Ricordi

"He and Machiavelli were friends. For a while, they lived across the road from one another. Guicciardini was slightly younger. He was born in 1493 into one of the great patrician families of Florence. He was a lawyer, then a diplomat—a very successful one—and a papal governor under Clement VII. Then he made the ultimate mistake—advising the Pope to support the French and not the imperials. Rome was sacked in 1527 and so Guicciardini was sacked as well. And he went back to Florence. But he did two things. Throughout his entire career he wrote a series of maxims—political observations about human nature, about the nature of politics, and especially where human nature and political circumstances coincide. He was an incredible observer. Then he wrote perhaps the single most important history—between Tacitus in the 2nd century and Edward Gibbon in the 18th. That is his History of Italy , which he wrote after losing his job once more under Cosimo de ’ Medici. Guicciardini’s response to the crises of Italy is very different from Machiavelli’s because he saw it first-hand. He was the one who had to deal with the invasions that resulted in the sack of Rome and all these terrible things, including the reconquest of Florence by the Medici in 1530. All of this he observed, which is why his history only covers things that he had actually seen between 1494 and 1538. Machiavelli’s response is that we have to temporarily store our values and principles and adopt the principles of the barbarians in order to beat them at their own game. Guicciardini is the ultimate civil servant. He is the ultimate cog in a wheel who says, essentially, ‘I do what I’m told and I deliver. I don’t think about whether it’s right or wrong. It’s not my place to make that consideration. I will simply do what I’m told and I will do it to the best of my ability. I will ensure that my masters are victorious, regardless of what it takes.’ He’s the ultimate collaborator and, ultimately, when he sees the invasions of Italy and he knows the Italians cannot win—he throws in his lot with the Hapsburgs. He say, ‘We’re not going to win this so I’m going to get what I can out of it. I’m going to make sure that I’m going to be the victor regardless of what’s going on. I’m going to get my share of the power and the wealth because, after all, what am I doing? I’m doing my job. I am fulfilling my obligations to my master. Who my master is, what I’m told to do, these are irrelevant. I simply deliver. I am a delivery mechanism.’ “If you’re going to look at the past, you have to understand the people who were living there and to see the world through their eyes” That is why I put the two of them together. They are different ways of approaching crisis. Machiavelli thinks of the desperate surgery needed to save the patient and afterwards the patient will recover, Guicciardini says, ‘I want to be the person that delivers the life support because then I’ll decide how many drips we’ll get into the IV and I’m the one who will ultimately determine whether the patient lives or dies. And that’s not going to be my call. Somebody will tell me to turn off the machine and let the patient die or heal the patient and get what you can out of it. That’s the way I see the world.’ Exactly. He was the ultimate realist. I don’t want to say he had no principles, but he was the person who thinks that principles ultimately don’t matter. Even his marriage is a famous story. He thought of going into the Church because his uncle was the bishop of Cortona and died and he could inherit his bishopric if he wanted. Guicciardini thought, ‘I’m a lawyer, I’m a very good lawyer, I know canon law, there’s a good chance if I’m a bishop I’ll be a cardinal, and if I’m a cardinal I could probably manipulate the situation and become pope.’ His father talked him out of it, saying he had no spirituality at all and saw the church as nothing but an imperfect organisation, and that this was not a good idea. When he decided not to become a cleric, he got married. In his description of his marriage, he wrote, ‘Then I decided to get married. I chose a woman of the Salviati family because this is a family that has much influence and wealth—the two things I was looking for. So they got married. Apparently they disliked each other, and he spent as much time away from her as possible. He chose her purely because she provided things that he wanted. They were not love and companionship, they were wealth and power. They’re in three series. Series three is an editing of the first two and much enlarged. They show clear signs of being polished. So my theory is that, yes, he intended them to be read by others. They fall into a historiographical tradition in Florence called the ‘ricordanze.’ Merchants would keep not only ledgers but describe the details of their lives and keep what amounts to a kind of memoir. So the ricordanze of Guicciardini are a kind of memoir of his political observations and his view on human nature. He says things about Machiavelli in them as well. He says it is foolish and pointless to continually compare us to the Greeks and Romans at every turn. The two of them had a relationship. It wasn’t all that close because they had different principles and values but, at the same time, it was one of mutual respect and a concern for Florence: Machiavelli because he was a patriot, Guicciardini because he had a lot of property in the city. Well, it is. His view of human nature all comes down to a very famous description of why people do what they do. It’s called the ‘particolare.’ The particolare is your immediate self-interest. Guicciardini observing people, especially people with people, sees that they will always sacrifice others and the future for their immediate, recognisable self-interest. That particolare is his own principle: I’m going to gain something out of everything that I do. I am looking at it from my point of view and what’s in it for me . It’s what we would call political and social cynicism. Montesquieu wasn’t really cynical, but during the civil disturbances during the minority of Louis XV, he also saw the sort of things that Guicciardini was talking about. He realised that he was right. With Francis Bacon, it was the same. He was the chancellor to James I who was fired because he was caught with his hand in the till. These are people who observed up close what Guicciardini was talking about. And so their conclusions were not unlike his. I think that if we were in government at any level, including the papal court, we would probably see people doing exactly that: acting in their own immediate self-interest to the detriment of others and to the detriment of the well-being of the institution as a whole. Well, Guicciardini would say that if you choose to be nice and kind, you have an ulterior motive. You think that that will be repaid in the future, that you will get a reward as consequence—not that it is good for your spirit or your soul. He was an Aristotelian, unlike his father who was a famous Platonist. He saw the world in material terms, stuff that you could measure and weigh. Because of his brilliant insight into human nature. His history is wonderful because he has insight into personality. He helps explain why people like Clement VII acted the way they did. He puts it in the category of, ‘he did it because he thought it was best for him at the time’. Generally, historians don’t like that sort of thing. They slip back into the 19th century ‘great man’ theory, that people with great power create great events and do great deeds. So Guicciardini’s insight into human nature and why events unfolded the way they did is absolutely marvellous. He also writes brilliantly. He’s always really intellectually engaging. He looks at all sides of the situation. If you look at his description of Savonarola, for example, he doesn’t say he was a madman and did all kinds of evil deeds, he says he seemed to believe what he said. He seemed to be pious but nevertheless the final effects were bad. And Savonarola was executed as a consequence. It’s the refusal to make value judgements that makes him quite attractive for our own time. He looks at the evidence and he draws his conclusions from the evidence. That’s why we need to read him. The interesting thing is that if you look at Machiavelli and Guicciardini together, during the period of Italian unification—the Risorgimento —Machiavelli was a hero because Machiavelli wrote in The Prince that we have to free Italy from the barbarians and we should unite Italy. And in chapter 26 of The Prince is the “Italia Mia” poem by Petrarch: “in the Italian breast, the Roman heart is beating still.” Guicciardini was specifically vilified. In a famous 1869 article by Francesco de Sanctis, he talks about the Guicciardinian man—Italians who did not think about their nation and their fellow Italians but thought only in terms of getting what they could from the barbarians who were keeping Italy under oppression until 1861. So, one of the reasons that Guicciardini hasn’t been read very much is that he was identified with forces of evil. The view of the two of them kept changing depending on Italian culture and politics over the next 400 years. Machiavelli lost some of his shine when Mussolini wrote an introduction to The Prince and said he slept with Machiavelli’s Prince under his pillow—and Mussolini’s identification of the man on horseback with himself. It reduced Machiavelli to being someone who seemed to be in favour of fascism. Whenever you look at in history—and that’s something I mention in my book—you have to look at it through the eyes of the historian and when the historian is writing. There is no absolute in history. It is always contingent. It always depends on the environment in which the historian is working. And that’s exactly what Guicciardini said would always happen. Guicciardini said that we would be naïve to think that anyone would behave any differently. It’s always been the case. Some were just better than others at hiding it—saying that they’re working for the general good when, in fact, the general good corresponds with their own particolare."