Florentine Political Writings from Petrarch to Machiavelli

By Mark Jurdjevic and John P. McCormick

In the fifteenth-century republic of Florence, political power resided in the hands of middle-class merchants, a few wealthy families, and powerful craftsmen's guilds. The intensity of Florentine factionalism and the frequent alterations in its political institutions gave Renaissance thinkers ample opportunities to inquire into the nature of political legitimacy and the relationship between authority and its social context.

This volume provides a selection of texts that describes the language, conceptual vocabulary, and issues at stake in Florentine political culture at key moments in its development during the Renaissance. Rather than presenting Renaissance political thought as a static set of arguments, Florentine Political Writings from Petrarch to Machiavelli instead illustrates the degree to which political thought in the Italian City revolved around a common cluster of topics that were continually modified and revised—and the way those common topics could be made to serve radically divergent political purposes.

Editors Mark Jurdjevic, Natasha Piano, and John P. McCormick offer readers the opportunity to appreciate how Renaissance political thought, often expressed in the language of classical idealism, could be productively applied to pressing civic questions. The editors expand the scope of Florentine humanist political writing by explicitly connecting it with the sixteenth-century realist turn most influentially exemplified by Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini. Presenting nineteen primary source documents, including lesser known texts by Machiavelli and Guicciardini, several of which are here translated into English for the first time, this useful compendium shows how the Renaissance political imagination could be deployed to think through methods of electoral technology, the balance of power between different social groups, and other practical matters of political stability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296020

Book preview

Introduction

MARK JURDJEVIC

Dante famously pathologized the incessant mutability of Florentine culture as a bedridden sick woman vainly attempting to ease her pain by constantly shifting position. Students of political culture, however, have been drawn to medieval and Renaissance Florence precisely because of what the medieval poet condemned as a tragic deviation from the pacific and timeless ideal of universal Christian monarchy. From our perspective, the city’s conflicts add up to more than the sum of their parts. In the intensity of Florentine factionalism and the frequent alterations in its political institutions lay a larger inquiry—more experiential and improvised than theoretical—into the nature of political legitimacy and the relationship between authority and its social context.¹ In this respect, Florence was both exceptional and typical of Renaissance political culture. As Dante rightly observed, Florentine political life was particularly unstable, but throughout Italy the emergence of communes and city-states in the collapse of papal and imperial power led to similar experiments in political legitimacy, constitutional configurations, and competing bids for power from newly empowered urban classes.

This volume provides a selection of political texts—largely but not exclusively Florentine—that illustrates the language, conceptual vocabulary, and issues at stake in Florentine political culture at key moments in its development. The volume opens in the mid-fourteenth century with the letter of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) to Francesco da Carrara, the ruler of Padua, on the nature and duties of the ideal prince. A quintessential example of the widespread mirror-for-princes genre (speculum principis) by the most influential humanist of his day, Petrarch’s advice to the lord of Padua demonstrates how late medieval Italians argued for the advantages and legitimacy of princely rule. Two texts by the early humanist Coluccio Salutati and the jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrato further explore the nature of monarchical government through an analysis of tyranny, monarchy’s corrupt counterpart. Texts by two leading fifteenth-century humanists, the Florentine chancellors Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, celebrate the republican constitutions of Florence and Venice in a context of increasing aristocratic domination of politics. Their texts demonstrate the way in which humanism’s emphasis on unity and consensus added a veneer of classical gravitas first to oligarchical rule in Florence and then to outright control of the city by the Medici family.² Not all humanists deployed their learning on behalf of those in power, however. De libertate, a text by Alamanno Rinuccini, demonstrates how classical ideas—in particular an exhortation to a life of Platonic withdrawal and contemplation—could become a bitter form of protest against the degree to which the Medici had subverted republican self-rule in Florence. Fifteen years after Rinuccini lamented the corruption of Florentine government, the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy, triggering a half century of peninsular warfare between Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire that permanently altered the political context in Florence and Italy.

The remainder of the texts in this volume—none by humanists, strictly speaking, but by thinkers nevertheless deeply immersed in the literature of antiquity and inconceivable without the Florentine humanist setting—were all composed in this context of heightened instability and all directly or indirectly address its implications. The first text is a constitutional proposal for the Florentine government by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, the most accomplished theologian of his day and consequently widely admired in the city’s humanist circles in spite of his fiery sermons expounding on the immorality of pagan writers. Savonarola’s treatise robustly championed a more popular and inclusive variety of republicanism that had distant precedents in Florentine history but had been more recently undermined in the fifteenth century by the Florentine elite and the rise of the Medici. Like Rinuccini, Savonarola’s treatise had a subtext that associated the Medici family, who had been ousted from the city in 1494, with tyranny. The next text, written by the Florentine ottimate Paolo Vettori, addressed the Medici family at the moment of their triumphant return to Florence in 1512, advocating that they adopt a de facto princely regime based on force. The remaining texts were all written by the two greatest political theorists of the Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini. The texts selected (several of which are translated into English for the first time) are all formally prescriptive: constitutional recommendations for the ideal configuration of the republic and for the stable integration of Medici power within it, technical analyses of electoral techniques and procedures, and complex mechanisms for harmoniously integrating the city’s competing social groups. They reveal a lesser-known aspect of the two thinkers’ intellectual preoccupations, both famous for other writings—Machiavelli of course for The Prince and Discourses on Livy and Guicciardini for his monumental history of Italy. Here we see them less as the grand sages of Renaissance political thought engaged in timeless dialogue with the canon and more as political artisans, intensely working on the technical aspects of Florentine politics, fine-tuning the city’s constitution with tools furnished by their experience and sharpened by their formidable intellects.

What these texts do not reveal, and hence part of their appeal, is the larger theoretical normative understanding of political authority elsewhere in Europe to which they were the exception. In Europe of the Middle Ages, political authority was fundamentally linked to the notion of universal monarchy. Because a single omnipotent God ruled over the universe, it followed in principle that a single divine figure should rule over Europe’s peoples, conceptualized not as members of different nations but as common members of Christendom.³ Of course no such central authority ever existed, but the theory of universal monarchy was supple enough to subsume and legitimate Europe’s complex political chessboard. In principle, power on earth in both spiritual and temporal affairs belonged to the pope, who, as God’s chief vicar on earth, enjoyed supernatural legitimacy. Primarily preoccupied with spiritual matters (in theory if not fact), the popes deputized emperors to wield the temporal sword on their behalf and administer justice in worldly matters. The emperors in turn granted authority to lesser monarchs, who in turn granted authority to lesser princes. As a result, all rulers in Europe outside of Italy in this period were local variations on a universal ideal, and they occupied rungs in an ascending ladder of authority that ultimately led, through kings, emperors, and popes, to God. Admittedly, this neat hierarchy was never more than theoretical, but as a shared theory it had considerable power to condition the language through which politics was conducted. We see this in the degree to which scholastic political thought overwhelmingly focused on monarchy, its prerogatives and limits, and its relationship to the church, also conceived as a monarchical structure.⁴

In the early Middle Ages, the political units of the Italian peninsula fit relatively clearly into the prevailing political schema. In the south, the Kingdom of Naples was a natural monarchy much like those north of the Alps, and the myriad city-states that dotted central and northern Italy were all theoretically subject to either pope or emperor. Many towns were supervised or ruled outright by papal or imperial vicars, and up and down the peninsula Guelf (pro-papal) and Ghibelline (pro-imperial) parties vied for power.⁵ Even as late as the sixteenth century vestiges of the luster of an imperial lineage remained: ambitious families who already wielded de facto power over their city, such as the Medici in Florence or the Sforza in Milan, sought out imperial investiture to suggest, however notionally, that their rule fit into Europe’s schema.⁶ The fact that these families valued theoretical imperial investiture long after they had already established themselves in power without making any reference to it whatsoever demonstrates the pan-European durability of the model of universal monarchy.

By the thirteenth century, occasional requests for investiture notwithstanding, the political landscape in Italy had changed in ways that required the creation of new versions of political legitimacy. The long and costly struggle for supremacy between the papacy and the empire left the two major powers increasingly bankrupt and unable to press their claims to the loyalty and obedience of Italy’s increasingly wealthy cities. As a result Italy’s many self-governing towns rejected their papal or imperial overlords and declared themselves autonomous and sovereign in their own right, removing themselves in the process from universal monarchy’s accepted chain of hierarchy. To articulate their new status in language required the fashioning of a new political vocabulary and novel arguments about how and why political communities come into existence. In that new vocabulary and those novel arguments lay the origins of Renaissance political thought and the underlying conceptual framework for the texts presented in this volume.

Initially, most of the central and northern Italian cities developed along republican and popular lines. In a fortuitous stroke of good timing, the thirteenth-century discovery and translation of Aristotle’s Politics added intellectual ballast to the fledgling communal regimes. For Aristotle, the city was the quintessential unit of political life, and his political theory correspondingly began with humanity’s natural instinct to gather together in political communities in pursuit of the common good. Urban Italians of the fourteenth century, living in socially complex communes organized around greater and lesser guilds, found a number of Aristotelian arguments congenial, particularly his definition of a citizen as one who alternately rules and is ruled; his account of distributive justice—the notion that wealth and status should be distributed according to merit; and his defense of the mixed constitution—the notion that an ideal government combines elements of the governments of the one, the few, and the many.⁷ Further, Aristotle’s theory was in significant ways applied from close study of the actual constitutions of the myriad Greek city-states of his day; the applied orientation appealed to the practically oriented merchant culture of the burgeoning communes as much as the numerous parallels between the Italian and ancient city-state systems.⁸

With a few major and important exceptions—particularly Florence, the subject of this volume—the experiment in communal government did not endure. In most cases, Italy’s urban communities succumbed to one-man, or signorial (lordly, from signore) rule. Conflict within the cities’ aristocracies, civil wars, external conflicts, and aristocratic hostility to periodic bids for power from the laboring classes all combined to create instabilities that fatally undermined communal regimes in Ferrara, Mantua, Verona, Milan, and elsewhere. Stability became a paramount priority for strife-ridden cities dominated by merchant elites who privileged commercial over martial values, and it usually came with the constitutional price of one-man rule. In some cases, mercenary captains installed themselves as lords of the cities they were hired to defend; in other cases, despots emerged out of the city’s judicial institutions, such as the captain of the people; and in others, powerful families outmaneuvered their elite competitors to claim control.⁹ As Machiavelli observed in The Prince, such new princes were products of conflicts between popular and elite groups and tended to arise as the champion of the people against the nobles or vice versa. In one respect, the monarchical form of government ubiquitous throughout Europe had returned. But these new self-styled and self-appointed princes, much like the communes they supplanted, could not defend their legitimacy in transalpine universalist language and were compelled to seek new justifications for their power. They found that justification through the reinvention of the mirror-for-princes tradition, a venerable genre of political counsel for monarchs dating from antiquity that was particularly dominant during the Middle Ages.¹⁰

The prevailing genre could not be applied without alteration, however, because the axioms on which it prescribed the conduct of ideal princes were fundamentally linked to and compatible with larger ubiquitous assumptions about universal monarchy (unsurprising, given that many were based on Thomas Aquinas’s On Kingship). We see this clearly in one of the quintessential medieval Italian examples of the genre, the De regimine principum (On the Government of Princes) by Giles of Rome (Egidio Colonna, also known as Egidio Romano). Giles’s arguments in favor of monarchical rule hinged critically on the institution’s religious universality: Just as all the universe is directed by one ruler, God, who is a separate and pure intellect, all things which are in a person, if they are properly to be governed, must be governed by intellect and reason. If, therefore, the government of the whole universe is assimilated to the government which ought to be in one person, since the city is part of the universe, much more should the government of the whole city be reserved to one house.¹¹ It followed from this deduction that the chief responsibility of a monarch as a key mediator between God and individual was not the pursuit of power, wealth, or glory, but the inculcation of Christian ethics, both as an example to his subjects and in order to discharge his own fundamentally religious duties. Giles’s assumptions and language spoke immediately to established rulers occupying clear rungs in the feudal ladder of authority and obligation but offered little to the new princes of Italy intent on asserting their independence from any higher authority.

In another stroke of intellectual good timing, much like the rediscovery of Aristotle that coincided with the rise of the independent communes, the new princes of Italy capitalized on and benefited from the increasingly dominant intellectual movement of Renaissance humanism and its glorification of classical antiquity, particularly its praise of glory won by virtuous individuals.¹² Although the humanist movement had initially begun in private writings and poetry that were far removed from the political arena, by the late fourteenth century humanists had become essential figures in Italian political culture, whether as notaries and speechwriters in chanceries or as court intellectuals and tutors to the children of princes. Humanists in search of patronage deployed their classical learning and their pens to normalize and exalt the rule of the Aragonese monarchs in Naples, the Visconti and Sforza dukes in Milan, and the peninsula’s many petty despotisms, such the Este family in Ferrara, the Gonzaga in Mantua (see Petrarch’s letter in this volume), and the Bentivogli in Bologna.

Humanists at princely courts all produced texts that followed the structure and form of the mirror-for-princes tradition but replaced the Christian interpretation of authority with antiquity’s exaltation of the glory achieved by individuals of exceptional virtue. In Milan, Giovanni Manzini and Antonio Loschi portrayed Giangaleazzo’s rise to power as the triumph of virtue over fortune by a prince skilled equally in arms and letters.¹³ In Naples humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and Giuniano Maio celebrated Alfonso V’s classicization of the city’s layout and architecture, the abundance of classical scholars attracted by his learning and the patronage his court offered, and his practical pursuit of the city’s common good, such as the founding of a public school and plague hospital and the renovation of the city’s ports.¹⁴ In Petrarch’s text from this volume, we see him urging the lord of Carrara to engage in similar practically oriented public-improvement projects. Petrarch drew on Cicero, Seneca, and Roman historians to portray society as a family and the ideal ruler as a loving benevolent father, a recurring humanist analogy that we will see in Florence accompanied the rise of elite oligarchy. In all these texts, rulers derived their legitimacy from their own exceptional virtue, defined according to classical secular values such as glory, magnificence, and liberality, not from royal blood in their veins that established their role in God’s providential plan.

The experiments in communal government did not fail everywhere, however. Of those that survived, Venice, a city-state and territorial power with a commercial empire in the eastern Mediterranean, was the only major power to maintain a relatively unchanging republican constitution without interruption until its conquest by Napoleon in the final years of the eighteenth century. Venetians saw their government as the perfect realization of the mixed constitution championed by Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, and other ancient authorities. The Venetian government combined elements of rule by the one, the few, and the many by distributing power respectively between the princely figure of the doge (a chief magistrate elected for life), an aristocratic Senate, and a popular Great Council. Consistent with ancient theory, Venetians valued the mixed constitution because its harmonious fusion benefited from the advantages of each form of government—the stability of monarchy, prudence of aristocracy, and moderation of democracy—and was uniquely effective at preventing the corresponding corruption associated with each—tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy.¹⁵ They attributed the longevity of their regime to its perfectly designed balance.

Although politically empowered Venetians cherished the notion that their government balanced its power via the one, the few, and the many, in practice Venice was an aristocratic republic dominated by a closed caste of nobles. The Venetian doge, elected for life, may have possessed considerable symbolic influence but in practice was largely a figurehead compelled to operate through and with the consent of the major Venetian councils: the Great Council, the Senate, and the Ten.¹⁶ The constitutional constraints on his power were such that ducal influence, as Robert Finlay put it, was covert and subtle.¹⁷ Nor was the Great Council a meaningful representation of the many. It is true that it was the largest and hence most inclusive of Venetian councils and membership in it confirmed patrician status, but a law—known as the serrata, or closing—passed in 1297 stipulated that membership would henceforth be restricted to families of the then-sitting council. As a consequence, only two hundred families, approximately, possessed rights to full active citizenship. Their system, as perceived by them and abroad, was indisputably successful: the government was wealthy, stable, and a major peninsular and maritime power.

Contemporaries nevertheless understood who was in charge in Venice in spite of its rhetoric of harmony and balance. As the Florentine ottimate Francesco Vettori observed, somewhat ironically given that he himself advocated for a narrow aristocratic republic in Florence: Is it not tyrannical that three thousand aristocrats rule over one hundred thousand popolani who have no hope becoming aristocrats themselves?¹⁸ But—pointed observations notwithstanding—the fact that their success was the product of a regime that limited power to a small caste of noble families only heightened its appeal in the eyes of elites in other republics. This was nowhere more true than in Florence, whose elites frequently praised Venetian government in principle and advocated the actual adoption of similar institutions (as the texts by Poggio Bracciolini, Francesco Guicciardini, and Niccolò Machiavelli in this volume demonstrate).¹⁹ The political preferences of the Florentine elite saw Venetian-style institutions as the best way to inoculate their power from aggression from below and above: popular bids for power by the city’s lesser families and princely bids for power from the Medici family.

Venetian stability and longevity did not reflect, as the Venetians were uniquely proud to recognize, the other peninsular experiments in republican government. Florence, Venice’s only republican rival in terms of wealth and power, was as famous for division, constitutional change, and factional conflict as the Venetians were famous for their opposites.²⁰ Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, advocates of rule by the one (whether the brief tyranny of Walter of Brienne in the fourteenth century or the rise of the Medici in the fifteenth), the few (the oligarchical period led by the Albizzi family), and the many (whether the radical Ciompi revolt of wool workers in 1378 or the more moderate Second Republic of Machiavelli’s day) fought many fierce battles for control of the city, and each form, for a time at least, had moments of triumph. Each triumphant group altered the city’s constitution to their advantage, and hence the form of the government itself remained a fundamentally unsettled question (as the documents by Vettori, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini in this volume demonstrate so clearly) until the abolition of the republic in 1532 by the Medici family, who installed themselves as dukes of a princely state.

In spite of the relatively frequent alterations to the city’s constitution, there were a few durable features that persisted either throughout or for much of the city’s history. The Florentine government distributed power through a network of councils and committees in which the duration of memberships was usually limited to brief intervals (two or three months). The signoria, the city’s chief executive council and center of power, consisted of nine priors, one of whom, the standard bearer of justice (gonfaloniere di giustizia), led the committee and therefore enjoyed elevated status and wielded additional powers (and for a brief period, 1502–12, was elected for life rather than for the standard two-month term). The composition of the Signoria, in keeping with the principles of guild government on which the government was based, was meant to represent the constituent parts of the city: each of the city’s four major neighborhoods elected two priors to the committee. The priors were advised by two councils, the Sixteen Standard Bearers and the Twelve Good Men, and by informal standing committees of ex-priors. The Council of the People and the Council of the Commune were the government’s major legislative bodies, though their power was limited to approving or vetoing proposals originating in the Signoria and its advisory colleges—they could not initiate legislation.²¹ The two other major committees were the Ten of War, which conducted diplomacy and military matters, and the widely feared Eight of Public Safety (otto di guardia e balìa), which investigated and punished political crimes. After the expulsion of the Medici family in 1494, the government added a major popular element in the form of a socially inclusive Great Council with the primary responsibility of appointing the city’s many lesser magistracies and political offices (and which Machiavelli’s texts in this volume demonstrate remained a controversial and symbolically charged institution for years afterward).

The nomenclature of the government’s most important offices and institutions—the captain of the people, standard bearer of justice, Councils of the Commune and the People, for example—reflects the influential role played by the laboring classes and the guild community during the early years of the commune’s development. As their political vocabulary suggests, Florentine guild republicanism of the fourteenth century was the product of the middle and working classes (known as the popolo) and was a self-conscious and substantial competitor to the oligarchic power of the city’s elite families. Unlike in Venice, where those families managed to restrict political citizenship to themselves, in Florence political participation was a function of membership in the city’s guilds, which, however much dominated by elite families, included a broad and multitudinous range of the city’s social classes (over a third of the city’s adult male population).²² In 1293, a popular regime led by Giano della Bella passed the Ordinances of Justice that, among other popular initiatives like banning the city’s magnate class from holding office, established the government as a sovereign federation of guilds, each an autonomous institution in its own right that protected and promoted the interests of its members. Given the multiplicity of the city’s guilds and their centrality to the Florentine economy, this vision of government recognized the inherent legitimacy of multiple competing and conflicting class interests. And given that its concept of government structure was modeled explicitly on guild structure, it championed similar values: the key words of guild republicanism were accountability, delegation, representation, and consent. Classically inclined Florentines viewed the system as the manifestation of the principle of Roman law quod omnes tangit: that which touches all must be approved by all. This brand of guild republicanism was fiercely, frequently, and often successfully contested by Florence’s great families, but it was particularly influential during the 1250s, 1290s, 1340s, and 1370s (culminating in the 1378 Ciompi revolt, an uprising of the city’s wool workers).²³

As much as the political vocabulary of the major political institutions might imply a government with an inherently popular predisposition, the city’s inner circle of elite families, wealthy, old, and as powerful as they were large, championed an altogether different vision of politics that ultimately triumphed over its guild rival. If the many imagined the political community in horizontal, fraternal terms—a band of brothers, separate and equal—the few, Florence’s elite families, imagined the political community in vertical, patriarchal terms—a family governed by a benevolent patriarch who ruled wisely but firmly.²⁴ Their vision of politics grew organically out of the informality and privacy of their patronage politics and the degree to which their wealth and connections made them naturally less dependent on public institutions to promote their interests. As Giovanni Cavalcanti, describing one such period of oligarchical rule, put it: the commune was being governed more at dinners and in studies than in the palace.²⁵ They worked first and foremost through the familial institutions of relatives, friends, and neighbors (parenti, amici, vicini) to create, cultivate, and expand reciprocal relationships of obligation and dependence. When cultivated on an adequately large scale, these networks of personal and family bonds of friendship and marriage became neighborhood-based factions that were shadow political parties, though defined less in the modern sense of a common ideology or advocacy of particular policies and more in terms of a commitment to mutual promotion and advantage. Well-organized and disciplined factional networks were capable of controlling the city’s politics and bending its laws to their will, in some cases by directly putting their members in the government’s key offices and in others by simply manipulating officeholders whose private lives were sufficiently entangled in their patronage network to make them vulnerable to informal pressure.²⁶ The key words of patronage politics were loyalty, obligation, deference, and protection.

Regimes of the few built on such foundations prevailed at numerous moments in Florentine history, but none was as successful, long lasting, or as fondly recalled within the city’s aristocratic houses as the Albizzi oligarchy that ruled Florence from the late fourteenth century to 1434 (though we see that Machiavelli, in his Discursus included in this volume, pointedly disputed such views). This regime came to power in the aftermath of the Ciompi revolt of 1378, which attempted to broaden the guild system and hence establish a considerably more inclusive range of politically active citizens. Benefiting in part from the temporary unity within the city’s normally fractious and mutually suspicious elite caused by the Ciompi revolt and in part from the skilled and muscular leadership of Maso and Rinaldo degli Albizzi, the Albizzean oligarchy maintained a firm grasp on the government and controlled the city’s domestic and foreign policy until they were outmaneuvered and ousted by Cosimo de’ Medici in 1434.

As a result of its success, most advocates of a narrow, aristocratic government throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries pointed to the Albizzi oligarchy as an undisputed example of the virtues of rule by the few. For example, in the 1460s the patrician Niccolò Soderini declared that only those who had governed prior to 1433 knew how to govern.²⁷ In 1500, Luca della Robbia declared that Florence during the Albizzi era was ruled by citizens who were not inferior to the most wise and celebrated Romans of antiquity.²⁸ But the regime’s most influential and intellectually formidable champion was Francesco Guicciardini, who declared in his History of Florence: Florence was successful both at home and abroad: at home, because it remained free, united, and governed by well-to-do, good, and capable men; abroad, because it defended itself against powerful enemies and greatly expanded its dominion. Florentine successes were so great that this government is deservedly said to be the wisest, the most glorious, and the happiest that our city had had for a long time.²⁹ As Guicciardini’s texts in this volume reveal, however, as much as he esteemed the Albizzi oligarchy, he shared Machiavelli’s view that any regime whose power relied on informal and private methods was flawed. He wished to see an aristocratic republic in Florence in which the elite’s leadership was formal, public, and constitutionally mandated.

In the 1430s, the Albizzi regime began to face increasing competition by a faction led by Cosimo de’ Medici, who, after a brief period of exile in 1433, outmaneuvered them the following year, seizing control of the government and banishing the Albizzi and their allies. The Medici family—Cosimo, his son Piero, and grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent—informally ruled Florence for sixty years. They left the city’s formal republican constitution intact, wielding power from behind the scenes using a combination of traditional but aggressive patronage politics and manipulation of the political process and the city’s electoral system.

Owing to the immense wealth of the Medici bank, Cosimo was able to build the largest and most effective patronage network in the city’s history. The family’s correspondence from these years reveals the vast extent of their patronage: they assisted clients with payment of taxes and appointments to political office, brokered marriage alliances, and arranged political introductions and a broad array of other favors.³⁰ In addition to political patronage, Cosimo was a major patron of artists such as Donatello and intellectuals such as Niccolò Niccoli and Marsilio Ficino, whose works naturally portrayed Cosimo and the Medici in the best possible light.³¹ In architecture, the scale and ambition of his patronage was colossal. As a Florentine contemporary of Cosimo put it: Cosimo himself, a most famous man, builds now private homes, now sacred buildings, now monasteries, inside and outside the city, at such expense that they seem to equal the magnificence of ancient kings and emperors.³² Cosimo’s patronage enabled him not only to wield an effective political machine, but also to create the kind of propaganda that masked the rough edges of his politics with the lofty notion that the family’s conspicuousness in the city’s political life reflected their pursuit of the common good, a sentiment expressed in the city’s bestowal on him of the title pater patriae upon his death in 1464.³³

In addition to patronage, Cosimo and Lorenzo also maintained their power through careful manipulation and modification of the city’s political institutions.³⁴ They frequently relied on balìe, special emergency councils with the power to override the city’s larger, and hence more difficult to control, legislative bodies such as the Councils of the People and the Commune. They also established new councils—Cosimo created the Council of One Hundred and his grandson Lorenzo the Council of Seventy—designed to enhance the family’s control of the appointments process and military and diplomatic matters. They deftly exploited a clause in the city’s electoral policy whereby, during periods of immediate crisis, the standard electoral procedure in which the names of appointees to office were drawn randomly from bags containing name tickets of eligible candidates (Coluccio Salutati, an author from this volume, served as chief notary of the tratte, the office in charge of preparing the lists of names) could be suspended and replaced by a system of direct appointment by officials known as accoppiatori. In a particularly adroit maneuver, while restricting key offices to party loyalists, Cosimo’s regime at the same time dramatically expanded the ranks of candidates eligible for office and widely distributed those lesser offices, creating the appearance that the government was becoming broader and more inclusive and granting a measure of pride to many Florentines for whom eligibility alone conferred status and prestige. As one astute observer put it: many were elected to office but few to government.³⁵ The combination of these techniques ensured that the family’s shadow government steered the city’s politics between 1434 and 1494 without any overt assault on the city’s cherished republican tradition (though there were several moments of concerted opposition made possible, according to Machiavelli’s constitutional assessment in this volume, by the limitations of their system of informal control).

The period between 1380 and 1494 that saw aristocratic domination of Florentine politics and the increasing restriction of power around the Medici family and their allies coincided with the rise of humanism as the dominant intellectual trend in Italy and the establishment of Florence as its center of gravity. The humanist movement itself had begun in the 1260s with the Latin poems of Lovato dei Lovati in Padua, roughly contemporaneous with the emergence of the communes from the power of popes and emperors. Humanism remained a largely poetic genre that circulated in the private writings of Lovato and his circle until Albertino Mussato’s Historia augusta, which extended the application of ancient Latin into prose composition and historical narrative. In the later fourteenth century the movement centered around Petrarch, who wrote classically inflected Latin texts in a variety of genres. Although he did apply his learning to political questions, such as his letter to the Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo, praised by Petrarch as the young Brutus, and his letter to Francesco da Carrara from this volume, Petrarch more often preferred Christian and contemplative themes that shifted humanism’s emphasis away from the communal secular themes of Lovato and Mussato. From Petrarch, the torch of humanist learning was passed to his admiring correspondent, the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati, who created a circle of exceptional humanist scholars in Florence, among them the future chancellors Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini (whose writings in praise of the Florentine and Venetian constitutions are included in this volume). By 1427, when Bruni was appointed chancellor of Florence, humanism had become the dominant intellectual movement in Italy and Florence its epicenter, in part owing to the success of Bruni himself, who was a best-selling author.³⁶

Humanism also became the dominant language for the Florentine establishment during the periods of aristocratic and Medicean hegemony, as the texts in this volume demonstrate. By its nature, given that it drew heavily on the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome and their estimation of the duties of citizenship and patriotism, humanism appealed to the elites of Italian city-states and Florentines in particular, who saw clear parallels between their lives as merchants and politicians and the values championed by humanism. In the fifteenth century, intellectuals such as Leonardo Bruni and Matteo Palmieri argued for the superiority of the active life of the engaged citizen over a life of scholarly and Christian withdrawal advocated by the influential Petrarch, who was shocked and disappointed to learn that Cicero had been a politician deeply invested in the Roman politics of his day. In keeping with the pragmatic orientation of Italian political thought, Poggio Bracciolini’s dialogue On Avarice (De avaritia) inverted the traditional Christian critique of wealth as an obstacle to virtue (a critique shared by Roman Stoicism) by contextualizing the question in terms of the day-to-day realities and necessities of the city-state.³⁷ Republics, the avaricious interlocutor proclaimed, rely for their existence, well-being, and prosperity on avaricious men: Because money is necessary as the sinews that maintain the state . . . it seems to be preferable to have many avaricious men who we can depend on in times of difficulty like a stronghold or a citadel.³⁸ Although De avaritia was a dialogue that elaborated the dangers of wealth in equal detail, it is hard to imagine that Poggio’s audience of Florentine bankers and cloth merchants would not have identified with the text’s frequent proclamations that abundant wealth was a vehicle for the expression of civic virtue and patriotism. Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Family (Della famiglia) drew on classical examples to elaborate the duties and values of the patrician pater familias, providing a Florentine example of a peninsular-wide humanist genre that portrayed the state as a family and implicitly argued that it should be ruled as fathers ruled their families—with benevolent, stern, and fundamentally incontestable authority.³⁹

These kinds of arguments spoke directly to the lived experience of the Florentine political community. We see striking evidence of this in the degree to which Florentines—politicians, not humanists—at the consulte e pratiche (advisory deliberations of former priors) began increasingly to defend their policy proposals in terms of classical precedents and parallels.⁴⁰

Many humanists worked in the chanceries of republican and princely governments and wrote explicitly political texts, applying their expertise in classical culture in support of their governments’ ideological and diplomatic needs. As chancellor of the Florentine republic, Coluccio Salutati was one of the first and most successful humanists to demonstrate the political utility of mastery of ancient rhetoric and classical culture. Giangaleazzo Visconti, the duke of Milan and frequent target of Salutati’s diplomatic correspondence during Milan’s long conflict with Florence, testified to Salutati’s power when he was reported to have declared that one letter of Salutati was worth a troop of horses.⁴¹ Leonardo Bruni’s Panegyric to the City of Florence (Laudatio florentinae urbis) and Oration for the Funeral of Nanni Strozzi (Oratio in funere Ioannis Stroze)—both reprinted here—celebrated Florence’s culture of liberty and equality and defended Florence’s increasing acquisition of territory in Tuscany by arguing that, as a state founded by the Romans, Florence was uniquely entitled to wield imperial power.⁴² In Milan, court humanists ennobled Visconti rule and territorial ambition through texts such as Antonio Loschi’s Achilles, an epic that personified the Visconti as the forces of order triumphing over fortune, the chief cause of Italy’s factional divisions.⁴³ In Naples, humanists such as Giuniano Maio, Giovanni Brancati, and Francesco Bandini praised the city’s Aragonese rulers, much as Petrarch had praised Carrara rule in Padua, in terms of their commitment to justice and the city’s material well-being.⁴⁴

The political thought of the Florentine humanists from the first half of the fifteenth century—often referred to as civic humanism, a term coined by the German scholar Hans Baron—has been the subject of considerable debate and controversy since Baron published The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance in 1955, one of the most influential twentieth-century contributions to Renaissance historiography.⁴⁵ In their celebration of the active life and Florence’s republican institutions, Baron saw a self-conscious and sustained defense of protodemocratic values: individualism, citizenship, political participation, and collective self-rule. Further, civic humanism as Baron saw it was no theoretical construct of ivory-tower intellectuals but the product of citizen-scholars intensely invested in the defining political struggle of the Florentine republic in their day: the imminent threat of conquest by Giangaleazzo Visconti. Humanism prior to Florence’s war of self-defense against Milanese expansion may have been fully committed to the recovery of ancient culture, but it did so while privileging the traditional Christian ideal of the withdrawn, contemplative life. While doing diplomatic intellectual battle against the Visconti, Florentine humanists, such as the chancellors Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni (most critically, in Baron’s interpretation), were pushed to articulate the moral righteousness of the Florentine cause. The more they gazed on Visconti tyranny the more clearly they saw the values of the Florentine cause—equality of all citizens before the law, free access to political positions, and freedom of speech—and the more squarely they resituated humanism from the quiet solitude of the scholar’s study to the civic loci of city hall and marketplace. Because Florence was one of the few remaining self-governing republics in Renaissance Italy and absolute monarchy was ascendant virtually everywhere else in Europe, Baron saw Florentine civic humanism as a vital moment in the survival and transmission of the democratic culture of antiquity to modernity, a point of considerable significance for a Jewish Weimar intellectual displaced from his homeland by the rise of anti-Semitic fascism.⁴⁶

Like all great theses, Baron’s interpretation of fifteenth-century Florentine humanism generated abundant controversy and criticism.⁴⁷ On some issues, such as the chronology of key texts and their genesis relative to Florence’s wars with Milan, Baron’s arguments proved durable, but on a number of other issues the Baron thesis, as it came to be known, required considerable revision or qualification, such that its relevance now is less the historical accuracy of its various claims and more the degree to which it has become a vehicle for exploring many of the competing claims about the significance of Florentine humanism. Some scholars, Quentin Skinner chief among them, have concurred with the civic dimension of Florentine humanism but disputed its genesis as a result of Florence’s triumph over Visconti Milan in 1402. Skinner instead situates Florentine civic writing of the fifteenth century as one chapter in a much longer tradition of medieval city-state political literature evident in texts such as the Livres du trésor by thirteenth-century Guelf (and guardian to the young Dante) Brunetto Latini.⁴⁸ Some scholars have argued that many Florentine humanists trumpeted Florentine cultural affinity with Roman traditions of republican freedom precisely to provide propagandistic ballast to Florence’s predatory subjugation of smaller and formerly independent Tuscan cities.⁴⁹ Others have disputed altogether any meaningful connection between the political content of Florentine humanist texts and their political environment. As professional rhetoricians trained to argue both sides of an issue, in utraque parte, the apparently republican sentiments of Bruni and others were not sincerely held convictions but temporary postures of contextual convenience, evident in Bruni’s—Baron’s most important republican ideologue—continuation as chancellor of Florence and lifelong tax exemption after Cosimo de’ Medici’s rise to power and subversion of the republic.⁵⁰ For some of these debates we can see in the texts reprinted here the validity of both sides and hence the degree to which students of these writings and the culture that generated them must decide for themselves. Take the key text at the center of Baron’s thesis, Bruni’s Panegyric to the City of Florence: it boldly and clearly praises freedom in terms of free access to political office and equality before the law, indisputably significant and rare in a Italian context of rising princely and oligarchic power and a European context of increasingly ambitious absolutist monarchies; but his idealization of Florence as the defender of freedom abroad is directly contradicted by the text’s triumphant imperialism.

Less immediately evident in the texts themselves is the degree to which their target may not have been the external threat of conquest by foreign princes, as John Najemy has forcefully argued, but rather Florence’s internal rival to the aristocratic and Medicean oligarchies: the guild republicanism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.⁵¹ The elite regimes that dominated Florentine politics during the efflorescence of civic humanism, even at moments of their most intense internal rivalry, shared a distaste for the corporate principles and language of guild republicanism. They particularly rejected its view of politics as a locus of healthy and legitimate competition between different social classes and social groups, each pursuing their specific interests, for the simple reason that popular movements of the city’s middle and lower classes had in the past periodically wrested control of the city’s politics from them in the name of those guild principles. Civic humanism, the political language that superseded guild republicanism, privileged consensus, concord, unity, and harmony, all values that made it difficult for those on the political perimeter to contest the authority of those at the center.

The case of Leonardo Bruni, as always, is illuminating. As Najemy has demonstrated, Leonardo Bruni’s otherwise laudatory Life of Dante quietly shifted the blame for the poet’s permanent banishment to Dante himself for criticizing those in power: Dante could not maintain his resolve to wait for favor, but rose up in his proud spirit and began to speak ill of those who were ruling the land. . . . Dante entirely lost all hope, since he himself had closed the way of a change of favor by having spoken and written against the citizens who were governing the republic.⁵² Bruni also played an instrumental role in promoting the familial vision of politics that took patriarchal authority for granted. He concluded his summary of Florence’s primary political institutions with a vision of paternal benevolence: under these magistracies this city has been governed with such diligence and competence that one could not find better discipline even in a household ruled by a solicitous father. As a result, no one has suffered any harm, and no one has ever had to alienate property except when he wanted to.⁵³ So long as civic humanism’s vision of politics prevailed, there were no words in the political lexicon to express legitimate dissent or loyal opposition, as Alamanno Rinuccini’s bitter exhortation to a life of contemplative withdrawal from this volume reveals.

After sixty years of Medicean hegemony, the political landscape in Florence changed dramatically in 1494 when the French king, Charles VIII, invaded Italy to press his claim to the Kingdom of Naples. Upon his arrival in Tuscany at the head of a forty-thousand-strong army, he was met by Piero de’ Medici, who had acceded to the position of primus inter pares in the Florentine government following the death of his father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, in 1492. Lacking his father’s charisma and political cunning, Piero soon learned the degree to which he had alienated a powerful faction of the city’s elite families. Capitalizing on the widespread outrage caused by Piero’s surrender of Florentine fortresses in Sarzana, Pisa, and Livorno and a sizeable Florentine payoff to the French king, Piero’s enemies expelled him from the city and seized control of the government, thereby restoring the reality of Florentine republicanism. The anti-Medicean conspirators were all members of powerful elite families resentful of the subordinate role they had played to the Medici over the course of the fifteenth century, hence their desire to reestablish the Florentine government along the aristocratic lines of the Albizzi regime that preceded the Medici—still elite, still narrow, and still conservative, just no Medici. But, as most revolutionaries discover, unintended consequences are difficult to foresee and more difficult still to overcome.⁵⁴

The republic that they ushered in quickly became more socially inclusive than they had intended, resulting in a popular regime that had to contend with opposition from many of the disgruntled aristocrats who had expelled Piero and from Medici sympathizers who agitated for the family’s return. The unexpected popular orientation of the new regime was largely the result of the sudden intervention of the prophetic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, under whose influence a new Great Council was created that elected officials to all major government offices and committees (except for the Signoria) and approved or rejected all legislation, and whose numbers and social composition were unprecedentedly large (though the city’s working classes were still excluded).⁵⁵ Associated as it was with Savonarola and the religious fervor he inspired in his followers, the Great Council was considered not only the popular anchor of the new regime but also a sacral institution with more enhanced status than the other purely secular committees and councils (and that remained at the center of Florentine constitutional experiments in the sixteenth century, as the texts by Machiavelli and Guicciardini in this volume clearly demonstrate).⁵⁶ Although the Savonarolans were only one of several factions in this period (there was also a powerful anti-Savonarolan faction, the angry ones or arrabbiati, a Medicean faction, the grays or bigi, so-called because their unpopularity compelled them to operate in the shadows, and others) Savonarola exerted an outsized impact on politics between 1494 and 1498 (evident also in his constitutional treatise from this volume).⁵⁷ Although Savonarola was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1498, the movement that he created continued to influence Florentine politics in subsequent decades and particularly the city’s adoption of institutions inspired by the Venetian republic that Savonarola had forcefully and publicly praised in his advocacy for a Great Council. The most significant Venetian-inspired institution adopted by the Florentines was their creation of a lifetime standard bearer of justice (gonfaloniere a vita), an attempt to add an element of long-term continuity that the Florentines identified with the Venetian office of the doge, an innovation particularly supported by the Florentine elite who felt that a lifetime standard bearer would increase aristocratic influence in general.⁵⁸ They were disappointed in that expectation, however: Piero Soderini, the only person to hold the office, maintained a position of relative neutrality until 1512, when a Spanish army toppled the republic and returned the Medici to power.

The year 1512 was a crucial one in the lives of Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, the two greatest political thinkers of the Renaissance and with whom our volume concludes. For Machiavelli, it meant an immediate end to his political career and a period of humiliation and political ostracization. After his election as second chancellor in 1498 in the aftermath of Savonarola’s execution, Machiavelli had become intensely involved in Florentine diplomacy as a de facto ambassador (owing to his middle-class status he held the title of secretary, rather than ambassador) on missions to the court of the king of France (Louis XII), Pope Alexander VI’s illegitimate son (Cesare Borgia), Pope Julius II, and the Holy Roman Emperor (Maximilian I), among other lesser figures. A close ally of Piero Soderini, he was also entrusted by him with creating and training a militia force, the first nonmercenary Florentine fighting force since the origins of the commune in the High Middle Ages. When the Medici returned to Florence in 1512, Machiavelli was one of only two people immediately sacked from their posts in the chancery, the result in part of his close relationship with Piero Soderini, to whom the Medici were particularly hostile, in part because of his conspicuous role in the creation of the militia, and in part because the blunt, critical, and sometimes outright dismissive tone of his diplomatic correspondence with his aristocratic superiors in the Florentine government had generated powerful enemies. Shortly afterward, his name was implicated (most likely without his knowledge) in a conspiracy against the Medici, who as a result had him arrested, tortured, and then confined to the Florentine countryside. Forcibly evicted from political life,