MOSES, BRUTUS, AND ROMULUS: EXEMPLARY ANCIENT FOUNDERS/REFORMERS

In order to establish the framework through which, I believe, Machiavelli wishes readers of the Histories to assess the individual actors whom he describes between its covers, let me briefly summarize Machiavelli's accounts of the ancient founders/reformers to whom he devotes the most time and space in The Prince and the Discourses: Moses, Brutus, and Romulus. Moses serves as one example of Machiavelli's most virtuous princes, an individual who made himself “happy,” and his patria “very happy” by eliminating the “envy” of rivals who sought to thwart the enactment of his new laws and orders; in fact, Machiavelli stresses how Moses kills “an infinite number” of envious men in order to bring about such felicitous outcomes for himself and his people (P 6; D III.30) (see Lynch Reference Lynch2006). Brutus, Machiavelli notes, led the aristocratic revolt that expelled the Tarquin kings from Rome, established the civic magistracy of the consuls to exercise kingly imperium within the republic, and then oversaw the prosecution and execution of his own sons, and their fellow conspirators among young nobles, who sought to overturn the republic, reinstitute the monarchy, and re-intensify their own oppression of the Roman people (D I.16, III.1, III.3, III.5–6)

Machiavelli unhesitatingly apologizes for the crimes of Romulus, who murdered both his brother and his coregent, so that he could more efficiently rule alone and enact laws and orders conducive to “the collectivity's benefit” and to “the civic way of life.” Specifically, Romulus prudently ordered the natural antagonism between the great and the people as it manifested itself in Rome. Romulus assembled members of the wealthiest and most prominent Roman families in the Senate and collected all of Rome's poorer citizens into a unified public army (P 6; D I.2, I.9). The institutionalized competition between an aristocratic Senate and a plebeian army, Machiavelli intimates, kept the nobles and the people more unified among themselves, such that each group did not split into the “unnatural” antagonisms, such as the Guelf/Ghibelline, Black/White Guelf, popolo/plebe oppositions, that perpetually plagued Florentine politics. Furthermore, these arrangements encouraged institutionalized class competition or “tumults” between the nobles and the people that, after the reigns of Romulus’ royal successors, resulted in the establishment of a magistracy that made Rome “more perfect,” the plebeian tribunate.

In short, all three of these ancient princes, in one way or another, kill or contain “the sons of Brutus,” Machiavelli's generalized term for the aristocratic common enemy of founders/reformers and poor subjects and citizens. Moreover, all three either expand or maintain a robust civil military comprised of a widely armed citizenry. These are not the only steps that, Machiavelli suggests, a founder/reformer must take in ordering or renewing a city. The Discourses would be a much shorter work, and the already brief Prince much briefer were this the case. Nevertheless, his accounts of the actions of Moses, Romulus, and Brutus provide the basic blueprint. Crucially, for our purposes, none of the Florentine leaders whom Machiavelli discusses in the Histories fully proceeds in the modes of these ancient princes or establish comparable orders when presented with manifest opportunities to do so. Again, as I will demonstrate, the sociohistorical circumstances that confront Giano and Michele very much recall the opportunities seized by Moses, Romulus, and Brutus, opportunities that resulted in the “happiness” of these founders/reformers and their peoples. As we will see, Machiavelli often praises the patriotism and goodness of the failed Florentine founders/reformers in demurring from fully taking up the violent modes of Moses, Romulus, and Brutus.Footnote ⁷ But because Machiavelli never repudiates his earlier, resoundingly explicit endorsements of the behavior and institutional enactments of such ancient founders and reformers, I judge that the Histories functions as an implicit but nevertheless severe criticism of Florence's excessively “good” would-be princes.

GIANO DELLA BELLA: FOUNDER OF NEW ORDERS? FATHER OF FLORENCE'S FREEDOM?

The first figure to emerge in the Histories with the prospect of acting as a Florentine founder or reformer is Giano della Bella. Giano appears during a period of rapid institutional innovation inspired by intensifying social conflict between the Guelf and Ghibelline nobles, and rather egregious acts of oppression on the part of the nobility, generally, toward common citizens enrolled in commercial and artisan guilds (FH II.12–3). By standards set forth by Machiavelli in the Discourses, the institutions devised by the Florentines to address these tumultuous circumstances are quite imperfect: Florence adopts neither an aristocratic senate nor a plebeian tribunate; it observes no popularly judged political trials and its terms of office are a meager two months rather than a full calendar year (see McCormick Reference McCormick2011).

Nevertheless, imperfection is hardly the most serious threat confronting the various institutions auditioned by the Florentine people in these circumstances; such innovations may have been relatively workable had only a Florentine individual of virtue stepped forward to “invigorate” them in the mode that, as Machiavelli insists in the Discourses, all new laws and orders require (D I.17; III.1). Machiavelli declares, “even well-ordered laws are useless lest they be invigorated with extreme force by one individual who insures compliance such that those who are corrupt become good” (D I.17). Furthermore, he insists that laws neither institute themselves nor become effective autogeneratively: Orders and laws that “oppose men's ambition and insolence must be invigorated by a virtuous citizen who runs spiritedly to enforce them against the power of their transgressors” (D III.1). Giano, notwithstanding Machiavelli's apparent praise, will prove to be a man woefully unworthy of the task of the kind of spirited institutional invigoration that makes ambitious and insolent men good citizens.

Giano is elected Florence's chief magistrate, the Gonfalonier of Justice, at the very moment that the republic's new institutions, the Gonfalonier and the Signoria, much like its traditional judicial magistracies, the Podestà and the People's Captain, prove excessively susceptible to intimidation and corruption by the city's nobility (FH II.12–3). Machiavelli writes that although Giano himself descended from a “very noble” family, he was nevertheless a “lover of the city's freedom” (FH II.13). Giano encouraged the guild leadership to once again reform the city's government, now in the following way: the number of soldiers at the Gonfalonier's command would be increased from one to four thousand; the nobles must be declared entirely ineligible to serve within the Signoria; the accomplices of any criminally accused individual would be subject to an identical punishment as the indicted offender; and a public report of a crime, unsupported by witnesses, would henceforth be sufficient for imposing a criminal sentence upon any accused individual.

Once this collection of laws, known as the “Ordinances of Justice,” was passed, Machiavelli writes, the people gained greater authority in the city, and Giano incurred the animosity of both “the powerful and the richest guildsmen” (FH II.13): The Guelf nobles despised Giano for diminishing their political influence and capacity to oppress; the rich popolani envied him as one among themselves who had gained inordinate authority. Giano and the people hence become the objects of the “envy” that Machiavelli previously attributed to the sons of Brutus and to elite adversaries of the founders of new laws and orders (P 6; D I.40, I.52, III.3, III.30). The sons of Brutus, Machiavelli explains, resent institutions that guarantee popular liberty, understanding them to constitute deprivations of their own freedom; and the partisans of old orders invariably harbor jealousy for an individual who acquires sufficient authority to introduce new laws, partisans who generally will enlist “the magistrates” in their efforts to block or roll back such reforms (P 6). In terms deployed by Machiavelli in the Discourses (D I.16), the new guild republic certainly has “partisan enemies”: firstly, the nobles who, like Brutus's son, wish to continue molesting the people without institutional restrictions; and, secondly, the envious peers of a founder/reformer, like Moses or Giano, who seek to halt the latters’ enactment of new laws and orders.

However, unlike the early Roman Republic, the guild republic most decidedly does enjoy what Machiavelli calls “partisan friends” (D I.16): as Machiavelli will show, the Florentine people, in a manner perhaps more virtuous than was exhibited by the Hebrews or the Romans, rush to defend themselves, Giano, their champion, and his new laws. As we will observe in Machiavelli's account, the Florentine people, quite spontaneously, and even before any figurative Sons of Brutus are executed, will hasten to Giano's defense. Indeed, Giano will face the opportunity to become a Moses or a Brutus with even more overt popular support than the latter two figures initially enjoyed—but he ultimately opts not to avail himself of this opportunity. As Machiavelli declares in the Discourses: “He who governs a multitude either through the way of freedom or through a principality, who does not secure himself against the enemies of the new order, establishes a very short-lived state” (D I.16). In those passages and others, Machiavelli insists that the founders of both principalities and republics must secure themselves and their new laws by killing the sons of Brutus at the first opportunity; and, as if on cue, the enemies of Giano's orders give him the opportunity to eliminate them almost immediately.

Soon after the establishment of the Ordinances, and also, unfortunately, soon after Giano's requisitely short, two month term as Gonfalonier, Machiavelli recounts how a gang of nobles, among whom was Corso Donati, killed one of the people in a street fight (FH II.13). Corso, as the boldest among the nobles present, took the blame for the entire incident and was arrested by the People's Captain. But Corso was soon freed, Machiavelli explains, either because he was innocent or because the Captain was afraid of convicting him. (Machiavelli's subsequent recounting of Corso's career suggests that he was more than capable of both causing such a death and of threatening the person of the Captain.) The people were outraged at Corso's acquittal: yet again, no matter what institutional reforms the city undertakes, the nobles, in the people's estimation, continue—literally—to get away with murder. The people spontaneously armed themselves and rushed to Giano's house, entreating him—in terms that recall the “uno solo” whom Machiavelli insists must resort to violence to enforce his new modes and orders—“to be the one” to insure that “the laws that he authored be followed” (FH II.13).

Machiavelli calls Giano a lover of liberty, and shows him to be sufficiently spirited to propose the Ordinances of Justice, and to carry them out during his term as Gonfalonier. Presumably therefore, Giano, like the people, wished that the laws he initiated gain force and longevity. Moreover, Machiavelli also notes that Giano “desired the punishment of Messer Corso”—whether because he believed this to serve justice or because he wished to eliminate a rival to his authority in the republic, Machiavelli does not say. The question is: Will Giano act as Florence's Romulus or Moses?—each of whom, Machiavelli previously tells readers, famously killed rivals with felicitous results for themselves and their fatherlands (P 6; D I.9, III.30)?

Giano proves indecisive, and he sends the people a mixed message: He encourages them to pursue the proper legal course by proceeding to the Signoria and pleading for a reconsideration of the case; but he does not insist that the people disarm themselves before doing so, as Machiavelli writes that his adversaries thought that he should have (FH II.13). No doubt, the nobles and the wealthy popolani who feared and resented Giano's reputation with the people, are quite alarmed to see the people assembled at Giano's house bearing arms. Giano's behavior here, Machiavelli writes, only inflamed the people's indignation: they felt that the Captain's “offense” against them had now been compounded by Giano's “abandonment” of their cause (FH II.13). They therefore disobey Giano, eschewing the procedurally legal route he recommended; instead, they exact vengeance on the Captain by ransacking his palazzo. Giano's enemies, who desired his ruin, quickly blame him for the incident, and set in motion the events that would lead to his exile.

Giano seems to take one of Machiavelli's dreaded “middle ways” here. As Machiavelli observes in the Discourses, “men often take very harmful middle ways, not knowing how to be completely wicked or completely good; too often they know not how to be evil in an honorable way or good in a perfect way. Thus, they demure from the former even when evil portends true greatness or at least partial generosity” (D I.26, I.27). By acting in an honorably evil fashion, Giano could have acquired “true greatness” for himself as Florence's Romulus, Moses, or Brutus–as something like “the father of Florence's liberty.” Moreover, he could have exhibited more than “partial generosity” to the people by punishing or perhaps eliminating their aristocratic oppressors. Both Giano and the people would have benefitted immensely had he spiritedly invigorated the laws that would have protected the people well into the indefinite future.

Thinking back to both Machiavelli's praise of successful ancient founders and reformers and his criticisms of failed Florentine princes (especially, Savonarola and Soderini) in The Prince and the Discourses, what exactly should Giano have done in these circumstances? There are several alternatives to Giano's “middle way” available here. Giano could have led the armed people to the Signoria or to the Captain's palace and insisted that either of them re-arrest and re-try Corso. Moreover, recall that under the Ordinances of Justice, all of the nobles who were in Corso's company on the night of the killing were eligible to be indicted and punished on the same charge—without recourse to witnesses. Therefore, Giano could have taken this opportunity to indict and prosecute many of the offending parties among the nobility, not just Corso.

These alternative modes of proceeding conform in spirit to the actions of Brutus, who followed legal channels in prosecuting and overseeing the execution of his treasonous sons, and their young aristocratic conspirators, who sought to overthrow the Roman Republic. Of course, Brutus enjoyed the luxury of still serving as consul at the moment when he pursued such prosecutions. Giano, because of Florence's excessively short terms of office, is no longer Gonfalonier; and so he must necessarily act somewhat extra-legally in pursuing the retrial and prospective execution of Corso (and perhaps his noble accomplices as well).

But Machiavelli does not rule out such quasi- or extra-legal measures when strictly legal ones are not available. Consider his thoughts on the legal and extra-legal options open to Soderini as he faced the necessity of eliminating the young, pro-Medici nobles who opposed the 1494 republic: In the Discourses, Machiavelli concedes that it would have been convenient if Soderini could have dealt with them through ordinary modes, but since that was not really a possibility, he should have therefore employed extraordinary ones (D III.3).

Alternatively, Giano could have pursued the “perfectly good,” as opposed to the “honorably evil,” course of action that would have enabled him to avoid taking “a middle way” in these circumstances: He could have insisted that the people, in his presence and at his house, immediately disarm, and then peaceably proceed to the Palazzo della Signoria and entreat the priors to revisit Corso's case. Machiavelli is, by and large, not particularly sympathetic to leaders who disarm their peoples. But at least Giano, in this case, would have freed himself of suspicion by his enemies and rivals among Florence's elite that he was pursuing a tyranny.

More radically though, Giano might have led the armed people to the Signoria and demanded that the present Gonfalonier resign, so that Giano, the author of the magistracy in its present form, could reassume the office under the present emergency circumstances, then call to arms the four thousand soldiers under his command as Gonfalonier. He could have then pursued whatever course he deemed necessary to “invigorate” the magistracy of the Gonfalonier and the “Ordinances of Justice,” as well as insure the security of the people against the “sons of Brutus”; that is, against any and all of the nobles and rich popolani who opposed the magistracy and the laws. By Machiavelli's ancient standards this very likely would have entailed the killing, not only of Corso, but also of whichever nobles and rich popolani envied Giano's authority. This is reminiscent of the mode through which Moses eliminated “infinite” envious competitors for his authority, in the process making himself “happy” and his patria “very happy” (P 6; D III.30). This is also akin to the extraordinary means, as mentioned above, that Machiavelli hints his former boss Soderini should have deployed against the “sons of Brutus,” who envied his authority and who despised “the collectivity” with whom Soderini held so much favor (D III.3). Had he taken these actions, Giano would have become prince or first citizen, one who is “alone” at the head of an enlarged armed citizenry, the uno solo who could remake the Florentine constitution in any mode he saw fit.

In any case, soon after the incident at Giano's house, one of Giano's detractors is appointed to the Signoria and he formally accuses Giano as a rabble-rouser to the Captain (whose house, recall, had been sacked in the recent popular riot) (FH II.13). The people may have initially resented Giano's abandonment of their cause, but they seem to fully forgive the former Gonfalonier. Upon hearing news of Giano's indictment, the people again arm themselves and rush to his house to offer Giano defense against, not only the Signoria or the Captain, but also, Machiavelli emphasizes, against any and all of Giano's “enemies”; that is, the nobles and rich popolani. Fortune, the saying goes, comes knocking only once; the people, Machiavelli seems to suggest, are more than willing to ring twice.

The Florentine people spontaneously pledge support to Giano against his rich and powerful accusers, but Giano demurs. Machiavelli writes “Giano wished neither to test his popular favor nor entrust his life to the magistrates, fearing the former's instability and the latter's malice” (FH II.13). Like several flawed popular champions whom Machiavelli criticizes in The Prince and the Discourses—Virginius, Savonarola, and Soderini—Giano reveals himself not to fully trust the people, whose cause he supposedly promotes (D I.44, I.45, III.3, III.30). All popular champions who signal distrust of the people's judgment and fidelity, Machiavelli avers, wind up catastrophic political failures.

Giano fears that his enemies among the nobles and popolani will sway either the Captain or the Signoria against him, and that the people—despite two vivid examples to the contrary—will prove to be a variable and inconstant source of support. Yet, in The Prince Machiavelli claims that only those individuals who call upon a disorganized and unarmed people, as did Giorgio Scali or the Gracchi, “build on mud” when anticipating promised popular support (P 9). On the contrary, individuals, like Giano, who enjoy an armed, enthusiastic people at their back are afforded many intriguing possibilities should they decide to take up the vocation of a founder or reformer.

In his final estimation of Giano, Machiavelli does not merely intimate that the former Gonfalonier was a hypocrite and a coward. He also invokes Giano's seemingly sincere desire to keep his supporters from “harming their patria” (FH II.13). Such fears, of course, never inhibited the likes of Moses, Romulus, and Brutus. The more reticent Giano thinks that leaving the republic improperly or incompletely ordered is more “patriotic” than is risking greater disorder in the effort to decisively set its affairs aright.

Thus, Giano “departs” the city, voluntarily opting for exile. Machiavelli seems to praise Giano, deeming his efforts effective and his motivations good; he writes that Giano “left the city that he freed from subjection to the powerful through careful and dangerous actions” (FH II.13). However, entirely different conclusions are in order in light of: on the one hand, Machiavelli's previously conveyed advice to would-be princes, and, on the other, his description, in the Histories, of subsequent rampant oppression perpetrated upon the Florentine people by the potenti, including Corso Donati. Giano did not prudently or effectively “free” Florence from aristocratic oppression, nor was his timid behavior sufficiently dangerous or audacious. Giano's actions, in fact, left Florence worse off than before. What Machiavelli writes of Soderini in the Discourses applies equally to Giano, his predecessor in the office of Gonfalonier, here: “one ought never permit an evil to run wild by adhering to a good, when precisely such a good could be so readily destroyed by that very evil” (D III.4). As Machiavelli's Histories make painfully evident, Corso Donati, and his noble confederates, whom Giano failed to see effectively punished, will soon become the personification of evil run wild.

Corso becomes the chief agent of virtually every one of the many civil disturbances, political controversies, foreign interventions, exiles and deaths that ensue between Giano's peaceful departure and the violent end of Corso's even more violent life (FH II.13–23). Eventually, after fourteen years of Corso's wreaking havoc on the republic, the same magistracies that in 1294 failed to convict Corso for murder, the Signoria and the People's Captain, in 1308 finally sentence him to death for conspiring to become tyrant of the city (FH II.23). Machiavelli seems to suggest that if only, at Giano's and the people's insistence, these magistracies had originally sentenced Corso to death, the city would have been spared countless convulsions and copious amounts of blood and tears. The failure to use cruelty “well,” that is, “at a stroke,” Machiavelli explains in The Prince, often insures that even greater cruelty will proliferate in ever more ugly and unpleasant ways for years to come (P 8, 17). Machiavelli intimates the following in his accounts of both Giano's and Corso's careers in the Histories: if only Giano, who loved liberty and his patria, were slightly more like Corso–a man of rare “virtue,” and a “restless,” if “indecent” spirit—the city would have been better off. The reverse also appears to be true: if only Corso had been motivated by just a little bit more of the goodness that inhered within Giano, Florence would have been a more stable and free republic.

MICHELE DI LANDO: SAVIOR OF THE REPUBLIC, OR STOOGE OF THE “POPULAR NOBLES”?

Few if any individuals are praised more fulsomely within the pages of the Histories than Michele di Lando. The barefoot, rag-clad Michele leads the plebeian mob that overthrows the Signoria during the Ciompi Revolt; becomes the first Gonfalonier of Justice in the fledgling popular republic; and then militarily suppresses the woolworkers barely a month after they had acclaimed him as their champion. Machiavelli's compliments for Michele are effusive:

Later, in his political epitaph for Michele, Machiavelli expresses dismay over the ingratitude shown to Michele by fellow citizens upon his exile from the city: “Michele di Lando could not be saved from the rage of the parties despite all the goods that his authority had provided while the unbridled multitude were ruining the city with their license. For his good deeds his patria paid him poor recompense. . .” (FH III.22).

Most interpreters take Machiavelli's lavish praise of Michele largely at face value.Footnote ⁸ However, Machiavelli's assessment looks quite different, once one evaluates Machiavelli's judgment of Michele's virtue, spirit, prudence, modest ambition and, especially, goodness in light of his analyses of new princes in The Prince and the Discourses. Michele's initial behavior, to a significant extent, conforms to the advice that Machiavelli offers founders and reformers in previous works. Ultimately, however, Michele does not go nearly far enough in acting as Machiavelli advises new princes to act—in fact, Machiavelli demonstrates, without editorializing on the fact, that Michele blatantly violates central tenets of Machiavelli's most fundamental political lessons.

Machiavelli's introduction of Michele in the Histories is unforgettable. Leading the insurrectionist woolworkers into the Palazzo and up the stairs to the threshold of the Signoria's chamber, Michele presents a tantalizingly contradictory image. Although “shoeless and barely clothed,” Michele held in his hands the banner of the Gonfalonier of Justice, the emblem of the republic's highest magistracy (FH III.16). A vision at once conjoining poverty and majesty, Michele turns and addresses his compatriots with the following words placed in his mouth by Machiavelli: “You see, the palace is yours, and the city is in your hands. What do you now propose to do?” According to Machiavelli, “the multitude” answered that Michele should assume authority as “their Gonfalonier and lord,” and should proceed to govern them and the city “however he saw fit.”

It is not clear whether the ciompi take the easy way out here by giving the authority of Gonfalonier to the person already carrying the banner of that office, or whether they judged Michele fully worthy of such status because of the courage he displayed in leading them to the republic's seat of power. Machiavelli endorses the latter view as he calls Michele, “by nature rather than fortune a sagacious and prudent man”; that is, it was no accident that Michele was the particular individual who took up the Gonfalonier's standard and led the charge to seize the palace (FH III.16). Moreover, this natural rather than accidental prudence and sagacity is borne out in Machiavelli's account of how Michele set about “quieting the city and ending the tumults.”

Machiavelli recounts how Michele, in his first act as Gonfalonier, demanded the arrest of the warden of the Bargello prison (FH III.16). This Ser Nuto presumably had incarcerated numerous ciompi within the jail after the many burnings and lootings committed during the early days of the woolworker's revolt; the plebs, no doubt, would have been deliriously happy to see him punished. However, Machiavelli takes note that Michele also sends a clear message, by setting up a gallows in the piazza, that he will tolerate no further license or disobedience—although he does permit the multitude to tear Ser Nuto to pieces, once they locate him and drag him to the piazza. Michele is off to a commendable start by standards set by Machiavelli for a founder: a new prince should found on the people and purge their vindictive spirits with a spectacular execution, as did, in different contexts, Lucius Brutus and Cesare Borgia (P 7, 9; D III.1; see Rebhorn Reference Rebhorn1988, 117–22). Michele manages to fix the attentions of the formerly oppressed woolworkers, for the moment, on a single object of vengeance, and, in so doing, he buys himself time to better secure his rule.

But with what modes and orders will Michele refound the Florentine Republic? Machiavelli reports that as his first reforms, Michele fired all the heads of the guilds and appointed new ones, dismissed from the magistracies all the members of the Signoria, the Colleges, and the Eight of the War, and he burned the existing bags of office (FH III.16). Michele then created a new Signoria, made up of four priors from the lower plebs (the plebe minuta), and two each from the major and the minor guilds (FH III.16). Moreover, he divided the state into three parts: one to the new plebeian guilds, one to the minor guilds and one to the major guilds. The new Signoria and new bags of eligible names for office constitute the very first representation of the ciompi, now finally organized in their own guilds, within Florence's government.

Quite notably, this new arrangement doubles the number of seats in the Signoria that the plebs themselves had demanded during the revolt: Machiavelli previously reported that the woolworkers wanted only two priors of their own (FH III.15), which would have left them, a majority of the newly constituted citizenry, with a minority of seats in the magistracy. Michele instead grants them four seats, making it much easier for them to achieve a voting majority within the Signoria. Beyond doubt, Michele has established laws that formally grant the Florentine plebs immense power. But, as we asked of Giano della Bella and his Ordinances of Justice: does Michele use sufficiently “spirited” action to “invigorate” these new laws and give them appropriate substance, force and longevity?

Indeed, Michele then takes several steps that will immediately compromise his standing with the ciompi and eventually undermine his own authority vis-à-vis the city's elite citizens, whom Machiavelli calls the “popular nobles”: Machiavelli reports that Michele granted to Salvestro de’ Medici the exceedingly valuable proceeds from the shops along the Ponte Vecchio; and that he assigned to himself the rectorship (la podesteria) of a subject city, Empoli (FH III.15). Moreover, Machiavelli writes, Michele conferred on numerous other prominent citizens “many other benefits. . . so that they might defend him in the future against envy.”

By trying to please both the plebs and the popular nobles, Michele is pursuing a middle way here that violates, both in general and in particular, crucial Machiavellian maxims for princely success. Machiavelli insists that a successful new prince, whether Cesare Borgia, Agathocles, Nabis, or Cleomenes, must establish his authority on popular and not aristocratic support: he cannot found on both the people and the nobles due to the opposing humors motivating these opposing classes; and he certainly cannot found his state mostly with the support of the nobles, because the latter will inevitably depose such a prince when he invariably fails to satisfy their unquenchable appetite to oppress (P 9; D 9). In fact, Machiavelli declares, if a prince comes to power through the support of the great he should switch sides to the people at the first opportune moment (P9), as did Clearchus of Heraclea (D I.16); and never vice versa as did Appius Claudius (D I.40), a course of action that Michele is precariously close to replicating here. Machiavelli also insists that a prince who has come to power through the people's support should never exhibit any loss of confidence in the latter's judgment, lest the people lose faith in him thus jeopardizing his authority, as happened, again, to both Savonarola and Virginius, when each signaled a loss of faith in the people (P 6; D I.45).

And then there is the issue of “envy,” and how a new prince should deal with it, which Machiavelli raises in his description of Michele's interactions with popular nobles like Salvestro de’ Medici and other prominent citizens. Machiavelli is adamant in The Prince and the Discourses: a new prince should worry about, first and foremost, the envy of the nobles, the “sons of Brutus”; an envy that Brutus successfully managed but that Friar Savonarola and Piero Soderini quite spectacularly did not (P 6; D III.30). Indeed, Michele seems to be following here almost precisely the course of action for which Machiavelli, in the Discourses, excoriated Savonarola, but especially, Soderini, Michele's eventual heir in the office of Gonfalonier of Justice.

Machiavelli traced Soderini's failed attempt to eliminate the envy directed toward him by the “sons of Brutus,” who despised the popular government over which Soderini, much like Michele here, presided as Gonfalonier. Machiavelli notes how Soderini thought that “patience and gifts” would overcome such envy, but that “he did not understand that such malignity cannot be. . . . appeased by gifts of any kind” (D III.3, emphases added). Soderini believed that “patience, goodness, and the distribution of benefits would eliminate envy” (D III.30, emphases added).

Soderini, Machiavelli observes, failed to appreciate a singularly brutal fact: “To overcome such envy the only remedy is the death of those consumed by it” (D III.30). In short, Machiavelli declares unequivocally that the nobles’ envy cannot be placated by goodness, the quality he most frequently attributes to Michele. And furthermore, he insists, the only “gift” that ultimately satisfies the sons of Brutus is “death”; certainly not the gift of real estate, however lucrative, that Michele presents to the likes of Salvestro de' Medici and other already quite rich popolani. Michele, by implication, is a fool to think otherwise.

Again, Michele intuitively knows some Machiavellian lessons but clearly not all of them: in the case of Ser Nuto, he successfully scapegoats an individual in order to redirect the people's ill spirit; but he himself has not yet spiritedly invigorated the laws and orders through which the people, including the plebs, have been empowered to rule. Brutus secured the fledgling Roman Republic by overseeing the trial and execution of his sons and their aristocratic coconspirators against the new regime; and Cesare Borgia secured his new principality, and the popularly beneficial representative institutions undergirding it, by eliminating the corrupt signori who previously misruled the Romagna (D I.16, III.3; P 7). But Michele has thus far eliminated no serious threats from the Sons of Brutus to his new laws and orders. Just as crucially, he has not followed the example of Romulus who founded Rome by arming the entire people under his own command (P 6, 20; D I.9–10). Michele has made no effort to integrate the armed plebs, the majority of able-bodied free-men in the city, into a unified Florentine civic-military order.

One might begin to ponder whether Michele understands how to gain the support of the people but not how to maintain it. This is borne out by Michele's pursuit of an ill-advised middle way: Michele pleases the plebs by giving them unprecedented formal, political authority in government, a move that no doubt raises the ire of the popular nobles; then, to placate the latter, Michele grants to them expanded substantive, economic authority within the city, which naturally compromises his relationship with the plebs. Moreover, by Machiavellian standards, Michele moves quite half-heartedly regarding the sons of Brutus, that is, rival elites and/or enemies of the new order: he dismisses some of them from their previous positions of guild and civic authority but he attempts to win over others with gifts to earn their future support. As we will see, by leaving the people's adversaries and his own rivals alive, not only does Michele permit them to persist in mischief directed against the newly enfranchised plebs, he also puts them in a position to use their still considerable power to eventually undermine his own authority.Footnote ⁹

Finally, besides perhaps foolishly believing that his own inherent goodness and his outward beneficence will placate dangerous adversaries among Florence's elites, why does Michele assign himself such prominent and profitable authority over a foreign city like Empoli? What message does this send to his supporters among the plebs? They might reasonably ponder: Does Michele plan to continue selling out the ciompi to the wealthiest guildsmen and then move-on to enjoy a luxurious retirement in Empoli? Or, more alarmingly, does he intend for this foreign city to serve as a source of military power with which Michele will tyrannize the plebs? Machiavelli previously noted how the tyrannical Duke of Athens used foreign French forces, in combination with the armed plebs, to oppress Florence's guild community (FH II.36). Does Michele here intend to use the richest popolani among the guilds, combined with foreign forces from Empoli, to suppress the plebs?

Unsurprisingly then, Machiavelli records that the plebs immediately start to worry that Michele's “excessive partisanship” for the upper guildsmen has jeopardized their own status within the new republic; they fear that they do not in fact possess a role in government sufficient “to preserve and protect themselves” (FH III.17). Before Machiavelli began his account of the Ciompi Revolt, he elaborated the extent to which oppression and exploitation of the plebs by the popolani of the major guilds—who had been steadily coopted and corrupted by the city's ancient nobility—were the underlying causes of the woolworkers’ insurrection (FH III.12). The plebs, thus, have good cause for anxiety over Michele's cultivation of favor with the popular nobles and his grasping for power outside the city. Machiavelli seems to take Michele's side here, condemning, as he often does in the Histories, the plebs’ supposedly immoderate desires and behavior: the ciompi, he writes, “motivated by their usual audacity,” take up arms, and tumultuously march on the Palazzo, demanding that the Signoria pass further measures “for their security and well-being” (FH III.17).

Michele, Machiavelli writes, perturbed by the plebs’ “arrogance,” insisted that they lay down their arms so that the Signoria might address their concerns “with dignity rather than through compulsion” (FH III.17). In response, the insulted plebs leave the Palace and retire to Santa Maria Novella, where they establish eight of themselves as heads, with ministerial trappings and other orders that might lend them “reputation and reverence.”

This episode subtly replays the two secessions of the Roman plebs, praised by Machiavelli in the Discourses (D I.3–4, I.40, I.44); secessions which resulted in an institution of “eminence and reputation,” the plebeian tribunate, which Machiavelli declares made the Roman constitution “more perfect.” Like their Roman antecedents, the Florentine plebs in this instance retire from the public seat of power, and set about establishing their own institution with veto authority over the workings of government: “They decided that eight members elected from their own guilds should always reside with the priors in the Palace, and that all of the Signoria's decisions must meet their approval” (FH III.17). When the Roman plebs complained that senatorial and consular authority was biased and self-serving, Machiavelli endorses their effort to create their own magistracy, the plebeian tribunate, with veto power over senators and consuls. Does Machiavelli really believe that the Florentine people are behaving with excessive arrogance and audacity by pursuing a nearly identical course of action? If such institutional innovations were good enough to make Rome nearly perfect, then why aren't they good enough for Florence?

The plebs, according to Machiavelli, sought to validate these reforms by sending two delegates to the Signoria, insisting that the measures be ratified by the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune, and threatening to use force, if necessary, to ensure this outcome (FH III.17). In apparently derogatory terms, Machiavelli declares that the plebs acted with “great audacity” by approaching the priors in such a manner, and “even greater presumptuousness” by chastising Michele for “the ingratitude and disrespect” he had shown them in return for “the dignity and honor” that they had conferred upon him. Again, how audacious and presumptuous, really, is this behavior? After all, the plebs, at this point, have merely sent emissaries to address the Signoria; they are not assaulting it with military force. Moreover, regarding Michele, they expected him to serve the ciompi cause and subdue their adversaries among the popolani; not to make himself rich and the latter even richer. In any case, as Machiavelli declares in the Discourses, such displays of popular indignation ought to be alarming “only to those who merely read about them in books” (D I.4).

At this moment, Michele could have reaffirmed his commitment to the ciompi. He could have assuaged the plebs’ fears of the popular nobles’ power and influence by accepting the plebeian reform proposal and by allowing them tribunician veto authority over the Signoria's decisions. Instead, Machiavelli reports that when “their rebukes turned to threats,” Michele could no longer endure the “arrogance” of the plebeian delegates (FH III.17). Resorting to physical violence, Michele struck the plebeian delegates with his sword and ordered them arrested and imprisoned. In the ensuing armed conflict, Michele, mounting his horse ahead of many armed men, assailed and routed the plebs, driving many from the city, and “compelling the rest to give up their arms and go searching for places to hide.”

Let us pause to examine Michele's motivations and actions here. Machiavelli writes that Michele is concerned with his own glory, with the dignity of his office and with the honor of the palace (FH III.17); in defense of these, Michele uses favors to garner support from the city's nobles and he deploys force to disperse and disarm the plebeians. This course of action defies the main lessons of The Prince, which insists that a new prince, like Cesare Borgia, Agathocles, or Nabis, in order to guarantee longevity and success, must: firstly, found on the people, whose motivations for security can be satisfied, rather than on the nobles whose envy and desire for oppression cannot (P 6, 9); and, secondly, arm as many citizen-subjects as he can, rather than, like Roman emperors, French monarchs and later Medici princes, disarm the populace (P 13, 19–20). Furthermore, in the Discourses, Machiavelli provides the examples of Romulus and Cleomenes, who, on the one hand, arm the entirety of their peoples; and, on the other, if the nobles are not yet fully corrupt, collect them in a senate—or if they are, kill them and distribute their wealth to the common people (D I.9–10).

Recall the numerous admirable qualities that Machiavelli attributes to Michele: virtue, spirit, prudence, and especially goodness (FH III.17). More specifically, Machiavelli declares that Michele's goodness “never permitted a thought to enter his mind that ran counter to the universal benefit.” We will have to assess whether Michele lives up to this wildly laudatory litany of qualities. In particular, we have to question whether the “goodness” that sets the boundaries of Michele's political imagination conforms to what Machiavelli means by the term. After all, a consistent political good exalted by Machiavelli in The Prince and the Discourses is the military empowerment of “the universality” of the people inhabiting a polity, and not the wholesale disarming of the vast majority of them. Michele, for his part, violently represses and disarms the ciompi, resulting in the immediate “demoralization of the plebs” (FH III.17).

And there was more harm to come. Machiavelli then reports that Michele's military victory over the plebs “encouraged the upper guildsmen to reflect on the ignominy of the fact that they, those who subdued the pride of the nobles, should now have to endure the stench of the plebs in the magistracies” (FH III.17). Michele has, wittingly or not, encouraged the popular nobles to disarm the plebs not only militarily but civically as well. Soon a large antiplebeian mob, presumably organized by the rich popolani, assaults the Signoria, deposes its plebeian priors and puts in their place popular nobles like Giorgio Scali. The mob then completely disbands the lesser people's new guild, and banned from further eligibility for office all of its plebeian members—except for Michele di Lando and a few others of “superior quality.”

The antiplebeian mob then demanded that the magistracies be divided into two parts, such that the Signoria would contain five priors from the minor guilds, and four from the major. The vast majority of the plebs whom Michele had enfranchised for the first time in the republic's history are, once again, and now permanently, excluded from Florence's government. Machiavelli fails to tell readers or even speculate whether Michele was complicit in the armed demonstration that led to the expulsion of the plebs from the Signoria, the disenfranchisement of the ciompi (with the notable exception of Michele himself), and the elevation of popular nobles like Giorgio Scali to the Signoria. He certainly does demonstrate that by previously crushing the plebs militarily, Michele insured that his new constitutional orders would also be gutted—the ciompi were now disenfranchised once again, and perhaps worse, they were now completely disarmed for the first time since the reign of the Duke of Athens. Florence's opportunity to boast a greater number of able-bodied, free men-at-arms—including plebs and popolani alike—than any other city in Europe was gone for good.

Whether or not Michele was complicit in this counter-revolutionary scaling back of the popular republic that he himself had founded, Michele clearly did nothing to stop it. Yet even readers considerably less cynical than the notorious “Machiavel” might pause to wonder: Perhaps Giorgio Scali, Salvestro de' Medici, and the popular nobles were pulling Michele's strings all along—or, at least, for some time. Ultimately, Machiavelli leaves readers to guess the veracity and extent of what other chroniclers of the Ciompi Revolt explicitly assert: Michele had been bought.Footnote ¹⁰

When Machiavelli surveys Florence's political landscape in the aftermath of Michele's suppression of the ciompi and their disenfranchisement by the popular nobles, he names the men who stood as “almost princes of the city” within this new form of government: Messer Giorgio Scali, Messer Benedetto Alberti, Messer Salvestro de’ Medici, and Messer Tommaso Strozzi (FH III.18). On this list of quasi-princes—all of them notably “sirs”—Michele di Lando's name is nowhere to be found. His term of office as Gonfalonier completed, and his power base among the plebeians dispersed and disarmed, Michele, Machiavelli suggests, has been consigned to irrelevance. Whatever his motivations, the elimination of the plebs’ power, Machiavelli shows, definitively results in the evaporation of Michele's own. He does not appear again in Machiavelli's narrative until the moment of his exile, chapters later, when Machiavelli recounts the ascension to power of the “harmful and offensive” Albizzi Oligarchy (FH III.20–2)—which effectively ends popular government in Florence for generations to come.

The regime of the Guild Republic that emerged after the Ciompi Revolt endured for only three years, Machiavelli writes, because its leaders among the popular nobles were compelled to enact “many executions and exiles” as a result of their suspicions of “so many malcontents” residing both within and outside the city (FH III.18). He recounts the executions of over a half dozen prominent popular nobles of the conservative party and the exiles of many Guelf Party members. Moreover, he reports how the republic paid an exorbitant amount of money to the mercenary captain, John Hawkwood, for all intents and purposes, to accomplish nothing in pursuit of the city's foreign policy agenda (FH III.18–9).

The discerning reader of The Prince and the Discourses might ask at this point in the Histories: What benefit would Michele di Lando have bestowed on the republic if, like Moses or Brutus, he had rid the city of its many “malcontents,” namely, many nobles of both the popular and conservative parties, during his tenure as Gonfalonier and lord? And would the republic have needed any further recourse to mercenaries like Hawkwood, if Michele had imitated Romulus and fully integrated the armed plebs into a unified civic-military force instead of humiliating and disarming them? But Machiavelli does not explicitly raise such questions.

When Machiavelli narrates Michele's exile, he laments the fact that Michele was treated with regrettable “ingratitude” despite “all the goods” that he had provided in service to “his patria” (FH III.22). But, as with Giano della Bella, the empirical facts and historical details provided by Machiavelli, cross-referenced with the lessons of The Prince and the Discourses, suggest that Michele provided nary any goods at all. Indeed, he may be accused of having helped make conditions in the republic demonstrably worse. Under the Albizzi oligarchy and then the Medici principate, Machiavelli subsequently indicates, Florence's civic culture would succumb to unprecedented corruption; and its reliance on mercenary arms, rather than a wide-scale popular army, would leave it hopelessly vulnerable to a veritable procession of foreign invaders (see Lynch Reference Lynch2012).