As Machiavelli quickly discovered, the answer came in two disarmingly simple stages. Before his elevation, Julius was careful to emphasize that, ‘being a man of great good faith’, he was absolutely bound ‘to stay in contact’ with Borgia ‘in order to keep his word to him’ (L 613, 621). But as soon as he felt secure, he instantly reneged on all his promises. He not only denied the duke his title and troops, but actually had him arrested and imprisoned him in the papal palace. Machiavelli is scarcely able to conceal his astonishment as well as admiration at the coup. ‘See now’, he exclaims, ‘how honourably this pope begins to pay his debts: he simply cancels them by crossing them out.’ Nor does anyone consider, he adds significantly, that the papacy has been disgraced; on the contrary, ‘everybody continues with the same enthusiasm to bless the pope’s hands’ (L 683).
On this occasion Machiavelli felt disappointed with Borgia for allowing himself to be so ruinously outflanked. As he typically put it, the duke ought never to have supposed ‘that the words of another are more to be relied on than his own’ (L 600). Nevertheless, Borgia was undoubtedly the ruler whom Machiavelli found it most instructive to observe in action, and on two other occasions he was privileged to watch him confronting a dangerous crisis and surmounting it with a strength and assurance that earned him Machiavelli’s complete respect.
The first of these emergencies arose in December 1502, when the people of the Romagna suddenly voiced their outrage at the oppressive methods used by Borgia’s lieutenant, Rimirro de Orco, in pacifying the province in the previous year. Admittedly Rimirro had merely been executing the duke’s orders, and had done so with conspicuous success, reducing the whole area from chaos to sound government. But his cruelty had stirred up so much hatred that the continuing stability of the province was now in jeopardy. What was Borgia to do? His solution displayed a terrifying briskness, a quality that Machiavelli mirrors in his account of the episode. Rimirro was summoned to Imola, and four days later ‘he was found in the public square, cut into two pieces, where his body still remains, so that the entire populace has been able to see it’. ‘It has simply been the pleasure of the duke’, Machiavelli adds, ‘to show that he can make and unmake men as he wants, according to their deserts’ (L 503).
The other point at which Borgia evoked Machiavelli’s rather stunned admiration was in dealing with the military difficulties that developed in the Romagna at about the same time. At first the duke had been obliged to rely on the petty lords of the area for his chief military support. But in the summer of 1502 it became clear that their leaders — especially the Orsini and the Vitelli — were not only untrustworthy but were plotting against him. What should he do? His first move was simply to get rid of them by feigning reconciliation, summoning them to a meeting at Senigallia and murdering them en masse. For once Machiavelli’s studied coolness deserts him as he describes the manœuvre, and he admits to being ‘lost in wonder at this development’ (L 508). Next, Borgia resolved that in future he ought never to make use of such treacherous allies, but ought instead to raise his own troops. This policy — almost unheard of at a time when practically every Italian prince fought with hired mercenaries — seems to have struck Machiavelli at once as being an exceptionally far-sighted move. He reports with obvious approval that the duke has not only decided that ‘one of the foundations of his power’ must henceforth be ‘his own arms’, but has started the process of recruitment at an astonishing rate, ‘having already conducted a review of five hundred men-at-arms and the same number of light cavalry’ (L 419). Switching to his most admonitory style, he explains that he is ‘writing this all the more willingly’ because he has come to believe that ‘anyone who is well-armed, and has his own soldiers, will always find himself in a position of advantage, however things may happen to turn out’ (L 455).
By 1510, after a decade of missions abroad, Machiavelli had made up his mind about most of the statesmen he had met. Only Julius II continued to some extent to puzzle him. On the one hand, the pope’s declaration of war on France in 1510 struck Machiavelli as almost insanely irresponsible. It required no imagination to see that ‘a state of enmity between these two powers’ would be ‘the most terrifying misfortune that could arise’ from Florence’s point of view (L 1273). On the other hand, he could not resist hoping that, by sheer impetuosity, Julius might yet prove to be the saviour rather than the scourge of Italy. At the end of the campaign against Bologna, Machiavelli permitted himself to wonder whether the pope might not ‘go on to something greater’, so that ‘this time Italy really may find herself delivered from those who have planned to engulf her’ (L 1028). Four years later, despite the worsening of the international crisis, he was still trying to fight off his growing fears with the reflection that, ‘as in the case of Bologna’, the pope might yet manage ‘to carry everyone along with him’ (L 1244).
Unfortunately for Machiavelli and for Florence, his fears yielded better predictions than his hopes. After being hard pressed in the fighting of 1511, Julius reacted by concluding an alliance that changed the face of Italy. On 4 October 1511 he signed the Holy League with Ferdinand of Spain, thereby winning Spanish military support for the crusade against France. As soon as the new campaigning season opened in 1512, the formidable Spanish infantry marched into Italy. First they pushed back the French advance, forcing them to evacuate Ravenna, Parma, and Bologna and finally to retreat beyond Milan. Then they turned against Florence. The city had not dared defy the French, and had failed in consequence to declare its support for the pope. Now it found itself paying a costly penalty for its mistake. On 29 August the Spanish sacked the neighbouring town of Prato, and three days later the Florentines capitulated. The gonfaloniere Soderini fled into exile, the Medici re-entered the city after an absence of eighteen years, and a few weeks later the republic was dissolved.
Machiavelli’s own fortunes collapsed with those of the republican regime. On 7 November he was formally dismissed from his post in the chancery. Three days later he was sentenced to confinement within Florentine territory for a year, the surety being the enormous sum of a thousand florins. Then in February 1513 came the worst blow of all. He was mistakenly suspected of taking part in an abortive conspiracy against the new Medicean government, and after being put to the torture he was condemned to imprisonment and the payment of a heavy fine. As he later complained to the Medici in the dedication to The Prince, ‘Fortune’s great and steady malice’ had suddenly and viciously struck him down (11).
Chapter 2
The Adviser to Princes
Early in 1513 the Medici family scored its most brilliant triumph of all. On 22 February Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici set out for Rome after learning of Julius II’s death, and on 11 March he emerged from the conclave of cardinals as Pope Leo X. In one way this represented a further blow to Machiavelli’s hopes, for it brought the new regime in Florence an unprecedented popularity. Giovanni was the first Florentine ever to become pope, and according to Luca Landucci, the contemporary diarist, the city celebrated with bonfires and ordnance for nearly a week. But in another way the development was an unexpected stroke of good fortune, for it prompted the government to declare an amnesty as part of the general rejoicing, and Machiavelli was freed.
As soon as he came out of prison Machiavelli began scheming to recommend himself to the city’s new authorities. His former colleague, Francesco Vettori, had been made ambassador to Rome, and Machiavelli repeatedly wrote urging him to use his influence ‘so that I may begin to receive some employment from our lord the pope’ (C 244). However, it soon became clear that Vettori was unable or perhaps unwilling to help. Greatly discouraged, Machiavelli withdrew to his little farm at Sant’Andrea, in order (as he wrote to Vettori) ‘to be at a distance from every human face’ (C 516). From there he began for the first time to contemplate the political scene less as a participant than as an analyst. First he sent long and powerfully argued letters to Vettori about the implications of the renewed French and Spanish interventions in Italy. And then — as he explained in a letter of 10 December — he started to beguile his enforced leisure by reflecting more systematically on his diplomatic experience, on the lessons of history, and hence on the rules of statecraft.