Quinquennial Terror: Machiavelli’s Understanding of the Political Sublime

doi:10.4236/ojps.2013.32010

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Open Journal of Political Science

2013. Vol.3, No.2, 69-75

Published Online April 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojps) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojps.2013.32010

Quinquennial Terror: Machiavelli’s Understanding of

the Political Sublime

Ed King

Political Science, Concordia Universi ty, Montreal, Canada

Email: [email protected]

Received September 19th, 2012; revised February 18th, 2013; accepted March 2nd, 2013

License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original

work is properly cited.

This paper argues that far from advocating fear of violence as a continuous source of civic provocation

Machiavelli’s ideal ruler employs an aesthetic approach to civic violence; one that actually harms few

citizens and moderates their fear with admiration through carefully considered psychological imperatives

similar to those articulated two hundred years later in theories of the sublime. Such violence as there was

would occur half a decade at a time in between which the citizens and the patria would enjoy stability,

wealth and honor. It had a proven Medici provenance, having been developed through Cosimo de

Medici’s intuitive genius for governance and was maintained by Piero and Lorenzo the Magnificent. The

insight was empirically confirmed by Niccolò’s observations of similarly intuitive political savants;

namely Cesare Borgia and Julius II. It was not given a technical title by Machiavelli, who unhelpfully re-

ferred to it as crudeltà bene usate (cruelty well used) but we might call it “the politics of the sublime”.

Despite its most dramatic (and consequentially disproportionate) evocation in the Prince, Machiavelli’s

reliance on the political sublime waned throughout his literary career, until he rejected it in a stunning cri-

tique of Cosimo’s reign in the Florentine Histories.

Keywords: Machiavelli; Aesthetics; Sublime; Violence; Historical of Public Policy; Medici, Florence

Introduction

“Machiavelli is excessively pleased by unusual and violent

remedies.”

Historically speaking, Machiavelli’s manifest interest in po-

litical violence has been viewed by his critics along a contin-

uum extending from immature fascination in violence for its

own sake to a belief that violence formed an essential if brutal

element in any practical approach to the maintenance of power.

His contemporary and friend, Guicciardini, was at the first ex-

treme; in response to Machiavelli’s Discourses he advised

against taking “for an absolute rule what Machiavelli says, who

is always excessively pleased by unusual and violent remedies”

(Guicciardini, 1933). The other extreme divides along moral

lines that see Machiavelli as offering a criminally negligent

authorization of force for the sake of political longevity

(Strauss, 1958; Manent, 1995) or an alternative morality that

reifies “well used” violence (Von Vacano, 2007; Berlin, 1982).

Unfortunately apologists such as Berlin never suggests how

violence “well used” is qualitatively, as opposed to strategically

distinct from any other violent act, whereas critics such as

Strauss and Manent ignore the distinction altogether, perceiving

any use of violence for political ends as an evil in itself. Some

critical apologists refine their moral concern to focus on Ma-

chiavelli’s sacrifice of republican principles on the altar of po-

litical expediency (Hulliung, 1884; Godman, 1998). While

those who lean towards approbation justify Machiavelli’s harsh

pragmatism by noting that Machiavelli makes his most shock-

ing suggestions exclusively to rulers, and excludes citizens

from their application (King, 2008).

What these commentators share is a more or less monologi-

cal understanding of the application, reception, and impact of

the violence offered up by Machiavelli’s exemplars. It is cruel,

brutal and overwhelming; being applied swiftly—without con-

sideration for age, gender or religious principles—and merci-

lessly to anyone opposed the ruler’s designs. The implication is

that once applied, such violence requires constant and active

maintenance in order to instill a continuous state of fear and

trepidation in the subject population. While such violent gov-

ernance was not unknown in Renaissance Europe, I argue that

such an application is not, and never was Machiavelli’s design.

His ideally violent actor employs an altogether more subtle, not

to say aesthetic approach to civic violence; one that actually

harms few citizens and moderates their fear with admiration

through carefully considered psychological imperatives. Sin-

gleton argues that by focusing on aesthetics rather than ethics

Machiavelli appropriates Aristotle’s conception of “making”,

which aims at a non-moral artefact, rather than “doing” which

seeks to internalize a “correct” way of living (Singleton, 1953).

This amoral perspective allows him to relax his advocacy of

state sponsored terror for half a decade at a time while the citi-

zens engage in an economically creative social tension that

produces stability, wealth and honor for both prince and patria.

It had a proven Medici provenance, having been developed

through Cosimo de Medici’s intuitive genius for governance

and maintained by Piero and Lorenzo the Magnificent. The

ED KING

insight was empirically confirmed by Niccolò’s extensive

reading in the Medici archives as well as his observations of

similarly intuitive political savants; namely Cesare Borgia and

Julius II. It was not given a technical title by Machiavelli, who

generally (and unhelpfully) referred to it as crudeltà (cruelty) in

his work. Nevertheless one of his earliest critical readers, Gio-

vanni Botero, recognizing its literary roots in the theories of

Longinus, immediately named it “the politics of the sublime”

(Kahn, 1994). What is most provocative perhaps is that while

the Prince is generally credited with offering tyrants a manual

on the most effective control of conquered peoples, it is the

“republican” Discourses along with the Florentine Histories

that actually show how Cosimo used sublime terror to govern

the city of his birth. It is equally provocative but demonstrable

that this literary progression from the Prince to the Histories

illustrates Machiavelli’s waning faith in the efficacy of sublime

violence from its height in 1513 to its low-tide mark in 1527.

The Sublime Family Secret

Although it must be acknowledged that nowhere in his writ-

ings does Machiavelli use the word “sublime” to describe the

theatrical acts of political violence he advocated, it remains the

best word to explain the various phenomena Machiavelli be-

lieved would result in civic acquiescence if they were “well-

used”. Eighteenth century scholars, most especially Edmund

Burke and Immanuel Kant, would later complete the theoretical

framework by identifying the aesthetic effect generated by

spectacles of sublime power. However, the political implica-

tions of psychologically inassimilable, aesthetically-based ter-

ror had not advanced much beyond the intuitive insights of the

successful tyrants of antiquity.

The sublime was present in literary discourse as far back as

the Peri Hupsous of Longinus and it had a demonstrable influ-

ence on thinkers from the beginning of the cinquecento; openly

influencing Machiavelli’s contemporary, Michelangelo and his

later reader, Botero (Arthos, 1963). It is unlikely that, despite

his pretensions to poetry, Machiavelli made the connection

between the literary and political sublime himself since he em-

ployed no convenient term with which to represent the feelings

of awe and terror generated by the sublime. His most common

synonyms, crudeltà bene usate (cruelty well-used) and rovina

(ruinous destruction) fail to convey to us the psychological

effects he assumed would occur, and have consequently led

many critics astray. This is because, despite enjoying a brief

reappearance in the work of Botero, the aesthetic effect of the

sublime was not popularly identified in the terms used here

until John Dryden and Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux’s work in

the 17th century. I am forced to take the consciously anachro-

nistic step of unpacking the concept using the terms adopted in

the Enlightenment while recognizing that Machiavelli applied

these concepts through the limited lexicon of his experiences.

The “Terrifying” Sublime

Violent storms, yawning chasms, vast mountain ranges, ter-

rible avalanches, or miraculous religious events, such as the

burning bush or the parting of the Red Sea, were all expressions

of terrifying power that produced similar psychological reac-

tions in all those that witnessed them. In 1763 Kant systema-

tized these reactions into three categories of the sublime; the

terrifying, the noble and the splendid, of which only the former

need concern us here (Kant, 1991)1. The “terrifying” sublime

describes the awe-inspiring terror experienced by witnesses of

dramatic vistas or overwhelmingly violent activities. “Whatever

is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that

is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about

terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a

source of the sublime; that is it is productive of the strongest

emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke, 1990).

However, the reaction is qualitatively different than if one were

actually in danger from such events; the sublime depends for its

effect on the combination of sympathetic horror for the victims

and relief at the comparative safety of one’s own person from

the events witnessed. Joseph Addison had already noted this

relationship in his 1712 “Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagi-

nation” which was to be influential on both Kant and Burke.

“When we look on such hideous Objects, we are not a little

pleased to think we are in no Danger of them. We consider

them at the same time as Dreadful and Harmless; so that the

more Frightful appearance they make the greater is the Pleasure

we receive from the sense of our own safety” (Addison, 1978).

The Political Sublime

As far as political implications are concerned the most im-

portant aspect of the terrifying sublime is the relationship be-

tween the viewer and the political actor; a reaction that tran-

scends reason, self-interest or filial loyalty. It has often been

noted that feeling threatened by extreme violence can cause the

witness to identify with the perpetrator. “The dazzled witness

then tends to identify with the source, acting as if the constraint

emanated not from without, but from within himself” (Kelly,

1998). Witnessing an act of sublime violence has the effect of

both terrifying yet at the same time profoundly satisfying the

witness. It is this response to the aesthetic effects of violence,

committed in the course of political ends, to which we should

attach the sobriquet “political sublime”.

This terminology no doubt appears peculiarly modern when

transported into the renaissance context, yet the Florentine sec-

retary’s near contemporaries had no trouble discerning the po-

litical point of Machiavelli’s interest in sublime violence or the

rhetoric he couched it in. Giovanni Botero showed acute appre-

ciation for Machiavelli’s political and rhetorical strategies only

half a century after his works became generally available. In

1585 he published a pamphlet about the political use of the

sublime for Jesuits engaged in the counter-reformation by stag-

ing a politics of the sublime (Kahn, 1994).

Sublime Not Bestial Violence

Botero does not refer to a continuous state of terror when he

1Outside of these categories I ignore Kant’s conception of the sublime,

especially as developed in the Critique of Judgment, as it is impossible to

form an understanding of the political sublime using such reasoning. Kant

argued that the sublime was an interesting category precisely becauseit

included no human artifacts. Man’s role was to be the subjective observer

and it was unimaginable that he could create any of the conditions that

could reproduce the sublime effect on others. The second and more impor-

tant problem concerns his devaluing of experience. I endorse Hegel’s criti-

cism that Kant continually condemns ex

erience as seeming to be possible

rather than actual. In Goldthwaite’s words Kant shifts from a “principle o

explanation”, which is the province of the Observations, to a “principle o

conduct” which informs the Critique (Kant, 1991). This move away from

the value of empirical observation runs completely counter to Machiavelli’s

conception of the political value of experience and renders their analyses

mutually exclusive.

ED KING

cites Machiavelli, being one of the few early readers to recog-

nize that Niccolò disdained terror for its own sake. It was never

acceptable for rulers to simply devolve to the level of beasts

and the Prince cites Commodus’ “cruel and bestial spirit” along

with Heliogabalus, Macrinus and Julianus’ bestial behavior as

being “entirely contemptible” (Machiavelli, 1998). Machiavelli

exemplifies the difference between the occasional, restrained

and therefore effective use of sublime violence—and the bestial

effect of its continual application—in the father and son de-

scription of the deeds of Severus and Caracalla.

Severus used leonine force when he moved swiftly against

Emperor Julianus, executing him in a sublime act of imperial

regicide but then imposed a fox like caution on himself, under-

taking no further acts of public violence. “Although the people

were overburdened by him, he was always able to rule happily

because his virtues made him so admirable in the sight of the

soldiers and the people that the latter remained somehow as-

tonished and stupefied, while the former were reverent and

satisfied” (Machiavelli, 1998). Severus’ son Caracalla on the

other hand, despite being a man “who had most excellent parts

that made him ma rve lous in t he sight of the people and pleasing

to the soldiers” (p. 78) was murdered by a soldier in his own

army. “His ferocity and cruelty were so great and unheard

of—for after infinite individual killings he had put to death a

great part of the people of Rome and all the people of Alexan-

dria—that he became most hateful to all the world” (p. 79).

Well used cruelties “are not persisted in but are turned to as

much utility for the subjects as one can” (p. 37). Bestial cruelty

simply leaves the citizenry perpetually afraid; and unremitting

fear leads to hatred, which will eventually lead to death at the

hands of one’s own people. Thus, the ordinary violence of ty-

rants is what Machiavelli refers to as

“Cruelties… badly used which, though few in the begin-

ning, rather grow with time than are eliminated. Whoever

does otherwise [than eliminating opposition in a single

sublime stroke] either through timidity or through bad

counsel, is always under necessity to hold a knife in his

hands; nor can one ever found himself on his subjects if,

because of fresh and continued injuries, they cannot be

secure against him. For injuries must be done all together,

so that, being tasted less they offend less; and benefits

should be done little by little so that they may be tasted

better” (38).

In the case of strategic, as opposed to moral, considerations

the difference between a badly conceived sublime act and one

that is properly understood is entirely determined by the benefit

that accrues to the people, not the ruler (38). For those who

could enact socially constructive violence in this manner, their

“well used” acts mitigated the moral impact of their deeds.

Those that overstepped the mark, however, soon discovered

that rather than live in permanent fear of a rogue leader, citizens

would destroy a bestial leader just as they would destroy a wild

animal they could not trust. Properly “staged”, strategic vio-

lence, on the other hand, had the power to overawe a subject

people into accepting one’s authority as implicitly or explicitly

derived from a supernatural source. These irrationally terri fy ing

acts left all but the immediately affected individual(s) physi-

cally unharmed, but shaken and respectful of the apparently

divine power of the executor. Such was the reaction of the

spectators to Remirro de Lorqua’s sublimely violent end at the

hands of Duke Valentino, Machiavelli’s greatest exemplar of

the political sublime.

“Divine” Justice in Cesena

When Cesare Borgia (Duke Valentino) needed to pacify the

rebellious peoples of the Romagna he placed his boyhood

friend Remirro de Lorqua, “a cruel and ready man”, in charge

of subduing the population.

“In a short time Remirro reduced it to peace and unity,

with the very greatest reputation to himself. Then the

Duke judged that such excessive authority was not neces-

sary, because he feared that it might become hateful; and

he set up a civil court in the middle of the province, with a

most excellent president, where each city had its advocate.

And because he knew that past rigors had generated some

hatred for Remirro, to purge the spirits of that people and

to gain them entirely to himself, he wished to show that if

any cruelty had been committed, this had not come from

him but had come from his minister. And having seized

this opportunity, he had him placed one morning in the

piazza at Cesena in two pieces, with a piece of wood and

a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of this spectacle

left the people at once satisfied and stupefied” (Machia-

velli, 1998).

Machiavelli was content to record the actions of his sublime

hero without explanation. This has important rhetorical impli-

cations; since if one were able to rationally analyze the effect

one would necessarily give undue prominence to reason’s

promise of a definitive answer to the paradox of safety through

fear. In the political realm, where even Kant admits “the little

force which the universal moral feeling would exercise over

most hearts” (Kant, 1991), this failure of the imagination pre-

sents the ordinary citizen not with the incentive to seek rational

answers but rather with their failure to comprehend the cause as

rational at all, leading to their assumption of the source of the

ruler’s power as divine2. By presenting their sublime deeds

without comment Machiavelli allows his exemplars’ deeds to

speak for themselves. This is typologically indicative of the

prince’s assumption of the divine in his political actions, since

the actions of gods do not require words to create their effect

(King, 2008). The only words involved in the recorded deeds of

gods are those spent on the interpretation of their divine acts by

their followers. This cultivation of a leader’s silence for politi-

cal effect was exemplified by Cesare Borgia, who in addition to

his spectacular acts of theatrical violence often left camp with-

out explanation, rarely made his plans known even to his clos-

est advisors and relished the anxiety his activities caused in the

hearts of those, like Machiavelli, whose job it was to divine his

“divine” plans for the benefit of the states they served.

The most insightful commentators on Machiavelli occasion-

ally intuit the sublime effect without isolating it as a political

tool he consciously advocated. Wayne Rebhorn, who never uses

the term “sublime” in his analysis of Machiavelli, describes the

effects on the viewer every bit as insightfully as Addison or

Burke. “As he has Borgia manipulate the traditional rituals of

execution, create a silent, mysterious, compelling emblem, and

2For Kant the sublime causes the failure of the imagination to comprehend

sensuous experience. This failure leads to the demand for com

rehension

on the par t of reason and thus to an awareness of reason as a higher faculty

that transcends mere nature.

ED KING

paradoxically appear both present and distant from the scene,

he makes this ideal prince into a figure of overwhelming power

for the citizens of Cesena. Indeed Borgia becomes nearly God

like” (Rebhorn, 1998).

The “prize” for successfully employing the political sublime

was quiescent citizens who were more than simply afraid; they

were awestruck, socially unified and collectively devoted to

your cause. The “price” lay in the fact that in order to appear to

wield divine power, a ruler’s sublime acts had to walk the

knife’s edge between incomprehensibly irrational violence that

transcends the rationally causal limits of strategic governance;

while never over-indulging in the terrifying cruelty of the sav-

age beast that such power invites. A more immediate cost

however, is that once abandoned, the prince can never again

enjoy the comforts of ordinary family life under the rule of law.

This is typologically signified by Machiavelli’s choice of

Moses, Theseus, Romulus and Cyrus, who were all either foun-

dlings or lost their parents early in their lives. The very trauma

that disrupted their private lives became a formative feature of

their political success. Hannah Pitkin notes that “throughout

all the many and complex things Machiavelli has to say about

those founders and heroes, a single theme is fundamental: the

founder’s exceptional personal autonomy. He stands out, he

stands alone” (Pitkin, 1984). By living above the law these

leaders stand outside of the protective comforts of the state,

since, as Aristotle had already noted, “anyone who by his na-

ture and not simply by ill luck has no state is either too bad or

too good, either subhuman or superhuman” (Aristotle, 1981).

This includes the man who opts to leave the security of the

political institution he is born into of his own freewill; he too

will necessaril y beco me either an animal or a god.

The ubiquitous use of the political sublime by all of the he-

roic exemplars in the Prince illustrates Machiavelli’s belief that

a different rule system applies when a prince decides to volun-

tarily leave the realm of ordinary citizens (Machiavelli, 1998b).

“Free not only from the pressure of custom and tradition, the

prince enjoys a more profound and disturbing freedom, a free-

dom from allegiance to the conventional moral system of his

society” (Rebhorn, 1998). Even so, if a prince is established, or

lacks the necessary virtù to achieve success, which was in-

creasingly the case in Florence as the memory of the republic

lost its potency, then the irony that his name will be cast into

obscurity or infamy while that of his family retains the stain of

his failure for as long as people remember becomes increas-

ingly relevant.

Agathocles and Cosimo’s Sublime Tyranny

Chapter VIII is the only chapter in which Machiavelli dis-

cusses the appropriate application of sublime crudeltà ra ther

than simply announcing or presenting examples of it. Following

on directly from the dissection of de Lorqua it presents Agatho-

cles as an example of “Those who have attained a principality

through crimes”. There are better examples of sublime heroes

manqué in the Prince, such as Duke Valentino, Hannibal,

Severus and Caracalla, but Agathocles accomplishes the dual

aim of showing that virtù is not contingent upon family back-

ground, fortune or high ideals but on will alone while high-

lighting the fact that successful political ends are judged by the

satisfaction of the people not the longevity of the ruler’s tenure.

The example of Agathocles shows that, with or without a re-

sort to the sublime, the “will to power” was a necessary but

insufficient attribute of a determined prince. The qualities that

inform virtù cannot be even instrumentally effective without a

guiding conception of the public good that corrals the corrosive

freedom engendered by a prince’s extralegal use of his power.

Agathocles was capable of extraordinary acts beyond the reach

of moral, especially Christian, censure, making him an exem-

plar with all the necessary attributes but one—he never estab-

lished a republic—and that fact alone makes him unsuitable for

virtuous emulation. Irrespective of his ability to effect acts of

sublime political violence, his lack of republican ambition

caused him to go down in Machiavelli’s narrative as a tragic

failure rather than the great founder his qualities clearly marked

him out to be. His failure to use sublime violence against ex-

ternal enemies rather than using it to smother internal dissent

served as an exemplary warning to the Medici princes not to

wield the sublime as their ancestors had done and ignore the

larger duty involved in accessing such a powerful force.

Cosimo’s public legend was that of a successful and long-

lived ruler of a peaceful state; the Pater Patriae, father of the

fat he rland no less. However, Machiavelli’s arrabbiati (wrathful)

version of Cosimo’s story is unique in the Florentine annals for

suggesting a sublime root to Medici power before going on to

eviscerate the benign paternalism of the legend.

“Those who governed the state of Florence from 1432 up

to 1494 used to say, to this purpose, that it was necessary

to regain the state every five years; otherwise it was diffi-

cult to maintain it. They called regaining the state putting

that terror and that fear in men that had been put there in

taking it, since at that time they had beaten down those

who, according to that mode of life, had worked for ill.

but as the memory of that beating is eliminated, men be-

gan to dare to try new things and to say evil; and so it is

necessary to provide for it, drawing the state back toward

its beginnings” (Machiavelli, 1998b).

This is an unequivocal statement to the effect that the Medici

ancestors: Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo—“those who governed

the state of Florence from 1432 up to 1494”—understood that

about once every five years it was necessary to put “that terror

and that fear in men that had been put there in taking it”. In

other words, the Medici brought peace to Florence by quin-

quennially carrying out acts terrifying enough to crush the

self-interested (read anti-Medici) ambitions of the politically

disaffected. This doubly effective policy eliminated personal

threats to the regime while simultaneously bringing the citi-

zenry back to the level of awestruck compliance that existed at

their patria’s founding. However, just as with Agathocles, Co-

simo and his progeny spoiled his legacy by employing

semi-divine power in the service of his family rather than the

commune at large and, instead of bequeathing his heirs a virtu-

ous legacy in a free state, he laid the foundations for the inter-

regnum. So, as he had himself carried through the house after

his son’s death, he said, sighing, “This is too big a house for so

small a family”. It distressed the greatness of his spirit that it

did not appear to him that he had increased the Florentine em-

pire by an honorable acquisition (Machiavelli, 1990). It takes

no great skill at allegorical interpretation to read Florence as the

“house” and the Medici as the “small family ” while the last line

remains as uncompromising a condemnation of Cosimo’s ac-

complishments in office as anything written by his enemies.

ED KING

Machiavelli’s Ancestral Connection to

Florence’s Sublime History

It is worth noting that Machiavelli had a personal interest in

the effect of this Medici policy, since one of its earliest targets

had been several of his own ancestors who had directly opposed

Cosimo’s right to authoritatively monopolize violence in Flor-

ence. As Machiavelli points out in the Histories, Girolamo

d’Angelo Machiavelli (1415-1460) was exiled in 1458 and later

executed for his principled opposition to Cosimo’s oligarchic

policies as well as his periodic use of extra-legal terror to con-

firm his authority (Machiavelli, 1990). Girolamo taught law at

the University of Florence, the same university where his grand

nephew Niccolò had recently completed the Histories, and he

may well already have been teaching when Bartolomeo Scala

and Niccolò’s father, Bernardo were completing their legal

studies at the studio. Girolamo was an active member of the

Florentine Guild of Judges and Notaries where he seems to

have become politically active (Atkinson, 2002) and in 1445 he

was on a panel tasked with drawing up legal reform (Brown,

1979). He incurred Cosimo’s displeasure by calling for a rein-

stitution of freedom of speech in political debate and took the

central role in an anti-Medici protest in 1458. He was arrested,

tortured, and then exiled to Avignon for 10 years with his

brother Piero and some other citizens. Another brother, Fran-

cesco d’Agnolo, was arrested and beheaded the following year

(Rubenstein, 1997). In 1460 Girolamo was taken prisoner on

charges of being a rebel in Lunigiana and returned to Florence,

where he was imprisoned and shortly afterwards died. Although

the cause of death is unknown the Medici humanist Giuliano

de’ Ricci was sure he was (deservedly) strangled (Atkinson,

2002).

Poisoning the Body Politic

Without a focus on the benefits to the republic, the demands

of initiating even a limited number of sublime acts would create

a municipal cancer, destroying the health of both the state and

the very family that a ruler might try to elevate and protect.

Machiavelli makes such a criticism of Cosimo: “…because of

the infirmity of his body, he could not bring his former dili-

gence to public or private affairs, so that he saw both being

ruined because the city was being destroyed by the citizens and

his substance by his agents and his sons” (Machiavelli, 1990).

Machiavelli maintained the sickness motif throughout the short

life of Cosimo’s son, Piero who, “because of the weakness of

his body” was declared “little fit for public and private affairs”.

Indeed, every Medici ruler after Cosimo suffered from poor

health and each lived a shorter life than his forbear because of it.

The early deaths of Giuliano and Lorenzo, the dedicatees of

Machiavelli’s Prince, kept the issue of health to the forefront of

public speculation, and by 1527 the family’s inability to main-

tain the leader’s good health threatened their future governance

of the state.

The rhetorical effect of paradoxically framing the Medici

(literally “Doctors”) through their illnesses was to interpret the

leadership as diseased; just as Cosimo bequeathed poor per-

sonal health through his flawed genes, he also bequeathed his

heirs a deeply flawed political framework of his own design.

Sick people have no real choices since they are constrained by

the demands that their infirmity imposes on them. Arthritic

people are especially locked into singular options with respect

to their range of movement and it became convenient for Ma-

chiavelli to depict Cosimo as politically arthritic as he was

physically. His dismissal of the achievements of Cosimo’s ten-

ure is displayed most obviously in the manner in which he skips

over nine years of his “reign” in a single sentence in order to

emphasize nothing but the disease that finally killed him.

“But Florence continued in its disunions and travails.

Disunion began in Cosimo’s party in ’55, for the causes

given, which through his prudence, as we have narrated,

were arrested for the timebeing. But when the year ’64

came, Cosimo’s illness became so serious again that he

passed from this life” (Machiavelli, 1990).

During the nine years Machiavelli dismisses with the phrase

“for the time being” Cosimo managed to prevent factionalism

from breaking out through the power of his will alone and

Florence lived in an outward state of peace. The lesson was that

if even Cosimo was unable to alter his face to the changing

times then his example, which had historically sustained Medici

success in the face of their changeable fortunes, should no

longer to be thought of as a guaranteed template for political

success. Cosimo’s time-honored political approach, as with the

genetic degeneration of the individuals who attempted to wield

it, was weak, disease ridden, and in need of a radical overhaul.

Most of Cosimo’s problems in government came, ironically

enough, with the success of his attempts to prevent the rise of

an effective opposition (Machiavelli, 1990). Machiavelli’s

wonderfully ironic conclusion to the second act of the Medici

story was that God was no longer comfortable with the Medici

expropriating His sublime power and that unless a republic was

established He would re-assume exclusive rights to it.

God’s “Retaking” of His Sublime

The strategic use of violence that had seemed so central to

the assumption of political power in the Prince was, a decade

later being blamed for Cosimo’s post 1455 inflexibility and

consequent endangerment of the patria (Machiavelli, 1998b).

Machiavelli emphasized the impiety at the core of Cosimo’s

appropriation of God’s power by selectively damning him

through his own aphorisms.

When some citizens told him after his return from exile

that the city was being spoiled and that was acting against

God to send away from it so many men of means, he an-

swered that a city spoiled was better than a city lost, that

two lengths of rose cloth made a man of means, and that

states were not held with paternosters in hand—which

sayings gave matter to his enemies to slander him as a

man who loved himself more than his patria and this

world more than the other (Machiavelli, 1990).

Machiavelli ends this collection of sayings with the phrase

“one could repeat many sayings of his, which will be omitted as

unnecessary” (283). So clearly what he has provided us with

are only the essential sayings; and what Machiavelli considered

essential was the message that Cosimo ensured his own power

over patriotic or pious considerations, having been able to ap-

propriate His power with nothing more sacred than “two

lengths of rose cloth”. He then used that authority to sublimely

“spoil” the city every five years to prevent it falling out of his

family’s hands. Since he no longer had any fear of the power

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wielded by God that power now passed out of his hands and,

through Machiavelli’s auctorial force as a historian, was sym-

bolically handed back to God. It was this literary retrieval of

divine power that accounts for an otherwise extremely unchar-

acteristic diversion in Book VI of the Histories, in which Ma-

chiavelli takes time out of his political perorations to speak of a

terrible storm.

This storm, which occurred in 1456, was so powerful that it

threatened to bring to an end the sublime splendor that God had

harnessed in the creation of the world. It was a supernaturally

informed version of the Medician requirement to “retake the

state” by putting that terror and that fear in men that had been

put there in taking it.”

From these clouds so broken and confused, from such fu-

rious winds and frequent flashes arose a noise never be-

fore heard from any earthquake or thunder of any kind or

greatness; from it arose such fear that anyone who heard it

judged that the end of the world had come, and that earth,

water and the rest of the sky and the world, would return

mixed together to its ancient chaos (Machiavelli, 1990).

The ostensible reason given for the tempest was the need to

revive the crusade against the Muslims, since the Italians’ ardor

had dampened appreciably once the Hungarian army slowed

their advance. However, “when arms had been put away by

men, it appeared that God wished to take them up himself”

(270).

God was evidently no longer prepared to allow His divine

power to be used for parochial goals such as familial self-pro-

motion when the more pressing mission was to retake Constan-

tinople, which had fallen only three years before. That Machia-

velli has God making a politically sublime statement through

the elements is clear from his description of the storm’s effects,

which closely parallel the sublime “regaining” of the city de-

scribed by Cosimo.

This storm, to those who saw and heard it, [not those who

experienced its deadly effects] brought the utmost pity

and terror. The purpose of God without doubt was to

threaten rather than to punish Tuscany; for if so great a

wind had entered a city, among the houses and the thickly

crowded inhabitants, as it came among the oaks and trees

and houses that were few and scattered, without doubt it

would have made the greatest ruin and destruction that the

mind can imagine. But God purposed at that time that this

slight example should suffice to refresh among men the

memory of his power (Machiavelli, 1990).

In this extended example Machiavelli has God confirm how

a human prince should act when invoking the sublime; hurting

a few so that the many who were not hurt would learn their

lesson and comply the more readily with his wishes. “A

waggoner, together with his mules, was found dead far from the

road in a nearby valley… When the storm passed and day came,

men were left altogether stupefied” (270). The effect of this

single death, that left the people stupefied, is noticeably in

keeping with that gained by Cesare’s execution of Remirro de

Lorqua or Cosimo’s murder of Girolamo. It also echoes Ma-

chiavelli’s advice in chapter III of the Prince: “And those

whom he [the prince] offends since they remain dispersed and

poor, can never harm him, while all the others remain on the

one hand unhurt, and for this they should be quiet; on the other

they are afraid to err from fear that what happened to the de-

spoiled might happen to them (Machiavelli, 1998).

Conclusion

In 1482 God escalated his opposition to the Medici by send-

ing in His instrument to retake the state from Lorenzo. When

one considers the role of Savonarola in Medici history it is easy

to imagine a narrative in which he is sent by God to refute Co-

sim o’ s b o a st s. D e spite Cosimo’s confident claim to the c on t ra ry ,

Savonarola was clearly more politically aware than two yards

of cloth alone could make him and in 1482 the city was held in

hand by paternosters, at least for long enough to remove the

Medici from power. If the logic of this narrative is maintained it

was actually God’s will, enacted through the sublime power of

the Church, that in 1494 brought an end to Medici rule and in

1512 reinstated it again through the intervention of Julius II.

Whether the irony was God’s or Machiavelli’s, by announcing

His “regaining” of the power of the sublime Machiavelli sig-

naled the inappropriateness of corrosive political violence as a

pedagogical tool for the Medici; except of course, if God’s

representative, his patron Clement VII, chose to instigate it on

His behalf, combining the forces of Church and State in order

to unify the whole of Italy.

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