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ABSTRACT
Given Machiavelli’s fascination with ancient Rome’s plebeian tribunate, it is not surprising that he would take an interest in Cola di Rienzo, the Roman who declared himself Tribune of the Plebs in 1347. However, Cola appears just once in Machiavelli’s corpus, in a single short and enigmatic chapter in the Florentine Histories. This paper argues that Machiavelli nevertheless quietly elaborates on Cola’s legacy later in his Histories, when he introduces Stefano Porcari, another ‘Roman citizen’ whose reform efforts fail catastrophically. Though Machiavelli never explicitly criticizes Cola, he does blame Porcari for exercising poor judgement. This blame, importantly, is entwined with Machiavelli’s allusions to the humanist writings of Francesco Petrarch. By placing these accounts of Cola and Porcari side by side, this paper aims to reveal the Florentine Histories’ complicated relationship with Petrarch, Italy’s most famous humanist. The web of cross-references among Cola, Porcari and Machiavelli himself indicates the latter’s vexation with the sort of rhetorical idealism that Petrarch’s famous endorsement of Cola’s revolution came to represent.
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Notes
1 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), I.3-5, III.1, III.8, III.11. Italian references correspond with Machiavelli, Opere, 3 vols., ed. Corrado Vivanti (Torino, 1997), 1:195–525.
2 For recent scholarship on Machiavelli and the tribunes, see John McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. 30–4, 92–7,103–7. Benedetto Fontana, ‘Machiavelli and the Gracchi’, in Machiavelli on Liberty & Conflict, ed. David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila Vergara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 235–56. Mark Jurdjevic, A Great and Wretched City: Promise and Failure in Machiavelli’s Florentine Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 57–8, 63.
3 Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Laura F. Banfield and Mansfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), I.31. Hereafter cited in text by book and chapter. All Italian references correspond to Opere, ed. Vivanti, 3: 305–732.
4 Anonimo Romano, The Life of Cola di Rienzo, trans. John Wright (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975), 41–2. Cf. Histories II.13, 36, 42.
5 Rienzo to Petrarch, Epistolario 15, July 28, 1347, in Petrarch: The Revolution of Cola di Rienzo, ed. Mario Emilio Cosenza, 3rd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Ithaca Press, 1996), 37. Unless otherwise noted, we draw on this collection for translations of Cola and Petrarch’s letters.
6 Jurdjevic, Great and Wretched City, 3. Cf. McCormick, ‘On the Myth of a Conservative Turn in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’, in Machiavelli on Liberty & Conflict, ed. Johnston et al., 330–51; Felix Gilbert, ‘Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine: An Essay in Interpretation’, in History, Choice and Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), 135–53; Robert Black, Machiavelli (New York: Routledge, 2013), 258–62.
7 Jurdjevic, 4, 53–80.
8 John Najemy, ‘Machiavelli and the Medici: The Lessons of Florentine History’, Renaissance Quarterly 35, no. 4 (1982): 575–6.
9 The Prince XXVI, trans. Mansfield, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Italian references correspond with Machiavelli, Opere, ed. Vivanti, I:117-92.
10 Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. 1, 97–113. For acknowledgement of the more manipulative potential of Machiavelli’s rhetorical project, see Victoria Cox, ‘Rhetoric and Ethics in Machiavelli’, in Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 173–85.
11 Filippo Del Lucchese, The Political Philosophy of Machiavelli (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 89–90.
12 Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5.
13 Ibid., 9. For an excellent reading of the ways in which the Histories’ speeches employ – and subvert – the Ciceronian emphasis on the honestum and utile, see Brian Richardson, ‘Notes on Machiavelli’s Sources and his Treatment of the Rhetorical Tradition’, Italian Studies 26 (1971): 36–48.
14 Bartlomeo Platina, Historia B. Platinae De Vitis Pontificum Romanorum: Ad D.N Iesu Christo Usque Ad Paulum II Venetum Papam (Coloniae: Apud Bernardum Gualtherium, 1600), 259–61. For an English translation, see The Lives of the Popes, vol. II. trans. Paul Rycaut, ed. William Benham (London, 1888), 152–4. Cf. Flavio Biondo, Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum (Basil, 1531), Decade II, pages 358–92.
15 Viroli, Machiavelli, 3, 112–13.
16 Giovanni Villani. Cronica, con le continuazioni di Matteo e Filippo (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 276–84.
17 Ibid., 278.
18 The 1492 edition of Petrarch’s Familiares only contained the first eight books, yet various manuscripts of later books, especially those dealing with political and civil themes, were in circulation in Machiavelli’s Florence. There were at least two Florentine codices containing Familiares XII–XXI, as well as a manuscript of Sine Nomine. See Codici latini del Petrarca nelle biblioteche fiorentine, ed. Michele Feo (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1991), 124–45, 205–10. There is good textual evidence that Machiavelli knew the Familiares. See Rinaldo Rinaldi, Scrivere Contro: Per Machiavelli (Milano: Unicipoli, 2009), 11–26; Francesca D'Alessandro, ‘Il Principe di Machiavelli e la lezione delle Familiares di Francesco Petrarca’, Aevum 80, no. 3 (2006): 641–69.
19 Biondo. See esp. Decade II, book 10 (pages 358–92) and Florentine Histories, I.23-39. For those nothing Machiavelli’s similarities with Biondo, see Black, Machiavelli, 250; Gilbert, ‘Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine’, 144; Denys Hey, ‘Flavio Biondo and the Middle Ages’, Proceedings of the British Academy 45, no. 1 (1959): 123.
20 In his second Decade, book 10, Biondo quotes, successively, from Petrarch’s Fam. IV.9, III.11, XVIII.1, VII.7, XI.16, XII.6, XIV.5, XVII.3, XI.8, VIII.1, XX.1, and XXIII.2.
21 ‘Variantibus sententiis auctor est petrarcha opinione poesis tribunum nostrum solam conservasset’, 366.
22 Rienzo to Petrarch, Epistolario 15, July 28, 1347, in Cosenza, Revolution of Cola di Rienzo, 37; Biondo, Historiarum, 364; Platina, Lives, 152.
23 Gian Mario Anselmi, L’età dell’Umanesimo e del Rinascimento (Roma: Carocci, 2008), 44.
24 Petrarch, Variae 48, in Cosenza, Revolution of Cola di Rienzo, 17.
25 Discourses, I.4-5.
26 Platina, Lives, trans. Rycaut, 2:152–3. Cf. Biondo, Decades, 366. For Petrarch’s address to the cardinals, see Fam. XI.16 and 17. All Latin references for Petrarch’s letters correspond with Le Familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco, 4 vols. (Florence: Casa Editrice Le lettere, 1997).
27 Cosenza, Revolution of Cola di Rienzo, 1–4.
28 Leonardo Bruni, Le Vite di Dante e del Petrarca, ed. Antontio Lanza (Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1987), 58–9.
29 Ernst Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 25–8.
30 Petrarch, Fam. I.2.9, in Letters on Familiar Matters, 3 vols., trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (New York: Ithaca Press, 1975), 1–17.
31 Biondo, Italy Illuminated, trans. Jeffrey White, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6.68, 6.77, 12.17, 13.42.
32 Biondo, Decades, 366.
33 James Hankins thinks Petrarch’s lengthy letter to the cardinals was perhaps ‘the closest Petrarch ever came to writing what a modern scholar would think of as political theory,’ ‘The Virtue Politics of the Italian Humanists’, in Beyond Reception: Renaissance Humanism and the Transformation of Classical Antiquity, eds. Patrick Baker, Johannes Helmrath, and Craig Kallendorf (forthcoming).
34 Petrarch Fam. XI.16.14, 21–2. For Machiavelli on Torquatus, see Discourses I.11, II.23, III.19, III.22, III.23, III.34, III.37; on Valerius, I.60, II.26, III.22-23, III.37-8; on Cincinnatus, III.24-5, III.28.
35 Cf. Prince XXVI.
36 Fam. XI.16.23. Cf. Discourses I.3 I.37, III.16, 25.
37 Fam. XI.16.26.
38 Fam. XI.17.1-2.
39 Craig Kallendorf, ‘The Historical Petrarch’, The American Historical Review 101, no. 1 (1996): 133.
40 For an overview of Machiavelli’s commission with Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and the Florentine Studio, see Black, Machiavelli, 242–62.
41 ‘A Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence’, in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, 3 vols., trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 1–114; Opere 1:733-46.
42 Jurdjevic, 179–205.
43 Fam. XI.16.1.
44 Fam. XI.16.5.
45 Hankins, ‘Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-monarchical Republic’, Political Theory 38, no. 4 (2010): 452–82. See also Peter Stacy, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 119–57; Hans Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, vol. I. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 28.
46 See, inter alia, Fam. I.2.7, IV.7.5, VII.7.25, XIX.1.2, XXIII.2.4.
47 Fam. XVIII.1.19, trans. Bernardo, 3:38.
48 Arjo Vanderjagt, ‘Civic Humanism in Practice: The Case of Stefano Porcari and the Christian Tradition’, in Antiquity Renewed: Late Classical and Early Modern Themes, ed. Zweder von Martels and Victor M. Schmidt (Leuven, Netherlands: Peeters, 2003), 68–73; Anna Modigliani, Congiurare All’antica: Stefano Porcari, Niccolò V, Roma 1453 (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2013), 24–5. See also Anthony D’Elia, ‘Stefano Porcari’s Conspiracy Against Pope Nicholas V in 1453 and Republican Culture in Papal Rome’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 2 (2007): 207–31.
49 See Carlo Varotti, ‘A “cavalier pensoso” between Machiavelli and Petrarch’, Humanist Studies & the Digital Age 1, no. 1 (2011): 194–200; Modigliani, ‘Aporie e profezie petrarchesche tra Stefano Porcari e Niccolò Machiavelli’, Roma nel Rinascimento (1995): 53–67; Oreste Tommasini, Documenti Relativi a Stefano Porcari (Roma, 1879), 11–18.
50 Canzoniere 53, ll. 99–101: ‘Sopra il monte Tarpeio canzon, vedrai /Un cavalier che Italia tutta onora, /Pensoso più d'altrui che di se stesso’, ed. Marco Santagata (Mondadori, 1996), 272–87.
51 There is, to be sure, also Machiavelli’s famous 10 December 1513 letter to Vettori, with its reference to Petrarch’s Triumph of Divinity and Machiavelli walking with Dante or Petrarch under his arm. Opere, vol. II, pages 294–7. The ‘Dialogue on our Language’ refers to Petrarch, alongside Dante and Boccaccio, as a master of the Tuscan vernacular. Opere, III:261-73. For connections between the Prince and FH VI.29, see Anselmi, L’età dell’Umanesimo, 32; Varotti, ‘A “Cavalier Pensoso”’, 195–7.
52 Modigliani, ‘Aporie e profezie petrarchesche’, 64–6. Cf. references in Cosenza, Revolution of Cola di Rienzo, 31–3.
53 Other accounts of the Porcari conspiracy include Leon Battista Alberti’s letter ‘De Porcaria coniuratione’ and Orazio Romano's epic, the Porcaria. On these, see D’Elia, ‘Stefano Porcari’s Conspiracy’. Alberti also refers to Porcari as an ‘eques romanes’ and ‘homo animio’, in Opera inedita et pauca separatim impressai, ed. H. Mancini (Florence, 1890), 258.
54 Platina, trans. Rycaut, 2:235-50; De Vitis Pontificum Romanorum, 307–15.
55 Ibid., 237, 246; De Vitis, 307, 312.
56 Eugenia Levi, ‘Due nuovi frammenti degli abbozzi autografi delle “Istorie fiorentine” del Machiavelli’, La Bibliofilià 69, no. 3 (1967): 309–23. The introductions to books II–VI are far more general than those of books VII and VIII.
57 Gilbert, ‘Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine’, 141–7. The first book's many comments on corruption mirror the latter books on the Medici. Secondly, book I contains a very time-bound to the island of Rhodes (I.17), suggesting it was written just before Rhodes fell to the Turks in December 1522. At this point, Machiavelli would have been working on the Histories for almost two years and must have been well beyond book I, chapter 17, if he was writing the work chronologically.
58 Vanderjagt, ‘Civic Humanism in Practice’, 68–70.
59 Ibid. Porcari’s speeches are misattributed but published in Prose del Giovane naccorso da Montemagno, ed. G.B.C. Giuliari (Forni, 1874), V, pages 63–6; VII, pages 69–74.
60 Prose, I, page 2.I; XV, page 104.
61 Ibid. On Brutus: I, page 22l; on Scipio: II, page 18; VII, page 70; on Cicero: VII, pages 72–4; XIII, pages 92–4; XIV, pages 96–7; on Aristotle: II, pages 28–31, IV, pages 50–60.
62 Ibid. II, page 30.
63 Vanderjagt, ‘Civic Humanism in Practice’, 65.
64 Pietro Godi, De Coniuratione Porcaria dialogus, reprinted in Modigliani, Congiurare All’antica, IV.23, page 178.
65 Prose, VII, page 72.
66 Fam. 13.6.15 Cf. Sine Nomine 7.
67 For Machiavelli’s poetic experiments in ‘antipetrarchisimo,’ see Emanuela Scarpa, ‘Machiavelli e la “neutralità” di Francesco Petrarca’, Lettere Italiane 27 (1975): 263–85.
68 Mark Jurdjevic, ‘Machiavelli’s Hybrid Republicanism’, The English Historical Review 122, no. 499 (2007): 1240.
69 John Najemy, ‘Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics’, Renaissance Civic Humanism, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 88.
70 Var. 7 in Epistolae, ed. Franchessetti, 3: 318–19. See Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Petrarch’s Eight Years in Milan (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1958).
71 Fam. XVI.11.9, trans. Bernardo, 2: 318.
72 James Hankins, ‘The Unpolitical Petrarch: Justifying the Life of Literary Retirement’, in Et Amicorum: Essays in Renaissance Humanism and Philosophy in Honour of Jill Kraye, eds. Anthony Ossa-Richardson and Margaret Meserve (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 10–11. Hankins refers most specifically here to Petrarch’s De Vita Solitaria. For the Ciceronian aspects of Petrarch’s solitude, see Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, 115–19.
73 Petrarch, La Vita Solitaria, ed. Marco Noce (Mondadori, 1992): I.9. For English, we have relied on The Life of Solitude, trans. Jacob Zeitlin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1924), 183.
74 Fam. XIII.6.8.
75 Fam. XIII.6.6-7.
76 See Discourses III.6 on conspiracies: ‘when someone is left who may avenge the dead prince.’ One must possess ‘a great and firm spirit [animo] made resolute in both life and death through much experience’ in order to succeed.
77 See Petrarch’s Triumphus Eternitatis:
And those who merited illustrious fame/That Time had quenched, and countenances fair /Made pale and wan by Time and bitter Death [Morte amara], / Becoming still more beauteous than before /Will leave to raging Death [Morte impetuosa] and thieving Time /Oblivion, and aspects dark and sad. / In the full flower of youth they shall possess /Immortal beauty and eternal fame [eterna fama]. (The Triumphs of Petrarch, trans. Wilkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 112)
78 ‘At that time in Florence,’ Machiavelli reminds us, ‘the Pazzi were the most splendid in wealth and nobility of all Florentine families’ (VIII.2). See Najemy, ‘Machiavelli and the Medici’, 572–4.
79 Richardson, ‘Notes on Machiavelli’s Sources’, 39–44. See also Jurdjevic, ‘Civic Humanism and the Rise of the Medici’, Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 4 (1999): 994–1020; Hankins, ‘The “Baron Thesis” after Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni’, Journal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 2 (1995): 321–2; Viroli, Machiavelli, 104–5.
80 Fam. XIII.6.6.
81 Cola may have been in the audience on the Capitoline in 1341 when Petrarch was crowned poet laureate – an honor bestowed largely on the reputation of his unfinished Africa. See Musto, Apocalypse in Rome, 56.
82 Petrarch, Africa, trans. Thomas Bergin and Alice Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 9.554-60, p. 237. See also 9.146-50. Hereafter cited in text by book and line number. Hans Baron argues that the republican themes of the Africa have more to do with Petrarch’s Italian nationalism than any critique of imperium as such. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty and the Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 45–7. In fact, Petrarch wrote favorably of Caesar Augustus throughout his career, not so much because he was the emperor under whom Christ was born as because he heralded poets like Virgil and Horace. In his ‘Coronation Oration’, Petrarch remarks that the laurel crown is worn by both Caesars and poets. Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch, ed. Wilkins (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1955), 309.
83 See Fam. 7.7.1; Variae 48 in Cosenza, Revolution of Cola di Rienzo, 13.
84 Prose del Giovane, II, p. 18; VII, p. 70.
85 Richardson, ‘Notes on Machiavelli’s Sources’, 25–8. The events of Scipio’s career unfold in the same sequence in both works. De Viris Illustribus and Capitolo each emphasize the invidia Scipio faced and Scipio’s decision to deny Rome his bones. La Vita du Scipione L’Africano, ed. Guido Martellotti (Milan, 1954), XI–XII.
86 ‘Tercets on Ingratitude or Envy’, trans. Allan Gilbert, 2: 740–44. Opere 3: 38–42, ll. 100–2.
87 Ibid., l. 6, 12.
88 Prince, XVII.
89 Discourses, III.21.
90 Cf. Ronald Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 230–91; Francesco de Sanctis, ‘The “Canzoniere” of Petrarch in History of Italian Literature’, trans. Joan Redfern (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 264–89.
91 Seniles XIV.1.100, in Francesco Petrarca: Selected Letters, vol. II, ed. Elaine Fantham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). For complete translation, see Letters of Old Age, 2 vols. ed. Bernardo et al. (New York: Ithaca Press, 2005), 2: 521–52.
92 Sen. XIV.1, ed. Bernardo, 2:551. Translation altered slightly.
93 Ibid., 2: 550.
94 Ibid., 2:526.
95 Eric Nelson, ‘The Problem of the Prince’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge, 2007), 332. See also Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 9, 32; Michelle Zerba, ‘The Frauds of Humanism: Cicero, Machiavelli, and the Rhetoric of Imposture’, Rhetorica 22, no. 3 (2004): 215–40.
96 Prince, XV.
97 Fam. XV.1, trans. Bernardo, 2: 249–51.
98 Nelson, ‘The Problem of the Prince’, 324.
99 Machiavelli uses spirito scarcely, almost always opting for the secular animo. See Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 403; Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 34–5.
100 Discourses, III.21, emphasis added.
101 Fam. XIII.6, ‘de poetice nomine inter vulgares et indoctos profanato.’
102 Fam.XIII.6.22-9.
103 Sen. XVI.1, in Letters of Old Age, ed. Bernardo et al., 2: 603–4.
104 Fam. 13.6. 25.
105 Varotti, ‘A “Cavalier Pensoso”’, 196.
106 Prince, XXVI.
107 Canzoniere 53, ll. 15–17.
108 ‘sanza capo,’ ‘mancassi ne’ capi,’ ‘debolezza de’ capi,’ Opere, I:189, 191.
109 ‘ma non senza destino a le tue braccia, /che scuoter forte et sollevarla ponno, /è or commesso il nostro capo Roma.’ Canzoniere, 53, ll. 18–20, emphasis added. For Petrarch’s concept of Roma caput mundi, see Fam. XI.7.
110 Opere, 2:296.
111 Ibid., 2:297.