How Republics Perish: Lodovico Alamanni, the Medici, and Transformational Leadership

ABSTRACT

The goals of the present study are to relate the transactional and transformational aspects of modern leadership theory to the history of Medici rule and influence in Renaissance Florentine politics, and, at the same time, to test leadership models against the humanist debates on the accession of the Medici to power. I will focus on the Discorso sopra il fermare lo stato di Firenze nella devozione de’ Medici [Discourse on holding the State of Florence in devotion to the Medici], written in 1516 by Lodovico Alamanni (1488–1526), a prominent Florentine statesman. Alamanni’s Discorso relates to the first restoration of the Medici government and engages with a number of issues that animate Machiavelli’s political theory as well as other memoranda for the Medici contemporaneous with The Prince. I argue that the two categories of leadership—the transactional and the transformational—first proposed by James MacGregor Burns, provide a new way of specifying Alamanni’s intentions and, by comparison, those of contemporary authors, including Machiavelli. I will also demonstrate that Alamanni’s work exemplifies more vividly than other political writings of the Medici period an approach to leadership that is predicated upon the combination of the transactional and transformational paradigms.

KEYWORDS:

• Lodovico Alamanni
• Renaissance Florence
• Renaissance political thought
• transactional and transformational leadership
• Medici
• Niccolò Machiavelli

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Bill Connell, Montserrat Herrero, Gary Ianziti, Haig Patapan, Luisa Simonutti, and Miguel Vatter for comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹. Burns, Leadership, 4–5, 19–20.

². See, in general, Boucheron, “Les laboratoires politiques de l’Italie”; as well as Brown, The Medici in Florence.

³. Padgett and Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434.”

⁴. Alamanni, Discorso sopra il fermare lo stato di Firenze, in Albertini, Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein im Übergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat, 362–71; Italian translation: Firenze dalla repubblica al principato, 376–84. Hereafter references to Alamanni’s Discorso will be to the Italian translation with page numbers cited in the text. An English translation of pages 381–84 is included in Lodovico Alamanni, “The Making of a Courtier,” in Social and Economic Foundations of the Italian Renaissance, 214–20; hereafter abbreviated as “TMC” with page numbers cited in the text. I have also consulted the presentation of Alamanni’s text in Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State, 141–45. Alamanni’s Discorso is discussed in Albertini, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato, 33–36, 71–72; Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575, 442–45; Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 101–3, 106–7, 136–38; Winter, Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence, 72, 75, 77; Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, 119; Dionisotti, Machiavellerie, 124–27; Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli: Storia del suo pensiero politico, 623–28. According to a different and less convincing interpretation, the intended recipient of Alamanni’s Discorso was Alberto Pio of Carpi (1475–1531), friend of Leo X and imperial ambassador in Rome. See Richardson, “The Prince and Its Early Italian Readers,” 27–28; Bausi, Il Principe dallo scrittoio alla stampa, 23. Alamanni addressed from Rome a discourse to Alberto Pio of Carpi that is dated 27 December 1516 and bears the title “Lodovicus Alamannus, Ill.mo domino domino Alberto Pio, carpensi principi et caesareo oratori, S. D.,” in Albertini, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato, 385–90.

⁵. Lauretum, sive carmina in laudem Laurentii Medicis, 3–4. See also Bausi, “Politica e Poesia”; Cummings, The Maecenas and the Madrigalist, 156. For Alamanni’s life and works, consult Inglese, s.v. “Alamanni, Lodovico.”

⁶. Burns, Transforming Leadership, 24.

⁷. Bass, Leadership and Performance, 20–22, 26–29; Bass, “Two Decades of Research and Development,” 11–13, 21. Consult also Bass, “From Transactional to Transformational Leadership”; Bass and Avolio, “Transformational Leadership.” For an overview of recent approaches and literature in this area, see Antonakis, “Transformational and Charismatic Leadership.”

⁸. Bass and Riggio, Transformational Leadership, 4, 8.

⁹. Ibid., 5.

¹⁰. Ibid., 12–14. See further Bass, “The Two Faces of Charisma”; Bass and Steidlmeier, “Ethics, Character, and Authentic Transformational Leadership Behavior.”

¹¹. Machiavelli, “Discursus florentinarum,” in Machiavelli, Opere, vol. 1: 733–45; English translations: Discourse on Florentine Affairs After the Death of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Younger (1520–21), in Machiavelli: Political, Historical, and Literary Writings, 169–80; “Discourse of Niccolò Machiavelli on Reforming the State of Florence Done at the Instance of Pope Leo X,” in Niccol[ò] Machiavelli and the United States of America, 629–38; “A Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence,” in Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, vol. 1, 101–15 (first published in 1760). For further discussion, see Barthas, “Forme démocratique en régime aristocratique”; Zancarini, Una scommessa di Machiavelli; Benner, Machiavelli’s Ethics, 54–61; Raimondi, “Il paradigma-Firenze nel Discursus florentinarum rerum di Machiavelli”; Gian Mario Anselmi, “Il Discursus florentinarum rerum tra progetto politico e prospettiva storiografica,” in Niccolò Machiavelli politico, storico, letterato, 189–207; Inglese, “Il Discursus Florentinarum rerum di Niccolò Machiavelli”; Guidi, “Niccolò Machiavelli”; De Mattei, Dal premachiavellismo all’antimachiavellismo, 77–88. Consider also the two editions of Cerretani, Dialogo della mutazione di Firenze [Dialogue on the change of Florence] (ca. 1520).

¹². Machiavelli, Il Principe, chap. 3.

¹³. Ibid., chap. 6.

¹⁴. Ibid., chap. 9.

¹⁵. Ibid., chap. 6.

¹⁶. Ibid., chap. 5.

¹⁷. For a broader treatment of the ways in which some of the topics of Machiavelli’s Prince were discussed in Cinquecento political writing, see Moyer, “Before the Prince of Machiavellism: Machiavellian Themes in Sixteenth-Century Florentine Thought”; and Moyer, “Reading Machiavelli in Sixteenth-Century Florence.”

¹⁸. See also Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 105–42.

¹⁹. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 101–2. On the “Myth of Lorenzo,” see Kent, “Introduction: The Myth of Lorenzo,” in Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, 1–9; Lorenzo dopo Lorenzo; Bullard, “The Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici.”

²⁰. Medici, “Instructione al Magnifico Lorenzo,” 293–306.

²¹. Paolo Vettori, “Ricordi di Paolo Vettori al Cardinale de’ Medici sopra le cose di Firenze,” in Albertini, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato, 357–59.

²². “Del governo di Firenze dopo la restaurazione de’ Medici nel 1512” and “Del modo di assicurare lo stato alla casa de’ Medici,” in Guicciadini, Dialogo e discorsi del reggimento di Firenze, 260–66 and 267–68, respectively.

²³. Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State, 135–38; Albertini, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato, 22–24.

²⁴. Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State, 138–40.

²⁵. Ibid., 140–41.

²⁶. Ibid., 378–79. On Piero de’ Medici, see the recent monograph by Brown, Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Crisis of Renaissance Italy.

²⁷. Compare Felix Gilbert’s thesis in “The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought,” that the gonfaloniere for life was a way to replicate the Venetian Doge, but that the Florentine aristocrats would have privileged a Senate as a means to control the political life of the city.

²⁸. Agathocles of Syracuse (361–289 BC) and Liverotto of Fermo (1475–1503), condottiero and ruler of Fermo, are also invoked by Machiavelli (Il Principe, chap. 8) as prime examples of princes who acquired and maintained power through the use of violence.

²⁹. Consider the letter written for Alessio Lapaccini on 20 October 1501 by the Florentine historian Jacopo Nardi (1476–1563), who observes that the patrician youth of Florence no longer wear the toga, follow a new fashion trend very different from the one of their fathers or the type pertaining to a citizen, and are keen to show off and flaunt their grace and magnificence. See Verde, Lo studio fiorentino, 411; Brown, “Rethinking the Renaissance,” 263–64.

³⁰. On this and the following, see Plaisance, Florence in the Time of the Medici, esp. 11–12, 55–56. Consider also Taddei, Fanciulli e giovani; Eisenbichler, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael; Polizzotto, Children of the Promise; Polizzotto, The Elect Nation, esp. 38–41, 123–27; Trexler, “Ritual in Florence: Adolescence and Salvation in the Renaissance.”

³¹. Savonarola, Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato, 469–70; and Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola, 195–96.

³². Baker, “Medicean Metamorphoses.”

³³. For the idea that Italian humanists relied on ancient political philosophy to justify absolutism, see Hankins, Virtue Politics, esp. chap. “Francesco Patrizi and Humanist Absolutism” (386–422).

³⁴. Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, 24–28.

³⁵. Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, 72–73.

³⁶. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 306–7.

³⁷. Aristotle, Politics, 1276^a34–1276^b15.

³⁸. Ibid., 1301^b5–26.

³⁹. Machiavelli, Art of War, 163.

⁴⁰. Giannotti, Della Repubblica fiorentina, 15.

⁴¹. Keane, The New Despotism, 14–15.

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Vasileios Syros

Vasileios Syros is Professor and Chair of Classical Greek Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He is also the Director of the Early Modern Greek Culture Program at The Medici Archive Project in Florence. His teaching and research interests focus on the history of Christian/Latin, Jewish, and Islamic political thought in the Middle Ages and the early modern period.