Florence was essentially the city of intelligence in modern times.  Other nations have surpassed the Italians in their genius ­the quality which gave a superhuman power of insight to Shakespeare and an universal sympathy to Goethe.  But nowhere else except at Athens has the whole population of a city been so permeated with ideas, so highly intellectual by nature, so keen in perception, so witty and so subtle, as at Florence.  The fine and delicate spirit of the Italians existed in quintessence among the Florentines.  And of this superiority not only they but the inhabitants also of Rome and Lombardy and Naples, were conscious.  Boniface VIII., when he received the ambassadors of the Christian powers in Rome on the occasion of the Jubilee in 1300, observed that all of them were citizens of Florence.  The witticism which he is said to have uttered, i Fiorentini essere il quinto elemento, ‘that the men of Florence form a fifth element,’ passed into a proverb.  The primacy of the Florentines in literature, the fine arts, law, scholarship, philosophy, and science was acknowledged throughout Italy.

When the struggle for existence has been successfully terminated, and the mere instinct of self-preservation no longer absorbs the activities of a people, then the three chief motive forces of civilization begin to operate.  These are cupidity, or the desire of wealth and all that it procures; curiosity, or the desire to discover new facts about the world and man; and the love of beauty, which is the parent of all art.  Commerce, philosophy, science, scholarship, sculpture, architecture, painting, music, poetry, are the products of these ruling impulses ­everything in fact which gives a higher value to the life of man.  Different nations have been swayed by these passions in different degrees.  The artistic faculty, which owes its energy to the love of beauty, has been denied to some; the philosophic faculty, which starts with curiosity, to others; and some again have shown but little capacity for amassing wealth by industry or calculation.  It is rare to find a whole nation possessed of all in an equal measure of perfection.  Such, however, were the Florentines. The mere sight of the city and her monuments would suffice to prove this.  But we are not reduced to the necessity of divining what Florence was by the inspection of her churches, palaces, and pictures.  That marvelous intelligence which was her pride, burned brightly in a long series of historians and annalists, who have handed down to us the biography of the city in volumes as remarkable for penetrative acumen as for definite delineation and dramatic interest.  We possess picture-galleries of pages in which the great men of Florence live again and seem to breathe and move, epics of the commonwealth’s vicissitudes from her earliest commencement, detailed tragedies and highly finished episodes, studies of separate characters, and idylls detached from the main current of her story.  The whole mass of this historical literature is instinct with the spirit of criticism and vital with experience.  The writers have been either actors or spectators of the drama.  Trained in the study of antiquity, as well as in the council-chambers of the republic and in the courts of foreign princes, they survey the matter of their histories from a lofty vantage ground, fortifying their speculative conclusions by practical knowledge and purifying their judgment of contemporary events with the philosophy of the past.  Owing to this rare mixture of qualities, the Florentines deserve to be styled the discoverers of the historic method for the modern world.  They first perceived that it is unprofitable to study the history of a state in isolation, that not wars and treaties only, but the internal vicissitudes of the commonwealth, form the real subject matter of inquiry, and that the smallest details, biographical, economical, or topographical, may have the greatest value.  While the rest of Europe was ignorant of statistics, and little apt to pierce below the surface of events to the secret springs of conduct, in Florence a body of scientific historians had gradually been formed, who recognized the necessity of basing their investigations upon a diligent study of public records, state-papers, and notes of contemporary observers. The same men prepared themselves for the task of criticism by a profound study of ethical and political philosophy in the works of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Tacitus. They examined the methods of classical historians, and compared the annals of Greece, Rome, and Palestine with the chronicles of their own country.  They attempted to divine the genius and to characterize the special qualities of the nations, cities, and individuals of whom they had to treat. At the same time they spared no pains in seeking out persons possessed of accurate knowledge in every branch of inquiry that came beneath their notice, so that their treatises have the freshness of original documents and the charm of personal memoirs.  Much, as I have elsewhere noted, was due to the peculiarly restless temper of the Florentines, speculative, variable, unquiet in their politics.  The very qualities which exposed the commonwealth to revolutions, developed the intelligence of her historians; her want of stability was the price she paid for intellectual versatility and acuteness unrivaled in modern times. ’"O ingenia magis acria quam matura,” said Petrarch, and with truth, about the wits of the Florentines; for it is their property by nature to have more of liveliness and acumen than of maturity or gravity.’

The year 1300 marks the first development of historical research in Florence.  Two great writers, Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Villani, at this epoch pursued different lines of study, which determined the future of this branch of literature for the Italians.  It is not uncharacteristic of Florentine genius that while the chief city of Tuscany was deficient in historians of her achievements before the date which I have mentioned, her first essays in historiography should have been monumental and standard-making for the rest of Italy.  Just as the great burghs of Lombardy attained municipal independence somewhat earlier than those of Tuscany, so the historic sense developed itself in the valley of the Po at a period when the valley of the Arno had no chronicler.  Sire Raul and Ottone Morena, the annalists of Milan, Fra Salimbene, the sagacious and comprehensive historian of Parma, Rolandino, to whom we owe the chronicle of Ezzelino and the tragedy of the Trevisan Marches, have no rivals south of the Apennines in the thirteenth century.  Even the Chronicle of the Malespini family, written in the vulgar tongue from the beginning of the world to the year 1281, which occupies 146 volumes of Muratori’s Collection, and which used to be the pride of Tuscan antiquarians, has recently been shown to be in all probability a compilation based upon the Annals of Villani. This makes the clear emergence of a scientific sense for history in the year 1300 at Florence all the more remarkable.  In order to estimate the high quality of the work achieved by the Villani it is only necessary to turn the pages of some early chronicles of sister cities which still breathe the spirit of unintelligent mediaeval industry, before the method of history had been critically apprehended.  The naïveté of these records may be appreciated by the following extracts.  A Roman writes:  ’I Lodovico Bonconte Monaldeschi was born in Orvieto, and was brought up in the city of Rome, where I have resided.  I was born in the year 1327, in the month of June, at the time when the Emperor Lodovico came.  Now I wish to relate the whole history of my age, seeing that I lived one hundred and fifteen years without illness, except that when I was born I fainted, and I died of old age, and remained in bed twelve months on end.’  Burigozzo’s Chronicle of Milan, again, concludes with these words: ’As you will see in the Annals of my son, inasmuch as the death which has overtaken me prevents my writing more.’  Chronicles conceived and written in this spirit are diaries of events, repertories of strange stories, and old wives’ tales, without a deep sense of personal responsibility, devoid alike of criticism and artistic unity.  Very different is the character of the historical literature which starts into being in Florence at the opening of the fourteenth century.

Giovanni Villani relates how, having visited Rome on the occasion of the Jubilee, when 200,000 pilgrims crowded the streets of the Eternal City, he was moved in the depth of his soul by the spectacle of the ruins of the discrowned mistress of the world. ’When I saw the great and ancient monuments of Rome, and read the histories and the great deeds of the Romans, written by Virgil, and by Sallust, and by Lucan, and by Livy, and by Valerius, and Orosius, and other masters of history, who related small as well as great things of the acts and doings of the Romans, I took style and manner from them, though, as a learner, I was not worthy of so vast a work.’  Like our own Gibbon, musing upon the steps of Ara Celi, within sight of the Capitol, and within hearing of the monks at prayer, he felt the genius loci stir him with a mixture of astonishment and pathos.  Then ’reflecting that our city of Florence, the daughter and the creature of Rome, was in the ascendant toward great achievements, while Rome was on the wane, I thought it seemly to relate in this new Chronicle all the doings and the origins of the town of Florence, as far as I could collect and discover them, and to continue the acts of the Florentines and the other notable things of the world in brief onwards so long as it shall be God’s pleasure, hoping in whom by His grace I have done the work rather than by my poor knowledge; and therefore in the year 1300, when I returned from Rome, I began to compile this book, to the reverence of God and Saint John and the praise of this our city Florence.’  The key-note is struck in these passages.  Admiration for the past mingles with prescience of the future.  The artist and the patriot awake together in Villani at the sight of Rome and the thought of Florence.

The result of this visit to Rome in 1300 was the Chronicle which Giovanni Villani carried in twelve books down to the year 1346.  In 1348 he died of the plague, and his work was continued on the same plan by his brother Matteo.  Matteo in his turn died of plague in 1362, and left the Chronicle to his son Filippo, who brought it down to the year 1365.  Of the three Villani, Giovanni is the greatest, both as a master of style and as an historical artist.  Matteo is valuable for the general reflections which form exordia to the eleven books that bear his name.  Filippo was more of a rhetorician.  He is known as the public lecturer upon the Divine Comedy, and as the author of some interesting but meager lives of eminent Florentines, his predecessors or contemporaries.

The Chronicle of the Villani is a treasure-house of clear and accurate delineations rather than of profound analysis.  Not only does it embrace the whole affairs of Europe in annals which leave little to be desired in precision of detail and brevity of statement; but, what is more to our present purpose, it conveys a lively picture of the internal condition of the Florentines and the statistics of the city in the fourteenth century.  We learn, for example, that the ordinary revenues of Florence amounted to about 300,000 golden florins, levied chiefly by way of taxes ­90,200 proceeding from the octroi, 58,300 from the retail wine trade, 14,450 from the salt duties, and so on through the various imposts, each of which is carefully calculated.  Then we are informed concerning the ordinary expenditure of the Commune ­15,240 lire for the podesta and his establishment, 5,880 lire for the Captain of the people and his train, 3,600 for the maintenance of the Signory in the Palazzo, and so on down to a sum of 2,400 for the food of the lions, for candles, torches, and bonfires.  The amount spent publicly in almsgiving; the salaries of ambassadors and governors; the cost of maintaining the state armory; the pay of the night-watch; the money spent upon the yearly games when the palio was run; the wages of the city trumpeters; and so forth, are all accurately reckoned.  In fact the ordinary Budget of the Commune is set forth.  The rate of extraordinary expenses during war-time is estimated on the scale of sums voted by the Florentines to carry on the war with Martino della Scala in 1338.  At that time they contributed 25,000 florins monthly to Venice, maintained full garrisons in the fortresses of the republic, and paid as well for upwards of 1,000 men at arms.  In order that a correct notion of these balance-sheets may be obtained, Villani is careful to give particulars about the value of the florin and the lira, and the number of florins coined yearly.  In describing the condition of Florence at this period, he computes the number of citizens capable of bearing arms, between the ages fifteen and seventy, at 25,000; the population of the city at 90,000, not counting the monastic communities, nor including the strangers, who are estimated at about 15,000.  The country districts belonging to Florence add 80,000 to this calculation.  It is further noticed that the excess of male births over female was between 300 and 500 yearly in Florence, that from 8,000 to 10,000 boys and girls learned to read; that there were six schools, in which from 10,000 to 12,000 children learned arithmetic; and four high schools, in which from 550 to 600 learned grammar and logic.  Then follows a list of the religious houses and churches:  among the charitable institutions are reckoned 30 hospitals capable of receiving more than 1,000 sick people.  Here too it may be mentioned that Villani reckons the beggars of Florence at 17,000, with the addition of 4,000 paupers and sick persons and religious mendicants. These mendicants were not all Florentines, but received relief from the city charities.  The big wool factories are numbered at upwards of two hundred; and it is calculated that from sixty to eighty thousand pieces of cloth were turned out yearly, to the value in all of about 1,200,000 florins.  More than 30,000 persons lived by this industry.  The calimala factories, where foreign cloths were manufactured into fine materials, numbered about twenty.  These imported some 10,000 pieces of cloth yearly, to the value of 300,000 florins.  The exchange offices are estimated at about eighty in number.  The fortunes made in Florence by trade and by banking were colossal for those days.  Villani tells us that the great houses of the Bardi and Peruzzi lent to our King Edward III. more than 1,365,000 golden florins. ‘And mark this,’ he continues, ’that these moneys were chiefly the property of persons who had given it to them on deposit.’  This debt was to have been recovered out of the wool revenues and other income of the English; in fact, the Bardi and Peruzzi had negotiated a national loan, by which they hoped to gain a superb percentage on their capital.  The speculation, however, proved unfortunate; and the two houses would have failed, but for their enormous possessions in Tuscany.  We hear, for example, of the Bardi buying the villages of Vernia and Mangona in 1337. As it was, their credit received a shock from which it never thoroughly recovered; and a little later on, in 1342, after the ruinous wars with the La Scala family and Pisa, and after the loss of Lucca, they finally stopped payment and declared themselves bankrupt. The shock communicated by this failure to the whole commerce of Christendom is well described by Villani. The enormous wealth amassed by Florentine citizens in commerce may be still better imagined when we remember that the Medici, between the years 1434 and 1471, spent some 663,755 golden florins upon alms and public works, of which 400,000 were supplied by Cosimo alone.  But to return to Villani; not content with the statistics which I have already extracted, he proceeds to calculate how many bushels of wheat, hogsheads of wine, and head of cattle were consumed in Florence by the year and the week. We are even told that in the month of July 1280, 40,000 loads of melons entered the gate of San Friano and were sold in the city.  Nor are the manners and the costume of the Florentines neglected:  the severe and decent dress of the citizens in the good old times (about 1260) is contrasted with the new-fangled fashions introduced by the French in 1342. In addition to all this miscellaneous information may be mentioned what we learn from Matteo Villani concerning the foundation of the Monte or Public Funds of Florence in the year 1345, as well as the remarkable essay upon the economical and other consequences of the plague of 1348, which forms the prelude to his continuation of his brother’s Chronicle.

In his survey of the results of the Black Death, Matteo notices not only the diminution of the population, but the alteration in public morality, the displacement of property, the increase in prices, the diminution of labor, and the multiplication of lawsuits, which were the consequences direct or indirect of the frightful mortality.  Among the details which he has supplied upon these topics deserve to be commemorated the enormous bequests to public charities in Florence ­350,000 florins to the Society of Orsammichele, 25,000 to the Compagnia della Misericordia, and 25,000 to the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova.  The poorer population had been almost utterly destroyed by the plague; so that these funds were for the most part wasted, misapplied, and preyed upon by mal-administrators. The foundation of the University of Florence is also mentioned as one of the extraordinary consequences of this calamity.

The whole work of the Villani remains a monument, unique in mediaeval literature, of statistical patience and economical sagacity, proving how far in advance of the other European nations were the Italians at this period. Dante’s aim is wholly different.  Of statistics and of historical detail we gain but little from his prose works.  His mind was that of a philosopher who generalizes, and of a poet who seizes salient characteristics, not that of an annalist who aims at scrupulous fidelity in his account of facts.  I need not do more than mention here the concise and vivid portraits, which he has sketched in the Divine Comedy, of all the chief cities of Italy; but in his treatise ‘De Monarchia’ we possess the first attempt at political speculation, the first essay in constitutional philosophy, to which the literature of modern Europe gave birth; while his letters addressed to the princes of Italy, the cardinals, the emperor and the republic of Florence, are in like manner the first instances of political pamphlets setting forth a rationalized and consistent system of the rights and duties of nations.  In the ’De Monarchia’ Dante bases a theory of universal government upon a definite conception of the nature and the destinies of humanity.  Amid the anarchy and discord of Italy, where selfishness was everywhere predominant, and where the factions of the Papacy and Empire were but cloaks for party strife, Dante endeavors to bring his countrymen back to a sublime ideal of a single monarchy, a true imperium, distinct from the priestly authority of the Church, but not hostile to it, ­nay, rather seeking sanction from Christ’s Vicar upon earth and affording protection to the Holy See, as deriving its own right from the same Divine source.  Political science in this essay takes rank as an independent branch of philosophy, and the points which Dante seeks to establish are supported by arguments implying much historical knowledge, though quaintly scholastic in their application.  The Epistles contain the same thoughts:  peace, mutual respect, and obedience to a common head, the duty of the chief to his subordinates and of the governed to their lord, are urged with no less force, but in a more familiar style and with direct allusion to the events which called each letter forth.  They are in fact political brochures addressed by a thinker from his solitude to the chief actors in the drama of history around him.  Nor would it here be right to omit some notice of the essay ‘De Vulgari Eloquio,’ which, considering the date of its appearance, is no less original and indicative of a new spirit in the world than the treatise ’De Monarchia.’  It is an attempt to write the history of Italian as a member of the Romance Languages, to discuss the qualities of its several dialects, and to prove the advantages to be gained by the formation of a common literary tongue for Italy.  Though Dante was of course devoid of what we now call comparative philology, and had but little knowledge of the first beginnings of the languages which he discusses, yet it is not more than the truth to say that this essay applies the true method of critical analysis for the first time to the subject, and is the first attempt to reason scientifically upon the origin and nature of a modern language.

While discussing the historical work of Dante and the Villani, it is impossible that another famous Florentine should not occur to our recollection, whose name has long been connected with the civic contests that resulted in the exile of Italy’s greatest poet from his native city.  Yet it is not easy for a foreign critic to deal with the question of Dino Compagni’s Chronicle ­a question which for years has divided Italian students into two camps, which has produced a voluminous literature of its own, and which still remains undecided.  The point at issue is by no means insignificant.  While one party contends that we have in this Chronicle the veracious record of an eye-witness, the other asserts that it is the impudent fabrication of a later century, composed on hints furnished by Dante, and obscure documents of the Compagni family, and expressed in language that has little of the fourteenth century.  The one regards it as a faithful narrative, deficient only in minor details of accuracy.  The other stigmatizes it as a wholly untrustworthy forgery, and calls attention to numberless mistakes, confusions, misconceptions, and misrepresentations of events, which place its genuineness beyond the pale of possibility.  After a careful consideration of Scheffer’s, Fanfani’s, Gino Capponi’s, and Isidoro del Lungo’s arguments, it seems to me clearly established that the Chronicle of Dino Compagni can no longer be regarded as a perfectly genuine document of fourteenth-century literature.  In the form in which we now possess it, we are rather obliged to regard it as a rifacimento of some authentic history, compiled during the course of the fifteenth century in a prose which bears traces of the post-Boccaccian style of composition. Yet the authority of Dino Compagni has long been such, and such is still the literary value of the monograph which bears his name, that it would be impertinent to dismiss the ‘Chronicle’ unceremoniously as a mere fiction.  I propose, therefore, first to give an account of the book on its professed merits, and then to discuss, as briefly as I can, the question of its authenticity.

The year 1300, which Dante chose for the date of his descent with Virgil to the nether world, and which marked the beginning of Villani’s ‘Chronicle,’ is also mentioned by Dino Compagni in the first sentence of the preface to his work.  ‘The recollections of ancient histories,’ he says, ’have a long while stirred my mind to writing the perilous and ill-fated events, which the noble city, daughter of Rome, has suffered many years, and especially at the time of the jubilee in the year 1300.’  Dino Compagni, whose ‘Chronicle’ embraces the period between 1280 and 1312, took the popular side in the struggles of 1282, sat as Prior in 1289, and in 1301, and was chosen Gonfalonier of Justice in 1293.  He was therefore a prominent actor in the drama of those troublous times.  He died in 1324, two years and four months after the date of Dante’s death, and was buried in the church of Santa Trinità.  He was a man of the same stamp as Dante; burning with love for his country, but still more a lover of the truth; severe in judgment, but beyond suspicion of mere partisanship; brief in utterance, but weighty with personal experience, profound conviction, prophetic intensity of feeling, sincerity, and justice.  As a historian, he narrowed his labors to the field of one small but highly finished picture.  He undertook to narrate the civic quarrels of his times, and to show how the commonwealth of Florence was brought to ruin by the selfishness of her own citizens; nor can his ‘Chronicle,’ although it is by no means a masterpiece of historical accuracy or of lucid arrangement, be surpassed for the liveliness of its delineation, the graphic clearness of its characters, the earnestness of its patriotic spirit, and the acute analysis which lays bare the political situation of a republic torn by factions, during the memorable period which embraced the revolution of Giano della Bella and the struggles of the Neri and Bianchi.  The comparison of Dino Compagni with any contemporary annalist in Italy shows that here again, in these pages, a new spirit has arisen.  Muratori, proud to print them for the first time in 1726, put them on a level with the ’Commentaries of Cæsar’; Giordani welcomed their author as a second Sallust.  The political sagacity and scientific penetration, possessed in so high a degree by the Florentines, appear in full maturity.  Compagni’s ‘Chronicle’ heads a long list of similar monographs, unique in the literature of a single city.

The arguments against the authenticity of Dino Compagni’s ‘Chronicle’ may be arranged in three groups.  The first concerns the man himself.  It is urged that, with the exception of his offices as Prior and Gonfalonier, we have no evidence of his political activity, beyond what is furnished by the disputed ‘Chronicle.’  According to his own account, Dino played a part of the first importance in the complicated events of 1280-1312.  Yet he is not mentioned by Giovanni Villani, by Filippo Vallani, or by Dante.  There is no record of his death, except a MS. note in the Magliabecchian Codex of his ‘Chronicle’ of the date 1514. He is known in literature as the author of a few lyrics and an oration to Pope John XXII., the style of which is so rough and mediaeval as to make it incredible that the same writer should have composed the masterly paragraphs of the ’Chronicle.’ The second group of arguments affects the substance of the ‘Chronicle’ itself.  Though Dino was Prior when Charles of Valois entered Florence, he records that event under the date of Sunday the fourth of November, whereas Charles arrived on the first of November, and the first Sunday of the month was the fifth.  He differs from the concurrent testimony of other historians in making the affianced bride of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti a Giantruffetti instead of an Amidei, and the Bishop of Arezzo a Pazzi instead of an Ubertini.  He reckons the Arti at twenty-four, whereas they numbered twenty-one.  He places the Coronation of Henry VII. in August, instead of in June, 1312.  He seems to refer to the Palace of the Signory, which could not have been built at the date in question.  He asserts that a member of the Benivieni family was killed by one of the Galligai, whereas the murderer was of the blood of the Galli.  He represents himself as having been the first Gonfalonier of Justice who destroyed the houses of rebellious nobles, while Baldo de’ Ruffoli, who held the office before him, had previously carried out the Ordinances.  Speaking of Guido Cavalcanti about the year 1300, he calls him ‘uno giovane gentile’; and yet Guido had married the daughter of Farinata degli Uberti in 1266, and certainly did not survive 1300 more than a few months.  The peace with Pisa, which was concluded during Compagni’s tenure of the Gonfalonierate, is not mentioned, though this must have been one of the most important public events with which he was concerned.  Chronology is hopelessly and inextricably confused; while inaccuracies and difficulties of the kind described abound on every page of the ‘Chronicle,’ rendering the labor of its last commentator and defender one of no small difficulty.  The third group of arguments assails the language of the ‘Chronicle’ and its MS. authority.  Fanfani, who showed more zeal than courtesy in his destructive criticism, undertook to prove that Dino’s style in general is not distinguished for the ‘purity, simplicity, and propriety’ of the trecento; that it abounds in expressions of a later period, such as armata for oste, marciare for andare, accio for acciocché, onde for affinché; that numerous imitations of Dante can be traced in it; and that to an acute student of early Italian prose its palpable quattrocentismo is only slightly veiled by a persistent affectation of fourteenth-century archaism.  This argument from style seems the strongest that can be brought against the genuineness of the ‘Chronicle’; for while it is possible that Dino may have made innumerable blunders about the events in which he took a part, it is incredible that he should have anticipated the growth of Italian by at least a century.  Yet judges no less competent than Fanfani in this matter of style, and far more trustworthy as witnesses, Vincenzo Nannucci, Gino Capponi, Isidoro del Lungo, are of opinion that Dino’s ‘Chronicle’ is a masterpiece of Italian fourteenth-century prose; and till Italian experts are agreed, foreign critics must suspend their judgment.  The analysis of style receives a different development from Scheffer-Boichorst.  In his last essay he undertakes to show that many passages of the ‘Chronicle,’ especially the important one which refers to the Ordinamenti della Giustizia, have been borrowed from Villani. This critical weapon is difficult to handle, for it almost always cuts both ways.  Yet the German historian has made out an undoubtedly good case by proving Villani’s language closer to the original Ordinamenti than Compagni’s.  With regard to MS. authority, the codices of Dino’s ‘Chronicle’ extant in Italy are all of them derived from a MS. transcribed by Noferi Busini and given by him to Giovanni Mazzuoli, surnamed Lo Stradino, who was a member of the Florentine Academy and a greedy collector of antiquities.  This MS. bears the date 1514.  The recent origin of this parent codex, and the questionable character of Lo Stradino, gave rise to not unreasonable suspicions.  Fanfani roundly asserted that the ‘Chronicle’ must have been fabricated as a hoax upon the uncritical antiquary, since it suddenly appeared without a pedigree, at a moment when such forgeries were not uncommon.  Scheffer-Boichorst, in his most recent pamphlet, committed himself to the opinion that either Lo Stradino himself, nicknamed Cronaca Scorretta by his Florentine cronies, or one of his contemporaries, was the forger. An Italian impugner of the ‘Chronicle,’ Giusto Grion of Verona, declared for Antonfrancesco Doni as the fabricator. These hypotheses, however, are, to say the least, unlucky for their suggestors, and really serve to weaken rather than to strengthen the destructive line of argument.  There exists an elder codex of which Fanfani and his followers were ignorant.  It is a MS. of perhaps the middle of the fifteenth century, which was purchased for the Ashburnham Library in 1846.  This MS. has been minutely described by Professor Paul Meyer; and Isidoro del Lungo publishes a fac-simile specimen of one of its pages. By some unaccountable negligence this latest and most determined defender of Compagni has failed to examine the MS. with his own eyes.

Thus stands the question of Dino Compagni’s ‘Chronicle.’  The defenders of its authenticity, forced to admit Compagni’s glaring inaccuracies, fall back upon arguments deduced from the internal spirit of the author, from the difficulties of fabricating a personal narrative instinct with the spirit of the fourteenth century, from the hypotheses of a copyist’s errors or of a thorough-going literary process of rewriting at a later date, from the absence of any positive evidence of forgery, and from general considerations affecting the validity of destructive criticism.  One thing has been clearly proved in the course of the controversy, that the book can have but little historical value when not corroborated.  Still there is a wide gap between inaccuracy and willful fabrication.  Until the best judges of Italian style are agreed that the ‘Chronicle’ could not have been written in the second decade of the fourteenth century, the arguments adduced from an examination of the facts recorded in it are not strong enough to demonstrate a forgery.  There is the further question of cui bono? which in all problems of literary forgery must first receive some probable solution.  What proof is there that the vanity or the cupidity of any parties was satisfied by its production?  A book exists in a MS. of about 1450, acquires some notice in a MS. of 1514, but is not published to the world until 1726.  Supposing it to have been a forgery, the labor of concocting it must have been enormous.  With all its defects, the ‘Chronicle’ would still remain a masterpiece of historical research, imagination, sympathy with bygone modes of feeling, dramatic vigor, and antiquarian command of language.  But who profited by that labor?  Not the author of the forgery, since he was dead or buried more than two centuries before his fabrication became famous.  Not the Compagni family; for there is no evidence to show that they had piqued themselves upon being the depositaries of their ancestors masterpiece, nor did they make any effort, at a period when the printing-press was very active, to give this jewel of their archives to the public.  If it be objected that, on the hypothesis of genuineness, the MS. of the ‘Chronicle’ must have been divulged before the beginning of the sixteenth century, we can adduce two plausible answers.  In the first place, Dino was the partisan of a conquered cause; and his family had nothing to gain by publishing an acrimonious political pamphlet during the triumph of his antagonists.  In the second place, MSS. of even greater literary importance disappeared in the course of the fourteenth century, to be reproduced when their subjects again excited interest in the literary world.  The history of Dante’s treatise De Vulgari Eloquio is a case in point.  With regard to style, no foreigner can pretend to be a competent judge.  Reading the celebrated description of Florence at the opening of Dino’s ‘Chronicle,’ I seem indeed, for my own part, to discern a post-Boccaccian artificiality of phrase.  Still there is nothing to render it impossible that the ‘Chronicle,’ as we possess it, in the texts of 1450(?) and 1514, may be a rifacimento of an elder and simpler work.  In that section of my history which deals with Italian literature of the fifteenth century, I shall have occasion to show that such remodeling of ancient texts to suit the fashion of the time was by no means unfrequent.  The curious discrepancies between the Trattato della Famiglia as written by Alberti and as ascribed to Pandolfini can only be explained upon the hypothesis of such rifacimento.  If the historical inaccuracies in which the ‘Chronicle’ abounds are adduced as convincing proof of its fabrication, it may be replied that the author of so masterly a romance would naturally have been anxious to preserve a strict accordance with documents of acknowledged validity.  Consequently, these very blunders might not unreasonably be used to combat the hypothesis of deliberate forgery.  It is remarkable, in this connection, that only one meager reference is made to Dante by the Chronicler, who, had he been a literary forger, would scarcely have omitted to enlarge upon this theme.  Without, therefore, venturing to express a decided opinion on a question which still divides the most competent Italian judges, I see no reason to despair of the problem being ultimately solved in a way less unfavorable to Dino Compagni than Scheffer-Boichorst and Fanfani would approve of.  Considered as the fifteenth century rifacimento of an elder document, the ‘Chronicle’ would lose its historical authority, but would still remain an interesting monument of Florentine literature, and would certainly not deserve the unqualified names of ‘forgery’ and ‘fabrication’ that have been unhesitatingly showered upon it.

The two chief Florentine historians of the fifteenth century are Lionardo Bruni of Arezzo, and Poggio Bracciolini, each of whom, in his capacity of Chancellor to the Republic, undertook to write the annals of the people of Florence from the earliest date to his own time.  Lionardo Aretino wrote down to the year 1404, and Poggio Bracciolini to the year 1455.  Their histories are composed in Latin, and savor much of the pedantic spirit of the age in which they were projected. Both of them deserve the criticism of Machiavelli, that they filled their pages too exclusively with the wars and foreign affairs in which Florence was engaged, failing to perceive that the true object of the historian is to set forth the life of a commonwealth as a continuous whole, to draw the portrait of a state with due regard to its especial physiognomy. To this critique we may add that both Lionardo and Poggio were led astray by the false taste of the earlier Renaissance.  Their admiration for Livy and the pedantic proprieties of a labored Latinism made them pay more attention to rhetoric than to the substance of their work. We meet with frigid imitations and bombastic generalities, where concise details and graphic touches would have been acceptable.  In short, these works are rather studies of style in an age when the greatest stylists were but bunglers and beginners, than valuable histories.  The Italians of the fifteenth century, striving to rival Cicero and Livy, succeeded only in becoming lifeless shadows of the past.  History dictated under the inspiration of pedantic scholarship, and with the object of reproducing an obsolete style, by men of letters who had played no prominent part in the Commonwealth, cannot pretend to the vigor and the freshness that we admire so much in the writings of men like the Villani, Gino Capponi, Giovanni Cavalcanti, and many others.  Yet even after making these deductions, it may be asserted with truth that no city of Italy at this period of the Renaissance, except Florence, could boast historiographers so competent.  Vespasiano at the close of his biography of Poggio estimates their labor in sentences which deserve to be remembered:  ’Among the other singular obligations which the city of Florence owes to Messer Lionardo and to Messer Poggio, is this, that except the Roman Commonwealth no republic or free state in Italy has been so distinguished as the town of Florence, in having had two such notable writers to record its doings as Messer Lionardo and Messer Poggio; for up to the time of their histories everything was in the greatest obscurity.  If the republic of Venice, which can show so many wise citizens, had the deeds which they have done by sea and land committed to writing, it would be far more illustrious even than it is now.  And Galeazzo Maria, and Filippo Maria, and all the Visconti ­their actions would also be more famous than they are.  Nay, there is not any republic that ought not to give every reward to writers who should commemorate its doings.  We see at Florence that from the foundation of the city to the days of Messer Lionardo and Messer Poggio there was no record of anything that the Florentines had done, in Latin, or history devoted to themselves.  Messer Poggio follows after Messer Lionardo, and writes like him in Latin.  Giovanni Villani, too, wrote an universal history in the vulgar tongue of whatsoever happened in every place, and introduces the affairs of Florence as they happened.  The same did Messer Filippo Villani, following after Giovanni Villani.  These are they alone who have distinguished Florence by the histories that they have written.’ The pride of the citizen and a just sense of the value of history, together with sound remarks upon Venice and Milan, mingle curiously in this passage with the pedantry of a fifteenth-century scholar.

The historians of the first half of the sixteenth century are a race apart.  Three generations of pedantic erudition and of courtly or scholastic trifling had separated the men of letters from the men of action, and had made literature a thing of curiosity.  Three generations of the masked Medicean despotism had destroyed the reality of freedom in Florence, and had corrupted her citizens to the core.  Yet, strange to say, it was at the end of the fifteenth century that the genius of the thirteenth revived.  Italian literature was cultivated for its own sake under the auspices of Lorenzo de’ Medici.  The year 1494 marks the resurrection of the spirit of old liberty beneath the trumpet-blast of Savonarola’s oratory.  Amid the universal corruption of public morals, from the depth of sloth and servitude, when the reality of liberty was lost, when fate and fortune had combined to render constitutional reconstruction impossible for the shattered republics of Italy, the intellect of the Florentines displayed itself with more than its old vigor in a series of the most brilliant political writers who have ever illustrated one short but eventful period in the life of a single nation.  That period is marked by the years 1494 and 1537.  It embraces the two final efforts of the Florentines to shake off the Medicean yoke, the disastrous siege at the end of which they fell a prey to the selfishness of their own party-leaders, the persecution of Savonarola by Pope Alexander, the Church-rule of Popes Leo and Clement, the extinction of the elder branch of the Medici in its two bastards (Ippolito, poisoned by his brother Alessandro, and Alessandro poignarded by his cousin Lorenzino), and the final eclipse of liberty beneath the Spain-appointed dynasty of the younger Medicean line in Duke Cosimo.  The names of the historians of this period are Niccolo Machiavelli, Jacopo Nardi, Francesco Guicciardini, Filippo Nerli, Donato Giannotti, Benedetto Varchi, Bernardo Segni, and Jacopo Pitti. In these men the mental qualities which we admire in the Villani, Dante, and Compagni reappear, combined, indeed, in different proportions, tempered with the new philosophy and scholarship of the Renaissance, and permeated with quite another morality.  In the interval of two centuries freedom has been lost.  It is only the desire for freedom that survives.  But that, after the apathy of the fifteenth century, is still a passion.  The rectitude of instinct and the intense convictions of the earlier age have been exchanged for a scientific clairvoyance, a ’stoic-epicurean acceptance’ of the facts of vitiated civilization, which in men like Guicciardini and Machiavelli is absolutely appalling.  Nearly all the authors of this period bear a double face.  They write one set of memoirs for the public, and another set for their own delectation.  In their inmost souls they burn with the zeal for liberty:  yet they sell their abilities to the highest bidder ­to Popes whom they despise, and to Dukes whom they revile in private.  What makes the literary labors of these historians doubly interesting is that they were carried on for the most part independently; for though they lived at the same time, and in some cases held familiar conversation with each other, they gave expression to different shades of political opinion, and their histories remained in manuscript till some time after their death. The student of the Renaissance has, therefore the advantage of comparing and confronting a whole band of independent witnesses to the same events.  Beside their own deliberate criticism of the drama in which all played some part as actors or spectators, we can use the not less important testimony they afford unconsciously, according to the bias of private or political interest by which they are severally swayed.

The Storia Fiorentina of Varchi extends from the year 1527 to the year 1538; that of Segni from 1527 to 1555; that of Nardi from 1494 to 1552; that of Pitti from 1494 to 1529; that of Nerli from 1494 to 1537; that of Guicciardini from 1420 to 1509.  The prefatory chapters, which in most cases introduce the special subject of each history, contain a series of retrospective surveys over the whole history of Florence extremely valuable for the detailed information they contain, as well as for the critical judgments of men whose acumen had been sharpened to the utmost by their practical participation in politics.  It will not, perhaps, be superfluous to indicate the different parts played by these historians in the events of their own time.  Guicciardini, it is well known, had governed Bologna and Romagna for the Medicean Popes.  He too was instrumental in placing Duke Cosimo at the head of the republic in 1536.  At Naples, in 1535, he pleaded the cause of Duke Alessandro against the exiles before Charles V. Nardi on this occasion acted as secretary and advocate for Filippo Strozzi and the exiles; his own history was composed in exile at Venice, where he died.  Segni was nephew of the Gonfalonier Capponi, and shared the anxieties of the moderate liberals during the siege of Florence.  Pitti was a member of the great house who contested the leadership of the republic with the Medici in the fifteenth century; his zeal for the popular party and his hatred of the Palleschi may still perhaps be tinctured with ancestral animosity.  Giannotti, in whose critique of the Florentine republic we trace a spirit no less democratic than Pitti’s, was also an actor in the events of the siege, and afterwards appeared among the exiles.  In the attempt made by the Cardinal Salviati (1537) to reconcile Duke Cosimo and the adherents of Filippo Strozzi, Giannotti was chosen as the spokesman for the latter.  He wrote and died in exile at Venice.  Nerli again took part in the events of those troublous times, but on the wrong side, by mixing himself up with the exiles and acting as a spy upon their projects.  All the authors I have mentioned were citizens of Florence, and some of them were members of her most illustrious families.  Varchi, in whom the flame of Florentine patriotism burns brightest, and who is by far the most copious annalist of the period, was a native of Montevarchi.  Yet, as often happens, he was more Florentine than the Florentines; and of the events which he describes, he had for the most part been witness.  Duke Cosimo employed him to write the history; it is a credit both to the prince and to the author that its chapters should be full of criticisms so outspoken, and of aspirations after liberty so vehement.  On the very first page of his preface Varchi dares to write these words respecting Florence ­’divenne, dico, di stato piuttosto corrotto e licenzioso, tirannide, che di sana e moderata repubblica, principato’; in which he deals blame with impartial justice all round.  It must, however, be remembered that at the time when Varchi wrote, the younger branch of the Medici were firmly established on the throne of Florence.  Between this branch and the elder line there had always been a coldness.  Moreover, all parties had agreed to accept the duchy as a divinely appointed instrument for rescuing the city from her factions and reducing her to tranquillity.

It would be beyond the purpose of this chapter to enter into the details of the history of Florence between 1527 and 1531 ­those years of her last struggle for freedom, which have been so admirably depicted by her great political annalists.  It is rather my object to illustrate the intellectual qualities of philosophical analysis and acute observation for which her citizens were eminent.  Yet a sketch of the situation is necessary in order to bring into relief the different points of view maintained by Segni, Nardi, Varchi, Pitti, and Nerli respectively.

At the period in question Florence was, according to the universal testimony of these authors, too corrupt for real liberty and too turbulent for the tranquil acceptance of a despotism.  The yoke of the Medici had destroyed the sense of honor and the pride of the old noble families; while the policy pursued by Lorenzo and the Popes had created a class of greedy professional politicians.  The city was not content with slavery; but the burghers, eminent for wealth or ability, were egotistical, vain, and mutually jealous.  Each man sought advantage for himself.  Common action seemed impossible.  The Medicean party, or Palleschi, were either extreme in their devotion to the ruling house, and desirous of establishing a tyranny; or else they were moderate and anxious to retain the Medici as the chiefs of a dominant oligarchy.  The point of union between these two divisions of the party was a prejudice in favor of class rule, a hope to get power and wealth for themselves through the elevation of the princely family The popular faction on the other hand agreed in wishing to place the government of the city upon a broad republican basis.  But the leaders of this section of the citizens favored the plebeian cause from different motives.  Some sought only a way to riches and authority, which they could never have opened for them under the oligarchy contemplated by the Palleschi.  Others, styled Frateschi or Piagnoni, clung to the ideas of liberty which were associated with the high morality and impassioned creed of Savonarola.  These were really the backbone of the nation, the class which might have saved the state if salvation had been possible.  Another section, steeped in the study of ancient authors and imbued with memories of Roman patriotism, thought it still possible to secure the freedom of the state by liberal institutions.  These men we may call the Doctrinaires.  Their panacea was the establishment of a mixed form of government, such as that which Giannotti so learnedly illustrated.  To these parties must be added the red republicans, or Arrabbiati ­a name originally reserved for the worst adherents of the Medici, but now applied to fanatics of Jacobin complexion ­and the Libertines, who only cared for such a form of government as should permit them to indulge their passions.

Amid this medley of interests there resulted, as a matter of fact, two policies at the moment when the affairs of Florence, threatened by Pope and Emperor in combination, and deserted by France and the rest of Italy, grew desperate.  One was that of the Gonfalonier Capponi, who advocated moderate counsels and an accommodation with Clement VII.  The other was that of the Gonfalonier Carducci, who pushed things to extremities and used the enthusiasm of the Frateschi for sustaining the spirit of the people in the siege. The latter policy triumphed over the former.  Its principles were an obstinate belief in Francis, though he had clearly turned a deaf ear to Florence; confidence in the generals, Baglioni and Colonna, who were privately traitors to the cause they professed to defend; and reliance on the prophecies of Savonarola, supported by the preaching of the Friars Foiano, Bartolommeo, and Zaccaria.  Ill-founded as it was in fact, the policy of Carducci had on its side all that was left of nobility, patriotism, and the fire of liberty among the Florentines.  In spite of the hopelessness of the attempt, we cannot now read without emotion how bravely and desperately those last champions of freedom fought, to maintain the independence of their city at any cost, and in the teeth of overwhelming opposition.  The memory of Savonarola was the inspiration of this policy.  Ferrucci was its hero.  It failed.  It was in vain that the Florentines had laid waste Valdarno, destroyed their beautiful suburbs, and leveled their crown of towers.  It was in vain that they had poured forth their treasures to the uttermost farthing, had borne plague and famine without a murmur, and had turned themselves at the call of their country into a nation of soldiers, Charles, Clement, the Palleschi, and Malatesta Baglioni ­enemies without the city walls and traitors within its gates ­were too powerful for the resistance of burghers who had learned but yesterday to handle arms and to conduct a war on their own account. Florence had to capitulate.  The venomous Palleschi, Francesco Guicciardini and Baccio Valori, by proscription, exile, and taxation, drained the strength and broke the spirit of the state.  Cæsar and Christ’s Vicar, a new Herod and a new Pilate, embraced and made friends over the prostrate corpse of sold and slaughtered liberty.  Florence was paid as compensation for the insult offered to the Pontiff in the sack of Rome.

The part played by Filippo Strozzi in this last drama of the liberties of Florence is feeble and discreditable, but at the same time historically instructive, since it shows to what a point the noblest of the Florentines had fallen.  All Pitti’s invectives against the Ottimati, bitter as they may be, are justified by the unvarnished narrative we read upon the pages of Varchi and Segni concerning this most vicious, selfish, vain, and brilliant hero of historical romance.  Married to Clarice de’ Medici, by whom he had a splendid family of handsome and vigorous sons, he was more than the rival of his wife’s princely relatives by his wealth.  Yet though he made a profession of patriotism, Filippo failed to use this great influence consistently as a counterpoise to the Medicean authority.  It was he, for instance, who advised Lorenzo the younger to make himself Duke of Florence.  Distinguished, as he was, above all men of his time for wit, urbanity, accomplishments, and splendid living, his want of character neutralized these radiant gifts of nature.  His private morals were infamous.  He encouraged by precept and example the worst vices of his age and nation, consorting with young men whom he instructed in the arts of dissolute living, and to whom he communicated his own selfish Epicureanism.  To him in a great measure may be attributed the corruption of the Florentine aristocracy in the sixteenth century.  In his public action he was no less vacillating than unprincipled in private life.  After prevailing upon Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici to leave Florence in 1527, he failed to execute his trust of getting Pisa from their grasp (moved, it is said, by a guilty fondness for the young and handsome Ippolito), nor did he afterwards share any of the hardships and responsibilities of the siege.  Indeed, he then found it necessary to retire into exile in France, on the excuse of superintending his vast commercial affairs at Lyons.  After the restoration of the Medici he returned to Florence as the courtier of Duke Alessandro, whom he aided and abetted in his juvenile debaucheries.  Quarreling with Alessandro on the occasion of an insult offered to his daughter Luisa, and the accusation of murder brought against his son Piero, he went into opposition and exile, less for political than for private reasons.  After the murder of Alessandro, he received Lorenzo de’ Medici, the fratricide, with the title of ‘Second Brutus’ at Venice.  Meanwhile it was he who paid the dowry of Catherine de’ Medici to the Duke of Orleans, helping thus to strengthen the house of princes against whom he was plotting, by that splendid foreign alliance which placed a descendant of the Florentine bill-brokers on the throne of France.  After all these vicissitudes Filippo Strozzi headed an armed attack upon the dominions of Duke Cosimo, was taken in the battle of Montemurlo, and finally was murdered in that very fortress, outside the Porto a Faenza, which he had counseled Alessandro to construct for the intimidation of the Florentines. The historians with the exception of Nerli agree in describing him as a pleasure-loving and self-seeking man, whose many changes of policy were due, not to conviction, but to the desire of gaining the utmost license of disorderly living.  At the same time we cannot deny him the fame of brilliant mental qualities, a princely bearing, and great courage.

The moral and political debility which proved the real source of the ruin of Florence is accounted for in different ways by the historians of the siege.  Pitti, whose insight into the situation is perhaps the keenest, and who is by far the most outspoken, does not refer the failure of the Florentines to the cowardice or stupidity of the popular party, but to the malignity of the Palleschi, the double-dealing and egotism of the wealthy nobles, who to suit their own interests favored now one and now another of the parties.  These Ottimati ­as he calls them, by a title borrowed from classical phraseology ­whether they professed the Medicean or the popular cause, were always bent on self-aggrandizement at the expense of the people or their princes. The sympathies of Pitti were on the side of the plebeians, whose policy during the siege was carried out by the Gonfalonier Carducci.  At the same time he admitted the feebleness and insufficiency of many of these men, called from a low rank of life and from mechanical trades to the administration of the commonwealth.  The state of Florence under Piero Soderini ­that ‘non mai abbastanza lodato cavalière,’ as he calls him ­was the ideal to which he reverted with longing eyes.  Segni, on the other hand, condemns the ambition of the plebeian leaders, and declares his opinion that the State could only have been saved by the more moderate among the influential citizens.  He belonged in fact to that section of the Medicean party which Varchi styles the Neutrals.  He had strong aristocratic leanings, and preferred a government of nobles to the popular democracy which flourished under Francesco Carducci.  While he desired the liberty of Florence, Segni saw that the republic could not hold its own against both Pope and Emperor, at a crisis when the King of France, who ought to have rendered assistance in the hour of need, was bound by the treaty of Cambray, and by the pledges he had given to Charles in the persons of his two sons.  The policy of which Segni approved was that which Niccolo Capponi had prepared before his fall ­a reconciliation with Clement through the intervention of the Emperor, according to the terms of which the Medici should have been restored as citizens of paramount authority, but not as sovereigns.  Varchi, while no less alive to the insecurity of Carducci’s policy, was animated with a more democratic spirit.  He had none of Segni’s Whig leanings, but shared the patriotic enthusiasm which at that supreme moment made the whole state splendidly audacious in the face of insurmountable difficulties.  Both Segni and Varchi discerned the exaggerated and therefore baneful influence of Savonarola’s prophecies over the populace of Florence.  In spite of continued failure, the people kept trusting to the monk’s prediction that, after her chastisement, Florence would bloom forth with double luster, and that angels in the last resort would man her walls and repel the invaders.  There is something pathetic in this delusion of a great city, trusting with infantine pertinacity to the promises of the man whom they had seen burned as an impostor, when all the while their statesmen and their generals were striking bargains with the foe.  Nardi is more sincerely Piagnone than either Segni or Varchi.  Yet, writing after the events of the siege, his faith is shaken; and while he records his conviction that Savonarola was an excellent Nomothetes, he questions his prophetic mission, and deplores the effect produced by his vain promises.  Nerli, as might have been expected from a noble married to Caterina Salviati, the niece of Leo and the aunt of Cosimo, who had himself been courtier to Clement and privy councilor to Alessandro, sustains the Medicean note throughout his commentaries.

Thus from these five authors, writing from different points of view, we gain a complete insight into the complicated politics of Florence, at a period when her vitality was still vigorous, but when she had lost all faculty for centralized or concerted action.  In sagacity, in the power of analysis with which they pierce below the surface, trace effects to causes, discern character, and regard the facts of history as the proper subject-matter of philosophical reflection, they have much in common.  He who has seen Rembrandt’s painting of the dissecting-room might construct for himself another picture, in which the five grave faces of these patient observers should be bent above the dead and diseased body of their native city.  Life is extinct.  Nothing is left for science but, scalpel in hand, to lay bare the secret causes of dissolution.  Each anatomist has his own opinion to deliver upon the nature of the malady.  Each records the facts revealed by the autopsy according to his own impressions.

The literary qualities of these historians are very different, and seem to be derived from essential differences in their characters.  Pitti is by far the most brilliant in style, concentrated in expression to the point of epigram, and weighty in judgment.  Nardi, though deficient in some of the most attractive characteristics of the historian, is invaluable for sincerity of intention and painstaking accuracy.  The philosophical, rhetorical, and dramatic passages which add so much splendor to the works of Guicciardini are absent from the pages of Nardi.  He is anxious to present a clear picture of what happened; but he cannot make it animated, and he never reflects at length upon the matter of his history.  At the same time he lacks the naiivete which makes Corio, Allegretti, Infessura, and Matarazzo so amusing.  He gossips as little as Machiavelli, and has no profundity to make up for the want of piquancy.  The interest of his chronicle is greatest in the part which concerns Savonarola, though even here the peculiarly reticent and dubitative nature of the man is obvious.  While he sympathizes with Savonarola’s political and moral reforms, he raises a doubt about his inner sincerity, and does not approve of the attitude of the Piagnoni. In his estimation of men Nardi was remarkably cautious, preferring always to give an external relation of events, instead of analyzing motives or criticising character. He is in especial silent about bad men and criminal actions.  Therefore, when he passes an adverse judgment (as, for instance, upon Cesare Borgia), or notes a dark act (as the stuprum committed upon Astorre Manfredi), his corroboration of historians more addicted to scandal is important.  Segni is far more lively than Nardi, while he is not less painstaking to be accurate.  He shows a partisan feeling, especially in his admiration for Niccolo Capponi and his prejudice against Francesco Carducci, which gives the relish of personality that Nardi’s cautiously dry chronicle lacks.  Rarely have the entangled events of a specially dramatic period been set forth more lucidly, more succinctly, and with greater elegance of style.  Segni is deficient, when compared with Varchi, only perhaps in volume, minuteness, and that wonderful mixture of candor, enthusiasm, and zeal for truth which makes Varchi incomparable.  His sketches of men, critiques, and digressions upon statistical details are far less copious than Varchi’s.  But in idiomatic purity of language he is superior.  Varchi had been spoiled by academic habits of composition.  His language is diffuse and lumbering.  He lacks the vivacity of epigram, selection, and pointed phrase.  But his Storia Fiorentina remains the most valuable repertory of information we possess about the later vicissitudes of the republic, and the charm of detail compensates for the lack of style.  Nerli is altogether a less interesting writer than those that have been mentioned; yet some of the particulars which he relates, about Savonarola’s reform of manners, for example, and the literary gatherings in the Rucellai gardens, are such as we find nowhere else.

Many of my readers will doubtless feel that too much time has been spent in the discussion of these annalists of the siege of Florence.  Yet for the student of history they have a value almost unique.  They suggest the possibilities of a true science of comparative history, and reveal a vivacity of the historic consciousness which can be paralleled by no other nation.  How different might be our conception of the vicissitudes of Athens between 404 and 338 B.C. if we possessed a similar Pleiad of contemporary Greek authors!

Having traced the development of historical research and political philosophy in Florence from the year 1300 to the fall of the Republic, it remains to speak of the two greatest masters of practical and theoretical statecraft ­Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolo Machiavelli.  These two writers combine all the distinctive qualities of the Florentine historiographers in the most eminent perfection.  At the same time they are, not merely as authors but also as men, mirrors of the times in which they both played prominent parts.  In their biographies and in their works we trace the spirit of an age devoid of moral sensibility, penetrative in analysis, but deficient in faith, hope, enthusiasm, and stability of character.  The dry light of the intellect determined their judgment of men, as well as their theories of government.  On the other hand, the sordid conditions of existence to which they were subjected as the servants of corrupt states, or the instruments of wily princes ­as diplomatists intent upon the plans of kings like Ferdinand or adventurers like Cesare Borgia, privy councilors of such Popes as Clement VII. and such tyrants as Duke Alessandro de’ Medici ­distorted their philosophy and blunted their instincts.  For the student of the sixteenth century they remain riddles, the solution of which is difficult, because by no strain of the imagination is it easy to place ourselves in their position.  One half of their written utterances seem to be at variance with the other half.  Their actions often contradict their most brilliant and emphatic precepts; while contemporaries disagree about their private character and public conduct.  All this confusion, through which it is now perhaps impossible to discern what either Guicciardini or Machiavelli really was, and what they really felt and thought, is due to the anomaly of consummate ability and unrivaled knowledge of the world existing without religious or political faith, in an age of the utmost depravity of public and private morals.  No criticism could be more stringent upon the contemporary disorganization of society in Italy than is the silent witness of these men, sublimely great in all mental qualities, but helplessly adrift upon a sea of contradictions and of doubts, ignorant of the real nature of mankind in spite of all their science, because they leave both goodness and beauty out of their calculations.

Francesco Guicciardini was born in 1482.  In 1505, at the age of twenty-three, he had already so distinguished himself as a student of law that he was appointed by the Signoria of Florence to read the Institutes in public.  However, as he preferred active to professorial work, he began at this time to practice at the bar, where he soon ranked as an able advocate and eloquent speaker.  This reputation, together with his character for gravity and insight, determined the Signoria to send him on an embassy to the Court of Ferdinand of Aragon in 1512.  Thus Guicciardini entered on the real work of his life as a diplomatist and statesman.  We may also conclude with safety that it was at the court of that crowned hypocrite and traitor to all loyalty of soul that he learned his first lessons in political cynicism.  The court of Spain under Ferdinand the Catholic was a perfect school of perfidy, where even an Italian might discern deeper reaches of human depravity and formulate for his own guidance a philosophy of despair.  It was whispered by his enemies that here, upon the threshold of his public life, Guicciardini sold his honor by accepting a bribe from Ferdinand. Certain it is that avarice was one of his besetting sins, and that from this time forward he preferred expediency to justice, and believed in the policy of supporting force by clever dissimulation. Returning to Florence, Guicciardini was, in 1515, deputed to meet Leo X. on the part of the Republic at Cortona.  Leo, who had the faculty of discerning able men and making use of them, took him into favor, and three years later appointed him Governor of Reggio and Modena.  In 1521 Parma was added to his rule.  Clement VII. made him Viceroy of Romagna in 1523, and in 1526 elevated him to the rank of Lieutenant-General of the Papal army.  In consequence of this high commission, Guicciardini shared in the humiliation attaching to all the officers of the League who, with the Duke of Urbino at their head suffered Rome to be sacked and the Pope to be imprisoned in 1527.  The blame of this contemptible display of cowardice or private spite cannot, however, be ascribed to him:  for he attended the armies of the League not as general, but as counselor and chief reporter.  It was his business not to control the movements of the army so much as to act as referee in the Pope’s interest, and to keep the Vatican informed of what was stirring in the camp.  In 1531 Guicciardini was advanced to the governorship of Bologna, the most important of all the Papal lord-lieutenancies.  This post he resigned in 1534 on the election of Paul III., preferring to follow the fortunes of the Medicean princes at Florence.  In this sketch of his career I must not omit to mention that Guicciardini was declared a rebel in 1527 by the popular government on account of his well-known Medicean prejudices, and that in 1530 he had been appointed by Clement VII. to punish the rebellious citizens.  On the latter occasion he revenged himself for the insults offered him in 1527 by the cruelty with which he pushed proscription to the utmost limits, relegating his enemies to unhealthy places of exile, burdening them with intolerable fines, and using all the indirect means which his ingenuity could devise for forcing them into outlawry and contumacy. Therefore when he returned to inhabit Florence, he did so as the creature of the Medici, sworn to maintain the bastard Alessandro in his power.  He was elected a member of the Senate of eighty; and so thoroughly did he espouse the cause of his new master, that he had the face to undertake the Duke’s defense before Charles V. at Naples in 1535.  On this occasion Alessandro, who had rendered himself unbearable by his despotic habits, and in particular by the insults which he offered to women of all ranks and conditions in Florence, was arraigned by the exiles before the bar of Cæsar.  Guicciardini won the cause of his client, and restored Alessandro with an Imperial confirmation of his despotism to Florence.  This period of his political career deserves particular attention, since it displays a glaring contradiction between some of his unpublished compositions and his actions, and confirms the accusations of his enemies. That he should have preferred a government of Ottimati, or wealthy nobles, to a more popular constitution, and that he should have adhered with fidelity to the Medicean faction in Florence, is no ground for censure. But when we find him in private unmasking the artifices of the despots by the most relentless use of frigid criticism, and advocating a mixed government upon the type of the Venetian Constitution, we are constrained to admit with Varchi and Pitti that his support of Alessandro was prompted less by loyalty than by a desire to gratify his own ambition and avarice under the protective shadow of the Medicean tyranny. He belonged in fact to those selfish citizens whom Pitti denounces, diplomatists and men of the world, whose thirst for power induced them to play into the hands of the Medici, wishing to suck the state themselves, and to hold the prince in the leading-strings of vice and pleasure for their own advantage. After the murder of Alessandro, it was principally through Guicciardini’s influence that Cosimo was placed at the head of the Florentine Republic with the title of Duke.  Cosimo was but a boy, and much addicted to field sports.  Guicciardini therefore reckoned that, with an assured income of 12,000 ducats, the youth would be contented to amuse himself, while he left the government of Florence in the hands of his Vizier. But here the wily politician overreached himself.  Cosimo wore an old head on his young shoulders.  With decent modesty and a becoming show of deference, he used Guicciardini as his ladder to mount the throne by, and then kicked the ladder away.  The first days of his administration showed that he intended to be sole master in Florence.  Guicciardini, perceiving that his game was spoiled, retired to his villa in 1537 and spent the last years of his life in composing his histories.  The famous Istoria d’ Italia was the work of one year of this enforced retirement.  The question irresistibly rises to our mind, whether some of the severe criticisms passed upon the Medici in his unpublished compositions were the fruit of these same bitter leisure hours. Guicciardini died in 1540 at the age of fifty-eight, without male heirs.

Turning now from the statesman to the man of letters, we find in Guicciardini one of the most consummate historians of any nation or of any age.  The work by which he is best known, the Istoria d’ Italia, is one that can scarcely be surpassed for masterly control of a very intricate period, for subordination of the parts to the whole, for calmness of judgment and for philosophic depth of thought.  Considering that Guicciardini in this great work was writing the annals of his own times, and that he had to disentangle the raveled skein of Italian politics in the sixteenth century, these qualities are most remarkable.  The whole movement of the history recalls the pomp and dignity of Livy, while a series of portraits sketched from life with the unerring hand of an anatomist and artist add something of the vivid force of Tacitus.  Yet Guicciardini in this work deserves less commendation as a writer than as a thinker.  There is a manifest straining to secure style, by manipulation and rehandling, which contrasts unfavorably with the unaffected ease, the pregnant spontaneity, of his unpublished writings.  His periods are almost interminable, and his rhetoric is prolix and monotonous.  We can trace the effort to emulate the authors of antiquity without the ease which is acquired by practice or the taste that comes with nature.

The transcendent merit of the history is this ­that it presents us with a scientific picture of politics and of society during the first half of the sixteenth century.  The picture is set forth with a clairvoyance and a candor that are almost terrible.  The author never feels enthusiasm for a moment:  no character, however great for good or evil, rouses him from the attitude of tranquil disillusioned criticism.  He utters but few exclamations of horror or of applause.  Faith, religion, conscience, self-subordination to the public good, have no place in his list of human motives; interest, ambition, calculation, envy, are the forces which, according to his experience, move the world.  That the strong should trample on the weak, that the wily should circumvent the innocent, that hypocrisy and fraud and dissimulation should triumph, seems to him but natural.  His whole theory of humanity is tinged with the sad gray colors of a stolid, cold-eyed, ill-contented, egotistical indifference.  He is not angry, desperate, indignant, but phlegmatically prudent, face to face with the ruin of his country.  For him the world was a game of intrigue, in which his friends, his enemies, and himself played parts, equally sordid, with grave faces and hearts bent only on the gratification of mean desires.  Accordingly, though his mastery of detail, his comprehension of personal motives, and his analysis of craft are alike incomparable, we find him incapable of forming general views with the breadth of philosophic insight or the sagacity of a frank and independent nature.  The movements of the eagle and the lion must be unintelligible to the spider or the fox.  It was impossible for Guicciardini to feel the real greatness of the century, or to foresee the new forces to which it was giving birth.  He could not divine the momentous issues of the Lutheran schism; and though he perceived the immediate effect upon Italian politics of the invasion of the French, he failed to comprehend the revolution marked out for the future in the shock of the modern nations.  While criticising the papacy, he discerned the pernicious results of nepotism and secular ambition:  but he had no instinct for the necessity of a spiritual and religious regeneration.  His judgment of the political situation led him to believe that the several units of the Italian system might be turned to profit and account by the application of superficial remedies, ­by the development of despotism, for example, or of oligarchy, when in reality the decay of the nation was already past all cure.

Two other masterpieces from Guicciardini’s pen, the Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze and the Storia Fiorentina, have been given to the world during the last twenty years.  To have published them immediately after their author’s death would have been inexpedient, since they are far too candid and outspoken to have been acceptable to the Medicean dynasty.  Yet in these writings we find Guicciardini at his best.  Here he has not yet assumed the mantle of the rhetorician, which in the Istoria d’ Italia sits upon him somewhat cumbrously.  His style is more spontaneous; his utterances are less guarded.  Writing for himself alone, he dares to say more plainly what he thinks and feels.  At the same time the political sagacity of the statesman is revealed in all its vigor.  I have so frequently used both of these treatises that I need not enter into a minute analysis of their contents.  It will be enough to indicate some of the passages which display the literary style and the scientific acumen of Guicciardini at their best.  The Reggimento di Firenze is an essay upon the form of government for which Florence was best suited.  Starting with a discussion of Savonarola’s constitution, in which ample justice is done to the sagacity and promptitude by means of which he saved the commonwealth at a critical juncture (pp. 27-30), the interlocutors pass to an examination of the Medicean tyranny (pp. 34-49).  This is one of the masterpieces of Guicciardini’s analysis.  He shows how the administration of justice, the distribution of public honors, and the foreign policy of the republic were perverted by this family.  He condemns Cosimo’s tyrannical application of fines and imposts , Piero the younger’s insolence , and Lorenzo’s appropriation of the public moneys to his private use .  Yet while setting forth the vices of this tyranny in language which even Sismondi would have been contented to translate and sign, Guicciardini shows no passion.  The Medici were only acting as befitted princes eager for power, although they crushed the spirit of the people, discouraged political ardor, extinguished military zeal, and did all that in them lay to enervate the nation they governed.  The scientific statist acknowledges no reciprocal rights and duties between the governor and the governed.  It is a trial of strength.  If the tyrant gets the upper hand, the people must expect to be oppressed.  If, on the other side, the people triumph, they must take good care to exterminate the despotic brood:  ’The one true remedy would be to destroy and extinguish them so utterly that not a vestige should remain, and to employ for this purpose the poignard or poison, as may be most convenient; otherwise the least surviving spark is certain to cause trouble and annoyance for the future’.  The same precise criticism lays bare the weakness of democracy.  Men, says Guicciardini, always really desire their own power more than the freedom of the state , and the motives even of tyrannicides are very rarely pure (pp. 53-54).  The governments established by the liberals are full of defects.  The Consiglio Grande, for example, of the Florentines is ignorant in its choice of magistrates, unjust in its apportionment of taxes, scarcely less prejudiced against individuals than a tyrant would be, and incapable of diplomatic foreign policy (pp. 58-69).  Then follows a discussion of the relative merits of the three chief forms of government ­the Governo dell’ Uno, the Governo degli Ottimati, and the Governo del Popolo .  Guicciardini has already criticised the first and the third. He now expresses a strong opinion that the second is the worst which could be applied to the actual conditions of the Florentine Republic .  His panegyric of the Venetian constitution (pp. 139-41) illustrates his plan for combining the advantages of the three species and obviating their respective evils.  In fact he declares for that Utopia of the sixteenth century ­the Governo Misto ­a political invention which fascinated the imagination of Italian statesmen much in the same way as the theory of perpetual motion attracted scientific minds in the last century. What follows is an elaborate scheme for applying the principles of the Governo Misto to the existing state of things in Florence.  This lucid and learned disquisition is wound up with a mournful expression of the doubt which hung like a thick cloud over all the political speculations of both Guicciardini and Machiavelli:  ’I hold it very doubtful, and I think it much depends on chance whether this disorganized constitution will ever take new shape or not ... and as I said yesterday, I should have more hope if the city were but young; seeing that not only does a state at the commencement take form with greater facility than one that has grown old under evil governments, but things always turn out more prosperously and more easily while fortune is yet fresh and has not run its course,’ etc. In reading the Dialogue on the Constitution of Florence it must finally be remembered that Guicciardini has thrown it back into the year 1494, and that he speaks through the mouths of four interlocutors.  Therefore we may presume that he intended his readers to regard it as a work of speculative science rather than of practical political philosophy.  Yet it is not difficult to gather the drift of his own meaning.

The Istoria Fiorentina is a succinct narrative of the events of Italian History, especially as they concerned Florence, between the years 1378 and 1509.  In other words it relates the vicissitudes of the Republic under the Medici, and the administration of the Gonfalonier Soderini.  This masterpiece of historical narration sets forth with brevity and frankness the whole series of events which are rhetorically and cautiously unfolded in the Istoria d’ Italia.  Most noticeable are the characters of Lorenzo de’ Medici (cap. ix.), of Savonarola (cap. xvii.), and of Alexander VI. (cap. xxvii.).  The immediate consequences of the French invasion have never been more ably treated than in Chapter xi., while the whole progress of Cesare Borgia in his career of villany is analyzed with exquisite distinctness in Chapter xxvi.  The wisdom of Guicciardini nowhere appears more ripe, or his intellect more elastic, than in the Istoria Fiorentina.  Students who desire to gain a still closer insight into the working of Guicciardini’s mind should consult the 403 Ricordi Politici e Civili collected in the first volume of his Opère Inédite.  These have all the charm which belongs to occasional utterances, and are fit, like proverbs, to be worn for jewels on the finger of time.

The biography of Niccolo Machiavelli consists for the most part of a record of his public services to the State of Florence.  He was born on May 3, 1469, of parents who belonged to the prosperous middle class of Florentine citizens.  His ancestry was noble; for the old tradition which connected his descent with the feudal house of Montespertoli has been confirmed by documentary evidence. His forefathers held offices of high distinction in the Commonwealth; and though their wealth and station had decreased, Machiavelli inherited a small landed estate.  His family, who were originally settled in the Val di Pesa, owned farms at San Casciano and in other villages of the Florentine dominion, a list of which may be seen in the return presented by his father Bernardo to the revenue office in 1498. Their wealth was no doubt trivial in comparison with that which citizens amassed by trade in Florence; for it was not the usage of those times to draw more than the necessaries of life from the Villa:  all superfluities were provided by the Bottega in the town. Yet there can be no question, after a comparison of Bernardo Machiavelli’s return of his landed property with Niccolo Machiavelli’s will, that the illustrious war secretary at all periods of his life owned just sufficient property to maintain his family in a decent, if not a dignified, style.  About his education we know next to nothing.  Giovio asserts that he possessed but little Latin, and that he owed the show of learning in his works to quotations furnished by Marcellus Virgilius.  This accusation, which, whether it be true or not, was intended to be injurious, has lost its force in an age that, like ours, values erudition less than native genius.  It is certain that Machiavelli knew quite enough of Latin and Greek literature to serve his turn; and his familiarity with some of the classical historians and philosophers is intimate.  There is even too much parade in his works of illustrations borrowed from Polybius, Livy, and Plutarch:  the only question is whether Machiavelli relied upon translations rather than originals.  On this point, it is also worthy of remark that his culture was rather Roman than Hellenic.  Had he at any period of his life made as profound a study of Plato’s political dialogues as he made of Livy’s histories, we cannot but feel that his theories both of government and statecraft might have been more concordant with a sane and normal humanity.

In 1494, the date of the expulsion of the Medici, Machiavelli was admitted to the Chancery of the Commune as a clerk; and in 1498 he was appointed to the post of chancellor and secretary to the Dieci di liberta e pace.  This place he held for the better half of fifteen years, that is to say, during the whole period of Florentine freedom.  His diplomatic missions undertaken at the instance of the Republic were very numerous.  Omitting those of less importance, we find him at the camp of Cesare Borgia in 1502, in France in 1504, with Julius II. in 1506, with the Emperor Maximilian in 1507, and again at the French Court in 1510. To this department of his public life belong the dispatches and Relazioni which he sent home to the Signory of Florence, his Monograph upon the Massacre of Sinigaglia, his treatises upon the method of dealing with Pisa, Pistoja, and Valdichiana, and those two remarkable studies of foreign nations which are entitled Ritratti delle Cose dell’ Alemagna and Ritratti delle Cose di Francia.  It was also in the year 1500 that he laid the first foundations of his improved military system.  The political sagacity and the patriotism for which Machiavelli has been admired are nowhere more conspicuous than in the discernment which suggested this measure, and in the indefatigable zeal with which he strove to carry it into effect.  Pondering upon the causes of Italian weakness when confronted with nations like the French, and comparing contemporary with ancient history, Machiavelli came to the conclusion that the universal employment of mercenary troops was the chief secret of the insecurity of Italy.  He therefore conceived a plan for establishing a national militia, and for placing the whole male population at the service of the state in times of war.  He had to begin cautiously in bringing this scheme before the public; for the stronghold of the mercenary system was the sloth and luxury of the burghers.  At first he induced the Dieci di liberta e pace, or war office, to require the service of one man per house throughout the Florentine dominion; but at the same time he caused a census to be taken of all men capable of bearing arms.  His next step was to carry a law by which the permanent militia of the state was fixed at 10,000.  Then in 1503, having prepared the way by these preliminary measures, he addressed the Council of the Burghers in a set oration, unfolding the principles of his proposed reform, and appealing not only to their patriotism but also to their sense of self-preservation.  It was his aim to prove that mercenary arms must be exchanged for a national militia, if freedom and independence were to be maintained.  The Florentines allowed themselves to be convinced, and, on the recommendation of Machiavelli, they voted in 1506 a new magistracy, called the Nove dell’ Ordinanza e Milizia, for the formation of companies, the discipline of soldiers, and the maintenance of the militia in a state of readiness for active service. Machiavelli became the secretary of this board; and much of his time was spent thenceforth in the levying of troops and the practical development of his system.  It requires an intimate familiarity with the Italian military system of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to understand the importance of this reform.  We are so accustomed to the systems of Militia, Conscription, and Landwehr, by means of which military service has been nationalized among the modern races, that we need to tax our imagination before we can place ourselves at the point of view of men to whom Machiavelli’s measure was a novelty of genius.

It must be admitted that the new militia proved ineffectual in the hour of need.  To revive the martial spirit of a nation, enervated by tyranny and given over to commerce, merely by a stroke of genius, was beyond the force of even Machiavelli.  When Prato had been sacked in 1512, the Florentines, destitute of troops, divided among themselves and headed by the excellent but hesitating Piero Soderini, threw their gates open to the Medici.  Giuliano, the brother of Pope Leo, and Lorenzo, his nephew, whose statues sit throned in the immortality of Michael Angelo’s marble upon their tombs in San Lorenzo, disposed of the republic at their pleasure.  Machiavelli, as War Secretary of the anti-Medicean government, was of course disgraced and deprived of his appointments.  In 1513 he was suspected of complicity in the conjuration of Pietropaolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, was imprisoned in the Bargello, and tortured to the extent of four turns of the rack.  It seems that he was innocent.  Leo X. released him by the act of amnesty passed upon the event of his assuming the tiara; and Machiavelli immediately retired to his farm near San Casciano.

Since we are now approaching the most critical passage of Machiavelli’s biography, it may be well to draw from his private letters a picture of the life to which this statesman of the restless brain was condemned in the solitude of the country. Writing on December 10 to his friend Francesco Vettori, he says, ’I am at my farm; and, since my last misfortunes, have not been in Florence twenty days.  I rise with the sun, and go into a wood of mine that is being cut, where I remain two hours inspecting the work of the previous day and conversing with the woodcutters, who have always some trouble on hand among themselves or with their neighbors.  When I leave the wood, I proceed to a well, and thence to the place which I use for snaring birds, with a book under my arm ­Dante, or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, like Tibullus or Ovid.  I read the story of their passions, and let their loves remind me of my own, which is a pleasant pastime for a while.  Next I take the road, enter the inn door, talk with the passers-by, inquire the news of the neighborhood, listen to a variety of matters, and make note of the different tastes and humors of men.  This brings me to dinner-time, when I join my family and eat the poor produce of my farm.  After dinner I go back to the inn, where I generally find the host and a butcher, a miller, and a pair of bakers.  With these companions I play the fool all day at cards or backgammon:  a thousand squabbles, a thousand insults and abusive dialogues take place, while we haggle over a farthing, and shout loud enough to be heard from San Casciano.  But when evening falls I go home and enter my writing-room.  On the threshold I put off my country habit, filthy with mud and mire, and array myself in royal courtly garments; thus worthily attired, I make my entrance into the ancient courts of the men of old, where they receive me with love, and where I feed upon that food which only is my own and for which I was born.  I feel no shame in conversing with them and asking them the reason of their actions.  They, moved by their humanity, make answer; for four hours’ space I feel no annoyance, forget all care; poverty cannot frighten, nor death appall me.  I am carried away to their society.  And since Dante says “that there is no science unless we retain what we have learned,” I have set down what I have gained from their discourse, and composed a treatise, De Principatibus, in which I enter as deeply as I can into the science of the subject, with reasonings on the nature of principality, its several species, and how they are acquired, how maintained, how lost.  If you ever liked any of my scribblings, this ought to suit your taste.  To a prince, and especially to a new prince, it ought to prove acceptable.  Therefore I am dedicating it to the Magnificence of Giuliano.’

Further on in the same letter he writes:  ’I have talked with Filippo Casavecchia about this little work of mine, whether I ought to present it or not; and if so, whether I ought to send or take it myself to him.  I was induced to doubt about presenting it at all by the fear lest Giuliano should not even read it, and that this Ardinghelli should profit by my latest labors.  On the other hand, I am prompted to present it by the necessity which pursues me, seeing that I am consuming myself in idleness, and I cannot continue long in this way without becoming contemptible through poverty.  I wish these Signori Medici would begin to make some use of me, if it were only to set me to the work of rolling a stone. If I did not win them over to me afterwards, I should only complain of myself.  As for my book, if they read it, they would perceive that the fifteen years I have spent in studying statecraft have not been wasted in sleep or play; and everybody ought to be glad to make use of a man who has so filled himself with experience at the expense of others.  About my fidelity they ought not to doubt.  Having always kept faith, I am not going to learn to break it now.  A man who has been loyal and good for forty-three years, like me, is not likely to change his nature; and of my loyalty and goodness my poverty is sufficient witness to them.’

This letter, invaluable to the student of Machiavelli’s works, is prejudicial to his reputation.  It was written only ten months after he had been imprisoned and tortured by the Medici, just thirteen months after the republic he had served so long had been enslaved by the princes before whom he was now cringing.  It is true that Machiavelli was not wealthy; his habits of prodigality made his fortune insufficient for his needs. It is true that he could ill bear the enforced idleness of country life, after being engaged for fifteen years in the most important concerns of the Florentine Republic.  But neither his poverty, which, after all, was but comparative, nor his inactivity, for which he found relief in study, justifies the tone of the conclusion to this letter.  When we read it, we cannot help remembering the language of another exile, who while he tells us ­

                Come sa di sale
  Lo pane altrui, e com’ e duro calle
  Lo scendere e ‘l salir per l’ altrui scale

­can yet refuse the advances of his factious city thus:  ’If Florence cannot be entered honorably, I will never set foot within her walls.  And what?  Shall I not be able from any angle whatsoever of the earth to gaze upon the sun and stars? shall I not beneath whatever region of the heavens have power to meditate the sweetest truths, unless I make myself ignoble first, nay ignominious, in the face of Florence and her people?  Nor will bread, I warrant, fail me!’ If Machiavelli, who in this very letter to Vettori quoted Dante, had remembered these words, they ought to have fallen like drops of molten lead upon his soul.  But such was the debasement of the century that probably he would have only shrugged his shoulders and sighed, ‘Témpora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.’

In some respects Dante, Machiavelli, and Michael Angelo Buonarroti may be said to have been the three greatest intellects produced by Florence.  Dante in exile and in opposition, would hold no sort of traffic with her citizens.  Michael Angelo, after the siege, worked at the Medici tombs for Pope Clement, as a makepeace offering for the fortification of Samminiato; while Machiavelli entreats to be put to roll a stone by these Signori Medici, if only he may so escape from poverty and dullness.  Michael Angelo, we must remember, owed a debt of gratitude as an artist to the Medici for his education in the gardens of Lorenzo.  Moreover, the quatrain which he wrote for his statue of the Night justifies us in regarding that chapel as the cenotaph designed by him for murdered Liberty.  Machiavelli owed nothing to the Medici, who had disgraced and tortured him, and whom he had opposed in all his public action during fifteen years.  Yet what was the gift with which he came before them as a suppliant, crawling to the footstool of their throne?  A treatise De Principatibus; in other words, the celebrated Principe; which, misread it as Machiavelli’s apologists may choose to do, or explain it as the rational historian is bound to do, yet carries venom in its pages.  Remembering the circumstances under which it was composed, we are in a condition to estimate the proud humility and prostrate pride of the dedication.  ’Niccolo Machiavelli to the Magnificent Lorenzo, son of Piero de’ Medici:’  so runs the title.  ’Desiring to present myself to your Magnificence with some proof of my devotion, I have not found among my various furniture aught that I prize more than the knowledge of the actions of great men acquired by me through a long experience of modern affairs and a continual study of ancient.  These I have long and diligently revolved and examined in my mind, and have now compressed into a little book which I send to your Magnificence.  And though I judge this work unworthy of your presence, yet I am confident that your humanity will cause you to value it when you consider that I could not make you a greater gift than this of enabling you in a few hours to understand what I have learned through perils and discomforts in a lengthy course of years.’  ’If your Magnificence will deign, from the summit of your height, some time to turn your eyes to my low place, you will know how unjustly I am forced to endure the great and continued malice of fortune.’  The work so dedicated was sent in MS. for the Magnificent’s private perusal.  It was not published until 1532, by order of Clement VII., after the death of Machiavelli.

I intend to reserve the Principe, considered as the supreme expression of Italian political science, for a separate study; and after the introduction to Macaulay’s Essay on Machiavelli, I need hardly enter in detail into a discussion of the various theories respecting the intention of this treatise. Yet this is the proper place for explaining my view about Machiavelli’s writings in relation to his biography, and for attempting to connect them into such unity as a mind so strictly logical as his may have designed.

With regard to the circumstances under which the Prince was composed, enough has been already said.  Machiavelli’s selfish purpose in putting it forth seems to my mind apparent.  He wanted employment:  he despaired of the republic:  he strove to furnish the princes in power with a convincing proof of his capacity for great affairs.  Yet it must not on this account be concluded that the Principe was merely a cheap bid for office.  On the contrary, it contained the most mature and the most splendid of Machiavelli’s thoughts, accumulated through his long years of public service; and, strange as it may seem, it embodied the dream of a philosophical patriot for the restitution of liberty to Italy.  Florence, indeed, was lost.  ‘These Signori Medici’ were in power.  But could not even they be employed to purge the sacred soil of Italy from the Barbarians?

If we can pretend to sound the depths of Machiavelli’s mind at this distance of time, we may conjecture that he had come to believe the free cities too corrupt for independence.  The only chance Italy had of holding her own against the great powers of Europe was by union under a prince.  At the same time the Utopia of this union, with which he closes the Principe, could only be realized by such a combination as would either neutralize the power of the Church, or else gain the Pope for an ally by motives of interest.  Now at the period of the dedication of the Principe to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Leo X. was striving to found a principality in the states of the Church. In 1516 he created his nephew Duke of Urbino, and it was thought that this was but a prelude to still further greatness.  Florence in combination with Rome might do much for Italy.  Leo meanwhile was still young, and his participation in the most ambitious schemes was to be expected.  Thus the moment was propitious for suggesting to Lorenzo that he should put himself at the head of an Italian kingdom, which, by its union beneath the strong will of a single prince, might suffice to cope with nations more potent in numbers and in arms. The Principe was therefore dedicated in good faith to the Medici, and the note on which it closes was not false.  Machiavelli hoped that what Cesare Borgia had but just failed in accomplishing, Lorenzo de’ Medici, with the assistance of a younger Pope than Alexander, a firmer basis to his princedom in Florence, and a grasp upon the states of the Church made sure by the policy of Julius II., might effect.  Whether so good a judge of character as Machiavelli expected really much from Lorenzo may be doubted.

These circumstances make the morality of the book the more remarkable.  To teach political science denuded of commonplace hypocrisies was a worthy object.  But while seeking to lay bare the springs of action, and to separate statecraft from morals, Machiavelli found himself impelled to recognize a system of inverted ethics.  The abrupt division of the two realms, ethical and political, which he attempted, was monstrous; and he ended by substituting inhumanity for human nature.  Unable to escape the logic which links morality of some sort with conduct, he gave his adhesion to the false code of contemporary practice.  He believed that the right way to attain a result so splendid as the liberation of Italy was to proceed by force, craft, bad faith, and all the petty arts of a political adventurer.  The public ethics of his day had sunk to this low level.  Success by means of plain dealing was impossible.  The game of statecraft could only be carried on by guile and violence.  Even the clear genius of Machiavelli had been obscured by the muddy medium of intrigue in which he had been working all his life.  Even his keen insight was dazzled by the false splendor of the adventurer Cesare Borgia.

To have formulated the ethics of the Principe is not diabolical.  There is no inventive superfluity of naughtiness in the treatise.  It is simply a handbook of princecraft, as that art was commonly received in Italy, where the principles of public morality had been translated into terms of material aggrandizement, glory, gain, and greatness.  No one thought of judging men by their motives but by their practice; they were not regarded as moral but as political beings, responsible, that is to say, to no law but the obligation of success.  Crimes which we regard as horrible were then commended as magnanimous, if it could be shown that they were prompted by a firm will and had for their object a deliberate end.  Machiavelli and Paolo Giovio, for example, both praise the massacre at Sinigaglia as a masterstroke of art, without uttering a word in condemnation of its perfidy.  Machiavelli sneers at Gianpaolo Baglioni because he had not the courage to strangle his guest Julius II. and to crown his other crimes with this signal act of magnanimity.  What virtue had come to mean in the Italian language we have seen already.  The one quality which every one despised was simplicity, however this might be combined with lofty genius and noble aims.  It was because Soderini was simple and had a good heart that Machiavelli wrote the famous epigram ­

  La notte che mori Pier Soderini
  L’ alma n’ andò dell’ inferno alla bocca;
  E Pluto lé grido:  Anima sciocca,
  Che inferno? va nel limbo de’ bambini.

  The night that Peter Soderini died,
  His soul flew down unto the mouth of hell: 
  ‘What?  Hell for you?  You silly spirit!’ cried
  The fiend:  ‘your place is where the babies dwell.’

As of old in Corcyra, so now in Italy, ’guilelessness, which is the principal ingredient of genuine nobleness, was laughed down, and disappeared.’ What men feared was not the moral verdict of society, pronouncing them degraded by vicious or violent acts, but the intellectual estimate of incapacity and the stigma of dullness.  They were afraid of being reckoned among feebler personalities; and to escape from this contempt, by the commission even of atrocities, had come to be accounted manly.  The truth, missed almost universally, was that the supreme wisdom, the paramount virility, is law-abiding honesty, the doing of right because right is right, in scorn of consequence.  Nothing appears more clearly in the memoirs of Cellini than this point, while the Italian novels are full of matter bearing on the same topic.  It is therefore ridiculous to assume that an Italian judged of men or conduct in any sense according to our standards.  Pinturicchio and Perugino thought it no shame to work for princes like the Baglioni and for Popes like Alexander VI.  Lionardo da Vinci placed his talents as an engineer at the service of Cesare Borgia, and employed his genius as a musician and a painter for the amusement of the Milanese Court, which must have been, according to Corio’s account, flagrantly and shamelessly corrupt.  Leo Battista Alberti, one of the most charming and the gentlest spirits of the earlier Renaissance, in like manner lent his architectural ability to the vanity of the iniquitous Sigismondo Malatesta.  No:  the Principe was not inconsistent with the general tone of Italian morality; and Machiavelli cannot be fairly taxed with the discovery of a new infernal method.  The conception of politics as a bare art of means to ends had grown up in his mind by the study of Italian history and social customs.  His idealization of Cesare Borgia and his romance of Castruccio were the first products of the theory he had formed by observation of the world he lived in.  The Principe revealed it fully organized.  But to have presented such an essay in good faith to the despots of his native city, at that particular moment in his own career, and under the pressure of trivial distress, is a real blot upon his memory.

We learn from Varchi that Machiavelli was execrated in Florence for his Principe, the poor thinking it would teach the Medici to take away their honor, the rich regarding it as an attack upon their wealth, and both discerning in it a death-blow to freedom. Machiavelli can scarcely have calculated upon this evil opinion, which followed him to the grave:  for though he showed some hesitation in his letter to Vettori about the propriety of presenting the essay to the Medici, this was only grounded on the fear lest a rival should get the credit of his labors.  Again, he uttered no syllable about its being intended for a trap to catch the Medici, and commit them to unpardonable crimes.  We may therefore conclude that this explanation of the purpose of the Principe (which, strange to say, has approved itself to even recent critics) was promulgated either by himself or by his friends, as an after-thought, when he saw that the work had missed its mark, and at the time when he was trying to suppress the MS. Bernardo Giunti in the dedication of the edition of 1532, and Reginald Pole in 1535, were, I believe, the first to put forth this fanciful theory in print.  Machiavelli could not before 1520 have boasted of the patriotic treachery with which he was afterwards accredited, so far, at any rate, as to lose the confidence of the Medicean family; for in that year the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici commissioned him to write the history of Florence.

The Principe, after its dedication to Lorenzo, remained in MS., and Machiavelli was not employed in spite of the continual solicitations of his friend Vettori. Nothing remained for him but to seek other patrons, and to employ his leisure in new literary work.  Between 1516 and 1519, therefore, we find him taking part in the literary and philosophical discussions of the Florentine Academy, which assembled at that period in the Rucellai Gardens. It was here that he read his Discourses on the First Decade of Livy ­a series of profound essays upon the administration of the state, to which the sentences of the Roman historian serve as texts.  Having set forth in the Principe the method of gaining or maintaining sovereign power, he shows in the Discorsi what institutions are necessary to preserve the body politic in a condition of vigorous activity.  We may therefore regard the Discorsi as in some sense a continuation of the Principe.  But the wisdom of the scientific politician is no longer placed at the disposal of a sovereign.  He addresses himself to all the members of a state who are concerned in its prosperity.  Machiavelli’s enemies have therefore been able to insinuate that, after teaching tyranny in one pamphlet, he expounded the principles of opposition to a tyrant in the other, shifting his sails as the wind veered. The truth here also lies in the critical and scientific quality of Machiavelli’s method.  He was content to lecture either to princes or to burghers upon politics, as an art which he had taken great pains to study, while his interest in the demonstration of principles rendered him in a measure indifferent to their application. In fact, to use the pithy words of Macaulay, ’the Prince traces the progress of an ambitious man, the Discourses the progress of an ambitious people.  The same principles on which, in the former work, the elevation of an individual is explained, are applied in the latter to the longer duration and more complex interest of a society.’

The Seven Books on the Art of War may be referred with certainty to the same period of Machiavelli’s life.  They were probably composed in 1520.  If we may venture to connect the works of the historian’s leisure, according to the plan above suggested, this treatise forms a supplement to the Principe and the Discorsi.  Both in his analysis of the successful tyrant and in his description of the powerful commonwealth he had insisted on the prime necessity of warfare, conducted by the people and their rulers in person.  The military organization of a great kingdom is here developed in a separate Essay, and Machiavelli’s favorite scheme for nationalizing the militia of Italy is systematically expounded.  Giovio’s flippant objection, that the philosopher could not in practice maneuver a single company, is no real criticism on the merit of his theory.

By this time the Medici had determined to take Machiavelli into favor; and since he had expressed a wish to be set at least to rolling stones, they found for him a trivial piece of work.  The Franciscans at Carpi had to be requested to organize a separate Province of their Order in the Florentine dominion; and the conduct of this weighty matter was intrusted to the former secretary at the Courts of Maximilian and Louis.  Several other missions during the last years of his life devolved upon Machiavelli; but none of them were of much importance:  nor, when the popular government was instituted in 1527, had he so far regained the confidence of the Florentines as to resume his old office of war secretary.  This post, considering his recent alliance with the Medicean party, he could hardly have expected to receive; and therefore it is improbable that the news of Gianotti’s election at all contributed to cause his death. Disappointment he may indeed have felt:  for his moral force had been squandered during fifteen years in the attempt to gain the favor of princes who were now once more regarded as the enemies of their country.  When the republic was at last restored, he found himself in neither camp.  The overtures which he had made to the Medici had been but coldly received; yet they were sufficiently notorious to bring upon him the suspicion of the patriots.  He had not sincerely acted up to the precept of Polonius:  ’This above all, ­to thine own self be true.’  His intellectual ability, untempered by sufficient political consistency or moral elevation, had placed him among the outcasts: ­

     che non furon ribelli,
  Ne fur fedeli a Dio, ma per se foro.

The great achievement of these years was the composition of the Istorie Fiorentine.  The commission for this work he received from Giulio de’ Medici through the Officiali dello Studio in 1520, with an annual allowance of 100 florins.  In 1527, the year of his death, he dedicated the finished History to Pope Clement VII.  This masterpiece of literary art, though it may be open to the charges of inaccuracy and superficiality, marks an epoch in the development of modern historiography.  It must be remembered that it preceded the great work of Guicciardini by some years, and that before the date of its appearance the annalists of Italy had been content with records of events, personal impressions, and critiques of particular periods.  Machiavelli was the first to contemplate the life of a nation in its continuity, to trace the operation of political forces through successive generations, to contrast the action of individuals with the evolution of causes over which they had but little control, and to bring the salient features of the national biography into relief by the suppression of comparatively unimportant details.  By thus applying the philosophical method to history, Machiavelli enriched the science of humanity with a new department.  There is something in his view of national existence beyond the reach of even the profoundest of the classical historians.  His style is adequate to the matter of his work.  Never were clear and definite thoughts expressed with greater precision in language of more masculine vigor.  We are irresistibly compelled, while characterizing this style, to think of the spare sinews of a trained gladiator.  Though Machiavelli was a poet, he indulges in no ornaments of rhetoric. His images, rare and carefully chosen, seem necessary to the thoughts they illustrate.  Though a philosopher, he never wanders into speculation.  Facts and experience are so thoroughly compacted with reflection in his mind, that his widest generalizations have the substance of realities.  The element of unreality, if such there be, is due to a misconception of human nature.  Machiavelli seems to have only studied men in masses, or as political instruments, never as feeling and thinking personalities.

Machiavelli, according to the letter addressed by his son Pietro to Francesco Nelli, died of a dose of medicine taken at the wrong time.  He was attended on his deathbed by a friar, who received his confession.  His private morality was but indifferent.  His contempt for weakness and simplicity was undisguised.  His knowledge of the world and men had turned to cynicism.  The frigid philosophy expressed in his political Essays, and the sarcastic speeches in which he gave a vent to his soured humors, made him unpopular.  It was supposed that he had died with blasphemy upon his lips, after turning all the sanctities of human nature into ridicule.  Through these myths, as through a mist, we may discern the bitterness of that great, disenchanted, disappointed soul.  The desert in which spirits of the stamp of Machiavelli wander is too arid and too aerial for the gross substantial bugbears of the vulgar conscience to inhabit.  Moreover, as Varchi says, ’In his conversation Machiavelli was pleasant, serviceable to his friends, a friend of virtuous men, and, in a word, worthy of having received from nature either less genius or a better mind.’