Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
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as products of transformations in language and discourse or place our emphasis on social relations and historical processes. It may be true that civic humanism had introduced a new language of politics, quite different from that of medieval scholasticism. It may even be true that Machiavelli belongs to the humanist tradition in a way that Marsilius did not. Yet both political thinkers were deeply rooted in the Italian city-state; and the differences between them have as much to do with changes in the circumstances of the city-states as they do with transformations in discourse.
The differences between Marsilius and Machiavelli also have to do with their differing relations to the social conflicts of their day. Marsilius was preoccupied not with the survival or autonomy of city-states but the factional struggles between papal and imperial parties. It can even be argued (as was done in the first volume of this study) that his defence of imperial power was driven less by fear of the papacy and its threats to civil peace than by his support for great aristocratic families like the Visconti of Milan and the della Scalas of Verona, who had strong imperial (Ghibelline) loyalties (as was typical among the landed nobility) and in whose service Marsilius worked. This allegiance to signorial power is masked by interpretations of Marsilius’s doctrine that treat him as a forerunner of modern republicanism, which also obscure the immediate issues confronting this late medieval thinker.
For Marsilius the problem, in the medieval manner, was a complex network of competing jurisdictions. When he outlined his idea of a single unitary jurisdiction, the civic corporation, he was certainly departing from the medieval norm of parcellized sovereignty; but he was by that means quite consciously supporting one claim to temporal authority against another, not so much the civic commune against all other jurisdictions but the Empire against the papacy, and Ghibelline signori against their civic rivals. He showed no concern for the threat to civic unity and jurisdiction posed by the feudal powers of the landed nobility, while his notion of a single unitary civic corporation represented a clear challenge to autonomous guilds and their anti-signorial powers. His notion of one undivided civic corporation simply trumped the claims of lesser corporate bodies.
Machiavelli’s Florence presented different problems, and his responses to them were shaped by different allegiances, perhaps more truly republican and certainly less inclined to the interests of the signori. The very survival of the city-state as anything like an autonomous entity was indeed at stake; and the immediate challenge was coming not from various fragmented jurisdictions, or from struggles between papal and imperial authorities, or between the civic factions they sustained, but from increasingly centralized and expanding states. The most powerful external forces were now rising territorial monarchies like France and Spain; and internal disorders in Florence were shaped by this new political reality.
The Italian city-states had already suffered from the general European crises, famine and plague of the fourteenth century. But even in good times their prosperity and success had depended on the fragmented governance of European feudalism and could not long survive the rise of strong territorial states. In constant rivalry and often open war with one another, the Italians were especially vulnerable to the territorial ambitions of the European monarchies. The role of commercial centres such as Venice and Florence as indispensable trading links in feudal Europe declined as feudal fragmentation gave way to centralized state powers, sustained by military superiority and the commercial advantages of imperial expansion.
By the fifteenth century, Venice and Florence stood almost alone as independent city-states. The Ottoman Empire deprived Venice of its dominance in east–west trade, capturing Constantinople in 1453, while European monarchies challenged both the political independence and the economic prosperity of the remaining city-states. Portugal extended its commercial reach to India, Spain gained access to the wealth of the New World, and France invaded Italy in 1494. Economic stagnation, social unrest and political upheaval in the city republics were immensely aggravated by years of war following the French invasion, as France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire battled for control of Italian territory – even while culture flourished in the city-states at the very moment of decline, when wealthy patrons of the arts, now more rentiers than entrepreneurs, engaged in ever more passionate conspicuous consumption.
It was the military disasters facing Italy, in 1494, and the political instability associated with them, that more than anything else concentrated the minds of Italian political thinkers, particularly in Florence. They were forced to reflect not only on the conditions of civic success and decline but also on the fundamental human traits that encouraged or impeded them. Niccolò Machiavelli’s generation was formed in this context, and its shadow looms over everything he wrote. He was born in 1469, the son of a distinguished lawyer, at a time when republican government had given way to Medici rule. Although of moderate means, his family seems to have belonged to a long line of Florentine notables. Machiavelli, who received a classic humanist education, began his career of public service as a clerk in 1494, the very year of the French invasion and the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, and would go on to serve the restored Florentine republic in various civil, diplomatic and military functions from 1498 to 1512.
When the Medici returned, Machiavelli was thrown out of office. In 1513, accused of conspiracy against the Medici, he was imprisoned and tortured. On his release, expelled from the centre of power, he retreated to the countryside outside Florence, where, as he would famously write in a wistful letter to his friend Vettori, he whiled away the time in idle rural pursuits all day and
When evening comes I return home and go into my study, and at the door I take off my daytime dress covered in mud and dirt, and put on royal and curial robes; and then decently attired I enter the courts of the ancients, where affectionately greeted by them, I partake of that food which is mine alone and for which I was born; where I am not ashamed to talk with them and inquire the reasons of their actions; and they out of their human kindness answer me, and for four hours at a stretch I feel no worry of any kind; I forget all my troubles, I am not afraid of poverty or of death. I give myself up entirely to them. And because Dante says that understanding does not constitute knowledge unless it is retained in the memory, I have written down what I have learned from their conversation and composed a short work de Principatibus4
And so he produced his most famous work, The Prince, though it was published only later, in 1532. His advice to princes has been variously described – for instance, as an effort to ingratiate himself with the Medici, in an attempt to revive his career; or even as a coded message to opponents of the Medici, and others like them, exposing their methods of obtaining and retaining power. Whatever his intentions, Machiavelli remained confined to his rural retreat, where he also wrote the Discourses, which more clearly expressed his republican convictions. The Medici would eventually call again on his services, but his later career was less notable for his official duties than for his work in other fields, such as his great History of Florence and his play La Mandragola. He died in 1527.
The rising monarchical states, and the French monarchy in particular, would figure prominently in the formation of Machiavelli’s political thought. He was sent several times on diplomatic missions to the court of Louis XII to enlist the aid of France in various battles on Italian territory, not least the rivalry between Florence and Pisa, or to ensure that Florence would not be implicated in territorial wars among the European monarchies. His early missions inspired a growing conviction that Florence should free itself of dependence on foreign powers by mobilizing its own citizen army, in sharp contrast to the Italian tradition of mercenary soldiers. Machiavelli supervised the formation of the Florentine army in the restored republic, which won a famous victory against Pisa in 1509; and a strong commitment to citizen militias would lie at the heart of his political thought. When Spain supported the Medici in their efforts to recover their power in Florence, the republic turned for help again to France, to no avail – with dramatic consequences for Machiavelli’s career. Whatever else he may have intended when he wrote The Prince, one bitter inspiration may have been Louis XII’s betrayal of the Florentine republic. Machiavelli would invoke the example of the French king as a primary lesson to princes not for his successes so much as for his failures, which, in Machiavelli’s eyes, had brought such tragedy to Italy.
European territorial monarchies, then, would always be in Machiavelli’s line of sight as he elaborated his political ideas. In the conclusion to The Prince, with its passionate call for the liberation of Italy from the ‘barbarians’,