Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/167

Rh MACHIAVELLI 149 through his exertions the war was terminated by the surrender of Pisa in June 1509. Meanwhile the league of Gxmbray had disturbed the peace of Italy, and Florence found herself in a perilous position between Spain and Francs. Soderini s Government grew weaker. The Medicean party lifted up its head. To the league of Oarnbrny succeeded the Lega Santa. The battle of Ravenna was fought, and the French retired from Italy. The Florentines had been spectators rather than actors in these great events. But they were now destined to feel the full effects of them. The cardinal Giovanni de Medici, who was present at the battle of Ravenna, brought a Spanish army into Tuscany. Prato was sacked in the August of 1512. Florence, in extreme terror, deposed the gonfalonier, and opened her gates to the princes of the house of Medici. The Government on which Machiavelli depended had fallen, never to rise again. The national militia in which he placed unbounded confidence had proved inefficient to protect Florence in the hour of need. He was surrounded by political and personal enemies, who regarded him with jealousy as the ex-gonfalonier s right hand man. Yet at first it appears that lie still hoped to retain his office. He showed no repugnance to a change of masters, and began to make overtures to the Medici. The Nove clella Milizia were, however, dissolved; and on November 7, 1512, Machiavelli was deprived of his appointments. He was exiled from Florence and confined to the dominion for one year, and on November 17 was further prohibited from setting foot in the Palazzo Pubblico, Ruin stared him in the face; and, to make matters worse, he was implicated in the conspiracy of Pier Paolo Boscoli in February 1513. Machiavelli had taken no share in that feeble attempt against the Medici, but his name was found upon a memorandum dropped by Boscoli. This was enough to ensure his imprisonment. He was racked, and only released upon Giovanni de Medici s election to the papacy in March 1513. When ho left his dungeon, he retired to a farm near San Casciano, and faced the fact that his political career was at an end. Machiavelli now entered upon a period of life to which we owe the great works that have rendered his name immortal. Bat it was one of prolonged disappointment and annoyance. He had not accustomed himself to economical living ; and, when the emoluments of his office were withdrawn, he had but barely enough to support his family. The previous years of his manhood had been spent in continual activity. Much as he enjoyed the study of the Latin and Italian classics, literature was not his business ; nor had he looked on writing as more than an occasional amusement. He was now driven in upon his books for the employment of a restless temperament ; and to this irksomeness of enforced leisure may be ascribed the production of the Principe, the Disrorsi, the Arte delta Guer/ /t, the comedies, and the Storla Fiorentina. The uneasiness of Machiavelli s mind in the first years of this retirement is brought before us by his private correspond ence. The letters with Vettori paint a man of vigorous intellect and feverish activity, dividing his time between studies and vulgar dissipations, seeking at one time distrac tion in low intrigues and wanton company, at another turning to the great minds of antiquity for solace. It is not easy for a modern gentleman to understand the spirit in which the author of the Principe sat down to exchange obscenities with the author of the Sommario della Storia d Italia, Nor can it be urged that Machiavelli plunged into dissipation at this crisis to escape from care, or that he penned filth because he had no other occupation for his thoughts. From the camp of Borgia in 1502, when his mind was on the stretch, and he was watching history in the making, he had written similar trash to his acquaintances at home. At the same time this coarseness of taste did not blunt his intellectual sagacity. His letters on public affairs in Italy and Europe, especially those which he meant Vettori to communicate to the Medici at Home, are marked by extraordinary fineness of perception, combined, as usual in his case, with philo sophical breadth. In retirement at his villa near Percussina, a hamlet of San Casciano, Machiavelli com pleted the Principle before the end of 1513. This famous book is an analysis of the methods whereby an ambitious man may rise to sovereign power. It appears to have grown out of another scarcely less celebrated work, upon which Machiavelli had been engaged before he took the Principe in hand, and which he did not finish until some time afterwards. This second treatise is the Discorsi sul primo libra delle Deche di Tito Livio, which will henceforth be mentioned in this article as the Discorsi. Cast iu the form ot comments on the Listory of Livy, tlic Discorsi are really an inquiry into the genesis and maintenance of states, how states come into being, prosper, and decline in what forms they can be modelled and maintained. The Principe is an ofi shoot from the main theme of the Discorsi, setting forth Machiavelli s views fit large and in detail upon the nature of principalities, the method of cementing them, and the qualities of a successful autocrat. Being more limited in subject and more independent as a work of literary art, tins essay detaches itself from tlie main body of the Discorsi, and lias attracted far more attention. We feel that the Principe is inspired witl^ greater fervency, as though its author had more than a speculative aim in view, and brought it forth to serve a special crisis. The moment of its composition was indeed decisive. Machiavelli judged the case of Italy so desperate that salvation could only be expected from the intervention of a power ful despot. The unification of Italy in a state protected by a national army was the cherished dream of his life ; and the peroration of the Principe shows that he meant this treatise to have a direct bearing on the problem. We must be careful, however, not to fall into the error of supposing that he wrote it with the sole object of meeting an occasional emergency. Together with the Discorsi, the Principe contains the speculative fruits of his experience and observation combined with his deductions from Roman history. The two works form one coherent body of opinion, not systematically expressed, it is true, but based on the same principles, involving the same conclusions, and directed to the same philosophical end. That end is the analysis of the conception of the state, studied under two main types, republican and monarchical. Up to the date of Machiavelli, modern political philosophy had always presupposed an ideal. Mediaeval speculation took the church and the empire for granted, as divinely appointed institutions, under which the nations of the earth must flourish for the space of man s probation on this planet. Thinkers differed only as Guelfs and Ghibellines, as leaning on the one side to papal on the other to imperial supremacy. In the revival of learning, scholarship supplanted scholasticism, and the old ways of mediaeval thinking were forgotten. But no substantial philosophy of any kind emerged from humanism ; the political lucubrations of the scholars were, like their ethical treatises, for the most part rhetorical. Still the humanists effected a delivery of the intellect from what had become the bondage of obsolete ideas, and created a new medium for the specu lative faculty. Society in Europe had outgrown the conditions of the Middle Ages, and this new humanistic atmosphere corresponded to the new phase upon which the modern nations were entering. Simultaneously with the revival, Italy had passed into that stage of her existence which has been called the age of despots. The yoke of the empire had been shaken off. The church had taken rank among Italian tyrannies. The peninsula was, roughly speak ing, divided into principalities and sovereign cities, each of which claimed autocratic jurisdiction. These separate despotisms owned no common social tie, were founded on no common jus or right, but were connected in a network of conflicting interests and change ful diplomatic combinations. A keen and positive political intelli gence emerged in the Italian race. The reports of Venetian and Florentine ambassadors at this epoch contain the first germs of an attempt to study politics from the point of view of science. At this moment Machiavelli intervenes. He was conscious of the change which had come over Italy and Europe. He was aware that the old strongholds of mediaeval thought must be abandoned, and that the decaying ruins of mediaeval institutions furnished no basis for the erection of solid political edifices. lie felt the corruption of his country, and sought to bring the world back to a lively sense of the necessity for reformation. His originality con sists in having extended the positive intelligence of his century from the sphere of contemporary politics and special interests to