family had made it possible for him to write his History. While he takes considerable pains to dissemble his hostility, however, it is easy to recover his feelings about the Medicean contribution to Florentine history if we piece together certain sections of the argument which he is careful to keep separate.
Book VII opens with a general discussion of the most insidious means by which a leading citizen can hope to corrupt the populace in such a way as to promote divisive factions and acquire absolute power for himself. The issue had already been extensively treated in the Discourses, and Machiavelli largely contents himself with reiterating his earlier arguments. The greatest danger is said to be that of permitting the rich to employ their wealth to gain ‘partisans who follow them for personal profit’ instead of following the public interest. He adds that there are two principal methods by which this can be done. One is ‘by doing favours to various citizens, defending them from the magistrates, assisting them with money and aiding them in getting undeserved offices’. The other is ‘by pleasing the masses with games and public gifts’, putting on costly displays of a kind calculated to win a spurious popularity and lull the people into forfeiting their liberties (337).
If we turn with this analysis in mind to the last two books of the History, it is not difficult to detect the tone of aversion underlying Machiavelli’s effusive descriptions of successive Medicean governments. He begins with Cosimo, on whom he lavishes a fine encomium in chapter 5 of Book VII, praising him in particular for surpassing ‘every other in his time’ not merely ‘in influence and wealth but also in liberality’. It shortly becomes clear, however, that what Machiavelli has in mind is that by the time of his death ‘there was no citizen of any standing in the city to whom Cosimo had not lent a large sum of money’ (1342). The sinister implications of such studied munificence have already been pointed out. Next, Machiavelli moves on to the brief career of Cosimo’s son, Piero de’ Medici. At first he is described as ‘good and honourable’, but we soon learn that his sense of honour prompted him to lay on a series of chivalric tournaments and other festivities that were so elaborate and splendid that the city was kept busy for months in preparing and presenting them (1352). As before, we have already been warned about the harmful influence of such blatant appeals to the masses. Finally, when Machiavelli comes to the years of Lorenzo the Magnificent — and thus to the period of his own youth — he scarcely troubles to suppress the rising note of antipathy. By this stage, he declares, ‘the Fortune and the liberality’ of the Medici had so decisively done their corrupting work that ‘the people had been made deaf’ to the very idea of throwing off the Medicean tyranny, in consequence of which ‘Liberty was not known in Florence’ any more (1393).
Despite Florence’s relapse into tyranny, despite the return of the barbarians, Machiavelli felt able to comfort himself with the reflection that Italy had been spared the worst degradation of all. Although the barbarians had conquered, they had not succeeded in putting to the sword any of Italy’s greatest cities. As he observes in The Art of War, Tortona may have been sacked ‘but not Milan, Capua but not Naples, Brescia but not Venice’ and — finally and most symbolically of all — ‘Ravenna but not Rome’ (624).