Trying (not very successfully) to read Machiavelli

Michele di Lando - for Machiavelli, one of the heroes of Florentine history for his role in confronting the Ciompi during their revolt in 1378

I’m reading Machiavelli's Florentine Histories simply because Tim Parks, in his wonderful Medici Money, stated in his guide to further reading, “stop worrying about ‘the truth’ and go back to what material from the time is available and readable. Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories is a joy …”

Well, I wouldn’t call it a joy, but it is a fascinating document that reveals more about the amazing story that is Florence. Understandably, Machiavelli the author was in a difficult position, since he was commissioned to write a history of Florence by the Medici family, the very family that had controlled the city for most of the 15th century (the opposite of what you might imagine from a state nominally labelled a republic). Machiavelli could hardly be openly critical of the Medici; instead, he uses the voice of Medici opponents to widen the viewpoint:

and if anyone nevertheless wants to understand this [what I think about the Medici], let him observe well what I shall have [Cosimo’s] opponents say, because what I am not willing to say as coming from myself, I shall have his opponents say. [from a private letter by Machiavelli]

But even without the problem of criticizing your patron, Machiavelli had a difficult challenge to depict the history of his own city in a positive way. Machiavelli’s view of history is very one-dimensional. There is almost no mention of culture, ideas, artefacts, or even geography. For Machiavelli, following his Roman historian models, history means political history, and throughout the book he wrestles with the problem of why Florence was so unsuccessful in terms of political organization. Following the Roman historians, Machiavelli sees no problem with inventing speeches by key people at various crisis points in Florentine history, even if there is no evidence that they said anything of the kind – but let that pass. At no point do I read any unmitigated praise of the Florentine Republic.

This is a surprise to the outside reader, who thinks of Florence as one of the great early models of republicanism. Sadly, for Machiavelli, Florence was never a successful republic. The text is a long account of factional strife between the major groups: nobles, popolo, and the plebs. A further challenge is that Machiavelli tends to reserve his major analysis for the introduction to each of the eight books that comprise his history. The narrative itself becomes a one-thing-follows-another kind of history – one faction gains power, exiles or murders members of the other faction or factions, and survives until an internal or external crisis prompts a rebalance of power. Then the exiled faction returns and wreaks revenge.  So you have to read these introductory sections very carefully, and return to them, for Machiavelli’s more considered viewpoint. For example, in the Preface, Machiavelli makes clear his priority:

When I read their [the other Florentine historians’] writings diligently, I found that in the descriptions of the wars waged by the Florentines with foreign princes and peoples they had been very diligent, but as regards civil discords and internal enmities, and the effects arising from them, they were altogether silent about the one and so brief about the other as to be of no use to readers or pleasure to anyone.

And while I am nit-picking, I think the Italian would be better translated as “so brief that it will not please any reader” (“che ai leggenti non puote arrecare utile o piacere alcuno”), since I don’t think you can describe 300 pages of factional strife as bringing pleasure to any reader, even though it would please them to be told the true position.

Here is an example of one of Machiavelli's great conclusions, buried in the first lines of book Three of the Histories:

The grave and natural enmities that exist between the men of the people and the nobles [gli uomini popolari e i nobili], caused by the wish of the latter to command and the former not to obey, are the cause of all evils that arise in cities. [3.1]

This startling statement may be as true today as it was then. 

In other words, Machiavelli’s account leaves out a lot of background. And this, incidentally, is where finding things out becomes surprisingly difficult. I bought a 500-page History of Florence by John Najemy, highly recommended by one of his peers, Robert Black, to pick up some background information for reading Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, only to find that first, the annotations in the edition of Machiavelli I was reading were very poor, and then, that finding simple things in the Najemy book were not so simple. Who were the plebs, for example? Machiavelli, of course, doesn’t have to define terms that for his readers would have been obvious, but it's not so simple for those of use reading him five hundred years later. There is no entry in the Najemy index for “plebe” or “plebs”, nor any references to “nobles” or “nobili”, for that matter. I can’t imagine that any history of Florence between 1200 and 1575 fails to mention both, but clearly, the author sees his role as writing the narrative, not providing clear signposts for readers who might not have the time to read the text from start to finish. Nobody is credited for compiling the index, so I assume the index is by the author. At this point, I long for a digital copy of the text so I could find references to these factions and find out for myself. This is where you realise that books, and even libraries, collections of texts, are a starting point, not an end point.