Florentine Histories Research Articles

Machiavelli’s Republicanism as the Overcoming of Exclusive Domination: Focusing on the Florentine Histories

Machiavelli’s Republicanism as the Overcoming of Exclusive Domination: Focusing on the Florentine Histories

Machiavelli, Humanism, and the Limits of Historical Knowledge

ABSTRACT Machiavelli’s historical writings, notably the Discourses on Livy (1531) and the Florentine Histories (1532), continued the tradition of the humanist historical enterprise. They were informed by the humanist conviction that historical learning provided guidance for public activity and was therefore an important means of political education. However, a close examination of these works reveals internal strains and an undercurrent of skepticism concerning the value of historical knowledge. The article argues that these tensions and doubts are symptoms of a paradox inherent in humanist discourse: the paradox of historical distance. The humanist project of reviving classical antiquity was based on the premise that the past is different yet relevant to the present. But the very historical consciousness implied by this project threatened to reveal the opposite: that the past was alien and therefore irrelevant to the present.

Aristocratic Insolenzia and the Role of Senates in Machiavelli's Mixed Republic

AbstractThis essay offers an alternative to influential interpretations of elites, peoples, and senates in Niccolò Machiavelli's theory of mixed republics. It analyzes in greater depth both Machiavelli's ascription of the morally objectionable and politically dangerous trait of insolenzia to the nobles as a social class; and his justifications for the establishment of senates as institutions that partially remedy the problem of aristocratic insolence—justifications that depart from traditional Ciceronian and Polybian standards. Machiavelli demonstrates in The Prince, the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories that republics with senates, such as ancient Rome, manage to mollify aristocratic insolence, while those lacking them, like modern Florence, permit such insolence to proliferate unchecked. Moreover, Machiavelli intimates, republics that collectively gather nobles within senate chambers are afforded the opportunity to entirely eliminate aristocratic insolence. The essay concludes with an analysis of senatorial institutions in Machiavelli's “Discursus on Florentine Matters.”

“Gli umori delle parti”: Humoral Dynamics and Democratic Potential in the Florentine Histories

In this essay I consider the potential of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories to contribute to the enrichment of contemporary democratic theory. In opposition to both of the major groups of current interpreters of this text—those who see it as representative of a conservative turn in Machiavelli’s thought grounded in a newfound skepticism regarding popular political competencies, and those who see it as merely a re-presentation of the republican commitments of the Discourses on Livy—I argue that it reveals to us a unique political potentiality, but one that is essential for the construction of an internally consistent Machiavellian theory of democracy. Specifically, through disclosing the historicity and contingency of the humors of the parts of the city, the Histories suggests the possibility of concretely actualizing a condition of social equality, thus overcoming the main democratic deficit of the Discourses—the perpetuation of inequality, as represented in the preservation of the existence of a class with a desire to oppress.

‘Per popolo e per confini’. Florentine tavola delle possessioni and the Property Registration in the Middle of the Fourteenth Century

In the mid-fourteenth century, the authorities of Florence resolved to establish registers of all the real properties within the Florentine dominion. A project, unprecedented in the Florentine history, to record and compile an inventory of estates was conceived. The article considers the circumstances behind the project, primarily the socioeconomic and political factors that drove the authorities’ decision. Details are discussed regarding the selection of officials responsible for the project and the work they did. Analysis of the project in question enables to address certain specific issues of late medieval perception and rationalisation of urban and off-urban space.

Review Essay: Machiavelli: Radical Democratic Political Theorist?

John P. McCormick has become the leading proponent of a new democratic—or, now, “populist”—reading of Machiavelli. The authors of all three of the other books reviewed here cite McCormick as a source and inspiration; and he has written positive blurbs for their books. In Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) McCormick argued that Machiavelli's praise of Roman “offices or assemblies that exclude the wealthiest citizens from eligibility; magistrate appointment procedures that combine lottery and election; and political trials in which the entire citizenry acts as ultimate judge over prosecutions and appeals” constitutes “a robust, extra-electoral model of elite accountability and popular empowerment” very different from, and much superior to, the aristocratic “republicanism” attributed to Machiavelli by the “Cambridge school.” In Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspect Engagements, and the Virtue of Populist Politics, McCormick extends his previous analysis by offering “original readings of crucial themes within … The Prince, the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories” (1–2). He also expands his critique of competing interpretations of Machiavelli and Rome by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Strauss, John Pocock, and Quentin Skinner.

A tribune named Niccolò: Petrarchan revolutionaries and humanist failures in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

ABSTRACTGiven Machiavelli’s fascination with ancient Rome’s plebeian tribunate, it is not surprising that he would take an interest in Cola di Rienzo, the Roman who declared himself Tribune of the Plebs in 1347. However, Cola appears just once in Machiavelli’s corpus, in a single short and enigmatic chapter in the Florentine Histories. This paper argues that Machiavelli nevertheless quietly elaborates on Cola’s legacy later in his Histories, when he introduces Stefano Porcari, another ‘Roman citizen’ whose reform efforts fail catastrophically. Though Machiavelli never explicitly criticizes Cola, he does blame Porcari for exercising poor judgement. This blame, importantly, is entwined with Machiavelli’s allusions to the humanist writings of Francesco Petrarch. By placing these accounts of Cola and Porcari side by side, this paper aims to reveal the Florentine Histories’ complicated relationship with Petrarch, Italy’s most famous humanist. The web of cross-references among Cola, Porcari and Machiavelli himself indicates the latter’s vexation with the sort of rhetorical idealism that Petrarch’s famous endorsement of Cola’s revolution came to represent.

The plebe in the Florentine Histories: Machiavelli’s notion of humours revisited

ABSTRACTAccording to recent scholarship, the Florentine Histories expresses Machiavelli’s growing scepticism toward the popolo. This more elitist ‘late Machiavelli’, however, is an illusion. I show that the illusion arose from (1) the scholarly oversight of Machiavelli’s criticism of the popolo in his early work, Discourses, and (2) the failure to notice his new terminological distinction between the popolo and the plebe in the Florentine Histories. Machiavelli never was a whole-hearted defender of the popolo in the first place, for his consistent commitment was to preserve the balance between the popolo and the grandi. Nor was he unusually critical of the popolo in his later work, Florentine Histories: he directs his harshest criticism to the lower-class plebe and not to the middle-class popolo.

Machiavelli and the Double Politics of Ambition

This article explores the early modern political science of vice by setting out Machiavelli’s treatment of ambition, which can be harnessed but never finally tamed. Even though ambition always aspires to tyranny, Machiavelli argues that it can serve the common goods of freedom and prosperity if it is reined in at home and unleashed abroad. This solution requires a combination of sound political orders and civic prudence. To grasp all of his two-part account of managing ambition, this study mines Machiavelli’s poetry and his Florentine Histories. Machiavelli not only agrees with his liberal heirs that political institutions defuse the threat and capture the energies of ambition in the short run but also adds that the most stable solution needs a dynamic of reinforcement between orders and civic character.

The power of “wealth, nobility and men:” Inequality and corruption in Machiavelli’sFlorentine Histories

This article draws a connection between socio-economic inequality and political corruption based on a reading of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. Prevailing interpretations of the Histories attribute the moral corruption and civil conflict Machiavelli condemns as the source of Florence’s republican failure to the unique historical conditions of early-modern Florence. In this article, I trace Florentine corruption and factionalism to the perennial problem of inequality. Through his narration of the two centuries of Florentine history leading up to Cosimo de Medici’s ascent to first citizen, I contend, Machiavelli demonstrates the deleterious effect of inequality on the social relations, organizational forms, and modes of collective action in Florence. At the same time, his depiction of Florence’s transformation from a quasi-feudal commune dominated by a nobility with private armies to a modern commercial city ruled through patronage illustrates the contingent modality of inequality and the particularly subversive way it can manifest in the more civil republics of the modern era.

The Duke’s Assassin: Exile and Death of Lorenzino de’ Medici. By Stefano Dall’Aglio. Translated by Donald Weinstein.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xx+300. $40.00.

<i>The Duke’s Assassin: Exile and Death of Lorenzino de’ Medici</i>. By Stefano Dall’Aglio. Translated by Donald Weinstein.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xx+300. $40.00.

Faulty Foundings and Failed Reformers in Machiavelli'sFlorentine Histories

T his article argues against prevailing scholarly trends that theFlorentine Historiescontinues to delineate the ways through which Niccolò Machiavelli, inThe Princeand theDiscourses, advised potential founders or reformers to exploit, for their own benefit and that of their patria, the inevitable social conflicts between elites and the people that arise in all polities. Machiavelli demonstrates that, in particular, Giano della Bella and Michele di Lando could and should have attempted to imitate exemplary ancient founders and reformers whom he praises in previous works, especially Moses, Romulus, and Brutus. Machiavelli implicitly criticizes Giano and Michele for failing to spiritedly invigorate new laws with necessary and salutary violence; for neglecting to effectively manage the “envy” of rival peers; for not resisting the allure of “middle ways” between difficult political choices; and for failing to militarily organize or mobilize the entirety of Florence's common people.

Citizens, Subjects or Tyrants? Relocating the People in Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment

SUMMARYJ.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment played a pivotal role in inaugurating the important turn toward the classical republican tradition in the history of political thought. In this revival of republicanism, the people are primarily presented as integral to combining active political participation and military prowess in the context of a common defence of liberty against foreign and domestic tyranny. In this essay we wish to revisit the role of the people in Pocock's interpretation of Machiavelli's republican thought. In doing so, we wish to bring Pocock's contentions relative to the governo popolare one step further by introducing and analysing Machiavelli's expositions of popular behaviour in the context of the Florentine Histories. Contrary to Pocock's assumptions, the Florentine Histories shows how Machiavelli became substantively more critical of the people as a sound political agent. We demonstrate this by reconstructing important shifts in the presentation of the people apparent in this later work, suggesting a number of important elaborations to Machiavelli's understanding of both the people and citizenship.

A Great and Wretched City: Promise and Failure in Machiavelli’s Florentine Political Thought

Like many inhabitants of booming metropolises, Machiavelli alternated between love and hate for his native city. He often wrote scathing remarks about political myopia, corruption, and servitude, but also wrote about Florence with pride, patriotism, and confident hope of better times. Despite the alternating tones of sarcasm and despair he used to describe affairs, Machiavelli provided a stubbornly persistent sense that his city had all the materials and potential necessary for a wholesale, triumphant, and epochal political renewal. As he memorably put it, Florence was truly a great and wretched city.Mark Jurdjevic focuses on the dimension of Machiavelli's political thought, revealing new aspects of his republican convictions. Through The Prince, Discourses, correspondence, and, most substantially, Florentine Histories, Jurdjevic examines Machiavelli's political career and relationships to the republic and the Medici. He shows that significant and as yet unrecognized aspects of Machiavelli's political thought were distinctly in inspiration, content, and purpose. From a new perspective and armed with new arguments, A Great and Wretched City reengages the venerable debate about Machiavelli's relationship to Renaissance republicanism. Dispelling the myth that politics offered Machiavelli only negative lessons, Jurdjevic argues that his contempt for the city's shortcomings was a direct function of his considerable estimation of its unrealized political potential.

A Great &amp; Wretched City: Promise and Failure in Machiavelli’s Florentine Political Thought, by Mark Jurdjevic

A Great & Wretched City: Promise and Failure in Machiavelli's Florentine Political Thought, by Mark Jurdjevic. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014, 295 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). Mark Jurdjevic focuses on two texts written by Machiavelli in the 1520s--the Discourse on Florentine affairs after the death of the younger Lorenzo [de ' Medici] and the Florentine Histories--contrasting their political thought with his two most famous political works, The Prince and the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, both written between 1513 and 1519. Jurdjevic's thesis is that the two later works represent a new direction: rejecting the individualistic emphasis of The Prince and the ancient Roman model advocated in the Discourses, Machiavelli now proposed a reform scheme based on radical institutional change. Much of Jurdjevic's argument is correct. Neither The Prince nor the Discourses is a text exclusively or even extensively focused on the particular problems of Machiavelli's native Florence: the former is directed to a potential Medici new prince in the Papal States, while the latter offers ancient Rome as a standard by which to judge modern politics (therefore including several discussions of Florence, as one among many modern states compared with the Roman paradigm). The Histories provide numerous specific examples of the disastrous institutional structures lambasted on a general level in the Discourse. Following the lead of Francesco Bausi and Humfrey Butters, Jurdjevic documents a sympathy for the traditional Florentine aristocracy in the two later works, absent from the populism dominant in The Prince and the Discourses. The most original contribution of Jurdjevic's book is a revealing demonstration that, in the Histories, Machiavelli is just as critical of the Florentine populace as he is of the Florentine elite (who replaced the ancient nobility), revising an interpretation by John Najemy, who had emphasized Machiavelli's populism in contrast to the aristocratic penchant of earlier Florentine political thinkers such as Leonardo Bruni. Nevertheless, Jurdjevic's analysis is sometimes misleading. Machiavelli did not reject reform initiatives by individuals in the two later works: in both, the reform scheme had to be implemented by Florence's Medici rulers (Pope Leo X explicitly in the Discourse, Pope Clement VII implicitly in the Histories [III. 1]). There is no evidence that Machiavelli was a friend or ally of the pro-Savonarolan leader Francesco Valori (p. 44), opposition to whose party helped Machiavelli gain appointment to the Florentine chancery in 1498. Jurdjevic repeats a blunder (p. 69) that vitiated two of his earlier publications: all Machiavelli scholars agree, on orthographical and palaeographical grounds, that the text now known as The Natures of Florentine Men was not written as a draft for unfinished chapters of the Histories but rather dates to 1506-1508. …

Quinquennial Terror: Machiavelli’s Understanding of the Political Sublime

This paper argues that far from advocating fear of violence as a continuous source of civic provocation Machiavelli’s ideal ruler employs an aesthetic approach to civic violence; one that actually harms few citizens and moderates their fear with admiration through carefully considered psychological imperatives similar to those articulated two hundred years later in theories of the sublime. Such violence as there was would occur half a decade at a time in between which the citizens and the patria would enjoy stability, wealth and honor. It had a proven Medici provenance, having been developed through Cosimo de Medici’s intuitive genius for governance and was maintained by Piero and Lorenzo the Magnificent. The insight was empirically confirmed by Niccolo’s observations of similarly intuitive political savants; namely Cesare Borgia and Julius II. It was not given a technical title by Machiavelli, who unhelpfully referred to it as crudelta bene usate (cruelty well used) but we might call it “the politics of the sublime”. Despite its most dramatic (and consequentially disproportionate) evocation in the Prince, Machiavelli’s reliance on the political sublime waned throughout his literary career, until he rejected it in a stunning critique of Cosimo’s reign in the Florentine Histories.

Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past, by Gary Ianziti.

Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past, by Gary Ianziti. I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2012. xiii, 418 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). According to many scholars of the European Renaissance, Italian humanism was characterized by the emergence of a new historical consciousness which marked a fundamental shift away from the chronicles of the Middle Ages, inaugurating new approaches and methods of studying the past that led directly to modern and, indeed, modernity itself. Nowhere is this shift in paradigm more evident than in the work of the Florentine statesman and scholar, Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444). A man of considerable talent and energy, his prodigious historical scholarship--he authored the famous multi-volume History of the Florentine People (1428), a biography of Cicero (Vita Ciceronis, 1413), and numerous studies of ancient history, including the Commentarium return grecarum (1439), Commentarii de primo bello punico (1418-1422), and De bello italico adversus Gothos (1441)--marks him as one of the greatest and most innovative historians of the early Renaissance. Along with Biondo Flavio (1392-1463) and Lorenzo Valla (1405-57), Bruni was one of the forefathers of modern historical writing. Even if did not quite revolutionize history by establishing it as a modern discipline, Ianziti argues, he set in motion a process of renewal that would lead more or less directly to the achievements of Machiavelli and Guicciardini in the following century (p. 6). Much has been written about Leonardo Bruni, but Gary Ianziti's new study is the most comprehensive and ground-breaking analysis of Bruni's historical work to date. Ianziti's reassessment of Bruni's place in the canon of western European is based on two complementary strategies. On the one hand, Ianziti seeks to recreate the context in which Bruni's historical thought emerged and matured. Bruni was not just a member of the intellectual avant-garde in Florence; was also a politician of great repute. He served the highest level in Italian and European politics (p. 101) as Florence's Chancellor, and also spent a decade in the service of a number of popes during a time of fundamental change in Italian political life and in the evolution of the state. As Ianziti carefully explains, there was a strong connection between Bruni's innovative historical writings, and the emergence of a new type of political culture and statecraft in early Renaissance Florence. Nowhere is this clearer than in his Florentine histories--arguably the first official history of a modern state--which were written during a time of political and social chaos that witnessed the demise of the oligarchy and the rise of the Medici. Not surprisingly, Bruni's historical writings were at once more secular and ideological than previous works, served a clear political agenda, and represented what the author refers to as a new public historiography (p. 308). On the other hand, Ianziti engages in a close, meticulous textual analysis of Bruni's extensive written work, one which is inseparable from the Florentine context and which is ultimately the greatest strength of Ianziti's work. …

Plebeian Politics

In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli offers an ambivalent portrayal of the revolt of the textile workers in late fourteenth-century Florence, known as the tumult of the Ciompi. On the face of it, Machiavelli’s depiction of the insurgent workers is not exactly flattering. Yet this picture is undermined by a firebrand speech, which Machiavelli invents and attributes to an unnamed leader of the plebeian revolt. I interpret this speech as a radical and egalitarian vector of thought opened up by Machiavelli’s text. The revolutionary address reveals an untimely and not entirely self-conscious political radicalism, a plebeian politics that repudiates the logic of oligarchic privilege and is simultaneously not available for subsumption under the mantle of civic republicanism.

New Insights on the Sources for Thomas Middleton's The Witch

SO far, one of the plots of Thomas Middleton's The Witch, involving Francisca and Aberzanes has been considered as free of literary influences, unlike the other plots respectively inspired by Cinzio's novella on Publio and Iforomena (Hecatommithi, Book IV, story iv), by Machiavelli's story of Rosemunde and Alboin (Florentine History, Book I), and by Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft. Yet even if Francisca and Aberzanes’ story seems to be invented by Middleton mostly to fit his satire of Frances Carr, there are a few elements that might have been suggested to Middleton by reading different sources available to him in his printers’ or fellow playwrights’ circles. Thus, when one reads on Cinzio's volume, the story directly succeeding that of Publio and Iforomena unfolds as follows: Nepa ingravida di vn suo amante per opera di vn Medico segretamente partorisce; Il Medico s’inuaghisce di lei, ella non consente al suo lasciuo desiderio; Il Medico palesa l’occulto parto, ella si salua, & è creduta pulzella, & il Medico patisce la pena della sua follia. [Nepa, made pregnant by her lover, gives birth secretly with the help of a doctor. The doctor falls in love with her, she does not want to consent to his lustful desire. The doctor reveals the secret childbirth, she saves herself and is deemed a virgin, and the doctor suffers the pain of his folly.]1

The Iconography of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio’sAltarino

The article discusses a portable altar or altarino painted in 1509-1515 by the Florentine artist Ridolfo Ghirlandaio owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, with particular focus given to the altarino's use of iconcography relating to the Virgin Mary and the Servite monastic order. A brief overview of the Servite order and its significance to Florentine history is offered, and the likelihood that the monk depicted in the work is Beato Filippo Benizi, the first Servite to be canonized, is explored.