Machiavelli on War

By Christopher Lynch

Machiavelli on War offers a comprehensive interpretation of the philosopher-historian's treatment of war throughout his writings, from poems and memoranda drafted while he was Florence's top official for military matters to his posthumous works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Christopher Lynch argues that the issue of war permeates the form and content of each of Machiavelli's works, the substance of his thoughts, and his own activity as a writer, concluding that he was the first great modern philosopher because he was the first modern philosopher of war.

Lynch details Machiavelli's understanding of warfare in terms of both actual armed conflict and at the intellectual level of thinkers competing on the field of knowledge and belief. Throughout Machiavelli's works, he focuses on how military commanders' knowledge of human necessities, beginning with their own, enables and requires them to mold soldiers, organizationally and politically, to best deploy them in operations attuned to political context and changing circumstances. Intellectually, leaders must shape minds, their own and others', to reject beliefs that would weaken their purpose; for Machiavelli, this meant overcoming the classical and Christian traditions in favor of a new teaching of human freedom and excellence.

As Machiavelli on War makes clear, prevailing both on the battlefield and in the war of ideas demands a single-minded engagement in "reasoning about everything," beginning with oneself. For Machiavelli, Lynch shows, the successful military commander is not just an excellent leader but also an excellent human being in constant pursuit of the truth about themselves and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501773037

Book preview

Machiavelli on War

Christopher Lynch

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations and Citations

Introduction

Part I. Secretary of War

1. Machiavelli’s Context: Decennials

2. Machiavelli in Command: Legations

Part II. War and Politics

3. Disarmed to Armed: Florentine Histories and Art of War

4. War Fighting

Part III. Politics and War

5. Prince’s Dilemma: The Prince

6. Captain’s Dilemma: The Life of Castruccio and On Ingratitude

7. Imperial Republic? Discourses on Livy

Part IV. Philosopher of War

8. Unseen Enemy: Art of War Redux

9. Philosophy adversus Religion

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

For offering helpful comments on earlier drafts of all or parts of this book I thank Peter Ahrensdorf, James Engel, Henry Higuera, Paul Kirkland, Steven Lenzner, Catherine Lynch, Henry Lynch, Jonathan Marks, John McCormick, David McNeill, Michael McShane, Svetozar Minkov, Christopher Nadon, Glenn Novak, Paul Rahe, Dante Scala, John Sheehan, Abram Shulsky, Nathan Tarcov, John Tryneski, and Karl Walling. For generous support I thank the John M. Olin Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, Dean Victor Matthews, and my wartime consigliere, Richard Goodman.

Portions of chapters 3, 8, and 9 of this book were published previously as journal articles or book chapters. Chapter 3 uses portions of "War and Foreign Affairs in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories," in the Review of Politics 74, no. 1 (2012): 1–26. Chapters 3 and 8 use portions of my introduction and Interpretive Essay in Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War, trans. and ed. Christopher Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), revised and reprinted here with permission from the publisher. Chapter 8 uses much of "The Ordine Nuovo of Machiavelli’s Arte della Guerra: Reforming Ancient Matter," in History of Political Thought 31, no. 3 (2010): 407–25. Chapter 9 uses a portion of Machiavelli’s Turn to Xenophon (with Christopher Nadon), in Machiavelli Then and Now: History, Politics, and Literature, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Prasanta Chakravarty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), revised and reprinted here with permission from the publisher.

Abbreviations and Citations

I have cited The Prince by chapter; Discourses on Livy by book, chapter, and, when appropriate, paragraph; the Florentine Histories by book and chapter; and the Art of War by book and line number in the Edizione nationale and in the translation by Lynch cited below. Occasionally, I have also added page numbers. In order to increase accessibility to English-speaking nonspecialists I generally provide the paragraph, line, scene, or page numbers that correspond to the following translations, even when modified or newly translated by me: The Prince, 2nd ed., trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Florentine Histories, trans. Laura Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Art of War, trans. Christopher Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Mandragola, trans. Mera J. Flaumenhaft (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1981); The Historical, Political, and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. Christian E. Detmold, vols. 3–4 (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1882); Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (DeKalb: Illinois University Press, 1996). I consulted The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli with Related Documents, trans. and ed. William J. Connell (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2016). Thus, for example, the last two numbers, 1 and 116 in the citation "D 1.58.1.116" refer respectively to the paragraph and page numbers of the Mansfield-Tarcov translation cited above.

For the Italian, I have used the following volumes of the Edizione nazionale delle opere di Niccolò Machiavelli whenever possible, citing the volume and embedded line or page numbers of that edition: L’Arte della guerra. Scritti politici minori, ed. Jean-Jacques Marchand, Denis Fachard, and Giorgio Masi (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2001); Legazioni. Commissarie. Scritti di Governo, vols. 1 and 4–7, ed. Jean-Jacques Marchand, Denis Fachard, Emanuela Cutinelli-Rèndina, Matteo Melera-Morettini, and Andrea Guidi (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2002–11); Opere storiche, vols. 1 and 2, ed. Gian Mario Anselmi, Alessandro Montevecchi, and Carlo Varotti (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2010); Il principe, ed. Mario Martelli and Nicoletta Marcelli (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2006); Scritti in poesia e in prosa, ed. Francesco Bausi, Antonio Corsaro, Paola Cosentino, Emanuela Cutinelli-Rèndina, Filippo Grazzini, and Nicoletta Marcelli (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2012). For Machiavelli’s letters I have used Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1971). I also have consulted Il principe, ed. Giorgio Inglese (Turin: Einaudi, 1995).

Introduction

The life and writings of Niccolò Machiavelli constitute a call to arms. His call—at once loud and carefully calibrated—was addressed to a wide array of audiences, from Florentines of his day to future generations of humanity at large. It was designed to persuade them to prepare themselves to conquer the foreign forces arrayed against them and to guide them once they engaged their enemies. To his fellow Florentines, he issued the call to arm themselves against breakaway subordinate cities such as nearby Pisa and longtime rival Lucca; to his fellow Tuscans, to unite in order to arm themselves against the other major Italian powers, be it the Kingdom of Naples to the south, the Milanese across the Po River, or the Venetians across the Apennine Mountains. Most famously he exhorted his fellow Italians to take up arms to expel the foreign invaders such as the French and Spanish. Less vocally, but no less surely, Machiavelli sought to inspire readers to resist the forces of the papal court itself, which he considered a foreign body in the midst of his native land. Most importantly, he called on his fellow human beings to arm themselves for a war of indefinite duration against the prevailing belief in an all-powerful God. Such belief, he maintained, diverted mankind from the necessities and possibilities of human life, thereby obstructing the surest path to human freedom and excellence.

In calling these various audiences to arms, Machiavelli sheds revealing light on the nature of war and warfighting, their relation to politics and human life, and the nature of things in general. When he declares categorically in his most famous work that a prince should have no other object, nor any other thought, nor take anything else as his art but that of war and its orders and discipline; for that is the only art which is of concern to one who commands (P 14), he suggests that knowledge of war is the one thing needful.¹ This provocative suggestion implies not an extreme reduction and narrowing of human life, but an understanding of war as being infinitely more complex, comprehensive, and fundamental than previously imagined. For how else could Machiavelli recommend to would-be rulers—and not just to petty tyrants, but to future founders as great as or greater than the likes of Romulus and Moses—that war be their exclusive preoccupation (P 14)? Machiavelli underlines the broad—even universal—applicability and significance of this directive to focus exclusively on war when he states my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it: such knowers—not the book’s immediate addressee, Lorenzo de’ Medici—are Machiavelli’s true audience (P 15). Indeed, Machiavelli does not reserve for rulers of monarchies alone such sweeping, martial exhortations. In both The Prince and the more republican Discourses on Livy he seems to assert that good military institutions are the necessary and perhaps sufficient condition of good political institutions of whatever type (P 12; D 1.4.1). Most important, in a chapter in the Discourses on Livy titled How much blame that prince and that republic merit that lack their own arms, Machiavelli casts in military terms his truest truth: It is more true than any other truth that if where there are men there are no soldiers, it arises through a defect of the prince and not through any other defect, either of the site or of nature (D 1.21). The most urgent or important fact about human beings is that they can be made into soldiers, any place, any time; the most urgent or important task is to make them so. Machiavelli will accept no excuse from heads of state if they fail to shape human beings in accordance with the most urgent necessity of war.

Such sayings suggest that Machiavelli asserts the primacy of war over peace. This assertion stands in stark contrast to the entire previous religious and intellectual tradition, which argued that the condition of peace among human beings was divinely or naturally superior to that of war. More general statements from the same works confirm this inversion of the traditional hierarchy of peace over war. When considering the problems presented by the little esteem accorded to worthy men in quiet times, Machiavelli offers in the Discourses on Livy the remedy of being "ordered for war so that one can always make war and always has need of reputed citizens, as did the Romans in their first times" (D 3.16, emphasis added). The main interlocutor of Machiavelli’s Art of War says that these same Romans were in continual war and praises them for leaving their soldiers with "no time … for thinking or for Love [Venere] or for games" (AW 1.206, 6.129, emphasis added). In both The Prince and Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli indicates that good military orders are perhaps the necessary and sufficient condition of good political orders, or at least that the latter are for the sake of the former (P 12.48; D 1.4.1; compare D 2.2). This book will consider such statements, first, as they arise from Machiavelli’s own, nearly all-consuming engagement with war during his many years of government service (part I), and then in light of his assessment of both the ineluctably political purpose of military operations and strategy (part II) and the bellicose basis of politics itself (part III). Ultimately, it seeks to uncover the philosophical motivation for the pervasive military emphasis of his writings and thought, a motivation whose fundamental character and full scope few interpreters of Machiavelli recognize (part IV).² As we trace this path, we will come to appreciate the central importance of war for his overall enterprise and gain a clearer understanding of the nature and scope of the enterprise itself. Machiavelli’s enterprise consists in his long-term campaign to free humankind intellectually from the restraints of traditional dogmas—religious, moral, and political—and replace them with a truer understanding of the character of human life and the conditions of human excellence. This is his intellectual warfare. Nonetheless, physical warfare was crucial to the content of his teaching and even to the success of his intellectual campaign. For the primary combatants he called to arms were actual warriors fighting battles whose outcomes could issue either in prosperity, freedom, and even long-lasting empire or in poverty, subjugation, and perhaps annihilation. To the many and varied motives to fight which Machiavelli sought to pique and then control, he added the reasonable hope of victory by providing the means for fighting well: knowledge of war and its art. He provided it for both physical and intellectual combat. On the level of actual physical warfare, he sought to prepare an army able to beat any other European army of his day, but also to provide guidance for military commanders of any time and place, including even our own. Carl von Clausewitz’s assertion that Machiavelli was a very sound judge of military matters hardly begins to signal the quality of Machiavelli’s military acumen.³ Seen in this light, Machiavelli emerges as a master of military and strategic thought who deserves a place among the likes of Sun Tzu, Antoine-Henri Jomini, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Clausewitz himself. On the intellectual field of battle, the most dangerous immediate enemy for Machiavelli was Christianity, both as the authoritative church on earth headed by the pope and in the form of its doctrines propagated throughout the Western world and beyond. In his analysis, Christianity was the proximate cause of the destruction of human excellence and political freedom. His aim was to defeat it as effectively as possible. No less essential to his campaign of spiritual warfare was the defeat of the intellectual tradition that helped give rise to Christianity, namely, that of classical political philosophy. That tradition was represented most famously in the imagined republics and principalities of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Cicero, and more immediately in their Scholastic and humanist successors and interpreters. Seen in this light, Machiavelli emerges as the captain-founder of the modern secular view of human life shared by thinkers from Francis Bacon to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and beyond. This book makes the case that Machiavelli wrote of both types of warfare, military and intellectual, physical and spiritual, usually at one and the same time, and always with an eye to the reestablishment of human excellence on new and firmer foundations.

Its emphasis on war—and especially on the importance of both physical and intellectual warfare—distinguishes this book from others, but it engages many types of interpretation, whether they fall within or outside the overall approach adopted here. This approach was pioneered by Leo Strauss and further explored by Harvey Mansfield, Nathan Tarcov, and others whose work I draw on repeatedly.⁴ Strauss insisted on the immoral and irreligious character of Machiavelli’s teaching while also admiring the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.⁵ Such thinking, seeing, and speaking are infinitely more important to both Strauss and Machiavelli than are teachings—dogmas—of any kind. But both Straussian and non-Straussian readers of Strauss have often focused more on Strauss’s apparent moral blame of Machiavelli than on his philosophical admiration of him—let alone on his thinking together with Machiavelli. Strauss accurately predicted that he would earn the good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule of many readers by expressing the mere inclination away from more sophisticated opinions and toward the opinion according to which Machiavelli was a teacher of evil, even though he called that opinion old-fashioned, simple, and insufficient for grasping the true character of Machiavelli’s thought.⁶ Pervading Strauss’s interpretation is the suggestion that in Machiavelli’s writings there is a certain similarity between warfare proper and spiritual warfare,⁷ a suggestion that the present study takes as its chief hypothesis. However, my understanding of this similarity precludes one line of Straussian interpretation that reasons as follows: because Machiavelli weighs his words with extreme care, when he says something foolish about physical warfare, his words must make sense on a symbolic or spiritual level. Strauss himself at one point seems to—but actually does not—adopt this approach.⁸ As I try to show in chapters 1 through 4, the minor premise of this line of reasoning is false: Machiavelli does not make foolish blunders regarding the basics of physical warfare, pace the judgments of influential military historians such as Michael Mallet.⁹ Therefore, if one is to transfer the argument to the intellectual or spiritual plane, it must be by other means. A more substantive way in which I differ from some scholars who follow Strauss’s approach is that I do not think Machiavelli’s attack on the tradition was animated by an overwhelming anti-theological ire or passion that distorted or narrowed his view of things, as Strauss seems to—but actually does not—think.¹⁰ I develop the thought, in chapters 5 through 9, that Machiavelli was in fact a philosopher of the very first rank who found himself facing necessities not confronted, and in fact in part created, by his philosophical predecessors. He casts those necessities in terms of war and himself as warrior whose chief weapon is his doctrine of the effectual truth of things.¹¹

This doctrine is taken by many interpreters to mean that Machiavelli’s thought rests on the assumption that human beings are naturally evil or selfish, the assumption that they are driven by natural necessity to satisfy their own desires and, absent material external restraint, to do so unjustly. This view is most forcefully stated by international relations theorists who hark back to Giovanni Botero’s late sixteenth-century elaboration of Machiavelli’s reason of state analysis, and it has more nuanced recent adherents, as well.¹² In many respects it is closer, in my estimation, to the truth than are other recent interpreters who seek to save Machiavelli from the charges of immoralism and atheism.¹³ The realist interpretation, however, fails to take adequately into account Machiavelli’s frequent acknowledgment of the fact of human goodness and his emphasis on the difficulty of being altogether wicked, an acknowledgment and emphasis that together signal the need for Machiavelli’s teachings to begin with. Indeed, it is because people are powerfully attracted to an imagined world in which one can safely make a profession of good in all regards (P 15.68), and because only very rarely do men know how to be altogether wicked (D 1.27, title), that Machiavelli is compelled to teach the potential dangers of the former and the frequent benefits of the latter. He does so less on the basis of the assumption of human evil or selfishness and more with the goal of bringing about a world in which a reasonable selfishness reigns supreme. His effectual truth, as we shall see, is not a deductive principle from which he begins but a practical result he seeks to effect.

This book arrives at this overall understanding only by first making an assessment of Machiavelli’s more specifically military activities and writings. This assessment has been aided by the recent scholarship of Mikael Hörnqvist and Andrea Guidi.¹⁴ They have published very useful studies on Machiavelli’s prodigious efforts while a Florentine government official to found a military under Florentine control instead of continuing to rely on mercenaries or soldiers beholden to other governments. Although their approaches are in many respects in keeping with the Cambridge school of Machiavelli interpretation with which I have fundamental disagreements, their attention to military and rhetorical detail helps to insulate their interpretations from what I take to be the most problematic aspect of that approach: its insistence on Machiavelli’s commitment to republicanism understood as an ideology, especially insofar as it seeks to inspire selfless dedication to the common good that reaches its apex in the ideal of the so-called citizen militia.¹⁵ Where this school sees advocacy for the inculcation of selfless dedication to the common good and continuity with the tradition of classical political philosophy, I see Machiavelli piquing and harnessing selfish desires by means of punishments and rewards and radically questioning the same tradition, as will be developed especially in chapters 1 through 4 below. For as different as are our interpretations of Machiavelli’s writings, we share the conviction that understanding the place of military matters in Machiavelli’s writings is crucial to understanding his thought as a whole.¹⁶

If it is problematic to read Machiavelli chiefly as an apologist of republican ideology, it is even more so to see him as a populist ideologue and to cast those who understand him differently as oligarchic ideologues or accomplices, as does John McCormick.¹⁷ His ideological reading nonetheless acknowledges the importance of military considerations for understanding Machiavelli’s thought and the place of the people or the multitude within it. This importance obtains if for no other reason than that the people must be armed in order to beat back—and to beat down, when opportunity arises—the great.¹⁸ This populist reading has less ideological counterparts in Miguel Vatter’s philosophically focused reading and Gabriele Pedullà’s textual-historical interpretation. Vatter argues that Machiavelli’s understanding of virtue carries within it the seeds of self-reinvention that burst the bonds of classical philosophical categories and social hierarchies, giving rise to an ethic of freedom. The present study’s treatment of Machiavelli’s doctrine of the effectual truth of things implicitly engages Vatter’s interpretation of Machiavelli’s thought as the crucial turning point toward a kind of historicism, that is, from philosophy taking its bearings by the form of things, to it doing so by actions and events that change the course of things.¹⁹ It issues in an understanding of a Machiavelli who is not only—as writer—the historical hinge between form and event, between permanence and change, but who, as thinker, moves between them even while placing this permanent problem within an entirely changed framework. Pedullà’s attention to Machiavelli’s conflictualism, and especially to the crucial nexus between the territorial expansion of the Republic and the expansion of the people’s power in the city,²⁰ bears affinities to the present book, and to chapter 7 in particular. His neglect of the princely side of Machiavelli’s thought, however, forestalls a full reckoning with the radical character of the latter’s attack on the classical and Christian accounts of morality.

Republican and democratic readings such as these can further our understanding of Machiavelli’s efforts on behalf of human freedom and excellence, but they tend to skirt those elements of his thought that are less flattering to our democratic sensibilities. This is especially true of the element they might call his intellectual elitism but which is better characterized as his affinity with the best knowers of the world.²¹ My differences from scholars of whatever approach are, I hope, chiefly the product of my conviction that the philosopher Machiavelli understood better than we scholars what was truly essential about his times, himself, and the nature of things—including, especially, the things of war.

Part I

Secretary of War

By Machiavelli’s own account, his practical experience is essential to the knowledge he seeks to convey in his two comprehensive works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Near their beginnings, Machiavelli suggests the comprehensive character of these books and identifies the twofold source of his knowledge. In the dedicatory letter of The Prince, Machiavelli says it will convey all that [he has] learned and understood of what he cares most about, namely, a knowledge learned by [him] from long experience with modern things and a continuous reading of ancient ones. Similarly, in his dedicatory letter (d.let.) to his much longer book on republics, Discourses on Livy, he says of that work, I have expressed as much as I know and as much as I have learned through a long practice and continual reading in the things of the world (P d.let.3; D d.let.3, translations modified). Whether discussing principalities or republics, he implies that neither his practical experience alone nor his reading of the ancients by itself would have been sufficient to arrive at the knowledge expressed in the works containing everything he knows. Why both sources are necessary conditions of this knowledge is a question that pervades the present book. This first part, however, limits its focus to just one of these sources: his experience of modern things, which consists above all in constant engagement with practical military and foreign policy matters throughout his fourteen years of government service. It concentrates on Machiavelli’s prodigious activities as head of Florence’s administration of military affairs, as top official overseeing the city’s Tuscan dominions during fourteen years of almost continuous war, and as diplomatic emissary to military and political leaders throughout Italy and beyond. It analyzes the chief record of the political philosopher’s own direct engagement with the practical affairs of government.¹ Few political philosophers have deeply immersed themselves in a particular area of public affairs for an extended period of time before making that area the central focus of their theoretical writings, as Machiavelli did with military affairs. And few have placed as much stress in their theoretical writings on their own practical experience as Machiavelli does in the above quotations, a stress all the more significant given his emphasis on the interplay between theory and practice.² It is therefore of particular importance that we have a clear understanding of both Machiavelli’s experience in the practical military endeavors that preoccupied him during his time in government and the degree to which his assessments were correct and his actions well taken.

In his Art of War, The Prince, and Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli would show himself to be abreast of innovations in military technology, an insightful participant in efforts to arrive at the optimal combination of weapon systems on the field of battle, and an opponent not of military professionals as such but of the prolonged reliance on mercenary bands not subject to state control.³ The first part of the present book illustrates how Machiavelli’s military analyses and prescriptions in his major works were firmly founded on his own extensive experience with nearly all facets of the organization and conduct of war, as well as with the domestic and foreign policy contexts with which they were so intricately intertwined.⁴ It does so by explicating Machiavelli’s own contemporary chronicle of the military-political context of his years in office supplied in his poems known as the Decennials; by illustrating his own experiences of military affairs while in office as reflected in his letters, dispatches from his diplomatic and military missions, and government memoranda, with particular attention to his central role in one of Florence’s most celebrated military-political successes, the reconquest of Pisa; and by analyzing situation reports connected to some of these missions and his policy paper advocating the founding of Florence’s first native fighting force in over a century.⁵ It also provides the context needed to recognize that the devastating Florentine defeat at Prato in 1512 in no way vitiates the value of Machiavelli’s thoughts on war and foreign affairs. Thus oriented, readers will be in a position to turn in later chapters to Machiavelli’s more historical, political, and philosophical treatments of war in full confidence that these writings were grounded on abundant experience and measured judgments regarding all relevant aspects of war and foreign affairs. By the end of these first two chapters, the reader should therefore be in possession of three things: (1) Machiavelli’s own overarching narrative version of the major political and military events that occurred immediately before and during his years in office, events that appear in episodic form throughout his better-known writings; (2) confidence that when it comes to military matters, Machiavelli knows whereof he speaks; and (3) familiarity with much of the contemporary scholarship on Machiavelli as it bears on Machiavelli’s practical engagement with military and foreign affairs.⁶

Chapter 1

Machiavelli’s Context

Decennials

In his chronicles of the period, Machiavelli himself provides a detailed, compressed account of the context of his years in office of greatest interest to us.¹ Two extended poems, the Decennali or Decennials,² recount fifteen years of Italy’s political and military turmoil beginning in 1494.³ Written for a contemporary audience,⁴ the Decennials are rife with allusions and knowing winks to events familiar in his day to the reading public, but in our day only to historians. Although the explicit subjects of the poems pertain to Italy as a whole, the author directly addresses the Florentines themselves, referring to them throughout as you. The First Decennial was written as Machiavelli was cultivating his plan to give Florence its own military force, and it was published just as the plan began to bear its first fruits in the form of a public display of four hundred recruits marching in formation in the Piazza della Signoria.⁵ The implicit purpose of at least the First Decennial is to so impress readers with Italy’s continued vulnerability to foreign invasion as to inspire Florence in particular to reopen the temple of Mars (FD 550)⁶ by forming a native militia of its own. The work also seems to seek to mollify to some extent the ottimati,⁷ the Florentine political faction of wealthy aristocrats most threatened by Machiavelli’s militia proposal.⁸ With some explication, these chronicles are especially useful as a practical guide to the salient events of Italy as Machiavelli wished his fellow citizens to see them. As the Decennials sing of Italian travails and of the high accidents and furious deeds entailed in the many changes of rule, empires, and states throughout Italy (FD 1, SD 1–5), they also make clear how central to Florentine politics were efforts to reacquire Pisa. Written years before he could possibly have known the crucial role he would play in the Florentine victory, the First Decennial repeatedly mentions efforts to retake Pisa as a barometer of the fortunes of Florence,⁹ which along with Milan, Venice, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples was one of the five great powers of Italy. The Decennials thus provide a condensed sketch of the period leading up to the summit of Machiavelli’s military achievement, the reconquest of Pisa, at the same time displaying the weakness of Italian—as compared to other European—arms, and of Florentine arms, in particular. The fact that the poems cast these important events in ways meant both to appeal to and influence his fellow Florentines is all the more reason to enter into the perspective they seek to foster. We thereby begin to learn from Machiavelli how to see the world along with him even as we prepare to reflect in later chapters on the complete scope of his vision.

The First Decennial begins its narration with perhaps the most consequential event of the age, the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France in 1494.¹⁰ This event was Renaissance Italy’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11, ending a discordant but generally stable era of balance of power among the major Italian states. It launched an extended period in which the power politics of Italian states became entwined with those of the major non-Italian states. In deliberately jingoistic terms, Machiavelli calls this the moment when the discord of Italy opened the way to the French, with the result that Italy suffered being trampled by barbarian peoples (FD 16–18). The other two of the three great powers from outside of Italy, the Holy Roman Empire under Maximilian and Spain under King Ferdinand II, would also be brought into Italy by the far greater discord caused by Charles’s invasion, as each sought to counter or imitate France’s interventions. Meanwhile, the major Italian powers variously invited in, sided with, or opposed outside powers as seemed most serviceable to their ends. Each of the five great Italian powers took its turn at suffering as a direct or indirect result of French intervention: first Florence, then Milan, Naples, the papacy (at least temporarily), and Venice. The immediate and dramatic effect for Florence of Charles’s invasion was the loss of its prized possession of Pisa. In their fury over this loss, the Florentines ousted their Medici overlords to earn their freedom, but the wound of Pisa would torment them for the next fifteen years, with their putative protector, France, applying salt more often than balm. For its part, Milan—whose dispute with Naples had facilitated the initial French invasion and successful attack on Naples—improved its fortunes at first with French successes on its behalf and then again when Milan assumed many of the best French prizes as Charles withdrew barely a year after invading. When Charles’s successor, Louis XII, invaded five years later to press his claims on Milan, it was Venice (which had remained aloof during the first invasion) that was happy to help the invader, in well-founded hopes of making gains against Milan, its rival for control and influence in northern Italy. The Borgia pope, Alexander VI, likewise exploited Louis’s invasion to advance his son Cesare’s designs on the Romagna in central Italy. But when Alexander’s death in 1503 brought Cesare’s enemy, Giuliano della Rovere, to the papacy as Julius II, Cesare was ruined. The new pope assumed Cesare’s gains and united all other major Italian powers and all three major outside powers (France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire) in the League of Cambrai against Venice. Ever since the initial French invasion, Venice had enjoyed profit after profit from others’ labors and hardships. Venice eventually suffered spectacular military defeat at the hands of the forces of the League of Cambrai in the battle of Agnadello. With Venice subdued, the pope swiftly pivoted against the French, his erstwhile partner in the League of Cambrai. Pope Julius famously united all in the Holy League to expel the French barbari from Italy. When the French were defeated,¹¹ Florence’s republican government—essentially loyal to France ever since the Medici quasi-betrayal of the French in 1494—fell at last, and Machiavelli was driven out of office. But discussion of the Holy League takes us beyond the period recorded in the Decennials.

Returning to the poems’ beginning, we see clearly from the outset that Machiavelli’s chief concern is the effects on and in Florence of the French invasions. The First Decennial recalls that the Medici ruler of Florence was deposed owing to his support of Naples at the beginning of Charles’s invasion. It goes on to lament, however, that you [Florentines] could not rejoice as you should have at being freed from under sixty years of being weighed down by that packsaddle of exploitative Medici rule. The chief reason they could not rejoice was that they lost Pisa and those states that the Medici family gave away to appease Charles’s anger at Piero de’ Medici’s failure to rally to France (FD 23–28). Thus, Machiavelli recounts how Florence’s domestic Medici rulers were ousted because of the mishandling of the Florentine dominion of Pisa precipitated by the encroachment of the foreign power of France. He is sure to note that loss of their imperial dominion excited feelings in the Florentines at least as strong as those inspired by their renewed freedom from their domestic oppressor.

Three foci of Florentine politics are here displayed in their dynamic relationship: domestic factions, regional dominions, and foreign interventions. The same dynamic is seen as Machiavelli, going on to note Charles’s departure from Florence toward Naples, recalls to his fellow citizens,

… you, full of indignation,

sent troops into Pisa’s country

against that people full of so much hate.

After some disagreement you found

new orders of government, and they were such

that you founded your state on the people.

(FD 67–73)

In Machiavelli’s poetic rendering, once the foreign power departed, the Florentines sought to regain the chief prize of their Tuscan empire even before they reordered their domestic government. Although Machiavelli’s contemporary Francesco Guicciardini makes clear that the historical sequence was just the reverse, Guicciardini, too, suggests that the dispossession of Pisa was at least as important as the repossession of liberty: The loss of Pisa especially was of such great and inestimable harm to the city that many have wondered which was more important on the day of the Holy Savior, the reacquisition of freedom, or the loss of Pisa.¹² Subject to Florence for nearly one hundred years, Pisa had been a possession of supreme political, economic, strategic, and symbolic importance, stemming first of all from its function as Florence’s chief conduit to the sea.¹³ Machiavelli never pauses to consider what could seem to be the contradiction of a free republic seeking to subject another free republic to servitude. Indeed, he surely includes himself when he writes a brief on reacquiring Pisa, blandly stating the sentiment that no one doubts regaining Pisa is necessary to one wanting to maintain the liberty of Florence.¹⁴ In the eyes of Florentines of all political camps, only one of these two cites could be free.¹⁵

Once Charles, from his perch in Milan, descended on Naples as swiftly as a falcon swoops down upon its prey (FD 47), the emperor Maximilian and the remaining Italian powers minus Florence united to destroy—or, as events would have it, usher out—Charles’s forces. For even Charles’s Italian abettors were aghast at what turned out to be the size, path, speed, and tumultuous consequences of his invasion. The duke of Milan, who initially invited Charles in, soon recognized his own clear stupidity, / and … to save the whole, with the Pope, the Empire and Mark [i.e., Venice, whose patron saint was Mark], made a huge front (FD 52–57). Therefore, as Charles himself left some of his forces in Naples and moved the rest back north to depart Italy via Asti, the battle line was set for the first major engagement of what would come to be called the Italian Wars. It was fought along the Taro river at the town of Fornovo not far from Parma. Charles wished to pass by without a fight, but the Italian forces insisted on engaging him by crossing the rain-swelled Taro. During the intense battle that ensued, the king narrowly escaped personal harm and lost his immensely valuable baggage train,¹⁶ but then continued his withdrawal once the Italians pulled back over the Taro. The French suffered few casualties relative to the very heavy losses inflicted on the much larger Italian forces. Although a case can be made for both sides’ claims to victory,¹⁷ Machiavelli portrays the French in a more favorable light:¹⁸

But these robust and furious [French] charged

the Italian army with such virtue

that over its belly they passed on.

To onlookers, [the Taro] seemed a river of blood,

full of men and arms and horses

fallen under Gallic sword.

So the Italians let them go

and they, without fearing hostile troops,

reached Asti without further travails.

(FD 85–93)

The carnage of the battle was much greater than that of the engagements between mercenaries in Italy in the preceding decades, a bloody sign of the great changes being wrought in war and politics by the invasions of outside powers, and a harbinger of greater changes to come. The content of Machiavelli’s positive portrayal of the French is telling. Whereas in his later, posthumously published Discourses on Livy Machiavelli denigrates unreliable French fury in favor of fury mixed with genuine virtue born of order, here he portrays the French as filled with both furor and formidable virtue.¹⁹ Machiavelli wishes to pique not just Florentine but pan-Italian shame in hopes of inspiring all to arms.

After depicting Charles’s departure from Italy, the poem turns to events related to Pisa and to Florentine domestic politics, events that would set the stage for Machiavelli’s own entry into politics. Machiavelli recalls to Florence her abject and often self-defeating dependence on France in a revealing mixed metaphor. He says, you stayed put here with your beak open, / waiting for someone to come from France / to bring you manna in the desert (FD 112–14). Not only did the almighty France fail to live up to previous promises to return Pisa and other towns to Florence, but fortune so hammers the Florentines that neighboring lesser powers, symbolized by various animals, tore at the hide of your Lion, the symbol for Florence, taking parts of Florence’s dominions for themselves (FD 124–25).²⁰ Florence’s own subsequent efforts to retake Pisa were no more successful than earlier attempts aided by the French, while her opponents were all the more formidable, since the anti-French league turned on an isolated Florence in order to take Pisa for themselves and even to threaten Florence itself, as whoever feared your greatness / came against you, and those [French] were deaf to your pleas, since every man prizes being lord of Pisa (FD 139–41). But as these efforts of the league against Florence foundered because of discord among its members, the vigor of Florence’s own Pisan effort was sapped by internal strife. At issue was the rise of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who had welcomed the French invasion and whose austere way of life, learning, and preaching gained him the authority to steer post-Medici Florence to a form of republican government far wider, that is, more inclusive, than ever before. Machiavelli reminds his Florentine audience that Savonarola, being

consumed [afflato] by a virtue divine,

held you rapt with his speech.

But because many feared to see the ruin

of their fatherland little by little

under his prophetic teaching,

no place was found for your reunion

unless his divine light either grew or was snuffed out

by an even greater fire.

(FD 160–65)²¹

Machiavelli alludes here with implicit satisfaction to the irony of the means of Savonarola’s death: claims that he and his followers could walk through fire unharmed having been debunked for all those with eyes to see, Savonarola was arrested, made to confess to lying and arrogance, and shortly thereafter burned in the Piazza della Signoria.²² The chief constitutional innovation supported by Savonarola, the Great Council, outlived the friar to remain the governing body of Florence throughout the years of Machiavelli’s government service. And Savonarola’s death seems to have been the necessary condition of that service, for Machiavelli’s entry into government was initially blocked by Savonarolan holdovers until, in June of 1498, his appointment to his government posts was approved.²³

Expectations that France would soon reinvade Italy fed Florence’s ever-increasing desire to reconquer Pisa.²⁴ With the death of Charles VIII, Louis XII ascended the French throne with his heart set on the conquest of Milan. Among Louis’s extensive preparations was a deal with Pope Alexander: the pope would grant Louis a much-needed marriage annulment and assist him in conquering Milan and Naples in exchange for Louis’s patronage of the pope’s son, Cesare Borgia, a cardinal until recently. Upon the death of Cesare’s brother Giovanni, Alexander had Cesare removed from among the great clerics, / changing his [cardinal’s] hat for a [soldier’s] cap (FD 178–80). Thus laicized, Cesare would now take over Giovanni’s role as instrument for the advancement of his father’s temporal power, holding high his banner (FD 176) in the Papal States and beyond. Initially, that would mean fighting under the banner of the three lilies of France to gain much of the Romagna region of Italy for himself, threatening rulers such as Caterina Sforza, Countess of Forlì, who contrived to receive protection from Florence, a matter that would be negotiated by Machiavelli on one of his early missions (July 1499, Forlì). Louis, in addition to this deal with the Borgias, would make an alliance with Venice in which he agreed to split Lombardy in exchange for cash to support his invasion. Florence, with backing from Milan, soon gave the truncheon and the contract to fight for Florence to Paolo Vitelli, arguably the most highly reputed mercenary in Italy. With Vitelli in her hire, Florence believed herself to be fierce, strong, and robust by virtue of these arms (FD 186–89). Yet Venice temporarily diverted Vitelli from Pisa by attacking other Florentine possessions, during which time Machiavelli was sent on his first mission (March 1499, Piombino) to prod a mercenary in Florence’s hire to fulfill his contract to move against Pisa in Vitelli’s absence. Vitelli soundly beat Venice, adding pressure on Venice to cooperate with France and freeing up Florence to plan a major push against Pisa with Vitelli in command. Although Vitelli breached Pisa’s walls with artillery, he failed to storm the city to the dismay and outrage of the Florentine people, which had believed victory imminent. Present outside the walls of Pisa at the time, Machiavelli here in the First Decennial reminds his fellow Florentines, Not seeing a remedy for acquiring [Pisa], / you broke camp in order to flee the anguish / of that enterprise and the frustration with Vitello. / Soon after, for the deception you suffered, / you took full revenge, putting to death / him who was the cause of so much harm (FD 226–31). No evidence of Vitelli’s betrayal ever emerged, but Machiavelli here retrospectively defends Florence’s harsh punishment, as he did at the time in his diplomatic correspondence.²⁵

As Louis’s invasion commenced, the five major Italian powers felt the consequences: Venice, as it had agreed with France, planted its flag in Milanese territory (FD 237); Ludovico of Milan, ousted when France invaded, returned briefly, only to be ousted once again and sent to France, miserable and captive (FD 264). Florence, this time aided by French troops, made another failed attempt to retake Pisa (FD 268–88); Cesare, initially supported by Louis but eventually deprived of his French troops, menaced Florentine dominions as he threatened to expand beyond his recent acquisitions in neighboring Romagna (FD 256–58, 289–306); and Naples braced for Louis’s coming southward push to conquer it with the aid of Spain, with whom Louis had agreed to divide the Kingdom of Naples (FD 307–12). Machiavelli was present at the French failure to retake Pisa for Florence. By his account in the First Decennial, French troops under Charles de Beaumont were full of confusion, surrounded by fear, / showing their forces not prepared at all, / but departing almost broken and tainted with / great shame. And the truth was recognized / that the French can be conquered. Even though the primary blame for the loss fell to France, Florence was not clear of guilt, / so the Gaul wanted to cover over / his own shame with your defects (FD 275–85), prompting Florence to send Machiavelli on his first mission outside Italy, and the first of four to the king of France (July–December 1500, French court), to assuage the king’s consternation, to shore up French general support, and to secure acceptable terms for continued French aid against Pisa, in particular.

Once France (quickly) and Spain (more slowly) conquered their respective portions of the Kingdom of Naples, France turned on Spain, and the two came to open warfare over control of the Kingdom and for influence throughout Italy. While the Spanish general Gonzalo de Córdoba prosecuted its more protracted war with the Kingdom of Naples (under the king’s son, Ferdinand), Florence made yet another attempt on Pisa, again with French aid. But the Florentines became distracted by challenges presented by two mercenary captains, first by attacks on its dominions by Paolo Vitelli’s brother, Vitellozzo, and then by fears that Cesare Borgia might join forces with him to do even greater damage: Having already done works of wonder with his troops … and turning Romagna upside down, Cesare seized the duchy of Urbino with a single leap, as Florence stood there with heart and soul suspended in fear of the two mercenary warlords (FD 343–48). The latter danger occasioned Machiavelli’s first mission to Cesare Borgia (June 1502, Urbino). These dangers were quelled only with French intervention, requested by Florence, while the Florentine dominions lost to Vitellozzo were recovered thanks to the energetic statesmanship of Alamanno Salviati, who was a leading ottimato, the most prominent Florentine citizen of the day, and sometime-dedicatee of the First Decennial itself.²⁶ At the same time, Salviati, by helping to establish an executive office that was strong because occupied for life by a single Florentine citizen, prepared the rise of Piero Soderini, the man whose ascent would, as already mentioned, greatly enhance Machiavelli’s influence on Florentine affairs. Punning on Soderini’s first name, Machiavelli says to his fellow Florentines that Piero was the solid rock²⁷ on which you could build your peace (FD 377–78). Referring to anyone, but especially wary ottimati, who may take exception to this lifetime office or to filling it with Soderini in particular, Machiavelli says, "And if from such an order one