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WorkNiccolò Machiavelli

History of Florence

A history of Florence told through its feuds and riots, written for the Medici by the official they had tortured seven years before.

by Niccolò Machiavelli698 passages held

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Original title
Istorie fiorentine
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
Italian

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Overview

Two chancellors of Florence, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, had already written the city's history in Latin, and Machiavelli opens his own by faulting them: they had described the wars with foreign powers in detail and passed over the quarrels inside the walls. His history makes those quarrels its subject. Rome, he argues, lived with one division, between nobles and people; Florence split again and again — nobles against nobles, then nobles against citizens, then citizens against the lower classes — and each winning party divided in two. A republic that learns why its citizens come to hate each other has a chance of staying united; that is the lesson he offers the men who govern it. The commission came in November 1520 from Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, through the city's university, and left him free to choose his starting point and to write in Latin or Tuscan. He chose Tuscan and began with the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire. The difficulty was the patron. From 1434 on, the story he had to tell was the rise of the Medici, and his employer was one of them. Donato Giannotti, a younger Florentine friend, later reported Machiavelli's own solution: what he could not say himself, he had the Medici's opponents say. Following humanist practice, he also wrote speeches for his characters, and the most radical goes to an unnamed worker, who tells the rioters of 1378, afraid of punishment for the houses they had burned, that their only safety lies in burning more. He mocked the hired armies of the age as well: at Anghiari in 1440, he reports, one man died, trampled after falling from his horse. The narrative, in eight books, stops at the death of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492. In 1525 he carried it to Rome and handed it to the same Medici, now Pope Clement VII. Antonio Blado printed it in Rome in 1532, five years after Machiavelli died. Historians have since faulted his reliance on earlier chroniclers, and scholars still disagree whether the book shows him making peace with the Medici or keeping the republican convictions of the Discourses on Livy.

Key concepts

Why does Machiavelli say some divisions help a republic and others destroy it?

Because what matters is how citizens gain influence. Divisions do no harm when rivals rise by public means, winning battles, carrying out missions, counselling well, since each must serve the state to beat the other and they watch one another within the law. They are ruinous when influence is bought privately, with loans, protection and largesse, because that breeds partisans and factions. Florence's quarrels, he argues in the seventh book, were always of the second kind.

What does Machiavelli mean by servitude and license?

They are the two conditions badly ordered republics swing between, he argues at the start of the fourth book: not from servitude to liberty, as people believe, but from servitude to license. The nobles serve the first, the popular faction the second, and both extol the name of liberty while submitting to neither laws nor men. A city is truly free only when good laws restrain both, so that it no longer depends on the virtue of one man.

What is the cycle of order and disorder in the History of Florence?

It is his account of why states cannot stand still. Having reached their height, they decline; having hit bottom, they rise. Virtue brings peace, peace leisure, leisure disorder, and disorder ruin; from ruin comes order again, then virtue, glory and good fortune. That is why, he says, letters follow arms, and why Cato wanted philosophers kept out of Rome: idleness never enters a well-ordered city in a more alluring and dangerous guise.

Why does the History give a rioter a speech arguing that great crimes go unpunished?

To show the logic of necessity at its starkest. In the third book Machiavelli writes a speech for an unnamed worker in the revolt of 1378: since the rioters face punishment anyway, they must multiply their crimes, because where the guilty are many none are punished, and where necessity presses, audacity is counted prudence. It is a character's argument, not the historian's verdict, but it states without disguise how men who fear hunger and prison reason.

What does Machiavelli think a history of his city is for?

Teaching the citizens who govern republics why their fellows come to hate each other, so that they can stay united. In the preface he faults the chancellor-historians Bruni and Poggio for describing Florence's foreign wars with care and passing over its civil discords, whether from contempt or fear of offending descendants. Both reasons, he replies, misjudge men: many who cannot win fame by praiseworthy deeds seek it by disgraceful ones, and great acts of state bring more honour than blame.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A city that kept splitting

Why do the citizens of one city come to hate each other, and why did Florence never stop at a single division? Machiavelli holds that a republic which learns the causes of its hatreds has a chance of staying united.

Rome's quarrels between nobles and people, he argues, were settled by a law; Florence's by the death and exile of citizens. The difference lay in the aims: the Roman people wanted to share the honours of the state, the Florentine people wanted them alone, so each victory produced laws for the winner rather than for the city. And no winning party stayed whole once its enemy was crushed. His remedy is not harmony, a hope he says deceives those who hold it, but an order in which rivals compete through public service, without partisans who follow them for private gain.

  • factionalism
  • civil conflict
  • political violence
  • political conflict
  • political instability
  • political institutions
  • republican government
  • republicanism
  • liberty

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Private favours, public mastery

How does one family come to hold a free city in its hands? Machiavelli follows the Medici from 1434 and asks why power bought with loans, favours and protection is more dangerous to a republic than power earned in public service.

Influence in a republic, he writes in the seventh book, comes by two roads: public service, such as winning a battle, carrying out a mission or counselling wisely, or private service, such as lending money, shielding men from the magistrates and courting favour with largesse and games. The first makes rivals outdo each other for the state; the second makes partisans, and partisans make factions. Cosimo de' Medici's enemies accused him of exactly the second. Nor is conspiracy an answer: a plot that fails, he observes, only raises its target higher, and often turns a good ruler bad.

  • political power
  • political ambition
  • political legitimacy
  • conspiracy
  • tyranny
  • political authority
  • political leadership
  • deception
  • ambition
  • power

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Wars fought without danger

What becomes of a people whose wars are begun without fear and ended without loss? Machiavelli reads the Italian wars after 1434 as a record of cowardice and fraud, and holds that such baseness teaches as much as ancient greatness.

At Anghiari in 1440, he reports, a long battle killed one man, who fell from his horse and was trampled, and the victors refused to pursue the beaten army because they wanted to secure their plunder first. He sets it down as an exhibit. Elsewhere long peace wears virtue away; in Italy, he argues, it was lost through cowardice, until the way lay open to the foreigners again. And a war that leaves the booty to the soldiers and the taxes to the citizens has failed even when it is won.

  • war
  • military strategy
  • diplomacy
  • political alliances
  • alliances
  • political strategy
  • fortune
  • political prudence
  • political judgment
  • leadership

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Within this work

passages held
698
distinct concepts
725
by passages held, corpus-wide
#100

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “military strategy” and “war”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
military strategywar24
factionalismpolitical power23
diplomacywar16
factionalismpolitical violence10
political powerwar9
political ambitionwar8
diplomacypolitical power7
political legitimacypolitical power7
diplomacymilitary strategy6
factionalismpolitical ambition6
political legitimacypolitical violence6
factionalismpolitical legitimacy5
political powerpolitical violence5
diplomacypolitical ambition4
political ambitionpolitical power4
factionalismwar3
political ambitionpolitical legitimacy3
diplomacyfactionalism2
factionalismmilitary strategy2
military strategypolitical ambition1
military strategypolitical power1
military strategypolitical violence1
political ambitionpolitical violence1
political legitimacywar1
political violencewar1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1503 Minor Political Writings (Scritti politici minori)

    Written on the job rather than for readers: the reports and memoranda of a working diplomat, most of them from before his fall in 1512.

     EN
  2. 1521 The Art of War (Dell'arte della guerra)

    A companion, in dialogue form, to the Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli had dedicated that book to Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti, and both reappear here as listeners while a soldier turns ancient military practice into a programme for a modern state.

     EN
  3. 1531 Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius

    Longer, later and far less read than The Prince, this republican commentary on Livy is the work that makes Machiavelli's real politics a genuine question. Published, like The Prince, only after he died.

     EN
  4. 1532 History of Florence (Istorie fiorentine) you are here EN
  5. 1532 The Prince

    Machiavelli's most famous and shortest book, written in 1513 and published in 1532. Read for centuries as a tyrant's manual — a reading its republican companion, the Discourses on Livy, complicates.

     DEEN
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