The essential writings of Machiavelli (59 page)

CALLIMACO:
The Lord be with you.

NICIA:
Doctor, take hold of my wife’s hand.

CALLIMACO:
Gladly.

NICIA:
Lucrezia, this man is the reason we will have a staff to lean on in our declining years.

LUCREZIA:
I am most grateful, and would be happy if he would be our friend.

NICIA:
Bless you, Lucrezia! I would like him and Ligurio to come dine with us today.

LUCREZIA:
Most definitely.

NICIA:
And I shall give them the key to the room above the arcade so that they can come whenever they like, as they do not have women at home to attend to them.

CALLIMACO:
That is very kind. I will gladly make good use of it from time to time.

FRIAR:
Am I to receive some money for charitable purposes?

NICIA:
You certainly will, Friar. It will be sent you today.

LIGURIO:
Will anyone see to Siro?

NICIA:
Let him come to me: What is mine is his for the asking. Lucrezia, how many coins do you have on you for the Friar’s purification ceremony?

LUCREZIA:
I don’t quite remember.

NICIA:
Well, how many?

LUCREZIA:
Let’s give him
ten grossi
.

NICIA:
Well, I’ll be hanged!

FRIAR:
And you, Madonna Sostrata, it seems, have made a robust new stalk shoot up in place of the old.

SOSTRATA:
That’s reason enough to rejoice, wouldn’t you say?

FRIAR:
Let us all go inside the church, where we can say our prayers. Then, after the sermon, you can go back home and dine at leisure.—As for you, dear spectators, do not wait for us to come back out: The service will be long, and afterward I shall stay inside the church, while they will use a side exit to go home. Farewell.

8.
Latin: “Good day.”

L
ETTERS

This selection from Machiavelli’s correspondence ranges from one of the earliest of his letters that has come down to us—a fascinating firsthand account of Savonarola’s final desperate sermons before his execution—to one of Machiavelli’s last letters, full of warmth and hope, written to his teenage son a few months before his death. The letters are elegant and informative, and they are carefully crafted, as they were written to be shown and read to friends and influential patrons. Machiavelli, forthright and outspoken in all his works, is even more at ease expressing his opinions in his correspondence, and we find in his letters some of his most creative, original, and inspired writings.

T
O
R
ICCARDO
B
ECCHI

F
LORENCE
, M
ARCH
9, 1498

Machiavelli composed this letter during a crucial and tumultuous period of change in Florence. Over the previous few years, Girolamo Savonarola had attained unprecedented political power in Florence, gaining an ever-larger fanatical following through eloquent sermons, in which he attacked the vice and worldliness of Florence, as well as through his predictions, such as that of the death date of Pope Innocent VIII. He arranged massive bonfires of the vanities in which citizens were pushed to burn worldly items ranging from clothing to books and paintings. Now, at the beginning of 1498, Savonarola was about to succumb to his opponents
.

This letter is addressed to Riccardo Becchi, Florence’s emissary to the court of Pope Alexander VI in Rome, and describes what were to be Savonarola’s last sermons. (He was executed two months later.) As Florence’s negotiator in Rome, it was important for Becchi to be apprised of the situation in Florence, and Machiavelli was eager to find out from Becchi the stratagems of the pope, Savonarola’s most formidable enemy. In
The Prince,
chapter 6, Machiavelli gives his assessment of Savonarola’s failure as a leader: “Savonarola did not have a system for holding on to those who had believed in him, nor did he have a system for making those believe who did not. Therefore, rulers like Savonarola have great difficulty in proceeding; their path is strewn with difficulties that they must overcome through prowess. Once they overcome these difficulties, the populace begin to venerate them. And once these rulers have eliminated those who resent their achievement, they remain powerful, secure, honored, and content.”

—

So that I may give you a full report of matters here in Florence concerning the Friar, as you requested, you must know that after the two sermons he delivered
¹
—of which you have received copies—he gave another on Carnival Sunday. He preached at length, after which he invited all his followers to take communion on Carnival Day at the Monastery of San Marco, saying that he would pray to God to send a clear sign in the event that the things he had predicted had not come down from Him.
²
The Friar did this in order to unite his supporters, some say, and to reinforce them in his defense, as he was certain that the new Signoria, who had already been elected but whose identity had not yet been made public, would be opposed to him.
³
When the members of the Signoria were announced on Monday (I assume you are aware of their names), the Friar determined that more than two-thirds of the new Signori would be hostile to him, not to mention that the pontiff had sent a papal brief summoning him to Rome under pain of interdiction. As the Friar felt certain that the Signoria would want him to obey the papal order, he decided, either by his own counsel or on the advice of others, not to preach in the Cathedral of Santa Reparata, but to retire to the safety of the Monastery of San Marco. On Thursday morning, however, when the new Signoria came into office, he announced—at Santa Reparata—that he would comply with the papal order so as to avoid turmoil and to serve the honor of God. The men of his congregation were to come to hear his sermon at San Marco, and the women were to go to Fra Domenico at the Cathedral of San Lorenzo.
⁴
If you had heard the audacity with which our Friar, finding himself in his own sanctuary, began his sermon, and the audacity with which he continued, your admiration would have been boundless. He was now greatly afraid for himself, and believing that the new Signoria would not hesitate to harm him, he had decided to bolster himself with as many citizens who would go down to ruin with him as he could. And so he began his sermon by instilling great fear and alarm, using reasoning that seemed sound enough to anyone not weighing it too carefully His followers, he proclaimed, were the very best of men and his adversaries the very worst, and he summoned up every argument that might weaken the opposing party and reinforce his own—a sermon that, as I was present, I shall briefly describe.

The subject of his first sermon at San Marco was the following text from Exodus: “The more they oppressed them, the more they were multiplied and increased.”
⁵
But before he began expounding on these words, he justified at some length his having given in to the pope’s command, saying: “Prudence is the right knowledge about what is to be done.”
⁶
All men, he declared, have and have had an aim, but different aims: The aim of the Christians is Christ, while the aims of other men, past and present, depended on their religion. As we are Christians, our aim is Christ, and we must strive toward this aim and serve the honor of Christ with utmost prudence and according to the times. If the times demand that we endanger our life for Christ, then we must endanger it. If the times demand that we hide ourselves, then we must hide, as we have read of Christ and Saint Paul. That, the Friar added, is what we must do, and that is what we have done: For when the time came to stand up to the furor and turmoil, we did so, as we did on the Day of Ascension,
⁷
because the situation demanded it, as did the honor of God. Now that the honor of God demands that we cede to wrath, we shall do so.

Having made this brief speech, he described two groups: one that fought under God, which comprised himself and his followers, and the other that fought under the Devil, which comprised the factions opposing him. After expounding on this at some length, he began an interpretation of the words he had quoted from Exodus, saying that tribulations made good men grow in two ways: in spirit and in number. Man grows in spirit, he explained, because when adversity descends on him, he draws closer to God, becoming stronger for being nearer his agent, just as hot water when it is brought closer to fire becomes scalding from being nearer its agent. And man grows in number because there are three types of man: the good man, in other words, he who follows me; the perverse and obstinate men, who are my adversaries; and a third type, who leads a dissolute life dedicated to pleasure, but who is neither obstinate in evil deed nor inclined to do good, because he cannot distinguish between evil and good. The moment there is an actual conflict between the two—“Opposites when placed next to each other come better to light”
⁸
—the malice of the evil and the candor of the good become clear, and man flees the former and draws close to the latter, because by nature man flees evil and readily follows good. Hence in times of adversity the evil ones become fewer while the good multiply, “and therefore they grow so much more, etc.”
⁹

I am discussing this only briefly, because the confines of a letter do not encourage lengthy narration. The Friar then entered into various discourses, as is his habit, and then, in order to deal his adversaries a hefty blow and lay the groundwork for his next sermon, announced that our discords and turmoil would engender a tyrant who would destroy our houses and ravage our land. This, he said, did not contradict what he had already preached—that Florence would prosper and rule all Italy—because the tyrant would prevail for only a short time in Florence before he was chased from the city. With this he completed his sermon.

The following morning, still expounding on Exodus, he came to the line where it says that Moses killed an Egyptian.
¹⁰
The Egyptian, he explained, stood for evil men, and Moses stood for the preacher who slew them by uncovering their vices. “O Egyptian, I shall stab you!” the Friar proclaimed, and began leafing through the books of priests, treating the men of cloth so vilely that even dogs would shun them. Then he added—and this is what he had been intending all along—that he wanted to inflict a second and greater wound on the Egyptian, announcing that God had told him that there was a man in Florence who had his sights set on becoming tyrant and was already pulling strings to accomplish his scheme, and that anyone wanting to oust the Friar, excommunicate the Friar, persecute the Friar, was simply aiming to become tyrant of Florence. But the laws, the Friar proclaimed, had to be observed. He continued about this at such length that in the course of the day people began publicly speculating about the intentions of a certain individual, who is as close to becoming tyrant as you are to being whisked up to the heavens. But then the Signoria responded to the papal brief in support of Savonarola, who suddenly felt he need no longer fear his adversaries in Florence. Where before he sought to unite only his own followers in hatred of his opponents and the fear of the word “tyrant,” now, seeing that he no longer needed them, he has changed masks and incites them to the union that had been initiated, and no longer mentions an impending tyrant or his evil ways. He now seeks to set them against the supreme pontiff, turning to the pontiff and his attacks, and what he says about the pontiff is what one might say about the most wicked of men. As I surmise, the Friar is adapting to the times and shifting his lies accordingly.

I shall leave it to you and your wisdom to judge what the common people are saying, what their hopes and fears might be, because you can judge that better than I, as you know the humors of our city and the quality of the times. And as you are in Rome, you also know the pontiff’s mind better than I. I beg only this of you: If it has not been too onerous a task to read these words of mine, then I pray that it will not be too onerous a task for you to reply and give me your judgment of the disposition of the times and the people’s stance as to what is happening in Florence. Farewell.

Yours
,
Niccolò di M. Bernardo Machiavelli

1.
Savonarola had given two sermons in Santa Reparata after the pope’s threat to interdict all Florence.

2.
Savonarola was prior of the Monastery of San Marco. He had summoned up his followers to pray to God that the instant he raised the sacrament, God would send a “clear sign” in the form of fire from Heaven that would drag him down into Hell.

3.
The body of magistrates of Florence’s Signoria, or supreme executive council, were elected for two-month periods, to ensure that no group or individual could gain control of the state.

4.
The men and women of Savonarola’s congregation were segregated, since the entire congregation was too large to assemble in the courtyard of the monastery. Fra Domenico da Pescia was one of Savonarola’s closest adherents.

5.
Machiavelli, probably quoting from memory, presents a slightly altered quotation from the Vulgate, Exodus 1:12.

6.
Prudentia est recta cognitio agibilium
, an altered quote from Thomas Aquinus,
Summa Theologica
, in which the actual words are
Prudentia est recta ratio agibilium
(Prudence is the right reasoning about what is to be done). Savonarola had studied Aquinus’s works in depth and quoted him extensively.

7.
In April 1497 a Signoria was elected with a majority that was against Savonarola. He initially remained within the safety of the Convent of San Marco, but came out to preach at great risk on the Day of Ascension on May 4, despite the interdiction and excommunication by Pope Alexander VI. A tumult broke out and there was an attempt on Savonarola’s life, but he managed to escape with an armed guard to the safety of the Monastery of San Marco.

8.
Machiavelli quotes in Latin from Thomas Aquinas’s
Commentary on the Book of Job: Quia opposita iuxta se posita magis elucescunt
.

9.
Quoted in Latin:
Ideo quanto magis
, etc. A reference to Savonarola’s initial quote from Exodus 1:12.

10.
Exodus 2:11-12.