Thursday 4 April 2024
My greatest reading pleasure this year has been in discovering the historian Felix Gilbert, and in particular his book Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (1965).
I read this book while working on a project about the Syrian city of Deir Ez-Zor, about how the 2011 Syrian revolution was experienced there, and while reading I felt that if twenty-first-century Deiris and sixteenth-century Florentines could converse, they might find a lot in common both in personality and in experience.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s writings resonate when looking at recent events in Syria, as, divided and occupied, Syria bears some resemblance to the political and military situation in Renaissance Italy. In the UK, our politics are mediated through institutions that soften and sometimes obscure the workings of politics, but in Syria politics are stripped back to fundamentals of force, economics, and terrain, revealing dynamics that Machiavelli would have recognised. Another resonance is that Machiavelli wrote from experience of lost influence and of defeat. During the Florentine republic (1494 to 1512), he acted as a political advisor, an ambassador, and a military organiser. After the fall of the republic, he was imprisoned and tortured, then released but excluded from political life.
The period of the Florentine republic was a time of tumult throughout Italy, beginning in 1494 when the King of France invaded in the north, an opening act which led to the revolution in Florence, the fall of the Medicis as the ruling family, and the establishment of the more inclusive republican regime, until the restoration of Medici rule in 1512. Italy was divided in these years not just by internal conflict between its several city states, but also by great power competition between two occupying powers, France and the Empire of Charles V, which included the Holy Roman Empire and Spain.
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) is known for his concept of political virtue, or virtù, which he positioned in opposition to Fortuna, or fortune, personified as a supernatural female figure and familiar to Florentines.
Felix Gilbert uses the archives of Florence’s government, and of one advisory committee in particular, to picture political debate during the republic, to see how Florentines referred in argument to historical precedent and to classical Roman history, and how they sought to distinguish between the requirements of personal morality and those of political leadership. All of this illuminates the degree to which Machiavelli’s ideas drew on the wider political discourse in Florence. In particular, Gilbert describes how Florentines generally saw a reliance on ragione, or reason, as the best means to withstand the vagaries of Fortuna:
“The Florentines clung to ragione as to a candle which creates a small circle of light in the surrounding darkness. The cry for ragione was the corollary of a feeling of helplessness in the face of non-rational forces.”
Machiavelli and Guicciardini, page 40
The 1494 revolution had been greatly inspired by the preachings of Girolamo Savonarola, and so some Florentines advocated following “the counsels of Christianity rather than the counsels of mundane wisdom,” while others made a distinction between personal morality (“the usual standards of fairness”) and the requirements of affairs of state. (Machiavelli and Guicciardini, pp 42-43)
The traumatic experiences of these years led some younger Florentines to conclude that the one deciding factor in politics was neither reason nor morality but force, in domestic affairs as well as foreign policy. Gilbert quotes Paolo Vettori, brother of Machiavelli’s friend Francesco Vettori, who advised Cardinal Giovanni Medici that “your forefathers, in maintaining their rule, employed skill rather than force; you must use force rather than skill.” (Machiavelli and Guicciardini, p. 131)
Machiavelli formed his conception of virtù as a way to navigate these competing perspectives, defining the highest level of political success as the establishment or maintenance of a lasting city state, while questioning the application of conventional morality in politics but also questioning the consequences of unbridled use of force.
In Discourses on Livy (1531), after writing at length on the value of reason in politics, Machiavelli declares that reason cannot overcome Fortuna when she wishes us ill, that she will even “blind men’s minds,” (Book II Chapter 29) but he argues that we should maintain hope despite this, because fortune may yet turn in our favour, thereby implying that the application of reason should be maintained even through the most unfavourable times so that when Fortuna smiles once again we may be in a position to gain advantage.
It is Francesco Guicciardini’s response to this overwhelming power of Fortuna which is the ultimate focus of Felix Gilbert’s book. Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) was active as a political advisor and diplomat in Florence during the same period as Machiavelli. Fourteen years younger, his political career ended later, and while it was not terminated with the same brutality of prison and torture as Machiavelli’s, it also came to an end because he was not regarded as sufficiently pliant by the Medici family. And like Machiavelli, he used his forced retirement to write, and his greatest achievement was his History of Italy, begun in 1538 and published posthumously in 1561.
Up to this time, the highest form of history writing was held to be that which followed a humanist model in imitation of classical authors, primarily Roman, and above all Livy and Sallust. (Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Chapter 5) Sallust wrote of single wars, and Livy’s great work was a history of Rome, so humanists followed them in writing either histories of single wars, or histories of individual city states which were principally concerned with foreign policy and war.
Gilbert describes a fixed pattern for humanist history writing derived from classical histories: dividing the work into a series of books, each beginning with general reflections, then using brevity and swiftness in the style to give both background knowledge and the impression of rapid developments. Narratives of war were to begin with the character and history of the peoples involved, then the negotiations preceding the war, then the military events. It was suggested that the story of a battle should begin with omens presaging the outcome, then a precise description of the terrain, then character sketches of the military leaders, the arrangement of troops, a description of war machines. Speeches of captains addressing their troops would be inserted at the beginning of battle as a device to describe the issues at stake, or speeches could be paired to give pros and cons of possible courses of action. Following classical examples, humanist authors felt free to invent these speeches.
The humanists believed that the purpose of history was to give moral instruction through example, and so “whereas in the Middle Ages history served to show the power of God, the humanist concept according to which history taught man to strive for virtue and to avoid vice emphasised the power which man could exert.” (Machiavelli and Guicciardini, p. 218) In the period during and after the Florentine republic both Machiavelli and Guicciardini as well as other writers (Bartolomeo Cerretani and Francesco Vettori) saw a need for a more pragmatic approach “to serve the understanding of the existing political situation and give guidance in political action,” (p. 233) something which could not be done if history writing was limited to composing morally improving tales.
The events which followed the 1494 French invasion of Italy had undermined trust in the idea that individual moral virtue was a basis for successful leadership, and so brought into question the validity of writing history to give moral instruction. Before 1494, Gilbert writes, Italians saw Italy as culturally superior to the rest of Europe, separated from foreigners by the protective wall of the Alps. The leaderships of the Italian city states were shocked by the success of the invasion, with the French king marching the length of the peninsula and conquering Naples. (pp. 255-257) Along the way, Piero Medici’s failure to provide effective leadership in the face of the invasion led to his downfall in the 1494 Florentine revolution.
The French were forced out in the summer of 1495, and Italians reassured themselves that it had all been a passing event, like earlier temporary invasions, but in 1499 the French returned, and in 1501 the Spanish conquered Naples. Competition between foreign powers intertwined with competition between Italian city states. Various writers now blamed different individuals for allowing foreign forces to enter Italy through foreign alliances, or for failing to maintain alliances within Italy to keep them out, but there was a growing awareness that Italy was now at the mercy of forces beyond the control of Italian leaders. (pp. 258-267)
Gilbert discusses several histories written during this period. Guicciardini wrote his Florentine History between 1508 and 1510, during the time of the republic. He didn’t follow all the humanist rules for historical writing, with no introductions, speeches, or omens, and the instruction provided was “instruction in the art of politics.” (pp. 229-230)
Machiavelli’s Florentine History, written between 1520 and 1525, after the fall of the republic, also gives instruction in laws of politics rather than morality. Machiavelli selects episodes and stylises them to illustrate these laws, “neglecting causal connections which tie single events together to form a coherent unit,” according to Gilbert. (p. 239)
And between 1527 and 1530, Francesco Vettori wrote his Summary of Italian History from 1511 to 1527. Vettori’s aim was to discover how the current situation of Florence and Italy had come about, which required understanding the interconnected European context as well as the leading personalities and their interests. Felix Gilbert credits Vettori with writing “the first European diplomatic history.” (pp. 247-248) Free governments existed only in theoretical utopias, Vettori declared. Actual governments were based on force, and so all governments were tyrannical. (pp. 249-250) “What, according to Vettori, man can learn from history is not rules for action, but a realisation of the ‘changeability of fortune,’” Gilbert writes. (p. 252) And, “Vettori had no confidence in man’s virtue; to Vettori, Fortuna was all-powerful, and man a toy in Fortuna’s hands.” (p. 251)
Guicciardini began and then abandoned a second Florentine history in the same years as Vettorio wrote his Summary. In this, Guicciardini was attempting a humanist history of Florence, but “his concern with the causal connections of political events resulted in significant deviations from the practice and method of humanist historians.” (p. 245) In short, he focused on verifiable fact, checking earlier narrative accounts against other sources and drawing on original documents. Explaining the causality of events drew him increasingly into widening the context of his history from Florence to the affairs of the whole of Italy. (pp. 246-247)
The writing of Guicciardini’s second Florentine history was interrupted by his political career, and when that ended, he didn’t return to the project, but instead sought a legacy in writing his History of Italy, detailing the events of the previous four decades through twenty volumes. It is the work of a man “steeped in trust in the efficacy of a rational conduct of politics” but who has also “experienced that the world is dominated and controlled by the power of Fortuna.” (p. 290) Now his view was that the reward of studying history was in a philosophical attitude of learning not to expect rewards for good behaviour, nor success from the use of intelligence, but instead to fortify oneself to withstand the adversities that may befall us whatever we do, and instead of choosing actions in expectation of reward, to consider the effect of each choice on our own dignity.
“Although Guicciardini did not share the humanist view that history exemplifies general rules of behaviour, he returned to the humanist concept of the moral value of history: history appeals to man to become conscious of his own intrinsic value.” (p. 300)
Felix Gilbert was born in Germany in 1905, and his own personal history, A European Past: Memoirs 1905-1945 (1988), provides other examples of dealing with such complexities, both in its content and its structure, a circular narrative circumscribing the trauma of two world wars and countless atrocities.