1 Political Praxis and Political Theory in the Florence of the Medici

The Medicis’ skilfully veiled exercise of power behind the scenes of a republic which, in crucial respects, was already hollowed out, presented unforeseen challenges for reflection on politics and its moral evaluation.¹ The rule of a complexly constructed patronage structure, built on deep-reaching foundations encompassing a large proportion of the Florentine middle class as well as expanding networks of half-vertical, half-horizontal associations of allied patrician clans, seemed to defy all classical systematizations of forms of government. Officially and formally Florence remained a republic even after 1434 – a fact that Cosimo de’ Medici, who, as its ‘godfather’, played so masterfully on all registers of political psychology and economy, never ceased to emphasize, and never tired of ritualizing in celebrations of all kinds. Nonetheless it was clear, and not only to insiders, that his will as the head of the dominant interest groups was generally the law.²

This phenomenon of power exercised with the support of clients was not included in the received cataloguing of good and bad forms of government; indeed, at least in the Florence of the time, it overstepped the limits of the sayable. On the contrary, the domination of such a loyalty-based alliance stood in opposition to the traditional guiding values of the bonum comune. Generations of Florentines had been raised in the spirit of these norms: the good of the Florentine community came first, and all particular interests were to be subordinated to it. All those concerned were aware that political reality was increasingly evolving in the opposite direction: that belonging to an influential patronage alliance was of decisive importance for political career opportunities, and that choosing the right patron could thus be crucial to setting the course of an individual’s life. But this could be communicated only behind closed doors. Officially, as proclaimed by official state historian Leonardo Bruni, Florence remained the civitas libertatis, the state of freedom and distributive justice, which gave to each his own.³ Bruni himself, as a creature of the Medici,⁴ had been elevated to the influential and lucrative position of chancellor. He thus had no interest in highlighting how after 1434, the erstwhile relatively open republic was steadily and deliberately narrowed until it became a syndicate for the pursuit of the interests of the Medici and their appendants.

But the transformation of the res publica into a cosa nostra was not the only shift of coordinates taking place on the Arno. The Medici evidently also did not wish to allow power relations to remain in a perpetual state of uncertainty, requiring constant rebalancing; they strove instead toward the final goal of establishing a dynastic principality.⁵ Because it would be impossible to see through such a transformation after a long republican past without vehement counterreactions, the Medici had to develop long-term strategies aimed at the revaluation of all political values. Concretely, this meant the mental embedding and acceptance of the notion that rule by a princely family was the culmination of the history of the republic. The ideological core of this ‘princely republic’ was the conceptual framing of the Medici as the incarnation of the will of the Florentine people – that the Medici had been ordained by divine providence to concentrate, ennoble, and historically realize all the yearnings and ambitions of their fellow citizens. Once this idea had spread and was accepted in wider circles, little stood in the way of a transformation of the political system into a principality sui generis. It had to be taken into account, however, that this process would stretch out over more than a generation. In the present state of research, it can be taken as established⁶ that this process was essentially complete by around 1530, and the majority of Florentine patricians treated the princely rule of the Medici positively, given firm rules advantaging the old elite. By this point, the transition from a clientelistic republic to a principality with simultaneously patrician and paternalistic underpinnings was experienced not as a rupture, but as continuity across forms that changed with the requirements of the times.

Naturally, there was resistance to this complex development, which was repeatedly stalled and set back by peripeteias such as the republic of 1494 to 1512 and its governo largo. Naturally, the opponents of the Medici, who mainly gathered in circles of those neglected or even damaged by the Medicis’ interest group, articulated their objections. But their counterprojects were marked by terminological insecurity, if not outright verbal helplessness. They regularly culminated in the general accusation of tyranny,⁷ and thereby in a broad repudiation which, being as traditional as it was vague, was scarcely adapted to the actual decision-making conditions of a patron taking into account the wishes of his influential supporters.

In such a political and cultural milieu, thinking on politics and the state had to be profoundly transformed. Old black-and-white delineations, such as those presented by the Florentine side during the heated debates with the Milanese humanists in the time of the hegemony of Gian Galeazzo Visconti and the impending capture of the republic, proved to be untenable.⁸ After a generation of Medici dominance, praise of the republic as the only form of government appropriate to the nature of man, once so loudly proclaimed, had faded away. Those who continued to articulate it were suspected either of being caught up in the Medici propaganda apparatus, or of wishing to return to the pre-1434 power distribution. Completely new approaches, new terminologies, and above all new differentiations were now needed to cope with the challenge of theorizing an increasingly unclear and ambiguous political praxis. This brought into play new categories in this analysis, understood as the art of decoding. Politics itself had become the art of obfuscation, and appearances stood on at least equal footing with reality. As politics had largely become a matter of dissimulation, the work of historians and political thinkers would now be to unmask this virtuosic political deception with intellectual brilliance. In the course of this development, the central types of classical political doctrine came to be seen as antiquated, as a crumbling ideological façade, and even as worthy of parody.

2 The Humanistic Mirror for Princes as Counterimage

The crowning examples of the humanistic mirror for princes,⁹ penned by Erasmus of Rotterdam¹⁰ and Guillaume Budé,¹¹ had inherited the traditions of the genre as shaped by Thomas Aquinas and other ecclesiastical authorities, while adding their own particular accents. The basis and starting point for their texts was the pedagogical impetus, and thus the educability of man, whose nature is corrupted by original sin, but who could be led away from concupiscentia and toward the Good through the interaction of the freely offered grace of God and a suitable educational programme. This overcoming of bestiality and ennoblement into a higher humanity was to be achieved by reading and internalizing a body of texts, in which ancient moral teachings and Christian instruction, Cicero and Augustine, harmoniously intertwine and complement one another. It was not disputed that in this combination, biblical revelation had the final and highest word, albeit in an emphatically undogmatic interpretation. All obscure points – of which, according to Erasmus, there were many – were not considered binding on human conduct; only passages with a clear moral philosophical message possessed an obligatory character. In this sifting-out, all chapters pointing to predestination were dismissed, whereas the moral striving of people of good will toward self-perfection – which the reformers, for their part, had devalued or suppressed – was correspondingly emphasized. For harsh critics such as Martin Luther, this synthesis led to an intolerable antiquization, and even paganization, of the Christian message of salvation and morality.¹²

Thus, at the centre of the humanistic programme for the education of princes stood the exemplum: both in theory and in practice, in text and in life. All exemplary instructions from antiquity would remain dead letters if they were not illustrated and typified by the living example of the humanistic educator at the prince’s side. The humanistic mirror for princes was largely a prospectus for its own cause. One of the loftiest imperatives of the prince was thus to cultivate, deepen, and propagate culture – meaning, concretely, the studia humanitatis – by all means, material and spiritual. Indeed, this energetic support for talent and scholarly diligence was nearly raised to the status of proof of a ruler’s legitimacy. The men of power who most intensively devoted themselves to this paramount duty thereby provided incontrovertible evidence of their divine appointment and mandate, while to neglect these patronage activities would raise serious doubts about the legitimacy of their power. In other words, the ideal prince was aware of his debt of gratitude to his educators, and thus founded academies and provided other lucrative posts for the pioneers of the new scholarship, who had first opened his eyes to the true dimensions of his calling as a ruler.

The ideal prince, educated by a humanistic educator, would then officiate in a seamless extension of his role as the educator of his people. The principles applying to this education of the people were the same as those of his own education, albeit with differing direction, dosage, and practical application. Here again, the vivid exemplum stood very much in the foreground. In order to fulfil this purpose, the prince had constantly to act as a visible model for his subjects, to the service of whose well-being he had been called by God. The good prince would teach his people to be good; all of his lessons would remain impotent, or transform into their opposite, if he did not make them believable through his own understandable example. The prince’s reign thus had to be authentic, free of pretence and hypocrisy. The ruler had to be good himself in order to be able to educate his subordinates into goodness. Consequently, good rule was without attributes; the outward markings of majesty, such as crowns, jewels, and other pompous ornaments, were vain trinkets, distorting the essence of good reign. The latter was incompatible with any medium that would take on its own independent power; it had to be direct, conveyed without recourse to any medium, through the pure power of fact. The good prince himself was the medium, permeating and dominating public space.

The ruler’s goodness included the capacity for strictness, just as the loving father – the archetype and matrix of all politics – needed to be able to flog and punish his children in order to guide them durably toward the good. This goodness, strict when necessary but never cruel, was simply the anthropologically proven and confirmed principle of godly rule. Only in this way could the tendencies of the good and movement toward the good, which remained present in humanity after the fall, be activated and afforded decisive strength. As a fallen creature, man still possessed the more or less repressed and diffuse impulse toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.¹³ Guided appropriately by a well-educated ruler, he could accept the divine offer of grace and then – as explained by Erasmus in his treatise on free will – be led by his creator, like a child who is still too awkward to walk alone, into a good life and, after death, into paradise. Nothing was so demotic as goodness – according to this pledge of success, the humanistically instructed ruler would win over and harmoniously govern his subjects, guaranteeing their well-being.¹⁴ Evil in the form of envy, ingratitude, avarice, and strife would not thereby be eliminated, but in normal cases could be managed through the superior strength of good people and of the good itself. If the balance were to shift and destructive forces gain strength, whether through internal uprisings or external threats, the good ruler must not pay them back in the same coin. The ruler was first a Christian and only secondly invested with a public function; as a Christian, he had to take more care than anyone to avoid putting his salvation at risk. The humanistic mirror for princes sought, in connection with ancient tradition, to show how it is possible to be at once a Christian and a prince. A few years later, Martin Luther took up the same problem in his work Von christlicher Obrigkeit, a sort of theologically founded mirror for princes.¹⁵ His conclusions ran in the same direction as those of Erasmus. For Luther, the Christian prince dwells in two kingdoms: the purely spiritual kingdom of Christ, in which every individual freely subordinates himself in anticipation, and the kingdom of this world, which must be ruled by the sword, a pure labour of love for the truly Christian prince, involving no personal gain. For Erasmus, the parallel consequence is that when conscience and the maintenance of power conflict, the prince must give up power rather than to allow himself to be morally compromised.

As can easily be recognized, the humanistic mirror for princes lacked any concept of statehood in the new understanding that had been shaped by the dynamic and demon-haunted spirit of the reason of state.¹⁶ Consequently, it suppressed the fact that irreconcilable interests clash in the state, and that violence is thus indispensable as a regulative. All tensions would be dissolved, and all disputes Solomonically settled, if the ruler, educated after the humanistic esprit de conseil, virtuously exercised his divinely appointed office as a guide in the direction of virtue. For Erasmus, pursuing this aim required the ruler to overcome substantial parts of his nature: he had to quell his rage and set aside his personal glory, the two causes of most wars, inevitably leading to higher taxes and thus the ruin of the people. Although he was to generously support art and science, he had to be economical with official funds in the manner of a caring father, setting aside his own needs. With Erasmus’s requirement of self-overcoming, and even self-mortification, the profession of ruler took on an almost martyrlike quality. Like a good shepherd, the ideal prince was to watch day and night over the well-being of the flock that had been entrusted to him, and if need be sacrifice himself for them. The ruler’s office thus parallels that of the pope, as Petrus explains in exemplary fashion in his exchange with the power-hungry, hedonistic Julius II in Erasmus’s satirical dialogue ‘Julius Exclusus’. A new synthesis would fuse together Christian morality, as traditionally taught by the church through the cardinal virtues, and government, in the spirit of humanistic educational optimism. Naturally, the good prince would also be the protector and paragon of his church. Working with high dignitaries of the church, not only would he have to ensure that his worldly subjects led pious lives, but as a good chief shepherd, also guide the personnel of the church through his own shining example.

3 Anti-Mirror for Princes: Machiavelli’s the Prince

This theory of governance was no longer adapted to the Italy of the Renaissance, least of all the political milieu of Florence. A rejection of tradition was inevitable, and political theorists and historians of the early 1500s saw through this process in an uncommonly forceful and radical fashion. The most blatant expression of the loss and revaluation of traditional values occurred in Machiavelli’s treatise De Principatibus, which has consequently been perceived as an anti-mirror for princes.¹⁷ This was also the author’s own claim; others had written about politics of and for men as they should be, but were not. He, Machiavelli, however, based his theory on actual human beings, and thereby the subject and object of politics, as an empirically supported appraisal showed them to be. This move reversed the direction of gaze and the thrust of the classical mirror for princes. The task of the prince’s teacher was no longer to morally upgrade his pupil, but to open his eyes to the knowledge of an evil reality and humanity’s incurably destructive nature. The Prince, seen from this perspective, represents practical knowledge of the world – indispensable tutoring in applied anthropology.

The prince nevertheless required instruction – indeed, required it more urgently than ever. Machiavelli’s text was constructed as a pitiless settling of accounts with the established theory of government. Only after the untenability of this theory had been brought to light, its teachings demolished, and its spirit driven out of the prince would successful rule become possible. In other words, Machiavelli’s book of rules for success as a prince was designed as an invalidation, refutation, and annihilation of all the ethical teachings that a prince had previously received. His countertreatise sought to replace all ecclesiastically transmitted Christian precepts – which, in a world whose nature was completely different from what they supposed, could only lead to ruin – with a tabula rasa. In this aim, Machiavelli almost seems to have revelled in multiplying contradictions. For example, he explained that the princely virtue of clementia, clemency, so prized by the church, regularly transforms in political practice into its opposite, cruelty: namely, whenever a neglectful ruler allowed his subjects to take the reins.¹⁸ Out of this carelessness, which raises the hope of impunity, arise numerous crimes. In other words, an exemplary death sentence, which excites fear and terror and thereby keeps the wanton within bounds, is much more clement than the traditionally prized clemency itself. This holds, he claimed, even if innocent people are sacrificed.¹⁹ All that counts is the deterrent effect. In particular, influential circles within the state must be made to reckon at all times with the possibility of being instrumentalized as sacrificial pawns, whether in a republic or a principality. The work of the ruler thus becomes a task of cool calculation: what damages or serves the state more or less? A second cardinal virtue, justitia, also thereby became nugatory. Justice is whatever strengthens the state: disadvantages to individuals are always compensated many times over by benefits to the state.

With his countertreatise, Machiavelli thus sought to demolish all past mirrors for princes at a single blow. This wholesale rejection of values in the name of a new science based on experience of humanity cumulated in the (in)famous negation of political morality as a whole: the accomplished prince must have the courage to be cruel. To properly fulfil his role as his subjects’ educator, his own education in the spirit of the reason of state tells him that he must be able to become a sly, swift predator.²⁰ In this process of becoming both educated and educator, there is a curious interference: the uomo virtuoso, the perfect prince in Machiavelli’s sense, is to impart a thoroughly traditional code of qualities and patterns of behaviour to his subordinates — one that was thus a world away from the teacher’s own education and orientation. While the prince must be able to trample on every conceivable norm for the good Christian ruler when the situation requires it, the inner polarity of the great mass of people must be entirely conventional. They are above all to believe in the tenets and moral prescriptions of the state religion, which the prince himself should see as a pure Instrumentum regni – a mere product of constructive political imagination – to be virtuosically played. On Machiavelli’s account – in which he bade farewell to Christian tradition²¹ – religion was made by human beings and arose out of their hopes and fears. For this reason, it must be well made, meaning that it must serve the purposes of human coexistence within the state. With this transfiguration of the function of religion and revaluation of its values, making it a pure instrument of rule, Machiavelli the religious sceptic provoked Christian Europe like no other thinker of his time. In one chapter,²² his ‘Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio’, he describes in detail how a Roman commander spontaneously manipulated an unfavourable augury, thereby firing up his soldiers’ fighting spirit and winning a battle that otherwise would have been lost. For Machiavelli, the accomplished prince must have the ability to manipulate the beliefs of his subjects precisely in the manner of this ancient Roman consul. He must hide this unbelief at all costs, however – if he fails to do so, his skilfully accomplished enchantment of the world will precipitously collapse. The art of dissimulation thus becomes the central axis of politics. In other words, the traditional mirror for princes had become a mirror for subjects. Machiavelli’s prince, like that of Erasmus but for opposing reasons, must effect an almost superhuman relinquishment of his own nature, and only the rules of political doctrine aimed entirely at political success apply. The only fixed point is avoiding a relapse into the state of nature, the bellum omnium contra omnes. For Machiavelli, there could be no other morality in politics. To be loved or feared, to act generously or prodigally – from this vantage point, focused entirely on context-dependent strategies, all such moral alternatives in traditional theories of government shrivel away. Because people would in any case be governed by ambizione and avarizia, and thus by an unscrupulous selfishness that by its nature breaks free of all traditional fetters, leaving room for only the self, instilling a fear of loss is ultimately the surest method of rule. According to Machiavelli, humans are so constituted that they are less able to deal with the loss of their riches than with the violent deaths of their loved ones.²³ Counting on gratitude for benefits received – nothing less than the psychological foundation of the humanistic mirror for princes – is thus the surest path to ruin. People hate to owe their well-being and success to others. Gratitude thus systematically transforms into hatred. This is the anthropological reality that Machiavelli contrasted with the fatal illusions of humanistic theory of government. In his eyes, this reality was empirically proven: history had borne it out anew many times over. The work of the historian thus became an expedition into the abysses of humanity.

For Machiavelli, contrary to the humanists’ belief, human nature cannot be ennobled, but it can be redirected, albeit only by the state, which the prince, as the state’s first servant, must obey. He then returns his finished work, the law-abiding subject, to the republic, which will shape him into a citizen-soldier. Thus is the vast bulk of human destructive powers channelled to the advantage of the state, which uses them for permanent expansion, to avoid being destroyed by them itself. Conversely, states that do not engage in war are fated for ruin – or, more precisely, implosion – due to the effects of the egoism of individuals, families, and classes when they are not redirected outward. As the most powerful and eloquent panegyrist of war in early modern political theory,²⁴ Machiavelli conceived internal politics as a permanent training camp for armed conflict. For him, the prince must be a general at all times, and the citizen always also a soldier. Internal disputes within the republic must constantly be kept alive, maintained just below the threshold of civil war, so that the energy thereby created could be turned outward for use in mighty conquests. For the humanistic mirror for princes, war is an emergency measure to be used only in defense against unjust external aggression. For Machiavelli, in contrast, war was the very motor of the state and its development. For him, this justifies all educative measures that toughened the citizenry. His verdict on the bonae litterae and the studia humanitatis, in contrast, is harsh: when citizens fritter away their time in æsthetic leisure pursuits, instead of devoting themselves to the work of politics, the state would inevitably come to ruin. All was lost if the powerful withdrew to their studies to delight in elegantly turned verses, instead of training in the ‘art of war’, as taught by a Machiavelli. He articulated just this reproach in the treatise of that title:²⁵ princes and republican leaders had preferred reading Cicero to warcraft; humanistic culture had softened, demilitarized, and depoliticized the powerful, and thereby plunged Italy into misfortune, instead of elevating it to a higher humanity. It is difficult to find a more blatant counterposition to the credo of the humanistic mirror for princes.

The aim of the humanistic mirror for princes was to educate the ruler, developing his good inclinations and repressing the questionable ones. It lauded the virtuous ruler, sought to convey morality and thereby to ensure a practice of rule oriented on the basis of immutable values. Machiavelli’s prince, in contrast, was a man without qualities, precisely because he could activate or discard any and all behaviours as needed, as if on demand. Correspondingly, the modi operandi recommended to him in De Principatibus are purely situational: they are generated not by a higher ethical rule system, but solely by the constellations of forces and problems that the prince faces. The uomo virtuoso is no longer accountable to any god or people. If he has internalized the teachings of his instructor Machiavelli, then he acts only in order to strengthen the state – which, until the transition to a republic, he incarnates – and for a glorious place in history. He can count on this only if he constantly keeps the ultimate act of self-overcoming in view as his ultimate duty and goal: stepping down, making himself superfluous, when the law has once again been impressed upon the population and the rules of the state religion internalized. In the mirror for princes of the ‘prince of the humanists’ himself, Erasmus of Rotterdam, the pious prince must step down if he is able to maintain his rule only by impious methods. Machiavelli’s ideal principe must also be able to step down, but on opposing grounds: namely, when he has accomplished the work he has been charged with, and not because of the constraints of conscience. These cease to be necessary in any case, as even by the standards of the most generous Christian moral teachings, he has sacrificed all hope of salvation. According to the teachings of the church (and the humanists), his place in the hereafter is hell. For Machiavelli, the final aim of all mirrors for princes, the reconciliation of worldly rule and salvation, was worthy only of witticisms. Thus Castruccio Castracani, a notably successful 14th-century ruler of Lucca, was convinced that the place of truly energetic generals and men of state in the hereafter was not in the insipid paradise of the blameless, but in the underworld.

Machiavelli devoted to Castracani a novelistically free exemplary biography,²⁶ which can be read as an explanatory and illustrative appendix to The Prince, and thus as a personalized mirror for princes. That Machiavelli’s political theory should shift into the genre of the life story is entirely logical: if the instruction of the successful ruler is dispersed across a variety of context-dependent stage directions, a concrete vita is the best illustrative material. And indeed, the fictional blocks that Machiavelli builds into his Castracani narrative make it unmistakably clear that the lives of previous princes have approached his ideal only loosely. In keeping with Machiavelli’s self-understanding as a rule-giver, a prince could completely fulfil the norm only after reading his work. In his Castracani story, for example, he invented the Moses-like discovery of the future ruler of the city and his upbringing by involuntary ‘adoptive parents’. The ‘historical’ Castracani came from the highest circles of his home city. His transformation in the story into a nobody and a newcomer illustrates Machiavelli’s meritocratic understanding of government. The perfect prince was to owe everything to his own talents and efforts, and nothing to his ancestry or other external conditions. This literary conceit not only cast doubt on the role of the historian as a faithful chronicler of facts, but introduced an ironic undertone that undermined the pious earnestness of the traditional mirror for princes: power is a game whose rules the powerful must master. Castracani, the nearly perfect model of the uomo virtuoso, also mastered these rules nearly perfectly. He carved himself a path to power with an unscrupulousness befitting each situation, and thus in each case with the appropriate combination of simulated clemency and targeted cruelty, and in the manner at once of a lion and a fox endeavoured to the best of his ability to impart political and military discipline to languishing Lucca. So far, so exemplary. Nonetheless, Castracani also failed to achieve fully exemplary status. Precisely in the same way as Cesare Borgia²⁷ – also a prince who failed to bring his long exemplary rule to an equivalently successful end – Castracani committed a decisive error, which brought upon him the corresponding effect. According to Machiavelli, he failed to establish his own son as his successor, instead favouring a ward from the family of his most important patron. In other words, after his long journey of deviation from the established rules of Christian government, fatal tradition suddenly caught up with the homo novus, thereby ensuring his long-term collapse. Castracani had relapsed into the – in reality long obsolete – norms of pietas, and was punished for it: his work died with him. It is hard to conceive of a colder farewell to the traditional mirror for princes.

4 Serious Parodies: Francesco Vettori and the Clemency of the Prince

Machiavelli announced that a first version of his De principatibus was ready in late 1513;²⁸ editing continued for a further three years. One of its first readers was the Florentine patrician Francesco Vettori, at the time the Florence’s ambassador in Rome, which had been ruled since March of that year by Pope Leo X, the head of the House of Medici. Vettori’s diplomatic duties thus took care of themselves, leaving him all the more time for discussions by correspondence with the hard-hit Machiavelli. The latter had just lost his position and narrowly escaped a conviction for conspiracy against the Medici, who had retaken the levers of power in Florence in 1512. Machiavelli and Vettori²⁹ knew and appreciated one another from a diplomatic mission that they had jointly undertaken a few years earlier in Germany, with Vettori as head and Machiavelli as secretary. Their correspondence between 1513 and 1515 shows that the protracted, difficult, and largely fruitless voyage had led to a thorough exchange of ideas between the two. It unmistakably ties in with earlier such discussions, to say nothing of its familiar tone. In other words, Vettori’s own ideas and positions were unquestionably stimulated by confrontation and debate with Machiavelli’s provocative theses, although this takes away nothing from their independence and distinctness – much to the contrary.³⁰

Following the legation to Kaiser Maximilian, Vettori wrote a text about it which undermined and subverted all conventions at least as radically as did Machiavelli’s treatise on the perfect prince. In it he transformed the historical voyage into a novelistically constructed expedition into the abysses of the condition humaine and the human soul. Certain passages of the ostensible travelogue³¹ thus read like a picaresque novel, recounting a string of tragedies in a collection of novellas showing humans experiencing every conceivable destiny – and, not least, as a mirror for princes of a special kind. For all its disillusionment with a world of ‘eat or be eaten’, Vettori’s thought revolves around the ideal of humane rule, and is thus closely connected to the ultimate purpose of the mirror for princes. At the same time, in its profoundly disenchanted vision of the world and of humanity, it is worlds away. For Vettori, an indifferent nature had tossed humans into a world in which only a few are conceded the resources needed for a pleasant life, while the majority are caught up in a merciless struggle for survival, which pits all against all. In this struggle for existence, all means are permitted in principle, although the powerful naturally seek to dictate their rulers’ morality to the little people, enjoining them to endure exploitation and injustice without complaint. However, this is contrary to human nature, which is geared to self-preservation and expansion. Thus, for Vettori, the -bellum omnium contra omnes is an enduring reality of society and state. The desire to apply moral standards is vain. There is no way out of this hopeless condition. Anyone wishing to flee, whether to a monastery or into reclusion, there too will be caught up in struggles for resources.

What remained, then, of political theory? The myth of the republic as the superior form of state had been refuted, and indeed the opposite proven: in a republic, the number of power-hungry bloodsuckers is larger, and the little people’s chance of enjoying something of the pleasures of life correspondingly smaller. What was left to be tried was monarchy. It is not better per se, given that a bad king serves as a plaything for greedy and power-hungry courtiers. Nor, naturally, can a good prince abolish the aporias of human life; but he can at least temper its hardships and prevent conditions from being even worse. All rumination and reasoning on state and politics could be reduced to this one feasible task: not to make an evil world even more evil, but to make it somewhat more bearable. This sounds Christian, but it is not. Vettori dismissed Christendom in exactly the same measure as Machiavelli: for him, the teachings of mild Jesus are not fit for this world, which was strikingly demonstrated by Jesus’s own fate. Mild rule is impossible in a republic, as in it inferior and otherwise unsuitable types of men systematically press for power. A prince, however, can be guided into an exercise of power that accommodates the needs of the weak. Vettori noted at least the principal features of this instruction, which consists above all in a renunciation of violence. Precisely in the spirit of an Erasmus, a good king must not wage wars, because they completely ruin both the state and the populace. Instead, his appropriate basic occupation is the game.³² Through play he can divert and hold in check his own destructive tendencies as well as the ambition of his courtiers, and attune himself to his true duty to protect the weak. The most important of these rules is to allow those individuals to win whose ambizione can thereby be satisfied, and who can thus be deterred from harmful undertakings. Concretely, this means that the monarch must allow his courtiers to triumph in courtly games, and do so in such a way that they do not perceive this cheating in their favour.³³

In the search for clement monarchs, Vettori’s compass oscillates considerably. Both of his favourites, Ferdinand of Aragon and Francis I of France, were anything but princes of peace – the latter in particular defined himself precisely as a chivalrous warrior. Given the ironic and playful tone of the text, the question of how seriously Vettori took the political concept of a ruler who must be made fit for his duties through a training programme in lightness remains open. In any case, he took the task of defining the underlying problem seriously enough. In a short biography with the characteristics of a mirror for princes – like Machiavelli with his life of Castruccio Castracani – Vettori showed that the conceptual figure of the rex ludens was more than an intriguing invention. Its originality lies in the fact that his model prince – the younger Lorenzo de’ Medici, grandson of the great Magnifico – did not actually wish to be a prince, at least not in the sense of the demands thrust upon him by his ambitious mother and his uncle, the pope.³⁴ Lorenzo also did not wish to rule the Urbino duchy independently – it had been stolen by Della Rovere, the adopted Montefeltro, in a dirty war – but only to administer it on behalf of the papal state. He thus overcame humanity’s innate power-egoism, and thus to some extent his own nature, becoming capable of clemency and unselfishness. The fact that he also let others win at courtly games completed his image as a good ruler. This portrait of the young scion as a humane prince is completely out of keeping with contemporary testimonies, which predominantly describe Lorenzo as an arrogant mummy’s boy and an externally controlled stooge. Vettori was closely acquainted with the young Medici, having been his mentor. His “novella-biography” thus probably also represents an attempt to save the young man’s honour, and thereby his own reputation.

For Francesco Vettori, as for so many of his contemporaries, the sack of Rome was not only a personal turning point, but also an impetus to revisit his historical and ideological views. Among the abundance of reflections on the event that arose beginning in 1527,³⁵ his text³⁶ stands out in many respects. Like his ‘Journey to Germany’, his essay on the plunder of the Eternal City is an artful literary work, constructed as a dialogue. One of the two interlocutors has witnessed the catastrophe on the Tiber, the other at least their convulsive further effects in Florence. In the interpretation of their experiences, the two are in complete agreement. In the end, the dialogue expands into a political anthropology on the example of the popes, and thereby a further anti-mirror for princes of a very distinct kind. Other commentators on the sack of Rome drew on Clement VII’s numerous strategic and tactical errors to create a portrait of the actions of an exemplary ruler in contrast to his rash and miserly ones. With an unquestionably playful zest for diametric deviation, Vettori derives exactly the opposite positions: his Clement VII was the first in many years to be free of the vices of simony and venality, decried throughout Europe for causing the division of the church, and had wished to convey his virtues through his Curia. However, his was precisely the figure – and herein lay the central point of Vettori’s dialogue on the sack of Rome – who was cruelly punished by fickle Fortune through the capture of his capital. What could appear to be the purely arbitrary act of the capricious goddess of luck was in reality system and law. With this astounding or shocking conclusion began a re-evaluation from a historical perspective of all the values of the mirror for princes, and even a veritable danse macabre of political morality. The dead dancers were the popes of the recent past themselves.

Their reign began with Paul II – by Vettori’s account an unscrupulous power-politician, who pursued a selfish policy of revenge against his personal enemies. When Paul’s successor Sixtus IV, a perfidious monk and crass parvenu, acceded to the Chair of St. Peter, he turned his undignified nephews into great lords, and to this end precipitated Italy into wars as unjust as they were bloody. He and his ilk showed no trace of compunction; like all the impudent and the bold who regularly dominate the affairs of state, he considered his own more than questionable actions to be justified. And indeed, according to the refrain of Vettori’s review of the popes, history had proved him right. The more misdeeds and immorality the political criminal accumulates, the greater and more numerous the rewards that fortune holds in store for him. All die at peace with themselves, with God, and with history. How could it be otherwise? They all see themselves as justified by their success, precisely as Machiavelli described. According to Vettori, the next pope, Innocent VIII, was an undignified sycophant who had snatched up as much of everything that the papacy had to offer of his basest heart’s desires; he had married his son to one of the daughters of the great Lorenzo de’ Medici – and then, spoiled with success and sated with pleasures, left the stage of history. The next pope, Alexander VI. Borgia, marked an unsurpassable apex of papal criminality. He subordinated his entire pontificate to his criminal family, murdered rich cardinals, sold the highest ecclesiastical dignities, broke his word without hesitation, indulged his nearly insatiable sexual appetites – and yet was obviously, given his record of success, the darling of providence. His successor Pius III, who ruled for less than a month, was a good man, and thus incapable of rule; at his early death, he was reconciled neither with himself nor with the world. The story of Pius’s successor Julius II, who according to Vettori could easily compete with Alexander VI in matters of vice, was altogether different. Committed only to his own power and honour, he pursued a policy that made a mockery of any sense of reason, and yet luck was constantly on his side – exactly like the next pope, the risk-taking politician Leo X. These provide rich material for contrasts with the supposedly good pontificate of the second Medici pope, Clement VII, who was punished by fate with exemplary severity for his deviation from the norms of evil.

Of course, these theses are conveyed through two fictional characters. But the fact that they correspond to the author’s own view is made clear by the many analogies to his previous texts. What sort of picture of history and rulers emerges? The unscrupulous and amoral are regularly rewarded. They act in complete harmony with the laws of the world. This seems to resemble Augustine’s civitas diaboli, but in Vettori’s vision there is no dimension of dichotomy, and thus of redemption. The world rewards the evil, and there is no talk of a final judgment or compensation in the hereafter. Those who want to survive or even live comfortably must adapt to the rules of the game. This applies not only to the powerful, but – as emphatically illustrated by the brutal stories in the ‘Journey to Germany’ – also and especially to the little people. Does this lead to the conclusion that rulers should obey the commandments of evil? Not even Machiavelli, who at least maintained that man could be educated by the state, had gone so far. The two interlocutors in Vettori’s dialogue on the sack of Rome also do not conclude that they should pay homage to victorious evil. Their interpretation is a resigned and helpless one: they preach retreat into the small and sheltered private sphere, and forbid themselves from reflecting on the way of the world, so as not to plunge into a mental abyss.

5 The Construction of the Principality

For Vettori himself, this made the task of political reflection even more difficult, and at the same time more urgent: how could a modicum of order and humanity be preserved in a world whose driving forces propel humanity into destructiveness? Beginning in 1530, this question became very concrete: the second Florentine Republic had fallen, opening the way to a Medici principality under the tutelage of Charles V, and the problem of how this long-sought and finally achievable princely rule should be designed remained unresolved. Vettori was at the forefront of the planning and implementation of this project, as creative director and advisor. Indeed, in many respects his memoranda for the new Florentine state offer a highly precise sketch of the future (grand-) ducal government.³⁷ Here we are faced with an unmistakable irony of fate: Machiavelli, who in his principal writings had so confidently understood and presented himself as the architect of solidly founded power structures, whether princely or republican, failed to attain such a position, while his correspondent and critic Vettori was given this role at an advanced age. His memoranda on the construction of the Medici monarchy offer a mature synthesis of his earlier writings and ideas: the line of anthropological-historical pessimism that runs as a leitmotif through the dialogue on the sack of Rome is unbroken, but here the art of politics lay in making man’s negative inclinations useful to the new state – transforming them into positives, in a sense. Machiavelli’s theory of the state was based on the same fundamental ideas, but in Vettori they found a very different, independent, and at the same time extremely precise application.³⁸

In the summer of 1530, the Medici had indeed triumphed, but much had also been lost. Because the path of their return had been cleared by foreign weapons, they had not won back their prestige. Even worse, within the city, an irreversible process of polarization had taken place, and supporters and opponents of the old and new orders were deeply hostile to one another. The ousted radical republican middle-class regime had made bitter opponents of the patriciate en bloc, and the mistrust between social strata was insurmountable. Establishing a principality in such a situation of crisis and division was a difficult, if not impossible mission. These extremely unfavourable conditions form the starting point of the four memoranda (pareri) that Vettori wrote in 1530–1532 on the construction of the Medici monarchy. They do not constitute a mirror for princes, either singly or as a collection, as the new prince Alessandro de’ Medici was not the target of moral-political teachings. Nevertheless, he stood at the centre of new plans for government and state: he was tasked with taking the order artfully designed here and making it fit to its purposes – indeed, with bringing it to life. He was thus assigned a difficult role: in a sociopolitical system resting on the mistrust of all towards all, he had to trust his subjects and, even more, win their trust. This, however, implied a re-evaluation of all values, which could only be achieved through highly skilled dissimulation. That which, in the humanistic mirror for princes, was to be brought about through the power of the good example; the effect of the bonae litterae as a means of education; fatherly care; and, if necessary, also the strictness of the properly educated prince, was now achievable only through strategies of salutary deception. To put it very briefly, this perfect technique of power can be summarized with the formula: a negative times a negative equals a positive.

According to Vettori, the dominant characteristics of humanity, and particularly of the Florentines at the zero hour of 1530, were destructive. Individual and collective egoisms, which determine social and political action in any case, had been intensified to extremes by the dramatic events of recent times. The problem that the pareri was to solve was to cross and combine these drives in such a way that they would create a well-ordered socio-political system; guidance for rulers, and politics altogether, were more than ever based on the psychological penetration and control of man. The front of hatred and rejection facing the Medici was devastatingly compact, both across social strata and within particular strata. Above all, young men from all milieux were deeply frustrated, and, according to Vettori, in the chaotic closing phase of the republic, they were able to live out their destructive instincts unchecked, harassing and terrorizing their fellow citizens with impunity. This was tantamount to the negative state of nature – in short, anarchy – with all its ruinous consequences. The first and most delicate task of the Medici principality was therefore to restore order and the authority of law. Violence, however, could only be contained through purposefully directed, and thereby justified, violence. For Vettori, the question of whether it is love or fear that best binds ruler and subject, which Machiavelli had answered at least partially with ‘Both, but in case of doubt, the latter’, no longer arose: after the breakdown of order in the preceding years, the only option was fear. It was the last resort when everything else had ceased to help.

But the ousted regime’s bands of thugs were not the principality’s only enemies. The middle class had used its full political rights between 1527 and 1530 to gain a share of power. The enjoyment of power is addictive, and the loss of power that now threatened them would inevitably produce dangerous withdrawal symptoms. Even the great families had become sceptical of the Medici; they had lost far too much influence and prestige since the harsh Medici restoration of 1512. The tried and tested means of binding all these losers of the new order to the Medici regime would consist in the family’s usual methods of building patronage relationships: awarding lucrative contracts to artisans and shopkeepers, and appointing members of the highest-ranking clans to profitable ecclesiastical benefices and influential political posts. From 1530, however, all of this was impossible. Rome was still devastated from the sack of 1527, and even the Medici pope Clement VII was able to procure very little for his followers. Money, in any case, was no longer available, and neither, as described above, was trust. Thus, the good old methods that had brought the Medici to power in 1434, and which they virtuosically refined thereafter, no longer worked. New methods of domination that would direct the people from within were therefore needed.

According to Vettori, the Archimedean lever that the Medici had to pull was the boundless vanity, and the no less unrestrained self-deception, of humanity. In other words, the Medici principality had to be so constructed as to ensure that all individuals and groups with the capacity to do it harm would be kept far from the levers of actual power, but endowed with sham posts and pseudo-powers. Their self-love could thus be played on to dupe them into feeling like active participants in the new system of rule. The foundation of the Medicis’ power, which Machiavelli had criticized so harshly on moral grounds, their patronage network, had thus in fact proved ineffective. Even the creatures of the Medici – men and families who owed to them their rise from obscurity to positions of rank and influence in Florence and the Church – were no longer trustworthy, and thus could no longer be counted on as keystones of Medici power. For Vettori, gratitude (and here again Vettori and Machiavelli’s positions meet in their contrast to the humanistic mirror for princes) is not a politically tenable category; it dissolves too quickly, and systematically turns into its opposite. The only recipe was thus to intertwine the mutually resistant and contradictory egoisms of individuals and groups in such a way that they kept each other in check, paralyzing one another, and, at the same time, could be diverted into neighbouring areas where they would not endanger the new duke’s exercise of power. But the decisive political bodies such as the old city government would first be deprived of their power and then completely abolished. What would remain were the playing fields of vanity, where the various social strata and interest groups would romp, be watched over, and prevented from having real influence.

The consequence of this theory of government left a major vacuum. How would the prince act in order to keep the new system together and make it functional? Vettori set out what he must do:³⁹ take artful deception to the extreme, radiating trust and, where trust was truly no longer possible, simulating esteem and respect, where the true aim was neutralization and disempowerment. The prince could be given advice on how to conduct his policy of divide et impera, and his attention drawn to the dangers associated to his profession, but he could not be educated into being a good regent. This was nothing short of the ultimate rejection of the idea of the mirror for princes. People are fundamentally uneducable, they follow their passions blindly, and reason plays no substantial role in their exercise of power. The only way to prevent the political worst from coming to pass is to stand by the prince as a counselor from situation to situation. Morality has never played a role in politics, because people have no morality. As for Machiavelli, for Vettori everything depends only on deciphering and thwarting the various constellations of interests in such a way that success is achieved in the end. The difference between the two is that Vettori’s focus is not on increasing power, but on tempering it. In pursuit of this aim, even tyranny, which according to the mirror for princes must be prevented at any cost, could be accepted – a second rejection of the genre and its tradition. At least in the initial phase, the prince even (and this was another concordance with Machiavelli) had to take on the traits of the tyrant, so compact and powerful was the phalanx of enemies facing him in Florence. The individuals, families, and networks that could not be won over to the new regime with the strategy of beautiful make-believe had to be eliminated by force. This was cruel but, all things considered, clement, given the internal unrest that it would prevent; Machiavelli had made a similar argument on this point as well. In addition, a secret police was needed to monitor the disarmed citizens and discourage resistance. What remains in the end is a wholly disillusioned conclusion: to govern is always to be a despot; this is ordained by the essence of man and the nature of the world. The art of politics thus consists only in arriving at the variant of tyranny that is the mildest, and thereby the most tolerable for the great majority of people. However, this is only possible in a monarchy that is correctly constructed – that is, that corresponds to the nature of man.

6 Francesco Guicciardini: The Refutation of the Mirror of Princes through History

Francesco Guicciardini reduced the idea of the mirror for princes to absurdity with entirely new ideas.⁴⁰ Exactly like Vettori, as the close advisor and ‘minister’ of a prince, Pope Clement VII, he had gained profound insights into the methods by which power is exercised, and thereby into the nature of power, leading to total disillusionment. For, first, ‘his’ prince had proved to be largely resistant to advice; and second, because of the prince’s inability to see through and enforce decisions once they were made, he was the worst conceivable candidate for the role of regent. Third, Guicciardini had had to admit to himself that he had failed as counselor to the prince at the decisive moment: contrary to Vettori, in the to-be-or-not-to-be question of whether to enter into an alliance with Charles V or Francis I of France in 1526 , he voted for the French option, and thereby indirectly paved the way for the catastrophic sack of Rome.⁴¹ At the end of all the self-deceptions and disappointments, what remained was a picture of humanity and history in which traditional theory of governance, and thus the mirror for princes, appear as mere erratic remnants of a misguided tradition.

In the disillusioned retrospective view that Guicciardini takes at the beginning of his monumental Storia d’Italia, the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent represents a golden age. Until 1492 – according to the introduction to his history of Italy, written in the 1530s, which blends dramatic accusations and nostalgia – the country’s powerful followed the only durably applicable rule of politics, namely prudentia, a sense of proportion, combined with defensive caution and foresight. In this way, they had saved Italy from foreign innovations and – with the exception of the increasingly nepotistic popes from Sixtus IV onward – guaranteed a minimum of internal equilibrium, protection for the status quo, and basic diplomatic trust. Beginning in 1492, following the death of Lorenzo and his acolyte pope Innocent VIII, this was all quickly lost. Circumspection and restraint were replaced by high-risk politics with no heed for the consequences – which arrived quickly enough, with the French campaigns of 1494 and 1499, allowing Italy to sink to the status of stage for European hegemonic wars. According to Guicciardini, this path into the abyss could have been avoided if the rulers of Italy had taken their occupation seriously and exercised it correctly, that is, with due wisdom. Their failures were not due to a lack of education in their duties, but to their character, which no counselor in the world could alter.⁴²

The historian thus became a pathologist of power, his work the danse macabre of political reason and thereby a retrospective anti-mirror for princes. Numerous recent examples, some very fresh indeed, showed that philosophers, educators and historians could not exert a moderating influence on the powerful. Italy had not seen a more intelligent, more creative and intellectually shrewd man in power than Lorenzo il Magnifico in many years. Lorenzo had sought to pass on the wisdom he had gathered through experience to his sons Piero and Giovanni as a good educator in power and its exercise, but was only modestly successful. Piero, his successor in the difficult role of string-puller behind the scenes of the republic, failed all along the line because he had thoroughly misunderstood his role. He saw himself ultimately as a prince, which he was not, and drove off the patriciate, although he depended on their support. Although Giovanni, with his proverbial fortune, was carried onto the pontiff’s throne, in this position he also remained what he had always been: a favourite child of fortune, an extravagant spendthrift, and an all-or-nothing politician. He owed the fact that his rule did not lead to catastrophe – unlike that of his cousin and second successor Clement VII – entirely to the counterbalance of a saving antagonism with the latter. Giulio de’ Medici, as a sort of assistant pope, was able to prevent the worst by virtue of his exactly opposite character, and resultingly thrifty and timid policy. The worst came to pass, however, when this professional inhibitor and preventer became pope himself, with no effective countervailing force to balance out his onesidedness.⁴³ For all their sagacity, Guicciardini and Vettori could not play this part, particularly as the two further advisors to the pope were like fire and water and, with their antithetical orientations, allowed the government of the second Medici pope to run completely out of control. For Guicciardini, this refuted the idea of princely education. A single ruler, he argued, because of the polarity of his individual character, is not in a position to successfully confront all the vicissitudes of politics; he may be fit for some situations, but necessarily he is no match for others. Guicciardini thus did not believe in Machiavelli’s model of the education of princes as universal men. On the contrary, in his critical commentaries on Machiavelli’s Discorsi, he picked apart the older man’s core ideology as the creation of baseless myth.⁴⁴ As individuals, men have their mentality, their beliefs, and their conscience; and Machiavelli’s uomo virtuoso was therefore the product of a political imagination run riot.

Guicciardini’s multilayered double portrait of the two Medici popes, and of Clement VII especially, transparently represents the antithesis of this figure, highlighting the narrowness, helplessness, and incorrigibility of these actually existing princes. Here Guicciardini and Vettori were in agreement: Clement VII actually possessed the best qualities for his high office. He lived as befitted a prince of the church, morally strict and incorruptible, and brought an uncommonly rich education and knowledge to his high position. But this very mixture proved fatal, as prudentia gave rise to such continual wavering, hesitation, and reversals that in a short time Rome and the Curia had completely disavowed the pope, and in the end turned almost all sides against him. What, for Vettori, spoke of a world without Nemesis or a righteous God, the triumph of evil in an amoral world, for Guicciardini stood above all as an argument against the monarchy and its ideology of the morally trained prince. The imponderables of politics could at best be mastered by an elite of the wise, acting collectively and thus subduing their individual destructiveness – not by a single ruler with his incorrigible qualities.⁴⁵ In the Storia d’Italia, light shines exclusively on republics, above all Venice, which was able to head off the political catastrophe that inevitably appeared following its defeat by the great European monarchies at Agnadello, thanks to the concentrated experience of a political class selected according to performance criteria and the psychological skills of individual diplomats. He portrayed the action of princes, however, as an uninterrupted succession of greed, overconfidence, irresponsibility, thoughtlessness, ingratitude, and miscalculation; not a single exemplary case appears. For him, then, the actual psychology of power definitively refuted the humanistic idea of rulers being brought up into the good through systematic education. Man in himself – as Guicciardini protests, against Machiavelli’s sweepingly negative anthropology – tends toward the good; but he can always be seduced into the opposite, and the seduction of the exercise and enjoyment of power is completely irresistible. This comes out very concretely in the case of Florence. After the assassination of the first duke, Alessandro de’ Medici, in January 1537, the leading patricians initially tried to put his inexperienced successor from a collateral line of the dynasty under the political tutelage of the great families, and thereby creating a prince trained and domesticated according to the specifications of the old elite. This final experiment in princely education backfired completely. Cosimo virtuosically exploited his room for political manoeuvre in both domestic and international spheres, quickly and enduringly breaking from this cumbersome dependency. Guicciardini’s late political reflections, which found their way into the polished aphorisms of the Ricordi, shed light on the phenomenon of individual rule from an opposite perspective. They look at how the individual close to the ruler, who threatens to become a tyrant at any time, can assert his autonomy: namely, through the art of dissimulation. The means shielding one’s inner self from the piercing gaze of the powerful, who seek also to rule over the consciences and feelings of their subjects.⁴⁶

7 Epilogue: Reason of State and the Mirror for Princes in the Confessional Age

The shift to princely rule was irrevocable: the republican patrician had become a courtier against his will. He now had to adapt his desires for self-assertion and upward mobility to the new ambiance of the court and the psyche of its master. The future belonged to whoever was able to use intelligence and insight to maintain the upper hand in this struggle. The great diplomat Baldassare Castiglione had discovered this some years earlier, as the ambassador of no less exacting a ruler than Charles V, about whom he wrote in his Libro del Cortegiano.⁴⁷ It was no longer the prince who was to be educated, but the substitute or supplementary self who was always available to him, the courtier. But as consummately trained as the courtier might be in how to act as a servant of the prince, it was neither possible nor desirable for him to merge completely with this role. For all his assiduity in obedience to the powerful, at the least he also had a duty to exert an influence on their morality and ethical behaviour. If he did not succeed in doing so, and if instead he was involved in ethically questionable undertakings, he was duty bound to quit the service to avoid being unfaithful to himself – just as, in the humanistic mirror for princes, the prince must give up his power if doing so is required to keep from losing his salvation. The fact that Castiglione’s writing was as much addressed to princes as to those who served them is widely attested by its success among the powerful, such as Charles V.

The mirror for princes was to be resurrected in altered form in the fundamentally transformed climate of the confessional age, beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, as for example in Giovanni Botero’s bestseller The Reason of State. As stated in his introduction, he saw his widely influential treatise⁴⁸ as a refutation of Machiavelli’s Prince. According to Botero, a Piedmontese pupil of Jesuits, Machiavelli had sprayed his poison so lastingly that moral resistance was urgently necessary. Botero argued that Machiavelli’s idea that political action which contradicts the morality taught by the church is not only permitted, but in fact required for the preservation of the state, had prevailed at courts everywhere, and that a return to the inalienable principles of Christian politics was therefore needed to eliminate these pernicious errors. Botero’s counterproposal was an education of the prince in the spirit of the Council of Trent and of a resurgent papacy, inculcating the precepts of Catholic reform to ensure its political primacy. The reason of state cited in his title was sorted by confession: among Catholic powers, beyond slight remnants of harmless subterfuge for the purposes of political survival, it had no right to exist; but in the combat against ‘unbelievers’ – that is, against Lutherans and above all Calvinists – who aim to destroy the declared will of God, it was appropriate. However, in all problematic situations, the exemplary prince was to seek the opinion of an ecclesiastical council of conscience and, in case of doubt, also comply with the instructions of this superordinate moral authority.

However, this modified mirror for the prince’s conscience did not return the genre to a position of profound influence. The idea of the reason of state, and thus of the autonomy of the state, whose interest was to be the sole determinant of the actions of the powerful, continued to make its inexorable way. The many mirrors for princes of the seventeenth century whose leitmotif, like that of Botero’s, was an endeavour to reinterpret Machiavelli’s reason of state and thereby bring about a modest re-moralization of politics, reflect only an apparent paradox. The great seventeenth-century texts on statesmanship very clearly reflect this supersession at a European scale: Cardinal Richelieu’s Political Testament veils only thinly his doctrine that the strengthening of the state also justifies extralegal measures, such as the suppression of uprisings without regular trials.⁴⁹ The most detailed instructions for princes written by a reigning prince of modern times, the Mémoires that the young King Louis XIV wrote for his first son and presumptive successor,⁵⁰ completely repudiate the idea of the classical mirror for princes for the ideology of absolutism. In this ideology, God alone chooses the king and confers upon him special graces for this purpose. He is thus raised so far above the category of other men that while he can indeed take advice from them in detail, he can never learn from them how to be a ruler. The secrets of successful rule are accessible to him alone, and he is thus the only one able to pass them on to his successor. Moreover, the art of rule can only be acquired through practice, never through the theories of those in circles without experience of power. Some decades later, with the help of Voltaire, the Prussian crown prince Frederick wrote his Anti-Machiavel, a mirror for princes in the spirit of the authoritarian Enlightenment⁵¹ – only to begin durably refuting it in practice as warrior-king only months after its publication in 1740. The fate of the genre was enduringly sealed.

Translated by Paul Reeve