Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

gentleness, humility, nonresistance; its love of peace and its

denunciation of war; its assumption that states, as well as

citizens, are bound by the one moral code. For his part he prefers the

Roman ethic, based upon the principle that the safety of the people or

state is the supreme law. "Where it is an absolute question of the

welfare of our country, we must admit of no considerations of

justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of praise or ignominy;

but putting all else aside we must adopt whatever course will save the

nation's existence and liberty." `051997 Morality in general is a code

of conduct given to the members of a society or state to maintain

collective order, unity, and strength; the government of that state

would fail in its duty if, in defending the state, it should allow

itself to be restricted by the moral code that it must inculcate in

its citizens. Hence a diplomat is not bound by the moral code of his

people. "When the act accuses him the result should excuse

him"; `051998 the end justifies the means. "No good man will ever

reproach another who endeavors to defend his country, whatever be

his mode of doing so." `051999 Frauds, cruelties, and crimes committed

in order to preserve one's country are "honorable frauds," "glorious

crimes." `0519100 So Romulus did right in killing his brother; the

young government had to have unity, or it would be torn to

pieces. `0519101 There is no "natural law," no "right" universally

agreed upon; politics, in the sense of statesmanship, must be held

completely independent of morality.

If we apply these considerations to the ethics of war, Machiavelli

is sure that they make Christian pacifism ridiculous and

treasonable. War violates practically all the commandments of Moses:

it swears, lies, steals, kills, commits adultery by the thousands;

nevertheless, if it preserves the society, or strengthens it, it is

good. When a state ceases to expand it begins to decay; when it

loses the will to war it is finished. Peace too long maintained is

enervating and disruptive; an occasional war is a national tonic,

restoring discipline, vigor, and unity. The Romans of the Republic

kept themselves ever ready for war; when they saw that they would have

trouble with another state, they did nothing to avoid the war, but

sent an army to attack Philip V in Macedon and Antiochus III in Greece

rather than wait for them to bring the evils of war to Italy. `0519102

Virtue, to a Roman, was not humility or gentleness or peace, but

virility, manliness, courage with energy and intelligence. This is

what Machiavelli means by virtu.

From this point of view of a statesmanship quite freed of moral

restraints, Machiavelli moves to meet what seems to him the basic

problem of his time: to achieve for Italy the unity and strength

indispensable to her collective liberty. He views with indignation the

division, disorder, corruption, and weakness of his country; and

here we find what in Petrarch's day was so rare- a man who loved his

city not the less because he loved his country more. Who was

responsible for keeping Italy so divided, and therefore so helpless

against the foreigner?

-

A nation can never be united and happy except when it obeys only one

government, whether a republic or a monarchy, as is the case in France

and Spain; and the one cause why Italy is not in the same condition is

the Church. For having acquired, and holding, a temporal dominion, yet

she has never had sufficient power or courage to enable her to seize

the rest of the country and make herself sole sovereign of all

Italy. *05053 `0519103

-

We have a new idea here: Machiavelli condemns the Church not for

protecting her temporal power, but for not having used all her

resources to bring Italy under her political rule. So Machiavelli

admired Caesar Borgia at Imola and Senigallia, because he thought he

saw in that ruthless youth the conception and promise of a united

Italy; and he was prepared to justify any means that the Borgias might

use to accomplish this heroic consummation. When he turned against

Caesar at Rome in 1503 it may have been through rage that his idol had

allowed a cup of poison (as Machiavelli thought) to destroy the dream.

From two centuries of disunity Italy had fallen into such physical

weakness and social decay that now (Machiavelli argued) only violent

means could save her. Governments and people alike were corrupt.

Sexual vice had come to replace military ardor and skill. As in the

dying days of ancient Rome, the citizens had delegated to others-

there to barbarians, here to mercenaries- the defense of their

cities and their lands; but what did these mercenary bands, or their

condottieri, care for the unity of Italy? They lived and thrived

by its division. They had by mutual agreement made war a game almost

as safe as politics; their soldiers had inconvenient objections to

being killed; and when they met foreign armies they took to their

heels and "brought Italy to slavery and contempt." `0519105

Who, then, would make Italy one? How could it be done? Not by

democratic suasion; men and cities were too individualistic, too

partisan, and too corrupt, to accept union peaceably; it would have to

be imposed upon them by all the methods of statecraft and war. Only

a ruthless dictator do it; one who would not let conscience make a

coward of him, but would strike with an iron hand, letting his great

aim justify all means.

We are not sure that The Prince was written in this mood. In the

very year 1513 in which it was apparently begun, Machiavelli wrote

to a friend that "the idea of Italian union is laughable. Even if

the heads of the states could agree, we have no soldiers but the

Spaniards that are worth a farthing. Moreover, the people would

never agree with the leaders." `0519106 But in that same 1513 Leo X,

young and rich and clever, had reached the papacy; Florence and

Rome, so long enemies, were united under the Medici. When

Machiavelli transferred the dedication of the book to Lorenzo, Duke of

Urbino, that state too had fallen to the Medici. The new Duke was only

twenty-four in 1516; he had shown ambition and courage; Machiavelli

might forgivably look to this reckless spirit as one who, under the

guidance and diplomacy of Leo (and the instruction of Machiavelli)

could accomplish what Caesar Borgia, under Alexander VI, had begun-

could lead the Italian states, at least north of Naples and omitting

proud Venice, into a federation strong enough to discourage foreign

invasion. There is evidence that this was also Leo's hope. The

dedication of The Prince to the Medici, though probably aiming first

of all to win employment for the author, could sincerely think of that

family as the possible creators of Italian unity.

The form of Il principe was traditional: it followed the outline

and method of a hundred medieval treatises De regimine principum.

But in content what a revolution! No idealistic charge here to a

prince to be a saint, no appeal to him to apply the Sermon on the

Mount to the problems of a throne. On the contrary:

-

It being my intention to write something that shall be useful to him

who comprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the

real truth of a matter than the imagination of it. Many have

pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been

known or seen, for how one lives is so far distant from how one

ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to

be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; a man who

wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with

destruction amidst so much that is evil. Hence it is necessary for a

prince who wishes to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make

use of it or not according to necessity. `0519107

-

The prince, therefore, must distinguish resolutely between

morality and statesmanship, between his private conscience and the

public good, and must be ready to do for the state what would be

called wickedness in the relations of individuals. He must scorn

half measures; enemies who cannot be won over must be crushed;

contenders for his throne must be killed. He must have a strong

army, for a statesman can speak no louder than his guns. He must

keep his army in constant health, discipline, and equipment; and he

must train himself for war by undertaking frequently the hardships and

dangers of the hunt. At the same time he must study the arts of

diplomacy, for sometimes cunning and deceit achieve more than force,

and less expensively. Treaties are not to be honored when they have

become a detriment to the nation; "a wise lord cannot, nor ought he,

keep faith when such observance can be turned against him, and when

the reasons that caused him to pledge it no longer exist." `0519108

Some degree of public support is indispensable. But if a ruler

must choose between being feared without love or being loved without

fear, he must sacrifice the love. `0519109 On the other hand (say

the Discorsi ) "a multitude is more easily governed by humanity and

gentleness than by haughtiness and cruelty.... `0519110 Titus,

Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius did not require

the pretorian guard nor the legions to defend them, because they

were protected by their own good conduct, the good will of the people,

and the love of the Senate." `0519111 To secure popular support the

prince should patronize art and learning, provide public spectacles

and games, and honor the guilds, always, however, maintaining the

majesty of his rank. `0519112 He should not give the people liberty,

but should comfort them as far as possible with the appearances of

liberty. Subject cities, like Pisa and Arezzo in the case of Florence,

must be dealt with vigorously, even cruelly, at the outset; then, when

obedience has been established, their submission may be made

habitual by gentler means. Indiscriminate and prolonged cruelty is

suicidal. `0519113

The ruler should support religion, and should himself appear to be

religious, whatever his private beliefs. `0519114 Indeed, it is more

important and profitable to the prince to seem to be virtuous than

to be so.

-

Though a prince need not possess all the virtues, to seem to have

them is useful; as, for example, to seem merciful, loyal, humane,

religious, and sincere; it is also useful to be so, but with a mind so

flexible that if the need arise he can be the contrary.... He should

be careful to let nothing fall from his lips that is not instinct with

the five qualities mentioned, and must appear to those who see and

hear him all compassion, all faith, all humanity, all religion, all

integrity.... One must color his conduct, and be a great dissembler;

and men are so simple, so absorbed in present necessities, that they

are easily deceived.... Everyone sees what you appear to be, few

know what you are; and those few dare not oppose the opinion of the

many. `0519115

-

To these precepts Machiavelli adds examples. He notes the success of

Alexander VI, and thinks it entirely due to marvelous lying. He

admires Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain for always putting a religious

front on his military enterprises. He praises the means- warlike

courage and strategic skill mingled with diplomatic craft- by which

Francesco Sforza rose to the throne of Milan. But above all he holds

up as his supreme and almost perfect exemplar Caesar Borgia:

-

When all the actions of the Duke are recalled, I do not know how

to blame him; but rather it appears to me that I ought to offer him

for imitation to all those who are... raised to government.... He

was considered cruel; nevertheless his cruelty reconciled all the

Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty.... Having a

lofty spirit and far-reaching aims, he could not have regulated his

conduct otherwise; and only the shortening of the life of Alexander,

and his own sickness, frustrated his designs. Therefore he who

considers it necessary to secure himself in his new principality, to

gain friends, to overcome enemies by force or fraud, to make himself

at once feared and loved by the people, to be followed and revered

by the soldiers, to exterminate those who have power or reason to hurt

him, to change the old order of things for new, to be severe and

gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to destroy a disloyal soldiery

and create new, to maintain friendship with kings and princes in

such a way that they must help him with zeal and offend him with

caution, cannot find a more lively example than the actions of this

man. `0519116

-

Machiavelli admired Borgia because he felt that his methods and

character, had it not been for the simultaneous illness of Pope and

son, would have gone far to unite Italy. Now, in concluding The

Prince, he appeals to the young Duke Lorenzo, and through him to

Leo and the Medici, to organize the union of the peninsula. He

describes his countrymen as "more enslaved than the Hebrews, more

oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians;

without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, pillaged, and torn,

and overrun by foreign powers." "Italy, left as without life, waits

for him who shall heal her wounds.... She entreats God to send some

one who shall deliver her from these wrong and alien

insolencies." `0519117 The situation is critical, but the

opportunity is ripe. "Italy is ready and willing to follow a banner if

only some one will raise it." And who better than the Medici, the most

famous family in Italy, and now heading the Church?

-

Who could express the love with which Italy would hail her

liberator, with what thirst for revenge, what stubborn faith, what

devotion, what tears? What door would be closed to him?- who would

refuse him obedience? To all of us this barbarous dominion is a stench

in the nostrils. Let therefore your illustrious house take up this

charge, with that courage and hope with which all just enterprises are

undertaken, so that under its standard our native country may be

ennobled, and under its auspices may be verified those words of

Petrarch:

-

Virtu contr' al furore

Prendera l'arme e sia il combatter corto,

Che l'antico valore

Negl' Italici cuor non e ancor morto-

-

"Manhood will take up arms against madness, and brief may the combat

be, for the ancient valor is not yet dead in the veins of Italy."

4. Considerations

-

So the cry that Dante and Petrarch had sent up to alien emperors was

here raised to the Medici; and indeed, had Leo lived longer and played

less, Machiavelli might have seen the liberation begin. But young

Lorenzo died in 1519, Leo in 1521; and in 1527, the year of

Machiavelli's death, Italy's subjection to a foreign power was

complete. Liberation would have to wait 343 years until Cavour would

effect it by Machiavellian statesmanship.

Philosophers have been well nigh unanimous in condemning The

Prince, and statesmen in practising its precepts. A thousand books

began to appear against it on the morrow of its publication (1532).

But Charles V studied it carefully, Catherine de' Medici brought it to

France, Henry III and Henry IV of France had it with them at their

death, Richelieu admired it, William of Orange kept it under his

pillow as if to memorize it by osmosis. `0519118 Frederick the Great

of Prussia wrote an Anti-Machiavel as a prelude to outprincing

The Prince. To most rulers, of course, these precepts were no

revelation, except as revealing injudiciously the secrets of their

guild. Dreamers who thought to turn Machiavelli into a Jacobin fancied

that he had written The Prince not to express his own philosophy

but, by sarcastic indirection, to expose the ways and wiles of rulers;

however, the Discourses expound at greater length the same views.

Francis Bacon ventured a condoning word: "Our thanks are due to

Machiavelli and similar writers, who have openly and without

dissimulation shown us what men are accustomed to do, not what they

ought to do." `0519119 Hegel's judgment was intelligent and generous:

-

The Prince has often been cast aside with horror as containing

maxims of the most revolting tyranny; yet it was Machiavelli's high

sense of the necessity of constituting a state which caused him to lay

down the principles on which alone states could be formed under the

circumstances. The isolated lords and lordships had to be entirely

suppressed; and though our idea of Freedom is incompatible with the

means which he proposes... including, as these do, the most reckless

violence, all kinds of deception, murder, and the like- yet we must

confess that the despots who had to be subdued were assailable in no

other way. `0519120

-

And Macaulay, in a famous essay, pictured the philosophy of

Machiavelli as a natural reflex of an Italy brilliant and

de-moral-ized, and long since accustomed, by her despots, to the

principles of The Prince.

Machiavelli represents the ultimate challenge of a revived

paganism to a weakened Christianity. In his philosophy religion

becomes again, as in ancient Rome, the humble servant of a state which

in effect is god. The only virtues honored are pagan Roman virtues-

courage, endurance, self-reliance, intelligence; the only

immortality is a fading fame. Perhaps Machiavelli exaggerated the

enfeebling influence of Christianity; had he forgotten the lusty

wars of medieval history, the campaigns of Constantine, Belisarius,

Charlemagne, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, and Julius II of

recent memory? The Christian morality emphasized the feminine

virtues because men had the opposite qualities in ruinous abundance;

some antidote and counterideal had to be preached to the sadistic

Romans of the amphitheater, to the rough barbarians entering Italy, to

lawless peoples striving to subside into civilization. The virtues

that Machiavelli scorned made for orderly and peaceful societies;

those that he admired (and, like Nietzsche, because he lacked them)

made for strong and warlike states, and for dictators capable of

murdering by the million to enforce conformity, and of incarnadining a

planet to extend their rule. He confused the good of the ruler with

the good of the nation; he thought too much of the preservation,

seldom of the obligations, never of the corruption, of power. He

ignored the stimulating rivalry and cultural fertility of the

Italian city-states; he cared little for the magnificent art of his

time, or even for that of ancient Rome. He was lost in idolatry of the

state. He helped to free the state from the Church, but he shared in

setting up for worship an atomistic nationalism not visibly superior

to the medieval notion of states subject to an international

morality represented by the pope. Each ideal has broken down under the

natural selfishness of men; and a candid Christian must admit that

in preaching and practising the principle that no faith need be kept

with a heretic (as in violating the safe-conduct of Huss at

Constance and of Alfonso of Ferrara in Rome), the Church herself was

playing a Machiavellian game fatal to her mission as a moral power.

And yet there is something stimulating in Machiavelli's

forthrightness. Reading him, we are brought face to face, as nowhere

else so vividly, with a question that few philosophers had dared

discuss: is statesmanship bound by morality? We may come to at least

one conclusion: that morality can exist only among the members of a

society equipped to teach and enforce it; and that an interstate

morality awaits the formation of an international organization dowered

with the physical power and the public opinion to maintain an

international law. Till then the nations will be as beasts in the

jungle; and whatever principles their governments may profess, their

practice will be that of The Prince.

-

Looking back upon two centuries of intellectual revolt in Italy from

Petrarch to Machiavelli, we perceive that its essence and basis lay

simply in lessened concern for another world, and a rising affirmation

of life. Men were delighted to rediscover a pagan civilization whose

citizens were not worried about original sin or a punitive hell, and

in which the natural impulses were accepted as forgivable elements

in a vibrant society. Asceticism, self-abnegation, and the sense of

sin lost their hold, almost their meaning, in the upper strata of

the Italian population; monasteries languished for lack of novices,

and monks and friars and popes themselves sought the joys of the earth

rather than the stigmata of Christ. The bonds of tradition and

authority relaxed; the massive fabric of the Church weighed more

lightly on the thoughts and purposes of men. Life became more

extrovert, and though this often took the form of violence, it

cleansed many souls of neurotic fears and disorders that had

darkened the medieval mind. The unfettered intellect disported

itself happily in every field but science; the exuberance of

emancipation hardly comported, as yet, with the discipline of

experiment and the patience of research; that would come in the

constructive aftermath of liberation. Meanwhile, among the educated,

the practices of piety made room for the worship of intellect and

genius; the belief in immortality was commuted into the quest for

enduring renown. Pagan ideals like Fortune, Fate, and Nature

encroached upon the Christian conception of God.

For all this a price had to be paid. The brilliant enfranchisement

of the mind sapped the supernatural sanctions of morality, and no

others were found to effectually replace them. The result was such a

repudiation of inhibitions, such a release of impulse and desire, so

gay a luxuriance of immorality, as history had not known since the

Sophists had shattered the myths, freed the mind, and loosened the

morals, of ancient Greece.

CHAPTER XX: The Moral Release: 1300-1534

I. THE FOUNTS AND FORMS OF IMMORALITY

-

NOWHERE are the prejudices of the historian so likely to mislead him

as when he seeks to determine the moral level of an age- unless it

be in the kindred inquiry into the decline of religious belief. In

either case the dramatic exception will strike his eye and turn it

from the unrecorded average. His vision will be further blurred if

he approaches the problem with a thesis to prove- as, for example,

that religious doubt brings moral decay. And the records themselves

are ambivalent, capable, according to the selective bias, of proving

almost anything. The works of Aretino, the autobiography of Cellini,

the correspondence of Machiavelli and Vettori can be stressed to

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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