Intellectual Revolt: Occult Sciences, Science, Medicine, Philosophy, Guicciardini, Machiavelli (1300–1534)

Occult Sciences

In every age and every nation, civilization is the product of the effort, privilege, and responsibility of a minority. The historian who is intimately familiar with the powerful influence of foolish ideas consoles himself with a brilliant future for superstition; he does not expect perfect countries to be made from imperfect men; and he is also aware that only a small number of individuals in each generation can be so free from economic hardships that they can think independently with power and leisure, instead of following the thoughts of their predecessors or the majority of their contemporaries. The historian will also be glad if he can find, in every period, a few men and women who, by the power of their own brains, by the blessing of being born into a wealthy family, or by living in favorable conditions, have freed themselves from superstition, occult sciences, and credulity and have raised themselves to an intelligent and honest understanding of their own boundless ignorance.

Therefore, in Renaissance Italy, civilization belonged to the few who cultivated it and benefited from it. The simple-minded ordinary man, called the legion, plowed the earth, extracted minerals, pulled carts, and carried loads; he toiled from dawn to dusk and at night was so exhausted that he had no strength left to think. This man took his ideas, religion, and answers to the mysteries of life from the atmosphere around him, or inherited them with his ancestral hut; he allowed others to force him to work for them. Not only did he accept the delightful, inspiring, soothing, and enchanting wonders of transmitted theology, which were renewed every day by calamity, suggestion, and works of art, but in his mental framework he added to that theology a belief in demons, witchcraft, prophecy, astrology, the worship of relics, and miracle-seeking, which formed what might be called a metaphysics rejected by the Church. The Church regarded these beliefs as a problem that sometimes caused more annoyance than unbelief. While the distinguished man in Italy was half a century or more ahead of his contemporaries beyond the Alps, the ordinary man south of the Alps was as superstitious as his peers north of the mountains.

Often the humanists themselves believed in “doubles” or “invisible guardians of the place” and mixed their Ciceronian-style writings with the mad spirit of their environment. Poggio spoke joyfully of goblins that migrated like headless horsemen from Como to Germany, or of bearded tritons that rose from the sea to kidnap beautiful women from the shore. Machiavelli, who was deeply skeptical of religion, alluded to the possibility that “the air is full of spirits” and expressed his belief that great events are announced by signs of strange shapes, prophecies and inspirations, and heavenly omens. The Florentines, who believed that the air they breathed made them excessively clever, thought that all important events happened on Saturday; and passing through certain streets on the way to the war front would certainly bring a bad end. Poliziano was so upset by the Pazzi conspiracy that he attributed the disastrous rain that followed it to that event and overlooked the action of young men who, to end the rain, dug up the body of the chief conspirator, paraded it through the city, and threw it into the Arno. Marsilio Ficino wrote a treatise in defense of divination, astrology, and belief in demons and excused himself from seeing Pico della Mirandola because the stars were in an inauspicious conjunction. Was this merely a strange whim? If the humanists could believe such things, how could ordinary people, who had no leisure or cultural education, be blamed for thinking that the natural world was a center or instrument of countless supernatural powers?

The objects that the people of Italy regarded as relics of Christ or the apostles were so numerous that one could assemble, merely from the churches of Renaissance Rome, all the props needed to stage the scenes of the Gospels. One church claimed to possess a piece of the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus; another boasted of owning some hay from the manger in which Jesus had been laid at birth; yet another boasted of having pieces of the blessed loaves and fishes from Christ; one more prided itself on possessing the table on which the Last Supper had been spread; and another church boasted of having a picture of the Virgin Mary painted by angels for Saint Luke. The churches of Venice displayed to pilgrims the body of the apostle Mark, an arm of Saint George, an ear of the apostle Paul, some roasted flesh of Saint Lawrence, and several of the stones with which Saint Stephen had been killed.

Almost everything, every number, and every letter of the alphabet possessed a kind of magical power. According to Aretino, some Roman prostitutes fed their lovers decaying human carrion to arouse their affection, and to obtain such meat they stole corpses from graveyards. Incantations were used for a thousand purposes. Apulian peasants said that one could save oneself from a mad dog with a suitable spell. Good and evil spirits filled the air. The devil often appeared in his own form or in another shape to seduce, frighten, and give power or instruction to people. Demons possessed a great deal of secret knowledge; if anyone could make them his allies, he would share in that knowledge. Some Carmelite monks in Bologna (until Sixtus IV condemned them in 1474) taught that there was no harm in acquiring knowledge from demons; and professional sorcerers used their proven spells to summon the help of demons for wealthy clients. In popular belief, witches had access to these helpful beings, whom they regarded as lovers or gods. According to the people, these women, with their demonic power, could foresee the future, fly to distant places in an instant, pass through closed doors, and inflict terrible evils on those who had offended them; they could arouse love or hatred, cause miscarriages, make poisons, and cause death with a single spell or glance.

In 1484 Innocent VIII, by a bull (Summis desiderantes), forbade recourse to magic, accepted as true some of the claimed powers of sorcerers, attributed certain storms and plagues to them, and lamented that many Christians who had strayed from the purity of the faith had formed a diabolical pact with devils and, by means of sorcery, spells, curses, and other demonic arts, had inflicted grievous injuries on men, women, children, and animals. The Pope recommended that the inquisitors watch for such acts. This bull did not impose belief in witchcraft as official Church doctrine nor did it originate the persecution of witches; both belief in sorcery and occasional punishment of sorcerers had existed long before its issuance. The Pope issued the decree out of firm faith in the Old Testament command: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The Church had for centuries believed in the possibility of demonic influence on mankind, but the Pope’s assumption of the reality of sorcery encouraged belief in it, and his order to the inquisitors played a role in the pursuit of witchcraft. In the year after the publication of that bull, forty-one women were burned for witchcraft in Como alone. In 1486 the inquisitors in Brescia condemned several women accused of witchcraft to death, but the government refused to carry out the sentence and Innocent was greatly distressed by this. In 1510, punishment for witchcraft was more in accordance with the wishes of its advocates. In that year one hundred and forty persons were burned for witchcraft in Brescia, and in 1514, during the papacy of the mild Leo, three hundred more met the same fate in Como.

Whether as a result of arousing popular stubbornness through the inquisitorial courts or for other reasons, the number of those who considered themselves witches, or were believed by the people to practice witchcraft, rapidly increased; especially in the Alps-adjacent parts of Italy, sorcery became, in nature and scale, a contagious disease. According to a famous report, twenty-five thousand persons had attended a “witches’ sabbath” in a plain near Brescia. In 1518 the inquisitorial courts burned seventy persons from that district alive for witchcraft and imprisoned thousands of suspects. The city council of Brescia protested against this mass imprisonment and intervened in subsequent executions. At this time Leo X, in a bull called Honestis (February 15, 1521), ordered that any official who refused to execute the sentences of the inquisitorial courts without examination or review should be excommunicated, and if a community committed this fault, religious services in that community should be suspended. The city council, ignoring that command, appointed two bishops, two Brescian physicians, and one inquisitor to supervise all subsequent trials of witches and to investigate the justice of previous convictions; only these persons could condemn the accused. The local government warned the papal representative to stop condemning persons for the purpose of confiscating their property. This was a courageous act, but popular ignorance and madness prevailed, and in the two following centuries, both in Protestant lands and in Catholic territories, both in the New World and the Old, the burning of persons for witchcraft became one of the most shameful stains on human history.

The madness of wanting to know the future aided various kinds of soothsayers—palmists, diviners, astrologers; the last group were more numerous and powerful in Italy than in the rest of Europe. Almost every Italian state had an official astrologer who determined the favorable times for beginning important undertakings. Julius II would not leave Bologna until his astrologer found the time propitious; Sixtus IV and Paul III ordered their astrologers to fix the hours for holding conferences. Belief that the stars governed human character and affairs was so widespread that many university professors in Italy published annually a collection called astrological predictions. One of Aretino’s pretexts for satire was these “learned” almanacs. When Lorenzo de’ Medici re-established the University of Pisa, he did not plan a department of astrology, but the students insistently demanded it, and he was forced to agree. In Lorenzo’s scholarly circle, Pico della Mirandola launched a fierce attack on astrology, but Marsilio Ficino, who was more learned than he, defended it. Guicciardini exclaimed: “How fortunate are the astrologers who, if they tell one truth among a hundred lies, are believed by the people, whereas if other people tell one lie among a hundred truths, they lose all their reputation.” Nevertheless, astrology, which blindly took a step toward a scientific theory of the world, had to some extent freed itself from the belief that the world is subject to divine or diabolical wills and was paying attention to finding a universal and consistent natural law.

Science

The development of science was delayed more by popular superstition than by opposition from the Church. Censorship of the press was not a major obstacle to science until the anti-Reformation measures that followed the Council of Trent (completed 1545). Sixtus IV brought Johann Müller “Regiomontanus,” the most famous astronomer of the fifteenth century, to Rome (1463). During Alexander’s papacy, Copernicus taught mathematics and astronomy at the University of Rome. He did not yet possess his astonishing theory of the earth’s translational motion, but Nicholas of Cusa had already alluded to it, and both men were churchmen. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Inquisition in Italy was relatively weak. This weakness was partly due to the absence of the popes from Rome and their residence in Avignon, their quarrels during the Schism, and their exposure to the enlightenment of the Renaissance. In 1440 Amadeo de Landi Madigra was tried and acquitted by the inquisitorial court in Milan. In 1497 Gabriele d’Asalo, a freethinking physician, was protected from the inquisitorial court by his patron, although “he believed that Christ was not God but the son of Joseph the carpenter.” Despite the Inquisition, thought in Italy was freer and culture more advanced than in any other country in the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth. The schools of astronomy, law, medicine, and literature in Italy were the destination of students from several lands; Thomas Linacre, the English physician and scholar, after completing his university studies in Italy, built an altar in the Italian Alps on his return to England and, with a last look at Italian soil, dedicated it to that country as “the nurturing mother of learning” and the supreme university of the Christian world.

In this atmosphere of superstition below and free thought above, if science made modest progress in the two centuries before Vesalius (1514–1564), it was largely because support and honor went to art, scholarship, and poetry; and there was still no clear call in the economic or intellectual life of Italy for scientific methods and ideas. A man like Leonardo could adopt a comprehensive and broad world theory and reach out with eager curiosity to several sciences, but there was no great library; dissection had only just begun, the microscope had not yet been invented to aid biology or medicine, and no telescope existed that could magnify the stars and bring the moon closer to the earth. The medieval love of beauty had manifested itself as the perfection of art, but little remained of the medieval love of truth that could nourish science; and the revival of ancient literature aroused a hedonistic skepticism that, instead of patient fidelity to scientific research for building the future, turned to idealizing antiquity. The Renaissance had given its soul to art and had left very little for literature; even less for philosophy and still less for science. In this sense the Renaissance lacked the diverse intellectual activity of the Greeks in their prosperous early days from the time of Pericles and Aeschylus to Zeno the Stoic and Aristarchus the astronomer. Until philosophy cleared the way, science could not advance.

Therefore, it is natural that a particular reader who knows the names of several Renaissance artists will have difficulty remembering the name of a Renaissance scientist except Leonardo; even the name of Amerigo Vespucci must be recalled to him, and Galileo (1564–1642) belongs to the seventeenth century. In truth, except in the fields of geography and medicine, there was no one whose name is worth remembering. Odoric of Pordenone went to India and China as a missionary (c. 1321), returned by way of Tibet and Iran, wrote an account of what he had seen, and added a valuable description to what Marco Polo had reported a generation earlier. Paolo Toscanelli, astronomer, physician, and geographer, observed Halley’s comet in 1456, and is famous for having given Christopher Columbus the necessary information and encouragement for his perilous voyage across the Atlantic. The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci made four voyages to the New World (completed 1497); he claimed to be the first to discover and map the mainland of that continent; Martin Waldseemüller, the publisher of those maps, suggested that the continent be called America. The Italians welcomed this and promoted it in their writings.

Medicine

The most progressive science was medicine, because man sacrifices everything except appetite for health. Physicians had acquired a large share of the new wealth of Italy. Padua paid one of them 2,000 ducats a year to serve as consultant, and at the same time left him free to practice privately. Petrarch, emphasizing the income of this physician, angrily denounced the fees of doctors, their purple robes and fur hoods, as well as their shining rings and gilded spurs. He warned the sick Pope Clement VI against trusting physicians: “I know that physicians have gathered around your bed, and naturally this alarms me. Their opinions are always contradictory, and he who has nothing new to say limps behind the others out of shame. As Pliny said: physicians, in order to gain a name for themselves through innovation, bargain with our lives. It is enough for someone to be called a physician for people to believe his words to the last syllable; yet the lies of physicians are more dangerous than any other lies. Only sweet hope keeps us from thinking about this danger. They learn their art at our expense, and even our death gives them experience; only the physician can kill with impudence. O most noble father, look upon this band as an army of enemies. Remember the inscription on the tomb of the unfortunate man: ‘My death was caused by the treatment of many physicians.’”

In all civilized lands, physicians, in that they have been both the most desired individuals and the most mocked and satirized, have been rivals of women.

The basis of progress in medicine was the movement of anatomy. Clerics who collaborated with physicians and artists sometimes provided them with corpses from hospitals under Church supervision for dissection. Mondino de’ Liuzzi dissected corpses in Bologna and wrote a treatise called Anatomy (1316) that remained a textbook for three centuries. Nevertheless, obtaining corpses was difficult. In 1319 several medical students in Bologna stole a corpse from a graveyard and took it to a teacher at the university; and the teacher dissected it for their instruction. The students were prosecuted but acquitted, and thereafter the city authorities turned a blind eye to the use of the bodies of executed criminals or the friendless for dissection. Berengario da Carpi, professor of anatomy at Bologna, had gained considerable fame for dissecting one hundred corpses. At the University of Pisa, dissection had begun at least by 1341; this practice soon became permitted in all the Italian faculties, including the papal medical faculty in Rome. Sixtus IV officially authorized such dissections.

Anatomy in the Renaissance recovered its forgotten ancient heritage. Men such as Antonio Benivieni, Alessandro Achillini, Alessandro Benedetti, and Marcantonio della Torre freed anatomy from Arab tutelage, returned to the age of Galen and Hippocrates, and even questioned the works of those two sacred masters; by dissecting all the nerves, muscles, and bones they added considerable knowledge to the science of the body. Benivieni directed his anatomical operations toward finding the internal causes of diseases; his treatise On Some Hidden and Wonderful Causes of Diseases and Their Treatments (1507) founded pathological anatomy and made dissection an important factor in the emergence of modern medicine. At the same time, the new art accelerated the progress of medicine by facilitating the publication and international exchange of medical texts.

We can understand the backwardness of science in Latin Christian medicine by noting that the most advanced physicians and anatomists of that age had scarcely been able, by the year 1500, to reach the knowledge attained by Hippocrates, Galen, and Soranus in the period between 450 BC and 200 AD. Treatment was still based on Hippocrates’ theory of the four humors, and bloodletting was considered the cure for all diseases. The first human blood transfusion was performed by a Jewish physician on the body of Pope Innocent IV (1492) and, as we saw, came to nothing. Exorcists and incantation readers were still called upon to treat impotence and forgetfulness by reciting religious spells or making the patient kiss the relics of saints, perhaps because such suggestive treatment sometimes proved beneficial. Pills and medicines were sold by apothecaries, who increased their income by adding stationery, various polishes, sweets, spices, and jewels to their goods. Michele Savonarola, father of the famous friar, wrote a book called Practical Medicine (c. 1440) and several shorter treatises; one of these discussed the abundance of brain diseases among great artists, another spoke of famous men who had lived long by the daily use of alcoholic beverages.

Quack physicians were still numerous, but medical practice had come under stricter legal regulations and obtaining a medical license required completing a four-year course of medical instruction (1500). No licensed physician was allowed to predict the course of a serious illness without consulting one of his colleagues. Venetian law required physicians and surgeons to meet once a month to exchange medical notes and to refresh their knowledge by attending at least one course of anatomy per year. Every medical student, upon graduation, had to swear never to prolong the period of treatment, to supervise the preparation of the medicines he prescribed, and not to share in the price of the drugs given to the apothecary. The same Venetian law (1368) limited to ten soldi the price of every prescription compounded by an apothecary – it is impossible to estimate the value of these coins in today’s money; we know of several cases of illness in which, by special contracts, payment of the fee was conditional upon the patient’s cure.

The reputation and prestige of surgery increased in proportion as the list of its operations and instruments grew in variety and competence, approaching the surgery of Egypt. Bernardo da Rapallo invented a marvelous operation for bladder stones (1451), and Mariano Santo became famous for the operation of bladder stones by transverse incision (c. 1530). Giovanni da Vigo, surgeon to Julius II, devised better methods for tying arteries and veins. Plastic surgery, which the ancients knew, reappeared in Sicily around 1450: severed or defective noses, lips, and ears were repaired by grafting skin from other parts of the body so skillfully that the lines of junction were hardly visible.

Public hygiene was improving. When Andrea Dandolo, Doge of Venice, established the first municipal commission for public health, other Italian cities followed his example. These “health commissions” examined all foods and medicines offered for sale and isolated persons suffering from certain infectious diseases. Because of the spread of the “Black Death,” and also in 1374, ships carrying passengers and goods suspected of infection were not admitted to their ports. In Ragusa in 1377 such travelers were kept for thirty days in special places before entering the city. Marseilles (1383) extended this detention to a “forty-day period,” and Venice followed the same practice in 1403.

The number of hospitals increased through the efforts of laypeople and clergy. Siena built a hospital in 1305 that was famous for its size and medical services, and Francesco Sforza founded the great hospital in Milan in 1456. In 1423 Venice turned the island of Santa Maria di Nazareth into a hospital for infectious diseases; this was the first institution of its kind in Europe. Florence had thirty-five hospitals in the fifteenth century. These institutions benefited from abundant public and private donations. Some hospitals, like the great hospital, were interesting examples of architecture; certain halls were adorned with life-giving works of art. The Ceppo Hospital in Pistoia employed Giovanni della Robbia to create for its walls terracotta reliefs depicting various hospital scenes; and the façade of another hospital in Florence, designed by Brunelleschi, had delightful terracotta medallions placed by Andrea della Robbia in the spandrels of the arches of its portico. Luther, who was deeply shocked by the prevalent immorality in Italy in 1511, and at the same time impressed by its charitable and medical institutions, described the hospitals in his table talk as follows: “In Italy beautiful hospitals have been built, and their condition with regard to food and drink, careful nurses, and learned physicians is admirable. The beds are clean and the walls are decorated with beautiful paintings. When a patient is admitted to the hospital, his clothes are removed in the presence of an official who makes an accurate list of them and they are kept safe; one day a white garment is put on him and he is laid on a comfortable bed with clean sheets. Immediately two physicians come to his bedside and servants bring him food and drink in clean vessels. … Many women take turns going to the hospitals and nursing the patients. They cover their faces so as not to be recognized; each of these women stays for a few days and then returns to her home and another takes her place. … There are also very good foundling homes in Florence where the children are well fed and educated, have suitable uniform clothing, and are on the whole given proper attention.”

A frequent medical problem is that the heroic advances in treatment are almost neutralized by new diseases. Smallpox and measles, which were almost unknown in Europe before the sixteenth century, had now appeared; the first influenza epidemic in Europe broke out in 1510; and the typhus epidemic, which had no name before 1477, swept Italy in 1505 and 1528. But the sudden appearance and rapid spread of syphilis in Italy and France in the late fifteenth century constituted the most astonishing phenomenon and the greatest test of Renaissance medicine. Whether syphilis existed in Europe before 1493 or was brought there in that year with the return of Christopher Columbus is still debated by the informed and there is no room to discuss it here.

Some facts support the theory of its native origin in Europe. On July 25, 1463, a prostitute in one of the courts of Dijon testified that she had told an unwelcome suitor that she had “the pox” and thus discouraged him from pursuing her. No further description appears in the report. On March 25, 1494, the town crier of Paris was ordered by the city authorities to proclaim the expulsion from the city of all those who had “the great pox.” We do not know what this great pox was; perhaps it was syphilis. In late 1494 a French army invaded Italy and on February 21, 1495 occupied Naples; shortly afterward a disease spread there that the Italians called “the French disease” and claimed that the French had brought it to Italy. Many French soldiers had contracted it. When the French soldiers returned to France in October 1495, they spread the disease among the people; hence in France it was called “the Neapolitan disease,” on the supposition that the French troops had caught it there. On August 7, 1495, two months before the return of the French army from Italy, Emperor Maximilian published a decree in which “the French disease” was mentioned; this “French disease” apparently could not be attributed to the French army, which had not yet returned from Italy. From the year 1500 onward, the term “French disease” was used throughout Europe to mean syphilis. From what has been said, it can be inferred that there are references to the existence of syphilis in Europe before 1493, but there is no convincing evidence to prove it.

The attribution of the origin of this disease to America is based on a report written between 1504 and 1506 by a Spanish physician named Ruy Díaz de Isla, but not published until 1539. He relates that on the return voyage of Christopher Columbus the helmsman of that admiral’s ship was attacked by a severe fever accompanied by skin eruptions, and he adds that he himself treated sailors in Barcelona who were suffering from this new disease – a disease never before known in that city. He identified it with what Europe called “the French disease” and argued that it had been brought from America. Christopher Columbus reached Palos in Spain on March 5, 1493 after his first return from the West Indies. In the same month Pintor, physician to Alexander VI, observed the first appearance of “the French disease” in Rome. Almost two years passed between Columbus’s return and the occupation of Naples by the French army, and this period was sufficient for the disease to spread from Spain to Italy. On the other hand, it is not certain that the disease prevalent in Naples in 1495 was syphilis. A very small quantity of bone showing lesions of a certain disease has been found among human remains in Europe before Columbus; it may be guessed that these lesions indicate syphilis. Many such bones have been found among pre-Columbian remains in America.

In any case this new disease spread with terrifying speed. Cesare Borgia apparently contracted it in France. Many cardinals, and Julius II himself, were afflicted with this disease; yet in such cases we must not overlook the possibility of infection through simple contact with persons or objects carrying the active microbe of the disease. Skin ulcers had long been treated in Europe with mercury ointment; at that time mercury was as common in treatments as penicillin is in our time; surgeons and quack physicians were called alchemists because they turned mercury into gold. Precautions were taken to prevent infection with syphilis. One of the laws of 1496 in Rome forbade barbers to accept syphilitic customers or to use instruments that had been used by or for them. Examination of prostitutes was carried out more frequently and at shorter intervals, and some cities tried to rid themselves of the problem by banishing harlots; thus Ferrara and Bologna exiled such women in 1496 on the pretext that “a kind of hidden pox is in them which others call the leprosy of Job.” The Church considered chastity the only necessary preventive factor, and many clerics acted on this principle.

The name syphilis was first applied to the disease by Girolamo Fracastoro, one of the most learned and comprehensive figures of the Renaissance. His life began happily: he was born in Verona into an aristocratic family that had previously given outstanding physicians to society. In Padua he studied almost everything. He studied with Copernicus in one school, learned philosophy and anatomy respectively from Pomponazzi and Achillini in the same school, and himself became professor of logic at the age of twenty-four. While possessing a considerable store of classical literature, he chose seclusion for scientific research, and above all for medicine. This union of science and literature gave him a complete personality and enabled him to write a poem in Latin in the style of Virgil’s Georgics. Its title was Syphilis or the French Disease (1521). The Italians had been skilled in writing didactic poems since the time of Lucretius, but who would have thought that the syphilis microbe could give rise to a flowing poem? In ancient mythology Syphilus was a shepherd who decided not to praise the unseen gods but to worship the king, the only visible owner of his flocks. This angered Apollo and caused him to fill the air with harmful vapors; Syphilus, as a result of breathing that air, contracted a disease infected with pustules on the surface of his skin; this story is essentially the story of Job. Fracastoro set out to investigate the origin, epidemic nature, causes of outbreak, and method of treatment of “a pernicious and strange disease never seen in past centuries and at that time stretching its ravages over Europe and the progressive cities of Asia and Libya and engulfing Italy in that dire war. A war to which the name French was given because of the attack of the Gauls.” He doubted that the disease had come from America, since it existed almost simultaneously in many European countries far apart from one another. Infection with this disease did not appear all at once, but remained latent for a certain period, sometimes a month … even four months. In most cases small ulcers appeared on the patient’s genital organ. … Shortly afterward the skin of the body developed eruptions with a hard crust. … Then these eruptions ate the skin and … even infected the bones. … In some cases the lips or nose or eyes, and in others the genital organ, were completely eaten away.

In this poem there is talk of treatment with mercury or guaiac – “the holy wood that the Indian dead of America used.” In his later work, On Contagious Diseases, in prose, Fracastoro spoke of various infectious diseases – syphilis, typhus, tuberculosis – and the ways they spread. In 1545 he was summoned by Paul III to be chief physician of the Council of Trent. Verona built a magnificent memorial in his honor, and Giovanni dal Cavino engraved his likeness on a medal that ranks among the most beautiful works of its kind.

Before 1500 it was customary to call all infectious diseases by the single name plague or pestilence. This was one of the advances of medical science that now clearly distinguished contagious diseases, determined the nature of each, and was ready to combat a virulent and rapidly spreading disease like syphilis. Mere trust in Hippocrates and Galen could never have been sufficient in such a crisis, for the medical profession had well understood the need for fresh and detailed studies of symptoms, causes, and treatments and had learned in its widening and connected experience that it was equal to this unexpected instruction.

Because of these excellent qualities, professional loyalty, and practical success, the higher class of physicians now ranked among the untitled nobility of Italy. While they had made their profession completely secular, their respect was greater than that of the clergy. Some of them were not only medical consultants but also political advisers and enjoyed the favor and attendance of princes, bishops, and kings. Many of them were humanists. They were familiar with ancient literature and collected manuscripts and works of art; they were often intimate friends of great artists. Finally, many of them recognized the Hippocratic ideal of joining philosophy to medicine. In their studies and teaching they easily moved from one subject to another and gave an incentive to the philosophical brotherhood of the profession for a new and bold examination of the truth in the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas – just as they had done with the works of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna.

Philosophy

At first glance, Renaissance Italy does not seem fertile in philosophy. Its product cannot be compared with the scholastic philosophy of France in its flowering period, from Abelard to Aquinas, let alone with the “School of Athens.” The most famous name in Renaissance philosophy (if we extend the chronological limit of the Renaissance) is Giordano Bruno, whose works fall beyond the period of our studies in this volume. Apart from him only Pomponazzi can be named, but who now cherishes his skeptical, bold but weak verbiage?

The humanists discovered the Greek philosophical world and revealed it carefully, thereby consolidating the philosophical revolution; but they were often, except for Valla, too clever to express their ideas explicitly. The university professors of philosophy were very attached to the scholastic tradition: after spending seven or eight years of effort in that desert, they either left it to enter other fields or, by praising the obstacles that had broken the feet of their will and led their intellect to a safe dead end, directed another generation toward it. And who knows whether many of them did not feel a particular intellectual and economic security in limiting their slight efforts, which were cast with precision and fruitlessly into the mold of incomprehensible phrases? In many faculties scholastic philosophy still had strength and had become more stubborn as its death approached. The old medieval questions were reviewed with medieval methods of discussion with great effort, and in the proud publications of the faculty members.

Two elements entered the arena for the revival of philosophy: the conflict between Platonists and Aristotelians, and the division of the Aristotelians into orthodox and Averroists. In Bologna and Padua these conflicts turned into real disputes and became a matter of life and death. The humanists were mostly Platonists; under the influence of Gemistus Pletho, Bessarion, Theodorus Gaza, and other Greeks, they drank deeply from the wine of the “Dialogues,” Plato’s work, and could hardly understand how people could tolerate Aristotle’s dry logic, impotent Organon, and heavy middle method of the prudent and cautious manager. But these Platonists were determined to remain Christian, and for this reason Marsilio Ficino, their representative, devoted his life to reconciling the two systems of thought. For this purpose he undertook extensive studies and went so far as to reach Zoroaster and Confucius. When he reached Plotinus and translated the Enneads, he thought he had found in Neoplatonic mysticism that silken thread that would bind Plato to Christ. He tried to turn this combination in his Platonic theology into a confused mixture of orthodoxy, occult sciences, and Hellenism, and with hesitation reached a pantheistic or monistic conclusion and said that God is the soul of the world. This doctrine became the philosophy of Lorenzo and his circle, and the philosophy of the Platonic academies of Rome, Naples, and elsewhere; it passed from Naples to Giordano Bruno; from Bruno to Spinoza, and from Spinoza to Hegel, and is still alive.

But something also had to be said in favor of Aristotle, especially if it could be misinterpreted. Had Aquinas correctly understood Aristotle when he said that he taught personal immortality, or had Averroes, in reading On the Soul as a work that only acknowledged the immortality of the universal soul of the human species, taken the right path? The formidable Averroes, that giant of Arab philosophy whom Italian art had long since placed under the feet of Saint Thomas, was such an active rival for dominance over the Aristotelians that both Bologna and Padua were angered by his heresy. It was in Padua that Marsilius lost his reputation for the sake of the Church; it was in Padua that Filippo Algeri da Nola, Bruno’s forerunner who was born in Nola, committed those terrible errors for which, with utmost regret, he was thrown into a barrel of boiling pitch. Nicoletto Vernias, as professor of philosophy at Padua (1471–1499), apparently taught a doctrine according to which the soul of the world, not the individual soul, is immortal; and his pupil Agostino Nifo presented the same concept in his treatise On the Intellect of Demons (1492). Usually the skeptics tried to appease the inquisitorial court by distinguishing between two kinds of truth (as Averroes had done). They argued that a proposition might be rejected by philosophical reasoning, whereas from the standpoint of faith it could be accepted according to Scripture or the decree of the Church. Nifo boldly simplified this principle as follows: “We must speak as many people speak, and think as a few think.” As Nifo’s hair changed color, he also changed his mind and reconciled himself with orthodoxy. As professor of philosophy at the University of Bologna, he attracted respectable men and women and interested groups to lectures that were made attractive by grimacing and strange gestures and embellished with anecdotes and witty jokes. Socially he was the most successful rival of Pomponazzi.

Pietro Pomponazzi, the short-statured wonder of Renaissance philosophy, had been nicknamed Peretto (little Peter) because of his small stature. But he had a large head, a broad forehead, a turned-up nose, and small, black, penetrating eyes. His features showed that he was a man who took life and thought very seriously. Born in Mantua of an aristocratic family, he studied philosophy and medicine at Padua, received the doctorate in both sciences at the age of twenty-five, and soon himself obtained a professorship at that university. The entire pessimistic tradition of Padua came to him and reached perfection in him, and as his admirer Vanini said, “If Pythagoras were alive, he would have judged that the soul of Averroes had entered the body of Pomponazzi.” Wisdom is always a reincarnation or an echo, for among thousands of kinds and thousands of generations of error, it remains in one state.

Pomponazzi continued to teach at the University of Padua from 1495 to 1509; then the wind of war blew over the city and closed the halls of its historic university. Pomponazzi remained there until the last day of his life, married three times, always lectured on Aristotle, and humbly compared himself to his master like an insect crawling on the body of an elephant. He thought it better not to attribute his ideas to himself, but to present them as if they were implicitly or explicitly found in Alexander of Aphrodisias’s interpretation of Aristotle. His methods were sometimes very petty and apparently subject to a dead authority, but since the Church, following Aquinas, claimed that his doctrine was the doctrine of Aristotle, Pomponazzi may have felt that proving any heresy as a truly Aristotelian doctrine, if it did not lead to the burner of the prover, would at least arouse the anger of the orthodox in some way. The Fifth Lateran Council, convened in 1513 under the presidency of Leo X, condemned all those who claimed that the soul in all people is one and indivisible and that the individual soul is mortal. Three years later, Pomponazzi published his great work On the Immortality of the Soul to prove that the condemned theory belonged entirely to Aristotle. According to Pietro’s interpretation, Aristotle believed that the soul at every step is dependent on matter; the most abstract knowledge is ultimately derived from sensation; only through the body can the soul act upon the world; the result is that a soul without a body, which remains alive after the death of its form, is a powerless and wretched ghost. Pomponazzi concluded that we, as children of the Church, are permitted to believe in the immortality of the individual soul, but as philosophers we have no such permission. Apparently it never occurred to Pomponazzi that his argument had no force against the Catholic religion, which believes in the resurrection of body and soul together. Perhaps he did not take this doctrine seriously and it did not occur to him that his readers would take it seriously. As far as we know, no one seriously persecuted him for it.

That book was caught in a storm. The Franciscan friars forced the Doge of Venice to order the burning of all obtainable copies of it, and this was done. Protest was made to the papal court about this, but Bembo and Bibbiena, who at that time had high standing in Leo’s councils, told him that the conclusions of that book were completely in accordance with orthodoxy, and so they were. Leo did not swallow the bait, for he was well aware of this little trick concerning the two truths, but he contented himself with ordering Pomponazzi to write a humble explanation of his obedience to religion. Pietro complied and in the third book of his apology (1518) again emphasized that he accepted all the teachings of the Church. At the same time, Leo commissioned Agostino Nifo to write a reply to Pomponazzi’s book; since Agostino loved debate, he carried out this mission with joy and skill. It is interesting, and perhaps also indicative of the antipathy between the universities and the clergy, that when Pomponazzi’s position was endangered by the opposition of the inquisitors, three universities competed with one another for his services. The authorities of the city of Bologna, who were apparently subject to the Pope but paid no attention to the Franciscans, strengthened Pomponazzi’s professorial position by extending it for another eight years and increased his annual salary to 1,600 ducats (20,000 dollars?).

Pomponazzi continued his skeptical battle in two smaller books that he did not publish during his lifetime. In On Incantations he reduced many phenomena that were thought to be supernatural to natural causes. A physician wrote to Pietro a description of a series of treatments that were claimed to be due to spells and magical operations, and Pietro invited him to doubt. He wrote: “It is ridiculous and foolish to despise what is visible and natural in order to resort to an invisible cause whose truth is not guaranteed to us by any probable evidence.” As a Christian he accepts the existence of angels and spirits, but as a philosopher he rejects belief in them and says that all causes in the divine system are natural. Reflecting his medical training, he laughs at the common belief in hidden sources of healing: if spirits could heal bodily diseases, then they themselves must be material or must use material means to make their healings effective in a material body; then he comically imagines the healing spirits running here and there with a colorful assortment of plasters, oils, and pills. Nevertheless, he acknowledges the therapeutic properties of some plants. He accepts the miracles mentioned in the Bible, but doubts that they were natural operations. The world is governed by uniform and unchanging laws. Miracles are unusual manifestations of natural forces whose powers and methods are only partially known to us, and people attribute to God what they cannot understand. Without denying this theory of natural causality, Pomponazzi accepts a large part of astrology. Not only are people’s lives subject to the movements of the heavenly bodies, but all human systems, including all religions, follow the path of elevation or decline according to celestial influences. This is true even of Christianity. Pomponazzi says that at present signs of the death of Christianity are appearing. But, as a Christian, he immediately rejects this theory as a foolish matter.

His last book, On Fate, is more in accordance with religious tradition, for it is a defense of free will. He acknowledges the incompatibility of free will with God’s foreknowledge and omniscience, but is firm in his awareness of free activity and also in the necessity of assuming some kind of freedom of choice if man is really to have moral responsibility. In his treatise On the Immortality of the Soul he had faced the question whether a moral law can succeed without supernatural punishment and reward. With pious pride he believed that the reward of virtue is virtue itself, not a paradise after death, but he admitted that people can be led to virtue only by supernatural fear and hope. Therefore he explained the matter by saying that the great lawgivers considered belief in a future state a convenient substitute for an omnipresent police, and like Plato justified the inculcation of myths if they were capable of preventing human wickedness.

Thus, for the pious, eternal reward has been assumed in the life of that world, but for sinners eternal punishments, to frighten them severely. The greater part of the people, if they do good, do so more from fear of eternal punishment than from eternal good, for bad penalties are more known to us than good rewards. And since this latter factor can benefit all people, of whatever class they may be, the lawgivers, considering the inclination of men to evil and desiring the common good, have expressed the opinion that the soul is immortal. Their point of view was not truth, but only piety, in order thereby to lead men to virtue.

Pomponazzi thought that most people are so intellectually raw and morally so bestial that they must be treated like children or invalids. It is not proper to teach them philosophical principles. Concerning his own considerations he says: “These matters should not be communicated to ordinary people, for they are not capable of receiving such secrets. We should even refrain from discussing these things with ignorant priests.” He divides mankind into philosophers and men of religion, and with simple belief holds that “only philosophers are gods on earth, and they differ from other people, of whatever rank and position, as much as a real man differs from the image of a man on a painted curtain.”

In weaker moments of his life he recognized the narrow limits of human reason and the honorable futility of metaphysical philosophy. In the last years of his life he found himself exhausted and bewildered by thinking about it and compared the philosopher to Prometheus who, because he wanted to steal fire, that is divine knowledge, from heaven, was condemned to be bound to a rock and have a vulture continually peck at his liver. “A thinker who seeks the secrets of the divine is like Prometheus. … The inquisitorial court pursues him as a heretic and the people mock him as a madman.”

The debates in which he participated exhausted his spirit and contributed to the destruction of his health. He suffered from one illness after another until he finally decided to die. He chose a hard path for suicide: he starved himself to death. He resisted every argument and threat, and did not even yield to the force used to make him eat, and by refusing to eat and speak he overcame that force. After seven days of this continuous fast, he felt that he had won his battle for the right to die and could now speak with ease. He said: “I leave this world with joy.” Someone asked: “Where are you going?” and he replied: “Where all mortals go.” His friends tried one last time to make him eat, but he preferred death. On the order of Cardinal Gonzaga, who was his pupil, his body was taken to Mantua and buried there, and, with the tolerance characteristic of the Renaissance, a statue was erected in his memory.

Pomponazzi gave philosophical form to the skepticism that for two centuries had attacked the foundations of Christian faith. The following factors and many others combined to make the middle and upper classes of Italy “the most skeptical people in Europe” in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: the failure of the Crusades; the dissemination of Islamic ideas through the Crusades, trade, and Arab philosophy; the transfer of the papal court to Avignon and its ridiculous Schism; the discovery of a Greek-Roman world filled with wise men and great arts and at the same time lacking a “Bible” or a Church; the spread of culture and its increasing emancipation from Church supervision; the moral corruption and worldliness of the clergy, even the popes, who displayed their private unbelief in the faith they publicly professed; their use of the concept of purgatory to amass wealth for their own purposes; the reaction of the growing merchant and wealthy classes against the domination of the Church; and the transformation of the Church from a religious organization into a non-spiritual political power.

From the poetry of Poliziano and Pulci and the philosophy of Ficino it is clear that Lorenzo’s circle had no real faith in the afterlife; and the spirit of Ferrara is evident in the mockery with which Ariosto treats the hell that seemed to Dante terrifyingly real. Almost half of Renaissance literature is anti-clerical. Many military leaders were openly atheists; courtiers were far less bound by religion than prostitutes; and a polite skepticism was the sign and requirement of the character of a gentleman. Petrarch regretted that in the minds of many scholars preferring the Christian religion to pagan philosophy was considered a sign of ignorance. In Venice in 1530 it was discovered that most people of the upper classes did not observe the feast of the Resurrection of Christ, that is, they did not even go to confession once a year or participate in the rite of Holy Communion. Luther claimed that among the educated classes in Italy when going to church to attend Mass, the common phrase was: “Let us agree with the common error.”

But in the case of the universities, a strange incident reveals the character of the professors and students. Shortly after Pomponazzi’s death, his pupil Simone Porzio, who had been invited to teach in Pisa, chose Aristotle’s On the Heavens as the text for his lecture. The listeners did not like that subject; several of them impatiently shouted: “Why don’t you talk about the soul?” Porzio was forced to set aside On the Heavens and bring forward Aristotle’s On the Soul, and all the listeners became all ears. We do not know whether in that lecture Porzio expressed his belief that the human soul does not differ in any essential way from the soul of a lion or a plant, but we know that he taught such a thing in his book On the Human Mind. And apparently he faced no danger. Eugenio Taralba, who was prosecuted by the Spanish inquisitorial courts in 1528, related that in his youth in Rome he had studied under three teachers, all of whom taught the perishability of the soul. Erasmus was amazed that in Rome the foundations of the Christian faith were discussed with skepticism among the cardinals. One cleric undertook to explain to him the triviality of belief in the future life; others laughed at Jesus and his apostles, and Erasmus himself assures us that many of them claimed to have heard with their own ears that papal officials blasphemed against the rite of Mass. As we shall see, the lower classes kept their faith; thousands who listened to Savonarola’s sermons must have been believers; and the life of Vittoria Colonna shows that piety could triumph over upbringing. But the spirit of the great faith had been pierced by the arrows of doubt, and the glory of the medieval legend had been tarnished by the accumulated gold of the Church.

Guicciardini

Guicciardini’s mind summarizes the pessimistic disillusionment of those times. His mind was one of the sharpest of the age, but inquisitive like a searchlight that scans the heavens with its beam, and its product was as honest as the work of a writer who has wisely decided to publish his book after his death.

Francesco Guicciardini had the advantage of being born into an aristocratic family. From childhood he had heard witty sayings in eloquent Italian and had learned how to accept life with the realism and composure of a man who is sure of his position. His great-uncle had several times been gonfalonier of the republic; his grandfather had in turn held most of the major state offices; his father knew Latin and Greek and had carried out several political missions. Francesco wrote: “My grandfather, Marsilio Ficino, was the greatest Platonic philosopher in the world.” But this did not prevent our historian from becoming an Aristotelian. He studied civil law and at the age of twenty-three was appointed professor of law at the University of Florence. He traveled a great deal, even to the extent of observing the “strange and fanciful inventions” of Hieronymus Bosch in Flanders. At the age of twenty-six he married Maria Salviati, “because the Salviati family, in addition to being wealthy, excelled other families in influence and power, and he was very interested in these things.”

Nevertheless, he had a love of superiority and sufficient self-discipline to create literary art. His History of Florence, written at the age of twenty-seven, was one of the most astonishing products of the century – a century in which genius, or the recovered but abandoned heritage of its own tradition, had become excessive and had flowed in several different directions. That book limited itself to a short part of the history of Florence, from 1378 to 1509, but gave a detailed and precise account of that period; it also contained a critical examination of the sources, a penetrating analysis of causes, and a considered and impartial judgment; and it also represented expressive power with a style excellent in the Italian language that Machiavelli’s History of Florence, written eleven years later in the sixth decade of his life, could not equal.

In 1512, while still a thirty-year-old youth, Guicciardini was sent as ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic. Leo X and Clement VII appointed him at short intervals to these positions: governor of Reggio Emilia, Modena, and Parma, then governor of Romagna, and then commander of all the papal forces. In 1534 he returned to Florence and supported Alessandro de’ Medici during that five-year period of tyranny. In 1537 he played a very important role in bringing Cosimo the Younger to the lordship of Florence. When his hope of dominating Cosimo vanished, he retired to a country villa to compose in one year those ten volumes of his masterpiece, which he called the History of Italy.

This book did not reach the level of his previous work in originality, power, and style. Guicciardini had examined the works of the humanists at an early age and tended toward rhetoric and ostentation; even so his style is magnificent and follows the novel prose of Gibbon. The subtitle of the book, History of the Wars, limits the subject to military and political matters; at the same time the scope of the discussion extends throughout Italy and also to all of Europe in connection with Italy. This is the first history that examines the political system of Europe as a whole and interconnected. Guicciardini writes about what he often has first-hand information about; and in the later part of the book he speaks of events in which he himself played a role. He collected documents with care and seriousness; his work is much more precise and reliable than Machiavelli’s. If, like his famous contemporary, he resorts to the old custom of inventing speeches for the characters in his story, he honestly says that those speeches are true only in their essential substance; he considers some of those speeches authentic, and uses all of them effectively to reveal both sides of the debate or to make clear the policies and diplomacy of the European countries. All in all, this voluminous history, and the valuable book History of Florence, make Guicciardini the greatest historian of the sixteenth century. Just as Napoleon was impatient to see Goethe, so too Charles V, when he spoke at length with Guicciardini in Bologna, kept the nobles and generals waiting in his antechamber. He would say: “I can make a hundred men nobles and aristocrats in one hour, but I cannot create such a historian in twenty years.”

He, as a worldly man, did not take seriously the efforts of philosophers to understand the world. He must have laughed at the excitement aroused by Pomponazzi – if he saw it. Since metaphysics is outside the sphere of our knowledge, he considered fighting over rival philosophies useless. Undoubtedly all religions are based on assumptions and myths. These factors are forgivable if they help maintain social order and moral discipline, for in Guicciardini’s view man is naturally selfish, immoral, and lawless; he must be watched at every turn of life by customs, morality, law, or power; and religion usually causes less discomfort for achieving these purposes. But when a religion becomes so corrupt that its corrupting influence exceeds its refining effect, society goes astray, for the religious supports of its moral law have weakened. Guicciardini writes in his secret notes: “For no one as much as for me is the sight of the ambition, greed, and excesses of priests unpleasant, not only because vice in itself is repulsive, but also because … such vice should not have a place in men whose way of life is based on a special relationship with God. … My relations with several popes have made me wish for their greatness to the detriment of my own interests. If it were not for this consideration, I would love Martin Luther as much as myself; not to free myself from the laws imposed on me by Christianity … but so that I may see this mass of scoundrels confined within proper limits, so that they are forced to choose between a life without crime and a life without power.”

Nevertheless, his own morality was not much superior to that of those priests. His personal moral law was to adapt himself at every moment to any superior power; he kept his general principles for his books. In his books too he could believe in human self-love as much as Machiavelli: “Sincerity pleases and brings admiration, hypocrisy is condemned and hated; nevertheless, the first of the two is more beneficial to others than to the person himself. However, I must praise the man whose usual way of life is open and sincere, and also the method of the man who uses hypocrisy only in certain very important cases. The more a man has gained a reputation for sincerity, the more successful the latter method becomes.”

He watched the slogans of the various political parties in Florence; although every group shouted for freedom, it wanted power: “It seems clear to me that the desire to gain dominance over one’s fellows and to show superiority over them is natural to man; so much so that among people who love freedom there are few who would not want to use every suitable opportunity to govern and rule over it. Look carefully at the behavior of the people of a city; observe and weigh their differences well; then you will find that the aim is more dominance than freedom. Therefore, those who stand in the front rank of citizens do not strive for freedom, although the word freedom is on their lips, but what they have in their hearts is the increase of their own opportunity and superiority. For them freedom is a hypocritical term that presents the lust for superiority in power and honor in another way.”

He despised Soderini, the republican merchant, who defended his freedom with gold instead of arms, and had no faith in the people or democracy: “To speak of the people is to speak of madmen, for the nation is a monster full of disorder and error; and its vain beliefs are as far from truth as Spain is from the Indies. … Experience shows that events rarely occur according to the expectations of the crowd. … The reason for this is that effects … are usually connected with the will of a few who are small in number, or whose aims and intentions almost always differ from that majority.”

Guicciardini was one of thousands of people in Renaissance Italy who had no faith, had forgotten the sweet melody of Christianity, had realized the emptiness of politics, did not expect a free country, saw no happy dreams, and while a terrible wave of war and barbarism was sweeping over Italy, had withdrawn; they were sad old men whose minds had been freed and whose hopes had been destroyed; they had realized too late that when myth dies, only power is freed.

Machiavelli

1 – The Diplomat

In this section one more man remains who is difficult to place in a particular class. This man was a diplomat, historian, playwright, and the most pessimistic thinker of his time; yet he was a patriot with a noble ideal; a man who failed in every task he undertook, but left a deeper mark on history than any character of his time.

Niccolò Machiavelli was the son of a Florentine lawyer; a man of moderate income who had a small post in the state service and a small villa in San Casciano, sixteen kilometers from the city. His son, Niccolò, received ordinary literary education, learned to read Latin well, but did not study Greek. He liked Roman history, fell in love with the works of Livy, and almost for every political system and every historical event of the day found a clear parallel in Roman history. He began the study of law, but apparently never completed it. He paid little attention to Renaissance art and showed no interest in the discovery of America (which was taking place in those days). Perhaps he felt that as a result of this discovery only the stage of politics had widened. His only heartfelt and real interest was politics, that is, the art of influence and the chess of power. In 1498, at the age of twenty-nine, he became secretary of the Ten of War and remained in that post for fourteen years.

His work was at first small and consisted of drawing up minutes and notes, summarizing reports, and writing letters; but since he was inside the government, he was able to observe the politics of Europe from an internal viewpoint and try, by using his historical knowledge, to predict developments. His eager, nervous, and ambitious spirit felt that only time was needed for him to reach a high position and play that rapid political role against the Duke of Milan, the Senate of Venice, the King of France, the King of Naples, the Pope, and the Emperor. Shortly afterward he was sent on a mission to Caterina Sforza, Countess of Imola and Forlì (1498). Caterina was too clever to fall under his influence; Machiavelli returned empty-handed, having learned a lesson from his failure. Two years later he was tested again and sent with Francesco della Casa as representative to the court of Louis XII, King of France; della Casa fell ill, and the leadership of the delegation fell to Machiavelli; he learned French, followed the court from palace to palace, and sent such precise and analytical information to the government of Florence that upon his return to that city his friends called him a skilled diplomat.

The turning point in his intellectual development was a mission in which he was sent as chargé d’affaires of Bishop Soderini to Urbino to Cesare Borgia (1502). After being recalled to Florence to present a verbal report, he celebrated his advancement in the world by marrying. In October he was sent again to Cesare. He joined Cesare at Imola and entered Senigallia just when Borgia was rejoicing at having trapped and strangled or caged the men who had conspired against him. These were events that stirred all Italy; for Machiavelli, who now saw that man-eating giant with his own eyes, his actions were lessons in philosophy. The man of ideas found himself face to face with the man of action and paid homage. This young diplomat, seeing the great distance he still had to travel from analytical and theoretical thought to a crushing deed, felt the fire of envy blaze in his soul. He had found a man who was six years younger than himself, who in two years had overthrown more than ten tyrants, commanded more than ten cities, and made himself the meteor of the time. How weak words were for that young man who was very sparing in their use! Cesare Borgia became the hero of Machiavelli’s philosophy; just as later Bismarck became the hero of Nietzsche; in that embodiment of power there was an ethics that went beyond good and evil; he was a model for superhuman beings.

After returning to Florence (1503), Machiavelli noticed that some members of the government had become suspicious of him, thinking that his mind, under the influence of the bold Borgia, had deviated from the path of righteousness. But his diligent plans for advancing the interests of the city won him the respect of Gonfaloniere Soderini and the Ten of War. In 1507 he saw the victory of one of his basic ideas. He had long argued that any country that respects itself cannot entrust its defense to mercenary soldiers, because such soldiers cannot be trusted in a crisis, since whenever an enemy has enough gold, he can always buy them and their leaders. Machiavelli said that a national guard composed of citizens, and preferably sturdy peasants accustomed to hardship and living in the open air, should be formed and always well equipped and trained. This guard should form the last firm line of defense of the republic. After much hesitation the government accepted the plan and appointed Machiavelli to carry it out.

In 1508 he led this guard in the siege of Pisa, and its units performed well in that task. Pisa surrendered and Machiavelli returned to Florence at the height of honor.

In his second mission to France (1510) he passed through Switzerland; his enthusiasm was aroused by the armed independence of the Swiss Confederation and he wished such independence for Italy as well. On his return from France he realized his country’s problem: if a united nation like France decided to conquer the entire Italian peninsula, how could its separate principalities unite to protect Italy?

The great test of his national guard soon came. In 1512 Julius II, angered that Florence had refused to cooperate in expelling the French from Italy, ordered the armies of the Holy League to overthrow that republic and restore the Medici to its government; Machiavelli’s national guard, which had been assigned to defend the Florentine front at Prato, could not withstand the mercenary soldiers of the League and fled. Florence was conquered, the Medici triumphed, and Machiavelli lost both his reputation and his state post. He made every effort to calm the conquerors, and might have succeeded in that effort, but two hot-blooded young men who had conspired to re-establish the republic fell into the hands of the agents; among their papers was found a list of names of those on whose support the two relied; this list included Machiavelli’s name. He was arrested and tortured four times, but since no evidence of his complicity with the arrested men was found, he was released. Fearing arrest, he went with his wife and four children to his ancestral villa in San Casciano. There he spent almost all the remaining fifteen years of his life and lived in poverty mixed with hope. If it had not been for that misfortune, perhaps we would never have heard anything of him, for he wrote those books of his that shook the world in those years of hunger.

2 – Writer and Man

For someone who had lived in the center of Florentine politics, solitude was very sad. Occasionally he rode to Florence to talk with old friends and to use every opportunity to find a job. He wrote several times to the Medici but received no answer. In a famous letter to his friend Vettori, who was then the Florentine ambassador in Rome, he described his life and said how he came to write the book The Prince: “Since the beginning of my last misfortunes I have led a quiet rural life. At sunrise I rise and go for a few hours to one of the woods to inspect the work of the previous day, and walk a while with the woodcutters who always share their problems with me, whether their own or their neighbors’. After leaving the wood, I go to a spring and from there to the place where I spread nets for birds, with a book under my arm – a book by Dante, Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus or Ovid. I read the account of their amorous ecstasies and the history of their loves, and recall my own love, and my time passes pleasantly in these thoughts. Then I go to the inn by the road, talk with the travelers, hear news of the places they come from; various things come to my ears, and I observe the tastes and whims of mankind. This keeps me busy until lunchtime, that is, until the time when, while occupied with my distant and long thoughts, I hastily eat whatever this humble place and my small inheritance can give me. In the afternoon I return to the inn. There I usually find the host, a butcher, a miller, and two brickmakers. I spend the whole day mixing with these rough people, playing cricca and backgammon, games that cause a thousand quarrels and exchanges of rude words; and we often quarrel over a few pennies, and our shouts can be heard in the town of San Casciano. By soiling myself with this baseness, my mind grows dark, and I pour out my anger on my shameful fate. …

At night I return home to devote myself to writing; at its threshold I take off my village clothes, which are soiled with mud, and put on my noble dress; when I am thus clothed, I enter the ancient courts of the men of old; and when I am warmly received, I am nourished with food that is mine alone and for which I was born; and I am not ashamed to converse with them and seek the motives of their actions; these men with their special humanity answer me, and for four hours I feel no annoyance, remember no trouble, no longer fear poverty, have no terror of death, and my whole being is absorbed in them. And since Dante says that no science can be preserved without what has been heard, I have noted down what I have gained from conversation with these eminent men and have prepared a little work called ‘On Principalities’ in which, as far as I can, I delve into this subject. I discuss the nature of principality and lordship, their types, the acquisition of these types, the way of maintaining them, and why they are lost; and if you have paid attention to any of my hasty writings, this one should not annoy you. This work should especially please a new prince; and for this reason I dedicate it to His Excellency Giuliano … (December 10, 1513).”

Machiavelli probably summarized the story here. Apparently he began by writing discourses on the first ten books of Livy, and completed his commentary only on the first three books. He began these discourses, addressed to Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, with these words: “I offer the most precious gift I have, because it includes everything I have learned from long experience and prolonged study.” He notes that ancient literature, law, and medicine have been renewed to refine writing and the practice of judgment and medicine; he also suggests that the ancient principles of government should be revived and applied to contemporary politics. He does not derive his political philosophy from history, but selects from history events whose conclusions support his experience and thought. He takes his examples almost entirely from Livy; sometimes he hastily bases his arguments on legend and occasionally uses passages from Polybius.

As he progressed in writing the discourses, he realized that completing them would take a long time and would be so delayed that it would not serve to dedicate it to one of the Medici. So he stopped the work to prepare a summary containing his conclusions; he thought that such a summary would have a greater chance of being read and might better win the favor of the family that at that time (1513) ruled half of Italy. Thus he composed The Prince (according to the title he himself gave it) in a few months of that year. He decided to dedicate it to Giuliano de’ Medici, who at that time ruled Florence, but Giuliano died before Machiavelli made a final decision to send the book to him (1516). Then he dedicated and sent it to Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, but he did not thank him. The manuscript circulated from hand to hand and secret copies were made of it, and it was not printed until 1532, five years after the author’s death. From then on it became one of the books whose editions were repeatedly renewed.

To Machiavelli’s self-description we can add only one portrait of him that exists in the Uffizi Gallery. This image shows a slender figure with a pale face, hollow cheeks, penetrating black eyes, and firmly closed lips. From this portrait one can judge that he was more a man of thought than of reason, and more sharp-witted than possessed of a lovable will. He could not be a good diplomat because his cunning was too obvious; nor was he a good statesman because he was too strict; as is evident in his portrait from the glove he holds firmly in his hand, representing his semi-aristocratic status, he clung fanatically to ideas. This man, who wrote more like the Cynics and often twisted his lips in mockery and adorned himself so much with the ornament of falsehood that people took even his truth for a lie, in the depths of his being had a fiery patriotism, considered the welfare of the people the supreme law, and regarded all ethics as subordinate to the unity and dignity of Italy.

He had many unlovable traits. When Borgia was at the height of his power, he idolized him; when he fell from power, he joined the crowd and denounced the “broken Caesar” as a criminal and “rebel against Christ.” When the Medici were out, he condemned them with full eloquence; when they returned to power, he licked their boots to gain office. Not only did he visit brothels before and after his marriage, but he sent complete reports of his adventures there to his friends. Some of his letters are so indecent that even his greatest admirer, who wrote the most voluminous biography of him, did not dare to publish them. Near the age of fifty he himself writes: “The snares of Cupid still hold and enchant me. Neither bad roads can end my patience nor dark nights frighten me. … My whole mind is inclined to love, for which I thank Venus.” These things are forgivable, for man was not created for singleness, but what is less forgivable in the considerable number of his letters that still exist, although completely in accordance with the customs of the time, is the complete absence of even one affectionate word – even one simple word – about his wife.

At the same time, he turned his powerful pen to various kinds of essay writing, in each type of which he equaled the masters of the art. In the treatise The Art of War (1520), from his ivory tower, he announced to countries and generals the laws of power and military success. A nation that has lost its military virtues is doomed to perish. An army does not need gold, but needs soldiers; “gold alone does not provide good soldiers, but good soldiers create gold.” Gold flows toward the strong nation, but power is lost from the wealthy nation, because wealth creates comfort and corruption. Therefore, the army must always be kept busy; a small war that occurs occasionally will keep the tools of war ready. Cavalry is beautiful (and effective), except when it faces strong spears; infantry must always be considered the nerve and foundation of the army. Mercenary armies are a cause of shame, idleness, and the ruin of Italy; every country must have a national guard of its own citizens, that is, guardians who fight for their own country and their own lands.

Machiavelli, testing his talent in storytelling, wrote one of the most famous Italian stories called Belfagor, the Great Devil, which speaks with clever humor about the institution of marriage. Turning his attention to playwriting, he wrote Mandragola, the outstanding comedy of the Renaissance Italian theater stage. The preface of the comedy has a modern tone and a novel tribute to the critics: “If anyone wants to frighten the author with slander, I inform you that he also knows how to slander and is truly unrivaled in this work. Although he bows to those who have better clothes than himself, he has no respect for anyone in Italy.”

This play is a strange revelation of the morality of the Renaissance. Its scene is in Florence. Callimaco hears praise of the beauty of Lucrezia, wife of Nicia. Although he has not seen her, he decides to seduce her, if only to sleep comfortably. When he learns that Lucrezia is as modest as she is beautiful, he becomes worried, but when he hears that Nicia is distressed by his wife’s failure to become pregnant, he gains hope. He bribes a friend to introduce him to Nicia as a physician. When he meets Nicia, he tells him that he has a potion that will make any woman fertile, but alas, after Lucrezia drinks this medicine, any man who sleeps with her will soon die. Then he himself undertakes to perform this deadly act; and Nicia, with the usual kindness of story characters toward their authors, agrees to this proposal. But Lucrezia is stubborn in preserving her chastity; she hesitates to commit adultery and suicide in one night. Nevertheless, failure does not occur; Lucrezia’s mother, who is impatient for a grandchild, deceives a priest into recommending in confession to Lucrezia that she consent to the proposal of that false physician, Lucrezia yields, drinks the potion, sleeps with Callimaco in one bed, and becomes pregnant. The story ends with general happiness: the priest absolves Lucrezia of sin, Nicia is pleased with his indirect fatherhood, and Callimaco can sleep. The coherence and style of the play are excellent, the dialogue of its characters delightful, and its humor powerful. What amazes us is not the subject of deception, which has become banal in classical comedy from excessive repetition, nor even the physical quality of love, but the readiness of a priest to recommend adultery for 25 ducats, and also the very successful performance of it in the presence of Leo X in Rome (1520). The Pope was so pleased with that performance that he asked Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici to hire him as a writer. Giulio offered Machiavelli to write the History of Florence for a fee of 300 ducats (3,750 dollars?).

The History of Florence (1520–1525), which was the product of this offer, was almost as decisive in historiography as The Prince was in political philosophy. Obviously that history had important defects: as a result of haste it lacked accuracy; its essential parts were plagiarized from previous historians; it devoted itself more than it should to the struggles of factions rather than to the development of systems; and it completely ignored the history of culture – just as was the method of historians before Voltaire. But it was the first great history written in Italian; its style was clear, powerful, and direct; it discarded the stories that one origin had made beautiful for Florence; it abandoned the year-by-year chronicle method and instead gave a flowing and logical narrative description; it discussed not only events but also causes and effects and, by means of illuminating analysis, considered the political chaos of Florence to be the result of the struggles of rival families and classes and conflicting interests. It based this analysis on two themes: one that the popes, to preserve the independence of their worldly power, had kept Italy divided, and the other that important advances in Italy had been achieved during the rule of princes like Theodoric, Cosimo, and Lorenzo. That a book with such tendencies was written by a man who was seeking money from the Pope, and that Pope Clement VII accepted the dedication of that book without distress, is evidence of the author’s courage and the Pope’s intellectual and financial liberality.

The History of Florence gave Machiavelli a job for five years, but it did not satisfy his desire to swim again in the muddy river of politics. When Francis I lost everything except his honor and life at Pavia (1525) and Clement VII found himself helpless before Charles V, Machiavelli sent letters to the Pope and Guicciardini and explained to the two what could still be done to counter the imminent conquest of Italy by Spain and Germany; and perhaps his suggestion that the Pope should arm Giovanni delle Bande Nere and give him power and money somewhat delayed that dire fate. When Giovanni died and the German troops advanced toward Florence, which was a rich and pliable ally of France, Machiavelli hurried to that city and at Clement’s request prepared a report on how the city’s walls could be rebuilt to make it defensible. On May 18, 1526 he was appointed by the Medici government as head of the five-man board of “gunners.” In any case the Germans bypassed Florence and continued their advance toward Rome. When Rome was sacked and Clement was captured by the mob, Florence once again expelled the Medici and re-established the republic. Machiavelli rejoiced and with great hope again sought his former post, that of secretary of the Ten of War. His request was rejected (June 10, 1527); his behavior toward the Medici had deprived him of the support of the republicans.

Machiavelli did not survive this blow for long. The spark of life and his hope was fading and wounding his body and soul. He had become seriously ill and suffered from gastric spasms. His wife, children, and friends gathered around his bed. He confessed his sins to the priest and, twelve days after the rejection of his request, he died. He left his family in severe poverty; the Italy for whose unity he had suffered so much was in the process of destruction. He was buried in the church of Santa Croce and there a magnificent tomb with this inscription was built for him: “No praise is sufficient for such a great man.” This tomb is evidence that the finally united Italy has forgiven his sins and remembered his dream.

3 – The Philosopher

Let us examine Machiavelli’s philosophy, as far as possible, impartially. Nowhere else do we find so much independent and fearless thought about ethics and politics. Machiavelli was right in claiming that he had opened new paths in uncharted seas.

Machiavelli’s philosophy was exclusively a political philosophy. In it there is no discussion of metaphysics, theology, theism or atheism, or free will and determinism; and ethics itself is subordinated to politics and even made an instrument for achieving political purposes. According to his understanding, politics is the supreme art of creating, conquering, protecting, and strengthening a country. He is more interested in countries than in humanity. He sees individuals only as members of a country and, except when they help determine its fate, pays no attention to the display of their personality on the stage of time. He wants to know why countries rise or perish, and how they can postpone their inevitable corruption as long as possible.

In his opinion, it is possible to establish a philosophy of history, a science of government, because human nature never changes: “Wise men say – and their saying is not without reason – that whoever wants to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events are always similar to past events. This arises from the fact that these events are always brought about by persons who are stimulated by the same passions and will be so; and thus they must necessarily have the same result. … I believe that the world has always been the same and has always contained as much good as evil. Although that good and evil, according to different times, have been divided among nations in different proportions.”

Among the most instructive patterns of history must be counted the manifestations of the rise and decline of civilizations and countries. Here Machiavelli confronts a complex problem with a very simple formula. “Valor brings peace; peace, leisure; leisure, disorder; and disorder, ruin. From disorder order arises; from order, virtue, and from this, glory and prosperity. Therefore wise men have observed that the brilliant age of literature comes after the period of military distinction; and … great warriors have come into existence before philosophers.” In addition to general factors in rise and decline, the action and influence of outstanding individuals can be named; thus, the excessive ambition of a ruler may blind his eyes to the inadequacy of his country’s resources and drag his country into war with a stronger power. Fortune and chance also affect the rise and fall of countries. “Fortune is the arbiter of half our actions, but it still allows us to lead the other half ourselves.” The braver a man is, the less subject to fortune he is, or the less he submits to it.

The history of a country follows general laws determined by the natural weakness of man. All people are naturally greedy, deceitful, quarrelsome, oppressive, and corrupt: “Whoever wants to found a country and lay down laws for it must think that all men are bad and that whenever they find the opportunity they will show their evil nature. If their inclination to evil remains hidden for a while, it must be attributed to an unknown cause; and we must assume that they have not found the opportunity to show it; but time will not fail to reveal it. … The desire for possession is truly very natural and ordinary, and people, whenever they can, will put it into practice; and for that they are always praised rather than blamed.”

Since this is so, people can be made good only by the successive use of power, deception, and habit – that is, made capable of living with order and discipline in a society. The foundation of a country is this: the organization of power through army and police, the establishment of laws and regulations, and the gradual formation of habits to maintain leadership and order in a human group. The more progressive a country is, the less need there is for the use or open expression of power in it; it is enough to familiarize people with principles and to instill the necessary habits in them, for people in the hands of a lawgiver or ruler are as soft as clay in the hands of a sculptor.

The best means of accustoming the evil class of people to respect law and order is religion. Machiavelli, whose admirer Paolo Giovio calls him an atheist and a satirist, writes with great enthusiasm about religion: “Although the founder of Rome was Romulus … nevertheless the gods did not consider the laws of that ruler sufficient … and therefore inspired the Roman Senate to choose Numa Pompilius as his successor. … Numa, who found himself faced with a very savage people and wanted to accustom them to obedience and peace through the arts of peace, resorted to religion as the most necessary and surest support of every civilized society and placed it on such foundations that for several centuries there was no place where fear of the gods was greater than in that republic; this fear facilitated all the actions that the Senate or its great men had in mind. … Numa pretended to have communication with a nymph, and that nymph suggested to him what he wanted the people to do. … In truth there never existed a distinguished lawgiver … who did not resort to divine power, for otherwise his laws would never have been accepted by the people; there are many good laws whose importance lies in the fame of the wise lawgiver, but whose reasons are not clear enough to enable him to urge others to obey them; therefore wise men resort to divine power to solve this problem. … Observance of religious supervision has been the cause of the greatness of republics, and disregard of it the cause of the destruction of countries. For wherever there is no fear of God, the country will be destroyed, unless it is maintained by fear of a ruler.”

Machiavelli, accepting religion in general, turns his attention to Christianity and severely condemns it on the grounds that it has not been able to make good citizens. In Machiavelli’s opinion, the Christian religion, with its great attention to the kingdom of heaven and the preaching of feminine virtues, weakens men: “The Christian religion leads us to despise the love of this world and makes us calmer. The ancients, on the contrary, found the greatest pleasures in this world … their religion glorified no one except men adorned with the ornament of glory, such as leaders of armies and founders of republics, while our religion has glorified the meek and the thinkers more than men of action. This religion has placed the supreme good in the humiliation and wretchedness of the spirit and in belittling the affairs of this world, while the other has placed it in greatness of mind, in strength of body, and in everything else that gives courage to men. … Thus the world has become prey to the wicked, who have found people more ready to go to paradise and to submit to misfortune than to hate it. … If the Christian religion had been preserved according to the commandments of its founder, the countries and territories of Christendom would be more united and happier than they are now. There is no greater proof of the decline of Christianity than that the closer people are to the Church of Rome, that is, to its head, the less they benefit from piety. And whoever examines the principles on which that religion is based and sees how far the present practice and use of it is from those principles will judge that the day of its destruction or fall is near. Certainly if Saint Francis and Saint Dominic had not re-established Christianity on those principles, this religion would now be completely extinct. … To ensure the survival of religious orders or republics, it is often necessary to return them to their original principles.”

We do not know whether these words were written before or after the news of the Protestant Reformation reached him.

Machiavelli’s revolt against Christianity differs completely from the revolt of Voltaire, Diderot, Pepin, Darwin, Spencer, and Renan. These men rejected Christian theology but praised and preserved its moral principles. This situation continued until the time of Nietzsche, and softened the “conflict between religion and science.” Machiavelli has nothing to do with the unbelievable nature of the dogmatic principles of religion; he takes it for granted, but accepts theology, in a favorable way, on the basis that a kind of metaphysical faith apparatus is a necessary support for social order. What he rejects more decisively from Christianity is its ethics and its mental concept of goodness, nobility, humility, and non-resistance; its love of peace and its condemnation of war; the assumption that countries, like their subjects, are bound only by one moral law. For his part, he prefers Roman ethics, which is based on the principle that the security of the people or the country is the supreme law. “When the welfare of our country is absolutely in view, we should admit no consideration of justice or injustice, mercy or cruelty, praise or blame, but, setting aside all other matters, we must take the path that saves the existence and freedom of the nation.” Ethics in general is a law of behavior given to the members of a society or country to preserve social order, unity, and power; any government that limits itself in the defense of the country to that set of moral principles that must be instilled in its citizens will fail to perform its duties. Therefore, a diplomat is not obliged to observe the moral law of his own people. “When an action accuses him, its result must acquit him”; the end justifies the means. Therefore, Romulus did well to kill his brother, because that young government either had to unite or be torn apart. There is no “natural law” and no right that enjoys general agreement; politics, in the sense of statecraft, must be completely separated from ethics.

If we apply these considerations to the ethics of war, Machiavelli certainly believes that those Christian pacifist ethics consider it ridiculous and treacherous. War in practice violates all ten commandments of Moses: in war perjury, lying, theft, murder, and the violation of the honor of thousands of women are common; yet if it preserves or strengthens society, it is good. If a country stops expanding, it declines; if it loses the will to war, it perishes. Peace, if it lasts too long, is weakening and disintegrating; an occasional war, as a tonic for nationality, restores order, strength, and unity. The Romans in their republican period always kept themselves ready for war; when they saw that they had a quarrel with another country, they never tried to avoid war; and it was they who sent an army to attack Philip V in Macedonia and Antiochus III in Greece, instead of waiting for those two to bring the evil of war to Italy. Virtue for a Roman individual was not humility or softness or pacifism, but manliness, masculinity; and courage combined with ability and intelligence. This is what Machiavelli means by the word “virtue.”

From this occasional viewpoint of statecraft, which is completely free from moral constraints, Machiavelli proceeds to the subject that was the fundamental issue of his time: namely, achieving that unity and power necessary for the collective freedom of Italy. He looks with anger at the division, disorder, corruption, and weakness of his country; and here we find what was very rare in Petrarch’s time – namely, that man who loved his country more than his own fame, not because he loved his fame less. Who was responsible for keeping Italy divided, and thus making it powerless against foreigners?

“A nation will never be united and happy except when it obeys only one government – whether that government is a republic or a monarchy – as in France and Spain; and the only reason that prevents Italy from reaching such a state is the Church. For although the Church has acquired and holds a worldly dominion, it has never had the power and courage to conquer the rest of the country and make itself the sole ruler of Italy.”

Here we encounter a new way of thinking; Machiavelli condemns the Church not for preserving its worldly power, but because it has not used all its resources to bring Italy under one political government. Therefore Machiavelli praised Cesare Borgia in Imola and Senigallia because, in his opinion, in that ruthless young man he saw the probability and promise of a united Italy; and he was ready to justify any means that he adopted to realize this heroic ideal. When in 1503 in Rome he turned away from Cesare, his disgust was probably the result of anger at the action that his idol (Cesare) had committed, namely that he had allowed a cup of poison (in Machiavelli’s opinion) to destroy that happy dream.

As a result of the lack of unity that had lasted for two centuries, Italy had fallen into such material weakness and social decline that now (according to Machiavelli’s discussion) only severe measures could save it. Governments and peoples were equally corrupt. Sexual corruption had taken the place of military ardor and skill. Just as was common in the days of the decline of ancient Rome, citizens had entrusted the defense of their cities and lands to others – in one place to barbarians and in another to mercenary soldiers – but what interest did these mercenary bands or their leaders have in the unity of Italy? Not only was there no such interest in them, but their life and happiness depended on the division of Italy. They had turned war into a game with mutual contracts that was as safe as politics; the soldiers refrained from being killed and when they faced foreign armies, they chose to flee and “brought Italy into slavery and humiliation.”

In this case, who could unite Italy? How was such a thing possible? Men and cities were too individualistic, partisan, and corrupt, and they could not be led to unity by incitement to democracy or recourse to peaceful means; the only solution was to impose unity on them with all the tricks of statecraft and with war. Only a ruthless dictator could do so – someone who would not allow his conscience to frighten him, but would strike with an iron hand and allow that supreme goal to justify the means used to achieve it.

We are not sure that The Prince was written with such a spirit. In the same year (1513) that the composition of the book apparently began, Machiavelli wrote to a friend that “the idea of the unity of Italy is ridiculous. Even if the leaders of the countries agree, we have no army except Spanish soldiers, who have little value. Moreover, the people will never agree with their leaders.”

But in the same year 1513 Leo X, who was young, wealthy, and clever, ascended to the papacy; Florence and Rome, which until then had been enemies, were united under the leadership of the Medici family. When Machiavelli transferred the dedication of the book to Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, that country had fallen into the hands of the Medici. The new duke was only twenty-four years old in 1516; and he had shown ambition and courage; Machiavelli might look with indulgent eyes on this brave young man – who, under the leadership and diplomacy of Leo (and the teachings of Machiavelli), could complete what Cesare Borgia had begun during the papacy of Alexander VI; that is, he could turn the countries of Italy, at least north of Naples, by destroying proud Venice, into a union strong enough to prevent foreign aggression. There is evidence that Leo also had this hope. The dedication of The Prince to the Medici family, although probably primarily intended to obtain a job for its author, may have been based on the idea that the Medici family could secure the unity of Italy.

The style of The Prince was old: it followed the plan and method of a hundred old medieval treatises on the government of princes. But in content it was completely revolutionary! It did not ask any prince to be like the saints and apply the Sermon on the Mount in matters related to the throne, but on the contrary it said: “Since my intention is to write something that will be useful to someone who understands it, it seems to me more fitting to pursue the real truth of the matter than its conception. Many have described republics and principalities that in truth have neither been known nor seen; for how someone lives is very different from how he should live. Whoever abandons what is usually done for what should be done will sooner or later, more than securing his own protection, prepare the causes of his own ruin; a man who wants to behave completely according to his claimed virtue will soon face destruction amid a mass of evils. Therefore, a prince who wants to preserve his position and status must know how to err and how, according to necessity, to use or not use that error.”

Therefore, the prince must clearly distinguish between ethics and statecraft, and between his personal conscience and the common good; and he must be ready to do for the country what in the private relations of individuals may be called vice. He must despise half-measures; enemies who cannot be won over must be killed. He must have a strong army, because no statesman can speak louder than his cannons. He must always keep his army healthy, disciplined, and equipped; and he must, by enduring hardships and open dangers, train himself for war. At the same time he must also study the arts of diplomacy, because cunning and deception are sometimes more effective and less costly than force. Treaties, when harmful to the nation, should not be respected, “a wise ruler cannot and should not, when such respect harms him, and when the causes that produced those treaties have disappeared, remain steadfast to his word.”

Benefiting from popular support is to some extent necessary. But if a ruler must choose between the people’s fear of him without love, or their love mixed with fear; he must sacrifice love. On the other hand (as he says in his Discourses) “the crowd is more easily governed with humanity and gentleness than with pride and cruelty … Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius did not need the guards of the emperor and the legions to defend themselves; their guardians were their own behavior and the goodwill of the people and the friendship of the Senate.” To secure the support of the people, the prince must support art and knowledge, arrange public games and shows, respect the guilds, and yet always preserve the majesty of his position. He should not give freedom to the people, but as far as possible he should reassure them with the appearances of freedom. With subject cities, like Pisa and Arezzo in the case of Florence, one must at first behave with severity and even cruelty; then when obedience is established, their subjection can be made normal with calmer arrangements. Prolonged and indiscriminate cruelty is tantamount to suicide.

The ruler must support religion and himself appear religious, whatever his inner beliefs may be. In truth, for a prince, appearing pious is better than being pious. Although the prince does not need to have virtues, pretending to have them is useful to him; for example, it is good to appear merciful, sincere, clean, religious, and honest; it is also useful to really have these qualities, but he must have a mind so flexible that when necessary he behaves in the opposite way. He must be careful not to utter any word that does not indicate the five mentioned qualities, and he must appear to those who see him and hear his words as full of mercy, faith, humanity, religion, and honesty. Man must color his behavior and be very deceptive; people are so simple and so immersed in daily needs that they are easily deceived. Everyone only looks at you, and only a few know what you are; and even those few do not dare to oppose the opinion of the majority.

Machiavelli adds examples to these teachings. He examines the success of Alexander VI and thinks that all of them are completely related to his astonishing ability to lie. He praises Ferdinand the Catholic, King of Spain, because he always covered his military operations with a veil of religion. He praises the means by which Francesco Sforza reached the throne of Milan. These means were courage and military skill, combined with political cunning. But above all, he presents Cesare Borgia as the supreme example of his ideal prince: “When all the actions of the Duke are remembered, I do not know how to blame him; rather it seems to me that he should be offered as an example to all those who have reached the position of government. … He was considered cruel, yet his cruelty reconciled all parts of Romagna, united it, and restored it to a state of peace and loyalty. … With a lofty spirit and vast aims, he could not regulate his behavior in any other way, and only the shortening of Alexander’s life and his own illness frustrated his plans. Therefore, whoever considers it necessary to secure his safety in his new principality, to acquire friends, to overcome enemies by force or cunning, to make himself both feared and loved by his people at the same time, to be respected and honored by his soldiers, to destroy those who have the power or intelligence to harm him, to change the old order into a new order, to be severe and merciful, to be generous and liberal, to dissolve a disloyal army and build a new one, and to preserve his friendship with kings and princes in such a way that they eagerly help him and are cautious in harming him, cannot have a livelier example than the actions of this man.”

Machiavelli praised Borgia because he felt that his methods and character, if it had not been for the simultaneous illness of the Pope and his son, would have led to the unity of Italy. Now at the end of The Prince he appeals to the young Duke Lorenzo, and through his mediation to Leo and the Medici family, to provide the means for the unity of the peninsula. He calls his compatriots more enslaved than the Jews, more oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians, and considers them without a leader, disordered, conquered, humiliated, cave-ridden, scattered, and subjected to the raids of foreigners. “Italy, as if lifeless, awaits someone to heal its wounds. … It begs God to send someone to save it from this tyranny and from the shamelessness of foreigners.” The situation is dire, but the opportunity is favorable. “Italy is ready and willing to follow a banner, if only there is someone to raise it.” And who are better for this task than the Medici family, the greatest family in Italy that now stands at the head of the Church? “Who can describe the love with which Italy will praise its savior, with what thirst for revenge, what firm faith, what loyalty, and what tears? What door will be closed to that man? Who will deny him obedience? This barbaric rule smells like a stench in all our nostrils. So let your illustrious family undertake this mission with that courage and hope with which all worthy matters are accomplished by force, so that our homeland may attain degrees of honor under its banner and under its attention these words of Petrarch may be fulfilled: ‘Valor will take up arms against madness, and the battle between the two will be very short, for ancient courage has not died in the veins of Italy.’”

4 – Considerations

Thus the cry that Dante and Petrarch had raised toward foreign emperors here turned toward the Medici family; and in truth if Leo had lived longer and played less, Machiavelli might have seen the beginning of freedom. But the young Lorenzo died in 1519, and Leo in 1521; and in 1527, the year of Machiavelli’s death, Italy’s subjection to a foreign power was completed. Its freedom was postponed for 343 years until Cavour achieved it by applying Machiavelli’s teachings.

Philosophers have almost unanimously condemned The Prince and politicians have applied its instructions. From the day after the publication of The Prince, a thousand books were published against it (1532). But Charles V examined it carefully, Catherine de’ Medici brought it to France; Henry III and Henry IV, kings of France, even kept it with them until their death; Richelieu praised it; and William of Orange put it under his pillow, as if he wanted to memorize its contents by osmosis. Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, wrote a treatise called Anti-Machiavel as a preface to his future actions, which even went beyond the instructions of The Prince. These teachings were of course nothing new for most rulers, except that they had foolishly revealed their professional secrets. Dreamers who wanted to portray Machiavelli as a left-wing politician imagined that he had written The Prince not to explain his philosophy but with a satirical allusion to expose the tricks of rulers, but the Discourses explain the same views in more detail. Francis Bacon wrote in a forgiving tone: “We must be grateful to Machiavelli and writers like him for showing openly and without any concealment what people are accustomed to do, not what they should do.”

Hegel’s judgment was intelligent and generous: “The Prince, like a book containing the most horrible cruelties, has often been thrown away in horror; yet that book is the product of Machiavelli’s intense feeling of the need to form a (united) country that prompted him to establish principles according to which countries can be founded. Separate rulers and principalities had to be completely eliminated; although our idea of freedom conflicts with the means he proposes. … For those means include the most fearless severity and all kinds of deceptions, murders, and the like; nevertheless, we must admit that those tyrants who had to be suppressed could not be suppressed in any other way.”

And Macaulay in a famous essay considers Machiavelli’s philosophy as the natural reaction of an Italy that was splendid but lacked the spirit of courage and had long been accustomed, due to the pressure of tyrants, to the principles set forth in The Prince.

Machiavelli represents the final struggle of a revived paganism with a weakened Christianity. In his philosophy religion once again, as in ancient Rome, became the servant of a country that is in truth God. The only virtues respected are the virtues of pagan Rome – courage, endurance, self-confidence, and intelligence; the only immortality is a fleeting fame. Perhaps Machiavelli exaggerated the weakening influence of Christianity. Had he forgotten the fierce wars of medieval history and the battles of Constantine, Belisarius, Charlemagne, the Knights Templar, the Teutonic Knights, and Julius II, whose memory was still fresh? Christian ethics relied on feminine virtues because men were to some extent destructive and had qualities opposed to them; to counter that situation, an antidote and also an opposite ideal was needed to be preached to the stony-hearted Romans of the amphitheater, the rough barbarians who entered Italy, and the law-abiding peoples who tried to settle themselves in the sphere of civilization. The virtues that Machiavelli despised were aimed at creating orderly and peaceful societies, and those that Machiavelli praised (and, like Nietzsche, he himself lacked) had as their goal the establishment of strong and warlike countries and the creation of dictators who could kill millions to create unity and drag the earth into blood and soil for the expansion of their rule. He confused the good of the ruler with the good of the nation, thought a great deal about preserving power, thought less about its duties, and never considered the corruptibility of power. He closed his eyes to the competitive and culturally fertile country-city of Italy and paid very little attention to the magnificent art of his time or even the art of ancient Rome. He was immersed in the worship of the country. He helped free the country from the Church, but participated in making an atomistic nationalism an idol that was conspicuously no better than the medieval theory that countries should obey an international morality whose symbol was the Pope. Every ideal was analyzed by the natural selfishness of the people; and a sincere Christian must admit that the Church itself, in propagating and implementing the principle that keeping a proper covenant with heretics is necessary (as was followed in the revocation of the safe-conduct of Hus at Constance and the safe-conduct of Alfonso, lord of Ferrara, in Rome), played a Machiavellian game that was dangerous for its mission as a moral power.

Nevertheless, there is a motivating factor in Machiavelli’s frankness; with reading his book we face a question that few philosophers have dared to pose: Is a statesman bound by ethics? This is a question that we do not find elsewhere in such an open way. Finally we may at least reach one conclusion, and that is: ethics exists only among the members of a society that is equipped to propagate and implement its principles; and international ethics awaits the formation of a world organization that possesses the necessary material power and public opinion to maintain international law. Until then, nations will be like the animals of the jungle and, whatever principles their governments have adopted, their actions will be what is written in The Prince.

When we look back over two centuries of intellectual revolt in Italy, from Petrarch to Machiavelli, we see that its basis and element consisted only in the reduction of attachment to the other world and the increase of interest in life. People rejoiced in the discovery of a pagan civilization in which citizens were not tormented by original sin or the punishment of hell and natural impulses were accepted as forgivable elements in a vibrant society. Asceticism, self-denial, and the sense of sin had lost their strength and, in the upper classes of Italian souls, had almost lost their meaning; monasteries had declined from lack of novices, and the monks, priests, and popes themselves, instead of the sign of Christ, sought worldly pleasures. The bonds of tradition and obedience to religious authorities were broken, and the weight of the Church’s vast organization had become lighter in the thoughts and purposes of the people. Life had become more extroverted and, although sometimes it took on a severe form, it freed many from the fears and anxieties that had darkened medieval minds. Reason, unrestrained, with great eagerness, had made every scene except the sphere of science its playground: the intoxication of freedom was not yet matched by the discipline of experience and the patience of research; this harmony was achieved in the constructive period after freedom. At the same time, among the educated, acts of piety gave way to the worship of reason and genius; faith in the survival of the soul turned into the search for lasting fame. Pagan ideals such as fortune, fate, and nature had encroached upon the Christian conception of God.

For all this a price had to be paid. The radiant freedom of the mind had weakened the supernatural guarantees of morality, and no other principles had been found to fully replace them. The result of this situation was the commission of forbidden acts, the indulgence of instincts and inclinations, and a joyful abundance of immorality – to such an extent that since the time when the Sophists of ancient Greece had shattered myths, freed thought, and broken the chain of ethics, nothing like it had been seen in history.