Politico vivere in Niccolò Machiavelli and Donato Giannotti: Monarchy, Republicanism and Mixed Government in Florence

ABSTRACT

The tensions between monarchy and republicanism are a dominant feature of Machiavelli’s political works, and both the so-called ‘monarchical’ work, The Prince, and the more overtly republican Discourses laud the benefits of republicanism and warn against relying on hereditary monarchy. This article compares Machiavelli’s proposals, advanced in 1520, for a mixed constitution for the city of Florence with those of his younger compatriot, Donato Giannotti, who became secretary to the Ten in the last Florentine republican government of 1527-30. As the historical context changed, and Florence progressed from republic to absolutist duchy under the later Medici, Giannotti was exiled from the city and the article examines how his proposed reforms of 1528 and then his major work, Della republica fiorentina, drafted and redrafted between 1531 and 1538 as the politics of Florence changed, reinforce and expand Machiavelli’s views of politico vivere in a republican polity like Florence whose constitution was being dramatically rewritten.

KEYWORDS:

• Niccolò Machiavelli
• Donato Giannotti
• liberty
• republicanism
• tyranny
• Florence

1. Introduction

For Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and Donato Giannotti (1492–1573), the Aristotelian mixed state and the example of republican Rome were intrinsic to the formation of their republican theories. Both held the office of secretary to the Dieci – Machiavelli between 1498 and 1512, Giannotti first under the moderate Niccolò Capponi’s term as gonfaloniere after 1527 and then under the more radical Florentine government that was elected in 1529 as the imperial siege of 1529–30 tightened its grip on the city. Peter Stacey’s stimulating analysis, in Part V of Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince, expounds the ‘strategy’ and the ‘battle’ waged by Machiavelli to undermine the classical Roman arguments for monarchy – bringing ‘over one and a half millennia of monarchical encroachment upon republican territory to a categorical halt’.¹ Stacey does not include Giannotti in his argument, for obvious reasons of chronology and scope, but had he done so, he might have found an expansion of Machiavelli’s ideas: perhaps one might speculate a chapter entitled ‘Siege’, namely the events of 1527–30, when Giannotti witnessed the unchecked actions of popular government that unwittingly led to the definitive return of the Medici and the institution of the duchy.

Further inspiration for this article comes from J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment, now approaching the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, particularly since his work remains the primary comparison of Machiavelli’s and Giannotti’s works in English – although Randolph Starn was the first to point to Giannotti’s unmerited neglect in 1968.² Pocock’s pivotal contribution was to analyse the ‘particular contingencies’ of the French invasion of Italy and ‘the intrusion of history on the civic ideal’ – the ‘Machiavellian moment’ – that challenged the ability of the citizen to fully participate in the political life of a free city (that politico vivere so dear to Machiavelli and his fellow Florentines). Moreover, the ‘moment’ Pocock identified highlighted how ‘the [Florentine] republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability’.³ The terms that framed the republican discourse to which both Machiavelli and Giannotti contributed were virtù and its antitheses, fortune and corruption. In such rapidly changing political situations, how could the citizens and the state survive, they asked? And how could civic liberty and the rule of law be best guaranteed? In the proposals for a republican constitution they each outlined, approximately a decade apart, in 1520 and 1528–29, both Machiavelli and Giannotti suggest that the liberty of citizens and the protection of property were not incompatible with a mixed constitution. Within the scope of this special issue, this article aims to contribute a reading that focuses on the monarchical element in the reforms offered by each writer – albeit certainly falling short of a recommendation – at particular junctures when their city appeared to be overtaken by the turbulent events of the times.

Throughout this period, a ‘long’ sixteenth century, the Italian peninsula was a complex system of states, whose development and institutions, as Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini note, can best be described as ‘more pactist than authoritarian, more reciprocal than vertical’.⁴ Monarchy in Italy was confined to the papacy (increasingly so after the mid-fifteenth century) and the Kingdom of Naples, but dynastic lordship in the form of signorie had become the norm – and for both Machiavelli, and arguably Giannotti, too, the terms signore and principe are interchangeable. There remained only a handful of oligarchical republics ruled by elected officials – Genoa, Florence, Lucca, Siena and Venice – and by the mid-sixteenth century, that number was reduced to three after both Florence and Siena came under the dominion of the Medici dukes. However, in the historiography, the precise nature of these republican polities, their overlap with popular government, and the ties between the elites or wealthy merchants who were elected as officials have become more nuanced, adding bonds of family, neighbourhood and business to legal definitions and guild membership.⁵ Above all, setting up a net antithesis between monarchy and republicanism in either Machiavelli’s or Giannotti’s texts can be difficult. As James Hankins pointed out in his analysis of the writings of an earlier Florentine chancellor, Leonardo Bruni (1350–1444), ‘the use of the term “republican” as the opposite of “monarchical” goes back only to the French ‘philosophes’, in particular to Montesquieu (1689–1755); in the older republican tradition “republican” means simply commonwealth, and its opposites are tyranny or mob rule’.⁶

The crisis of republicanism in early sixteenth-century Florence has been a focus of the historiography for decades – centuries, if we include the analyses of contemporaries. Recent additions to the debate include an emphasis on continuity, rather than abrupt change.⁷ The roots of this continuity can also be found during the years of Savonarola and Piero Soderini (elected as Florence’s first lifelong gonfaloniere in 1502) and in the years immediately after the return of the Medici to Florence in 1512. The return of the Medici clearly marked the start of a new regime, but differing views about the extent or speed of that change led to rivalry between two ‘factions’ of the Medici, led respectively by Giuliano de’ Medici, duke of Nemours (1479–1516), and by his sister-in-law Alfonsina Orsini and her son Lorenzo de’ Medici (1492–1519). Unlike the latter, mother and son, Giuliano remained a firm supporter of popular government, the governo largo and its institutions, namely the Great Council that gave some political agency to a broader spectrum of Florentine men. This political rift was stressed by Humphrey Butters, and Josephine Jungić has also highlighted the ideological divisions between uncle and nephew regarding the government of Florence.⁸ It is worth remembering that it was the uncle, Giuliano, to whom Machiavelli first dedicated The Prince.

I will begin by analysing Machiavelli’s views of some sole rulers of his own time and his use of social determinism to argue that some societies were suitable to be ruled under a monarchy and others as a republic. Owing to the extraordinary influence of Machiavelli’s short treatise, the figure of the ‘prince’ is now widely associated with Renaissance Italy. Yet, for his contemporaries, the ‘princes’ of Italy – more strictly speaking signori, marquises, dukes, the highest-ranking ecclesiastics, the pope himself, and the king of Naples – represented a group of decidedly sui generis rulers in the Italian peninsula in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.⁹

The second half of the article will consider Giannotti’s views against the background of Florentine politics between 1494 and the late 1530s, looking in particular at the dedication of his work Della republica fiorentina to the Florentine cardinal, Niccolò Ridolfi (1501–1550).¹⁰ This will lead to a discussion of the potestà regia or the royal power in the mixed constitution that Giannotti advocated for the particular circumstances of Florence at the time, and specifically the role of the ‘perpetual’ or lifelong prince (such as a gonfaloniere elected for life) in the governance of the city. In this respect, it is important to note how his views have been regarded as either more abstract than Machiavelli’s or, in a teleological analysis, more prescient of the later evolution of republican constitutions, even constitutional monarchy, in northern Europe.

For Giannotti, the suppression of tyranny becomes a leitmotif of Della republica fiorentina, and some of these repercussions are explored against the dynamic political context in which the work is written. Machiavelli did not live to see the final downfall of the Republic of Florence, yet, against the background of the rapid changes between 1494 and the 1520s, he too contemplates the risks of tyranny. The last part of the article therefore seeks to answer the question of how he and Giannotti balance the need to preserve the state by introducing a mixed republican government and how they evaluate the implications for the republican way of life, that vivere politico which represents both uncorrupted institutions and moral probity.

In 1955 John Whitfield felt the need to review what he called ‘the plain surface’ of Machiavelli’s vocabulary, because ‘the cooks have adulterated the dish so much’.¹¹ I hope that it is useful to review some of Machiavelli’s arguments relating specifically to monarchy and the monarchical element of mixed government, and that a comparison to Donato Giannotti’s proposed reforms for a restored republican regime in 1527 may serve to clarify the ingredients, at least in the culinary sense of the term.

2. Machiavelli on contemporary rulers

Machiavelli’s opinions of contemporary monarchs were formative to his writings. Cases in point are the rulers with whom he had official dealings during the fourteen years of his service to the Florentine Republic, from 1498 to 1512, and who are frequently mentioned in the Legations, as well as those, like the Turkish sultan, who was a constant presence in Italian affairs. Notably, however, the two key examples to which he returns are not chosen from the ‘Italian’ rulers. Machiavelli’s repeated missions to the French court, for example, offered him ample time to observe both the system and the leading actors; his observations appear throughout the legations and were the subject of two more focused writings, De natura Gallorum, following his first and least satisfactory sojourn in 1500, and later the Ritratto delle cose di Francia (composed in two phases, the first in 1510–11 and a subsequent one in 1512). The formative nature of the latter report – outlining the key characteristics of the French monarchy in line with Francesco Guicciardini’s analysis of the Spanish monarchy – is the subject of Jean-Marc Rivière’s article in this issue.¹² When Machiavelli came to write his political works, he drew on this extensive first-hand experience in his remarks on the government of King Louis XII of France (r. 1498–1515), and on second-hand knowledge in the form of reports from Florentine merchants for his comments on the Turkish ruler, Bayezid II (1481–1512). The French and Turkish monarchies are compared in a well-known passage in The Prince, Chapter 4, setting them in diametric opposition:

The whole Turkish kingdom is governed by one ruler, the others all being his servants; and his kingdom is divided into sanjaks, to which he sends various administrators, whom he changes and moves as he pleases. But the King of France is placed amidst a great number of hereditary lords, recognised in that state by their own subjects, who are devoted to them. They have their own hereditary privileges, which the King disallows only at his peril.¹³

These comments are used to analyse the degree to which a kingdom is open to attack and the question is posed entirely from the viewpoint of the would-be attacker who is addressed as ‘you’.¹⁴ As Machiavelli is at pains to point out, the Turkish kingdom is very difficult to conquer, because of the sole ruler and the loyalty of his servant administrators who cannot be corrupted, nor do they have followers who might rise up. Moreover, as Machiavelli would write in a later chapter, the sultan’s despotic rule was backed by infantrymen and cavalry, and ‘the security and strength of his kingdom depends on these forces’.¹⁵ He therefore concludes that an attacker would have to take on the unified Turkish forces: ‘It is difficult to overcome a state of the Turkish type but, if it has been conquered, very easy to hold it’.¹⁶ In the unlikely event of conquest, only the ruler’s family need be ‘wiped out’, since there are no other nobles to act as a focus of resistance. It is a chilling conclusion, but one that was notably devoid of religious considerations. As Margaret Meserve has noted, Machiavelli wrote ‘about the Turks without thinking of and objecting to their religion. [He] was probably the first to do so in total seriousness’.¹⁷ But, above all, there is also respect for the Turkish empire as the inheritors of Roman virtue. This has been argued by Lucette Valensi, who cites the ‘unambiguously positive connotations’ of the Turkish sultan’s virtù in Discourses, 1.30.¹⁸ Valensi’s and also Meserve’s observations are countered by Stacey’s view that the differences between ‘the Turk and the King of France’ amount to ‘Machiavelli’s idea of a joke’.¹⁹ Not a joke, I venture, but information that would have been read in all seriousness as it highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the Ottoman Empire: effectively the advice here is entirely pragmatic in the context of an era of Turkish advances, but also key alliances, not least that between it and the French kingdom that he compares it to.²⁰ Montesquieu, too, would later build on Machiavelli’s arguments by identifying that the separation between sovereignty and criminal justice was a critical distinction between European monarchies and Oriental despotism.²¹

Returning to Machiavelli’s comparison between France and the Ottoman Empire, he writes in Chapter 4 of The Prince that the French kingdom is ‘in some respects’ easier to seize than the sultan’s, because there are always ‘malcontents and those who desire changes’, but this type of kingdom is ‘very difficult to hold’ because of its fragmentation: ‘countless difficulties will be encountered, both from those who have helped you and from those who have suffered because of your invasion’.²² The French nobility, as Machiavelli was well aware – after an initial legation lasting several months in 1500–1501, he had returned repeatedly, until as late as 1512 – retained the feudal powers of levy: these private militias meant that the French nobles were ‘very ready to lead new revolts’, and ‘since you can neither satisfy nor destroy them, you will lose that state whenever the circumstances are unfavourable’.²³ The remarks about the French nobles made in Chapter 4 of The Prince echo the divisive factionalism of Florence’s infamous feuds that had riven the city since the death of “Messer Buondelmonte”, after which the enmities between the main families “were sometimes calmed and sometimes inflamed” – quite literally when a terrible fire tore through the city in 1304 and Florence was “agitated by fire and steel”.²⁴ Machiavelli was outspoken in his criticism of these evils in the Florentine Histories commissioned by Pope Clement VII and completed in 1525. However, it was as a result of such “frequent divisions” – factional tumult, bloodshed and exiles – that Florence had succeeded in eliminating its magnates which on the one hand bolstered the position of its merchants, but on the other, left it crucially reliant on mercenaries.²⁵

We can question how antithetical is Machiavelli’s comparison between the French and Turkish models of monarchy in Chapter 4 of The Prince? What he is warning about is not modes of royal government – the French or the Turkish were, as he points out, ‘used to living under a prince’²⁶ – but rather the capacity of the nobility to destabilise and weaken a state by introducing divided loyalties, competing dynastic claims and rival militias. This broader criticism affected all forms of state in Italy. For all, whether monarchy or republic, Machiavelli’s principal advice is to maintain strong laws and a strong military. Indeed, in Chapter 12 of The Prince when Machiavelli expounds his famous dictum that ‘the main foundations of all states (whether they are new, old or mixed), are good laws and good armies’, he singles out the disastrous defence of Italy in 1494, when the Italian rulers relied on mercenary armies whose ‘real character was soon revealed’ leaving the states exposed to the invaders.²⁷ The French kings maintained a much better army, broadly speaking, although Machiavelli is quick to point out that poor judgement and blunders had resulted in the national army becoming reliant on Swiss soldiers.²⁸ Moreover, writing in the Discourses, the Kingdom of France is highly praised for its excellent laws given that it is ‘better regulated by laws than is any other of which at present we have knowledge’²⁹ – although this is clarified in Book 3.1 where Machiavelli acknowledges that the institutions and laws of France are maintained by the parlements, principally that of Paris, which ‘takes action against a prince of this realm or in its judgements condemns the king’.³⁰

On the opposite side of the English Channel, praise for King Henry VIII is couched in similar terms: Machiavelli famously describes Henry as ‘a prudent man’ stating that his kingdom had been kept ‘in good order, for in times of peace it had not dropped the institutions associated with war’. Thus, when the time came to attack France in 1513, the prince used ‘none but his own people as troops’.³¹ Admiration for a prince’s undertakings can also win the people’s support and Ferdinand of Aragon, King of Spain, is praised in The Prince for his fame and glory, which have made him the ‘most famous and glorious king in Christendom’.³² However, Machiavelli describes the king’s endeavours as ‘very remarkable, and some of them quite extraordinary’, epithets that Erica Benner identifies as warnings to the reader that Machiavelli is being ironic.³³ This is borne out in letters written in 1513, where Machiavelli states, with no irony, to Francesco Vettori that, ‘the king of Spain unnecessarily endangered all his territories – always a reckless course of action for any man’.³⁴

Machiavelli’s Discourses reaffirm the theory he had outlined in Chapter 5 of The Prince: how difficult it was to establish a monarchy where none has previously existed and where the people were used to living ‘in freedom’, and their ‘greater vitality’ and the memory of ‘lost liberties and ancient institutions’ will increase the desire to recover them.³⁵ On the contrary, where there is inequality, such as under a principality, the inhabitants ‘do not know how to embrace a free way of life’ if a republic is instituted.³⁶ Book 1.55 of Discourses is titled: ‘That it is very easy to manage things in a State in which the Masses are not Corrupt; and that, where Equality exists, it is impossible to set up a Principality, and, where it does not exist, impossible to set up a Republic’.³⁷ Here Machiavelli appears to assert the social determinism underlying these two forms of government, harking back to his distinction in the opening chapter of The Prince that states are either republics or principalities (my italics).³⁸ However, this is not a simple two-option choice. Stacey returned to Machiavelli’s rhetorical devices of division and difference in a recent article to argue that the reconstruction of this device – the dilemmatic form of either/or – has been misleading: ‘this belief that Machiavelli cannot count to more than two persists’.³⁹ Instead, in Discourses 1.55 the complexity of forms is clarified when rather than emphasise the form of governance, Machiavelli focuses on the social customs, forms of property-ownership and legal traditions of a society that will dictate the polity and affect what he calls the ‘proportion’ of the outcome of a change of regime. Moreover, changing ‘a province suited to a republican regime, into a kingdom’ can only be successfully achieved by a ‘man of outstanding brain-power and authority’, and as was obvious to all – then and now – ‘such men are rare’.⁴⁰

Monarchy cannot survive without the presence of gentiluomini, the landed gentry, whom Machiavelli defines as ‘those who live in idleness on the abundant revenue derived from their estates, without having anything to do either with their cultivation or with other forms of labour essential to life’.⁴¹ In short, their sort are described as a ‘pest’ and have no place in a republic.⁴² In Italy, these men, ‘inimical to any form of civic government’, abound in areas like the kingdom of Naples, the Papal States, and in Lombardy and Romagna, and here the ‘absolute and overwhelming power’ of monarchy – including the papal monarchy – is required to restrain ‘excesses due to ambition and the corrupt practices of the powerful’. Only a monarch can instate order since ‘the material is so corrupt, laws do not suffice to keep it in hand; it is necessary to have, besides laws, a superior force, such as appertains to a monarch’.⁴³

Not that success was guaranteed, as is exemplified by the fates of two contemporary Italian princes who had recently lost power: Lodovico il Moro, Duke of Milan (r. 1494–1499) and Ferrante King of Naples (r. 1496–1501). The immediate cause of their downfall was their reliance on mercenaries, but this had been accentuated either because they had aroused the enmity of the people, in the case of the Duke of Milan, or were incapable of pacifying the nobility, in the case of the King of Naples.⁴⁴ On the contrary, the Duke of Ferrara was aided by the long tradition of his family’s rule. The duke is mentioned in The Prince, Chapter 2 on hereditary principalities and, as if to stress the point, Machiavelli conflates two rulers, father and son: Duke Ercole d’Este (1471–1505) and Duke Alfonso d’Este (1505–1534).⁴⁵ A more literal translation of the famous phrase from the opening chapter of The Prince (‘I principati sono o ereditari, de’ quali il sangue del loro Signore ne sia stato lungo tempo Principe, o e’ sono nuovi’) strengthens the physicality of this transition from father to son: ‘Monarchies are either hereditary, where the bloodline of their ruler has long ruled over them, or they are new’.⁴⁶

The inherent uncertainties of bloodline – nowhere clearer to Machiavelli than in the Medici family and the differences between Lorenzo the Magnificent’s surviving sons and grandson – were always a risk to the stability of monarchy. In Discourses 1.19, Machiavelli notes how Beyezid II, Sultan of the Turks (r. 1481–1512), was ‘able to enjoy the fruits of his father, Mahomet’s, labours’, because his father had left him a ‘strong kingdom’ and had defeated his neighbours. Yet, this pattern would not have survived to a third generation, and ‘the kingdom would have been ruined’ if Selim, Beyezid’s son (r. 1512–20), had not turned out to be like his grandfather, or in Machiavelli’s eyes, possibly an even greater ruler.⁴⁷ Machiavelli’s graphic descriptions of the failings of famous sons – one could certainly include Cesare Borgia among them – were designed to leave his readers in no doubt that Fortune held hereditary monarchy hostage.

Machiavelli’s ultimate conditions for the benefits of monarchy are that a sole ruler – lord, prince, king – must, on the one hand, restrain the excessive ambition of the mighty and prevent corruption in situations where the social and legal circumstances make it acceptable to the people; on the other hand, the monarch must ensure that laws and institutions are established and preserved in order to allow the ordinary people to go about their daily lives. Interestingly, Machiavelli’s views evolved when he returned to this argument in 1520 in what is usually known as his Discursus, or discourse on remodelling the government of Florence, which I shall discuss more fully in a later section. Again, he warned his readers of the impossibility of establishing a principality in a city that was not accustomed to it, clearly stating that, ‘in order to have a princedom in Florence, where equality is great, the establishment of inequality would be necessary; noble lords of walled towns and boroughs would have to be set up, who, in support of the prince, would with their arms and their followers stifle the city and the whole province’.⁴⁸

Therefore, while a handful of contemporary ‘princes’ earned praise from Machiavelli because of their ability to retain popular support, dominate the nobility, institute and impose good laws and maintain their own troops, these positives were overridden by the principal criticisms of hereditary monarchy, namely the unlikelihood of a succession of virtuous princes and the likelihood of the corruption of institutions under an autocratic ruler resulting in the loss of freedom for citizens. Looking back to the Roman classical tradition, Machiavelli noted how the society of his time relied on classical examples in law, medicine and art, yet – in the preface to Discourses, Book I – to his ‘astonishment and grief’, this reliance did not extend to governance: ‘in constituting republics, in maintaining states, in governing kingdoms, in forming an army or conducting a war, in dealing with subjects, in extending the empire, one finds neither prince nor republic who repairs to antiquity for examples’.⁴⁹ Before we turn to examine Giannotti’s views, it is worth noting Machiavelli’s assertion that Rome lived in libertà under her early kings.⁵⁰ There is no inherent contradiction here since the early kings had respected ‘the ancient institutions’ and did not antagonise the senate and the populace. Given Machiavelli's and Giannotti's similar humanist formation, it is no surprise to find that Giannotti praises the early kings of Rome, too, asserting that ‘while the Roman republic lived under the kings it experienced no discord whatsoever and, under that form of government, made such acquisitions that it dominated all Italy and finally all the world’.⁵¹ Yet the key statement in Machiavelli’s Discourses 3.5, one that surely Giannotti would have taken note of in view of the changed polity of Florence and the advent of the new duke, Alessandro de’ Medici, is that princes should learn ‘that they begin to lose their state the moment they begin to break the laws and to disregard the ancient traditions and customs under which men have long lived’.⁵²

3. Giannotti and the genesis of Della republica fiorentina

Machiavelli’s younger compatriot, and fervent republican, Donato Giannotti has long been recognised as Machiavelli’s ‘famous competitor’ – the phrase appeared in 1734, shortly after the first publication of Della repubblica fiorentina (Venice, 1721).⁵³ But the pairing of Giannotti with Machiavelli started in the former's lifetime with Benedetto Varchi (1502/3–1565) who, in his Storia fiorentina (spanning the years 1527-1538, the manuscript remained unpublished until 1721), included ‘these two secretaries of the Florentine Republic […] among the rarest men in political affairs, I would say not just of the city but of our time’.⁵⁴ Giannotti’s ranking among the key Florentine political writers of the period was firmly established in the historiography by Roberto Ridolfi, first in an article of 1929 and then in a lengthy ‘sommario’ of Giannotti’s life, written in the ‘ore grige’ of 1942.⁵⁵ Ridolfi’s Opuscoli di storia e di erudizione, which also contain chapters on Savonarola, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, established Giannotti’s presence among the great practitioners of Florentine political theory between 1494 and the Medici duchy.⁵⁶ Giannotti’s study of Venice, which, unlike that of his native city, was published in his lifetime, has frequently displaced interest in his political analysis of Florentine government. Furio Diaz’s edition of Giannotti’s political works has now been supplemented by two critical editions of Della republica fiorentina; the first with an English introduction by Giovanni Silvano published in 1990, and more recently Théa Stella Picquet’s edition of 2011.⁵⁷ In the Anglophone scholarship, Giannotti’s name is no longer surrounded by ‘uncertainty and confusion’, as Randolph Starn wrote in 1968.⁵⁸ J.G.A. Pocock’s 1975 monograph The Machiavellian Moment did even more to revive interest outside Italy in Giannotti as a political thinker by including him in what Pocock himself described as ‘the only full-dress study of theory during 1494–1530 which I’ve seen – at any rate in English – placing Savonarola, Guicciardini, Machiavelli and Giannotti side by side in a developing context’.⁵⁹ That ‘developing context’ was the ‘Machiavellian moment’ – the development of constitutional thought ‘existing in secular time’, and in this case the question of how Florence should be governed after the return of the Medici in 1512. The historiography on Giannotti in Italy is clearly now ahead of the field. Monographs and articles by Giuseppe Bisaccia – to whom scholars are indebted for the philological and chronological analysis of the text – and Giorgio Cadoni form the rock bed of this interpretation,⁶⁰ and, more recently, significant contributions by Simone Albonico and Hélène Soldini have enriched the understanding of Giannotti’s importance.⁶¹ In particular, Paolo Simoncelli’s essential work on the anti-Medicean Florentine exiles, the fuorusciti, places Giannotti – one of the ‘greatest theoretical exponents of republicanism’ – at the heart of the continued struggle to undermine the Florentine regime, even after 1537.⁶² Lastly, in this fecund moment of studies on and surrounding Machiavelli in the Italian sphere, a new biography of Giannotti by Francesca Russo includes a full chapter on Della Republica fiorentina which is a valuable addition that emphasises the ‘profound originality’ of this text.⁶³ Aloïs Riklin’s work has also been important to this study, in particular his article on the originality of Giannotti’s proposals for a mixed constitution.⁶⁴ However, although these studies highlight Giannotti’s contribution to an understanding of sixteenth-century republican thought, there still seems to be space for a renewed examination of his acknowledgement that a permanent ‘royal power’ (potestà regia), albeit subject to constraints and not in the form of a hereditary dynasty, was a key strand in his hopes for a mixed constitution specifically, but not only, in Florence.⁶⁵

Starn rightly stressed that it would be ‘misleading at best’ to imagine that the ‘republican’ Giannotti emerged fully fledged in the republican government of 1527. Giannotti was, after all, in his twenties during the crucial years following Soderini’s departure and the return of the Medici in the late summer of 1512. There is a resounding silence from him regarding the events of May 1513 when Giuliano de’ Medici joined the other syndics and proctors (Procuratores fisci et reipublice Florentine) to exercise the powers of the now permanent magistracy, the Balía, which John N. Stephens notes as being of “great importance” in “the progress of the Medici to despotic powers”.⁶⁶ Stephens is correct about the power of the Balía but he overstates the unitary front of the Medici and their ‘progress’ to despotism since, as has already been pointed out, this overlooks Giuliano’s support for the Great Council and the bitter rivalry between Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo.

Giannotti’s name does not appear among those who attended the intellectual gatherings of Florentine patricians at the Orti Oricellari or the Accademia Sacra Medicea, but his acquaintance with Machiavelli and others, both supportive and critical of the Medici, may date from the years around 1515–21.⁶⁷ His earliest letter to survive dates from November-December 1523, after his appointment to the chair of rhetoric, poetics and Greek in Pisa, and it congratulates the newly elected Pope Clement VII on behalf of a former friend (‘pro quondam amico’). Identifying Lorenzo Ridolfi (1503–1576), the cardinal's brother as ‘the most likely candidate' for whom it was written, Starn describes it as ‘an artfully flattering missive for the Medici pope who presided over the dismemberment of the last Florentine republic with which Giannotti’s life and works was to be so closely allied’, and a clear expression of the fundamental problems in Giannotti’s life and works.⁶⁸ At the crux of these fundamental problems was the tension between an unwavering loyalty to popular republican government and the realisation that it could not survive without the support of the Medicean faction. Giannotti’s politics would not mature for another few years, initially during the writing of Della republica de’ vinitiani, dating from 1526–27 and the only work to be published in his lifetime.⁶⁹ For reasons of space, Giannotti’s work on the Venetian constitution is not included in this article, which instead seeks to explore the writer’s views on monarchy in relation to the government of Florence.⁷⁰

Giannotti’s active involvement in Florentine political affairs began during the so-called Last Republic of Florence (1527–30) when he held Machiavelli’s former post as first secretary to the ‘Ten of Liberty and Peace’ (Dieci di Libertà e Pace) from September 1527. A key document from this period is the Discorso sopra il fermare il governo di Firenze, written in late 1528 while Niccolò Capponi was still gonfaloniere and head of government, although Capponi’s ‘ill chance, and the wrongdoing of those who persecuted him’ meant that he never acted upon it.⁷¹ This was no idealistic manifesto but a practical programme for constitutional reform to which we will return.⁷² After the city fell to the combined military might of Emperor Charles V and that same pope whom he had formerly congratulated, leading to the accession of Alessandro de’ Medici, Giannotti was imprisoned, tortured and finally banished in December 1530. Seven years later, in the rapidly evolving political situation that followed Alessandro de’ Medici's assassination on 6 January 1537, Giannotti first joined Cardinal Ridolfi in actively seeking to reverse the decision to appoint Cosimo de’ Medici as the new ruler of Florence, before later returning as an official spokesman to the duke on behalf of the fuorusciti or exiles in May 1537. The failure of both petitions paved the way to military confrontation.⁷³

Giannotti’s major treatise on the government of Florence, Della repubblica fiorentina, is usually dated between 1531 and 1534, with a series of final amendments and the addition of the dedication in 1537–38. Studies of the evolution of the manuscript highlight the contradictions and shifts in Giannotti’s thought that prompted the editing of the work in the light of the rapid changes in political circumstances that had occurred between April 1532, when Alessandro de’ Medici was made hereditary ‘Duke of the Florentine Republic’ and proceeded to abolish its nearly 250-year-old republican institutions,⁷⁴ and 1538, when France and Spain reached a truce in Nice that ended hostilities between the two super powers and reaffirmed Spain’s influence and support of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici’s absolute rule. Bisaccia was the first to comment on the marginal comment in the copy of Giannotti’s treatise preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. The apograph is a faithful copy of Giannotti’s autograph in Florence (Magliabecchiano XXX 230), to the extent that it includes the marginal comment in question which was later erased and obliterated by Giannotti himself from the Florentine original.⁷⁵ Bisaccia has dated the comment to pre-1534, therefore well into Duke Alessandro’s five-year rule and also after Giannotti’s banishment had been renewed, under stricter and more burdensome conditions in Bibbiena rather than Comeano where his brother owned a farm.⁷⁶ Such was Giannotti’s disillusionment and frustration that he wrote:

Ass that I was to believe and write this drivel as if I did not know the ambition, cowardice, miserliness of the rogues now at the head of this violent and evil tyranny.⁷⁷

This outburst – later removed from the autograph, but surviving in the Paris copy – marks the passage (Book 1.5)⁷⁸ where Giannotti had counted on the support of some of Florence’s ‘grandi’, its wealthiest merchant families, to counter the radical shift to autocracy that he saw happening under Duke Alessandro. When this failed to materialise, Giannotti cursed himself for such naivety and scribbled this comment in the margin. Notwithstanding his frustration and anger, however, Giannotti still had many influential friends among the exiles outside Florence who recognised the value of his proposals.

Della repubblica fiorentina was finally dedicated to Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, Giannotti’s patron until 1550, whose position – like Giannotti’s – had become openly antagonistic to the Medici after the death of Pope Clement VII on 25 September 1534. For both men, the last Medici pope still offered the faint hope of a resolution for the situation in Florence. Giannotti even appealed, in vain, for the pope’s personal intercession in the conditions of his banishment: on 19 June 1534, Giannotti wrote to Clement in Latin, requesting permission to return from Bibbiena to Comeano.⁷⁹

Giannotti approached the cardinal through a common acquaintance, and as he announced in a letter to his friend Benedetto Varchi on 18 February/March 1538, he sent the reworked treatise on Florence to his future patron ‘to whom it was destined from the start’.⁸⁰ This copy included the dedication to the cardinal:

I cannot think of a better person to whom to dedicate my efforts owing to your prudence and learning and all the other qualities that make men fit to undertake great enterprises […].⁸¹

Cardinal Ridolfi would also have known Machiavelli’s works – certainly the Discorsi – as well as Giannotti’s own treatises on Venice and Florence. Gennaro Sasso has corrected that assumption that the Florentine cardinal was in possession of an autograph of the Discorsi by noting that, while Ridolfi undoubtedly had a copy, it was more likely to have been taken from the manuscript that had remained in Florence and was subsequently used by the Giunti press to publish another edition of the Discorsi there in 1531, months after the book had first appeared in Rome.⁸² Ridolfi moved between Florence and Rome during these crucial years after the siege and is likely to have seen both editions. However, it is not known whether any manuscript or printed copy of either Machiavelli’s or Giannotti’s works were in the cardinal’s library, since, as Davide Muratore notes, only the Greek books were inventoried after the cardinal’s death in 1550.⁸³ Relations between Giannotti and the Ridolfi family would extend over the coming decades: Giannotti continued to receive the cardinal’s patronage and was a member of his court until the latter’s death, not formally as secretary but as a confidant and trusted advisor.⁸⁴

The focus for my discussion of Giannotti’s recommendations regarding Florence, republicanism and any form of princely power addresses the question of their relevance in the years after 1532 and the establishment of the Medicean duchy. The great historian of literary and religious culture Delio Cantimori noted ‘a marked tendency towards abstract theorising’ in Giannotti’s writing, while Pocock regarded him as ‘a more formally academic thinker’ whose ‘thought does not grow out of the tormenting experience of citizenship’.⁸⁵ Pocock is right to view him as an academic – he did after all teach for a short time at the university of Pisa – but I can think of nothing more tormenting than Giannotti’s first-hand experience of the turbulent events of 1527–30, let alone the years that followed. It can also be argued that the extended editorial process of his work on Florence, and the fact that its publication was seen as being too dangerous, even after his death, also show Giannotti’s theories as appealing to activists not academics.⁸⁶ Starn has called him a ‘Janus-like’ figure, a humanist working for the last Republic of Florence and ‘a political figure of the future’, a pointer to Giannotti’s advocacy for mixed government.⁸⁷

4. The ‘potestà regia’ in the mixed constitution

The augury for a stable government reappears in Della repubblica fiorentina, where Giannotti expresses the conviction that, if the government is reformed, all active citizens shall

live peacefully, without fear, without hatred, without suspicion, loving, defending and dedicating all their efforts to a shared liberty and civil government.⁸⁸

Such ambitions were enshrined in Florentine politics, dating back to the first priorate of the guilds of 1282, before more fully taking form in the fifteenth century. Leonardo Bruni’s high praise for the constitution of Florence, made in a funeral oration to Nanni Strozzi given in 1428, highlights the desirability of civic equality and equality before the law, and how this cannot be achieved under a sole ruler – or even an oligarchy (‘oligarchies have roughly the same weaknesses’ as monarchies).⁸⁹ Hankins warns of Bruni’s ‘shameless exaggerations, embellishments, fictions, and untruths’, ‘crowd-pleasing, Land-of-Hope-and-Glory jingoism that could not then and should not now be taken too seriously’.⁹⁰ Yet, Bruni’s comparison of the city’s republican government with the government and mores of monarchy strikes to the heart of the question by focusing on the fact that in a republic ‘liberty is real’, and ‘legal equality is the same for all citizens’. In contrast,

those who prefer royal government appear to ascribe a virtue to the king that they concede was never present in any man. What king has there ever been who would carry out all the acts involved in government for the sake of his people, and desire nothing for his own sake beyond the mere glory of the name? This is why praise of monarchy has something fictitious and shadowy [ficta et umbratilis] about it, and lacks precision and solidity’.⁹¹

This offers an interesting lens through which to reflect on Florentine political views in the radically different circumstances that followed the deaths of first Giuliano – a supporter of the Great Council, as has been seen – and then of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici Duke of Urbino, in May 1519. Machiavelli was one of several authors to submit suggestions to the most senior surviving Medici – the pontiff Leo X and his younger cousin, Cardinal Giulio – regarding the future government of the city. Machiavelli’s Discursus florentinarum rerum post mortem iunioris Laurentii Medices is usually dated to late 1520, a time when he and Giannotti were already well acquainted. Over a decade later, in 1533, Giannotti would tell the Venetian Marcantonio Michiel that he and Machiavelli had been on close terms while the latter was working on the Florentine Histories (commissioned in late 1520), writing that ‘because of my familiarity with him, he shared all his things with me’.⁹² It is not impossible that these ‘things’ also included Machiavelli’s advice on the government of Florence.

In the Discursus, Machiavelli reserved an active role for both Leo X and Giulio de’ Medici, giving them, ‘by means of the Balía, as much authority during the lives of both as is held by the entire people of Florence’, thus assuring ‘firmness to your authority in the city and to that of your friends’.⁹³ These proposals are based on a tripartite form that would allow the ruling Medici to act in counsel with the city’s elite while also giving a voice to the citizens. This renewed role for the ‘princes’ and the elite in Machiavelli’s thought from around 1520 onwards has been seen as a dramatic shift in Machiavelli’s political views, one that was refined during the writing of the Florentine Histories.⁹⁴ However, in the Discursus the importance of satisfying the most numerous group, ‘the whole general body of citizens’, is first and foremost in Machiavelli’s mind. To ensure that they are given due consideration and influence, and to prevent the bloodshed that would result if they were ignored, he writes: ‘I judge that you [Leo X and Giulio de’ Medici] are faced with the necessity of reopening the Hall of the Council of One Thousand, or at least of the Six Hundred Citizens’.⁹⁵ The Hall is of course the one that had housed the Great Council established through the advocacy of Girolamo Savonarola in 1495 and abolished in 1513. There are certainly resounding echoes of Machiavelli’s recommendations in Giannotti’s work and the essential nature of the popular component in his advice for a mixed constitution was stressed in 1528, when he described it as ‘the base and foundation of the entire state’,⁹⁶ and in Della republica fiorentina where he lavished praise on ‘the prudence of those who instituted the great council’.⁹⁷

Giannotti’s enthusiasm for an Aristotelian mixed constitution was evident from the outset of his engagement in Florentine politics. The Discorso sopra il formare il governo di Firenze, first written in 1528 at the request of Gonfaloniere Niccolò Capponi, was revised in the first year of banishment when it was dedicated to Zanobi Salimbeni Bartolini, one of the few surviving officials who Giannotti would have known during the last republic. Giannotti argues cogently for a mixed government, since ‘it is necessary to combine all three said types of republic’: the popular, the oligarchic and the ‘principate of a single man'.⁹⁸ ‘Properly ordered’ in this manner, ‘each category of citizens is able to obtain its desires’.⁹⁹ Unlike Machiavelli in his proposal of 1521, Giannotti did not single out by name the highest-ranking Medici, Pope Clement VII, in his Discorso, but in the letter to Bartolini, written after the disastrous end of the siege, he urges Bartolini – who had been pardoned by the Medici – to ‘persuade His Holiness to do the right thing for his fatherland, which will bring honour to his family, benefit to all, and immortal glory to his name’.¹⁰⁰ Starn notes that ‘[s]uch a proposition, quixotic, frank, and opportunistic at the same time, was altogether characteristic’ of Giannotti, but nonetheless Clement ‘evidently did not discourage Giannotti from reviving his constitutional schemes’.¹⁰¹

However, during his first period of confinement and then during the subsequent years of self-exile, Giannotti’s proposals moved away from the ‘narrow government’ (governo stretto) he had outlined for Florence in his Discorso, in which the elite predominated over the ‘democratic’ element, and toward a broad government (governo largo) in which the ‘democratic’ element – made up of the middling sort (the mediocri) and the masses (plebei) – played a greater role.¹⁰² ‘Ass that I was’, he had written in a marginal comment to Della republica fiorentina, for having preferred a government led by those ottimati or grandi, many of whom he later saw as having betrayed the republican cause. Indeed, in Book 3.3 of Della republica fiorentina, Giannotti concludes that the republic ‘should not incline towards the kingdom, nor should it lean to the rule of the few, in other words to the aristocracy’.¹⁰³ Instead, it should lean towards ‘popularity’, and it is the people, the popular voice that contributes most to the ‘common good life which is the purpose of the city’.¹⁰⁴ ‘I conclude’, he writes, ‘that the people know best how to rule and they should be granted the government’.¹⁰⁵ Nonetheless, in order to establish such a broad government, Giannotti advocates that, in line with ‘our proposal (ordine)’, ‘our republic’ will also need monarchical and aristocratic components.¹⁰⁶

For our purposes, the key question to address in both Machiavelli’s and Giannotti’s models of mixed rule is the form taken by the ‘royal’ power. Earlier in Discourses – in Book 1.9, for example¹⁰⁷ – Machiavelli had made it clear that there were times when it was appropriate for a sole ruler, provided he abided by the law, to take charge of the state and quell the nobility in order to preserve the res publica. Later in his Discursus for the remodelling of the government after Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death, Machiavelli singled out the role of the two highest-ranking ecclesiastics in the Medici family. The resulting form of government unambiguously resembles an absolute monarchy:

[I]t is a monarchy, because you [Leo X and Giulio de’ Medici] have authority over the armed forces, you have authority over the criminal judges, you keep the laws in your bosom; I do not know anything more to be wished for in a city.¹⁰⁸

The key phrase for understanding Machiavelli’s train of thought, however, is the opening few words of this assertion and in what is not said: such a ‘monarchy’ would exist during the pope’s and the cardinal’s lifetimes but, of course, not in that of their heirs, since there could be none.¹⁰⁹ This was monarchy, but not as it was understood in any other nation, except perhaps in the Papal States.

What of Giannotti? Does his construct of ‘royal’ power echo Machiavelli’s? Felix Gilbert wrote, in 1968 – the same year as Starn’s ground-breaking work was published – that Giannotti ‘was not a disciple who followed blindly the precepts of the master’.¹¹⁰ Gilbert’s focus was Giannotti’s study of the Venetian constitution, Della repubblica de’ Veneziani, but the point holds true equally for Giannotti’s recommendations for Florence in which he goes further than ‘the master’, particularly in what interests us here: the ‘royal’ power. After the failure of Florence’s republican government to implement the reforms he proposed to Capponi in 1528, and in view of the changing events in the city, in Della republica fiorentina Giannotti advocates the benefits of the office of a ‘principe perpetuo’, a permanent, lifelong prince, in his recommendations. This ‘principe’ is an evolution of Machiavelli’s definition: for Giannotti the ‘prince’ is no dynastic scion, no representative of a bloodline (even if, as ecclesiastics, the pope and cardinal were at the end of their respective lines, in theory), but an official, a citizen who holds an elected, lifetime position – in short a gonfaloniere or doge.

Therefore in this government that we seek, one must be Prince, but his principate shall not depend on him; the grandi must command but that authority shall not rest with them; the multitude must be free, but that liberty shall be dependent, and finally the middling sort, as well as being free, may obtain honour, but that faculty shall not be decided by them.¹¹¹

Unsurprisingly, Giannotti cites the example of Venice whose republic has been able to ‘live serenely and last a long time’.¹¹² Other republics without a lifetime ‘prince’ – and Genoa, Lucca and Siena are mentioned – have been torn by ‘intrinsic discords and have seen frequent changes’.¹¹³ Moreover, Florence itself provides ample testimony of ‘the tranquillity of governments where there is a perpetual prince, and the disquiet suffered when this institution (ordine) is lacking’ – an obvious reference first to the years of 1502–12 and then to those after 1512.¹¹⁴ The key model Giannotti had in mind was that of Piero Soderini, who was elected as gonfaloniere for life in 1502, an innovation which he describes as ‘excellent and most useful for the city’.¹¹⁵ In passing, it might be useful to clarify Giannotti’s unusual turn of phrase quoted above, that the freedom of the multitude shall be dependent, by referring to an earlier phrase in Book 1, Chapter 3 of Della republica Fiorentina. Here he writes that the poor [poveri] do not wish to command but, fearing the insolence of the grandi, they will only obey ‘the law which commands all, without distinction’; therefore, Giannotti concludes, ‘it is sufficient for [the poor] to be free, given that anyone is free if he but obeys the laws’.¹¹⁶ Hence, in a state where ‘vivere politico', to which I soon turn, those checks and balances of institutions and the rule of law are respected by all, freedom is the reward for a law-abiding citzenship.

Machiavelli’s qualified recommendation of a ‘royal’ element in his proposed reform of 1520 was therefore expanded and developed by Giannotti, outlining the ‘perfect mixed constitution with a division of power tailored to the [changed] Florentine circumstances’ after 1532.¹¹⁷ Referring to ‘our’ republic, governed following ‘our’ proposed institutions, Giannotti fully owns the realistic possibility of returning to a mode of governance that gave a preponderant voice to the middling sort and the people. These were not the ideas of an ‘academic thinker’, as Pocock suggested, or of an ‘armchair scholar’, as Riklin writes,¹¹⁸ but viable propositions to deal with the present situation of Florence, and above all a plan to rid the city of its tyrannical ruler and install a stable republican government.

5. Tyranny and vivere politico

In Della republica fiorentina, Giannotti dwells at length on monarchy’s evil twin, tyranny, a form of government contrary to ‘civil life’. Machiavelli never used the term ‘tyrant’ in The Prince, although tyranny is amply discussed in Discourses. But it is more revealing to compare Machiavelli’s treatment of the Medici in Florentine Histories with Giannotti’s outspoken criticisms in Della republica fiorentina. In the dedicatory letter to Pope Clement VII, dated presumably in 1525 when he presented the work to the pontiff, Machiavelli goes out of his way to stress his ‘fair’ treatment of Florence’s fifteenth-century rulers in the somewhat disingenuous claim that ‘if under those remarkable deeds of theirs was hidden an ambition contrary to the common utility, as some say, I who do not know it am not bound to write about it’.¹¹⁹

Roberto Ridolfi throws light on the friendship between Machiavelli and Giannotti between circa 1520 and Machiavelli’s death, but notes what might appear to be a surprising inversion of status and reputation: Machiavelli was the “poor dejected man from San Casciano”, writing the Florentine Histories to commission, while Giannotti, fully twenty years younger, was then teaching at Pisa and, in terms of learning, clearly his superior.¹²⁰ As mentioned above, on 30 June 1533, and writing in different circumstances – having been banished from Florence – Giannotti informed Marcantonio Michiel how Machiavelli had confided to him, that he ‘could not write’ about the period of Medici dominance in the Histories ‘as I would if I were free from all scruples’.¹²¹ Instead, Giannotti wrote, Machiavelli repeatedly told him that he had described the events but not the ‘causes’ and ‘methods’ of the Medici ascendancy; and to ‘note well what I make his [Cosimo de’ Medici’s] adversaries say, because what I do not wish to say as coming from myself I shall put in the mouths of his adversaries’.¹²² It is clear from the letter that Giannotti had read the autograph of Machiavelli’s Storie fiorentine well before the author's death, rather than when it was published in 1531.¹²³ Giannotti’s final comment in the letter to Michiel was that ‘[Machiavelli] wrote nothing about events later than 1492. He sincerely wanted to continue to the more recent past, and was very excited about; and he would have done it well, because he was present at all the events up until 1512’.¹²⁴

By contrast Giannotti had no such scruples in writing of the most recent events of his own lifetime and that of his readers. He openly asserted that Florence had fallen ‘under the yoke of tyranny’ when Giuliano and Giovanni de’ Medici returned in 1512.¹²⁵ The next generation of Medici were worse: Giannotti describes Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, as absolute lord (signore assoluto) of Florence, a position he achieved with the support of King Francis I of France.¹²⁶ The regime after 1532 is described as tyranny and although Giannotti never refers to Duke Alessandro de’ Medici by name, his cutting remarks pull no punches.

But at present there can be no one who is not aware of the intention of the man who is master of the present tyranny, having seen magistrates removed, fortresses built, he treats everyone imperiously and adopts lordly ways … ¹²⁷

The long tradition of anti-tyranny in Italy, stemming from the distinguished fourteenth-century jurist Bartolo da Sassoferrato, has been the focus of several historians, including J.G.A. Pocock.¹²⁸ In the minds of many Florentine political thinkers – including Leonardo Bruni, Machiavelli, and Giannotti himself – the assassination of a tyrant was a price worth paying for liberty.¹²⁹ In Della republica fiorentina Giannotti is openly supportive of tyrannicide as the most radical measure to halt absolutism and reintroduce a republican regime. The choice of dedicatee for the work may have changed – not dissimilar to the case of The Prince. In the early phases of writing, during his banishment, Giannotti might have considered dedicating his work to Pope Clement VII.¹³⁰ But the pope’s death in 1534 changed everything, freeing a movement of moderate Florentine ottimati, including Cardinal Ridolfi, to coalesce in the hope that a change of regime in Florence was still feasible. Soldini’s arguments for a later dating of the dedication to Ridolfi are linked to the letters to Benedetto Varchi in 1538.¹³¹ This hypothesis places the dedication after the assassination of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici by Lorenzino de’ Medici on 6 January 1537.¹³² If the dedication was indeed written post factum, then Giannotti’s praise for the act of tyrannicide confirms the stiffened resolve among the fuorusciti to reinstate a republican government in Florence. In any event, although no definitive answer can be given to the question of whether Giannotti’s words are an augury of tyrannicide or a celebration of its accomplishment, the sentiment is clear-cut:

Of all the undertakings, Monsignor [Ridolfi], which are taken for the universal benefit of mankind, freeing cities from tyranny is regarded as great and marvellous.¹³³

This exhortation is repeated in the last chapter of Book 4 where Giannotti encourages ‘some citizen to bring great benefit to our city’ and free it from the malignity of fortune under which it currently labours.¹³⁴ In preparing and carrying out such a step he (indirectly) refers his reader to Machiavelli’s extensive advice for conspirators in Discourses 3.6, noting that in ‘seizing the opportunity’, great prudence is needed in order to avoid ruin.¹³⁵

But how can we square such utter condemnation of the sixteenth-century Medici with the notion of ‘royal’ power in Giannotti’s scheme of republican government? Would it not be possible for the lifetime holder of such power to descend into tyranny, if the checks and balances failed to work, or if violence was used? Whitfield, whose work was mentioned in the introduction, discusses a term which brings us back to the purity of the mixed form of government advocated by both writers. This is vivere politico, whose etymology and occurrence Whitfield discusses in detail.¹³⁶ Not long before Whitfield, Hans Baron had also discussed vivere politico and noted ‘one may take it for certain that as a rule (Machiavelli is never wholly consistent) il vivere politico – almost identical with una repubblica – means what we call a republic, while il vivere libero, il vivere civile, la vita civile may be found in monarchies as well as republics’.¹³⁷ So the term is used by Machiavelli to signify a republican government whose institutions are not corrupted and whose inhabitants are equal: as in Discourses, I.55, discussed earlier, and more particularly Discourses 1.18 which again focuses on corruption and stresses that ‘to reconstitute political life in a state presupposes a good man, whereas to have recourse to violence in order to make oneself prince in a republic supposes a bad man’.¹³⁸

In contrast to Machiavelli, the term ‘vivere politico’ only appears once, albeit in an expanded form – ‘vivere universale, e politico’ – in Giannotti’s Della republica Fiorentina: the context is highly significant, in the years after 1530, as it underlines the implications of a ‘recourse to violence, known to the whole World’ (Book 1, Chapter 5).¹³⁹ In this section, Giannotti reproduces the Machiavellian categories of corruption, inequality and improbity (in the form of pride), but he stresses how in 1494 and again in 1527 these were countered by the influence of the Great Council. Instead, he identifies a turning point in 1530, when the violence of the ‘second return’ of the Medici and the harsh measures to which many Florentine patricians (‘many citizens of great quality’) were subjected in the latter phase of the republican government, 1529–30, had ‘alienated’ their soul (animo) from the notion of a republic, or as he writes: ‘è necessario che abbiano l’animo alienato dal vivere universale, e politico’.¹⁴⁰ This alienation had prompted these patricians to turn to the Medici and support their return. Nonetheless, Giannotti firmly believed that the essential nature of the city (like Machiavelli, he talks of the ‘humour’ of the city) had remained unchanged – indeed, the ‘violent way of life observed at present’ had reaffirmed the desire for ‘a peaceful and quiet way of life’, under the mixed republican government that Giannotti proceeds to outline.¹⁴¹

Whitfield takes his analysis based on Machiavelli’s use of the term ‘vivere politico’ further by connecting the term with Lorenzino de’ Medici, Duke Alessandro de’ Medici’s assassin, whom Giannotti in all likelihood met on various occasions.¹⁴² In the Apologia, written to justify the assassination, Lorenzino de’ Medici claimed that ‘men should not desire more than vivere politico [a republic], and therefore living in freedom’, and that ‘since tyranny is completely contrary to vivere politico [a republic], it must likewise be hated above all else’.¹⁴³

6. Conclusion

Quentin Skinner wrote that ‘for Machiavelli the question of whether a monarchy can be a repubblica is not an empty paradox, as it would be for us, but a deep question of statecraft’. The key question he continued to identify was whether ‘kings can ever be relied upon to pass only such laws as will serve the common good’ – drawing on similar phrasing in Bruni’s oration.¹⁴⁴ As Skinner points out: ‘Machiavelli is telling us that, under Romulus and his successors, the laws of Rome served the common good, so that the government, although monarchical in form, was an instance of a repubblica’.¹⁴⁵ This was the true res publica or the things common to a people – and the preferable form of liberty as clearly expressed in the Discourses. In Book II.2, Machiavelli speaks of how this affection for self-government [del vivere libero] is only truly present in republics: ‘it is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly in that all that promotes it is carried out … . The opposite happens where there is a prince’.¹⁴⁶

Yet a key innovation of the Machiavellian republic is its ability to adapt. As Machiavelli writes eloquently: ‘a republic has a fuller life and enjoys good fortune for a longer time than a principality, since it is better able to adapt itself to diverse circumstances owing to the diversity found among its citizens than a prince can do’ (Discourses, III.9). In certain situations, the ability to change to suit the times admits the need for the potestà regia: for Machiavelli, princes create or restore states, whereas republics preserve them. Machiavelli himself proposed a role for the Medici in his Discursus, and Giannotti, who had enjoyed ‘familiarity’ (dimestichezza) with him, later drew on this model.

The change of language introduced by Giannotti who refers to the role of the ‘principe perpetuo’ highlights the importance of the monarchical element in the mixed constitution. As Nicholas Scott Baker has argued, the continuum of political experience that underlay the dramatic shifts in Florentine politics in the early sixteenth century shows that ‘republics and monarchies in early modern Europe were far closer in terms of political culture’ than has sometimes been understood.¹⁴⁷ Giannotti remained politically active, although effectively muzzled by Medici censorship and bound by his own iron will not to concede to a regime that he recognised as tyrannical rule. While writing his main work on the Florentine government in the 1530s, his views evolved, particularly in response to the alienation of some of the previously pro-republican Florentine patricians who were won over by the absolutist regime – accusing himself of having been an ‘ass’ not to foresee this. Yet he remained politically engaged and saw no irony in accepting a role in the courtly entourage of his patron, Cardinal Ridolfi, because the latter was as staunchly anti-Medicean as himself. Giannotti’s reforms for Florence, at least, were not utopian, but rather part of a broader view of how to assure the stability of the Florentine state at a particularly dramatic juncture. Felix Gilbert stressed this practical aspect with reference to Giannotti’s study of the Venetian Republic, noting his ‘much more concrete and realistic treatment of political problems than the humanists’.¹⁴⁸ As Simoncelli has shown, Florentine republicanism did not end with the defeat of the Florentine exiles at Montemurlo but it continued to thrive in the Florentine communities, whether in Rome, Lyons, Venice or elsewhere. Absolutist rule in Florence was threatened by the assassination of the duke in 1537 – when Giannotti heralded the tyrannicide as the ‘Tuscan Brutus’ – and again in the Pucci conspiracies of 1559 and 1575. But in the event of a regime change, Giannotti realised that the elected, lifelong ‘prince’ had an essential role to play. This model re-emerged in Giannotti’s recommendations for the government of Siena, the Discorso sopra il riordinare la Repubblica di Siena of 1552, although these reforms did nothing to prevent the fall of that republic in April 1555.¹⁴⁹ William Connell has now drawn scholars’ attention to Giannotti’s vernacular manuscript of Della republica ecclesiastica (1541), written ‘at the request and for the use of’ Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, and, like the earlier work on Florence, dedicated to him.¹⁵⁰ Giannotti proposed to introduce democratic (election of the bishops by the clergy and people of their diocese) and oligarchical (the legislative and executive role of the College of Cardinals, resembling a senate) elements to the Church of Rome itself – a scheme that, with hindsight, as Connell writes, could indeed be described as ‘utopian’.¹⁵¹ One is tempted to say, following in Stacey’s scheme, that Giannotti’s final proposition would have led to a final chapter entitled ‘Rout’. Nonetheless, the tradition of advocating mixed rule extended across the early modern period and before long would be argued by others north of the Alps and across the Atlantic, although perhaps never with the brilliance of these two secretaries of the Florentine Republic, Machiavelli and Giannotti.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 260. Part V of the book, ‘The Machiavellian Attack’, contains chapters 6 and 7 entitled ‘The Strategy’ and ‘The Battle’, respectively.

2 Randolph Starn, Donato Giannotti and his Epistolae. Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina, Rome Ms. 107 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1968).

3 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), xxiv. Pocock elaborates on the ‘particular contingencies’ and the historicist nature of the ‘Machiavellian moment’, in J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Afterword: The Machiavellian Moment : A Very Short Retrospect and Re-Introduction’, History of European Ideas 43, no. 2 (2017): 215–21, esp. 215–16.

4 Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini, ed., The Italian Renaissance State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4. In a survey of the precocious development of thriving urban centres from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, Giorgio Chittolini noted their transformation into ‘city-states’ which led to the ‘early elimination from central and northern Italy’s political firmament of any superior – king, emperor, or princes’; Giorgio Chittolini, ‘“City-States” and Regional States in North-Central Italy’, Theory and Society 18, no. 5 (1989): 689–706, esp. 689.

5 William Caferro, Contesting the Renaissance (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 156–84.

6 James Hankins, ‘Rhetoric, History, and Ideology: The Civic Panegyrics of Leonardo Bruni’, in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143–78, esp. 151, n. 22.

7 For example, see Nicholas Scott Baker, The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance 1480–1550 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 231.

8 Humphrey Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth Century Florence, 1502–1519 (Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1985); Josephine Jungić notes that after 1512 the Medici are more often seen as ‘a monolithic entity, with all members united in a single effort of strengthening the regime’, Giuliano de’Medici: Machiavelli’s Prince in Life and Art (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), 8. Christine Shaw rightly emphasises the overlaps between popular government and oligarchy, both more broadly across Italy and specifically in Siena; see Christine Shaw, Popular Government and Oligarchy in Renaissance Italy (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2006).

9 The Kingdom of Naples was the only monarchy on the peninsula, but the evolution of papal plenitudo potestatis developed from the late eleventh century. A renewed discussion of the concept of ‘papal monarchy’ was introduced by Paolo Prodi in his 1982 book, Il sovrano pontefice; see Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince, trans. Susan Haskins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). More recent studies of the origins and development of the Roman Curia include Miles Pattenden, ‘The Roman Curia’, in A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692, ed. Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 44–59.

10 Giannotti’s spelling of ‘republica’ highlights the Latinate roots. I have not modernised the title here, but later editions often use the accepted Italian orthography. On Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, see Lucinda Byatt, Niccolò Ridolfi and the Cardinal’s Court. Politics, Patronage and Service in Sixteenth-Century Italy (New York/Abingdon: Routledge, 2023).

11 J.H. Whitfield, ‘The Politics of Machiavelli’, The Modern Language Review 50, no. 4 (October 1955): 434.

12 Jean-Marc Rivière, ‘The French and Spanish Monarchies in the Embassy Writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini’ in this issue.

13 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 15.

14 Rivière, ‘The French and Spanish Monarchies in the Embassy Writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini’.

15 Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, 69.

16 Ibid., 15.

17 Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 9.

18 Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 59.

19 Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince, 300.

20 For a valuable assessment that I have not been able to include here in full, see Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci, ‘Introduction: Reorienting Machiavelli’, in Machiavelli, Islam and the East: Reorienting the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 4–5.

21 I thank Carolina Armenteros for pointing me in this direction: for a valuable discussion of Montesquieu’s (unacknowledged) debt to Machiavelli on the separation between sovereignty and judgement, see Paul A. Rahe, ‘Montesquieu’s Anti-Machiavellian Machiavellianism’, History of European Ideas 37, no. 2 (2011): 128–36, esp. 133 and n. 44. Montesquieu’s theoretical expansion of the ‘despotic disease’ is also considered by Vickie B. Sullivan, Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe: An Interpretation of “The Spirit of the Laws”. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017), esp. chapter 1.

22 Machiavelli, Prince, 1988, 16.

23 Ibid.

24 Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine Histories. A New Translation. Trans. Laura Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield (Princeton University Press, 1990), 55–56 (II.3); 74–75 (II.21).

25 Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 50 (I.39): ‘All these principal powers were not armed with arms of their own […] the Florentines also obeyed the same necessities because, having eliminated their nobility by frequent divisions, the republic was left in the hands of men nurtured in trade and thus continued in the orders and fortune of the others’.

26 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4 (chapter 1).

27 Ibid., 42 (chapter 12).

28 Ibid., 50 (chapter 13).

29 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker and Brian Richardson. Reprinted with corrections (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 253 (I.58).

30 Ibid., 389–90 (III.1).

31 Ibid., 168–69 (I.21).

32 Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, 76 (chapter 21).

33 Erica Benner, Machiavelli’s Prince. A New Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), liii.24/10/2020 08:59:00

34 Ibid., 224.

35 Machiavelli, The Prince, 1988, 18.

36 Ibid., 18–19.

37 Machiavelli, The Discourses, 243–48.

38 Machiavelli, The Prince, 1988, 5 (chapter 1).

39 Peter Stacey, ‘Definition, Division, and Difference in Machiavelli’s Political Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 75, no. 2 (2014): 189–212, 196.

40 Machiavelli, The Discourses, 247. Crick notes (536, n.34) that ‘this is the most important discourse in the whole book’.

41 Ibid., 245–46.

42 Ibid., 246.

43 Ibid.

44 Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, 83 (chapter 24).

45 Ibid., 6.

46 Russell Price’s translation here reads: ‘their rulers having been for a long time from the same family’: Machiavelli, The Prince, 5.

47 Machiavelli, The Discourses, 166 (1.19). Sultan Mahomet is likened by Machiavelli to the biblical figure, David, King of Israel and Judah, who had defeated Goliath and was then able to rule peacefully.

48 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Chief Works, and Others. Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Allan H. Gilbert, ‘Discourse on Remodelling the Government of Florence’, 107.

49 Machiavelli, The Discourses, 98.

50 Ibid., 396 (III.V).

51 Donato Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 186.

52 Machiavelli, The Discourses, 396.

53 Simone Albonico, ‘Donato Giannotti’, in Autografi dei letterati italiani. Il Cinquecento II, ed. Matteo Motolese, Paolo Procaccioli, and Emilio Russo (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2013), 217–34.

54 Ibid.

55 Roberto Ridolfi, ‘Nuovi contributi alla biografia di Donato Giannotti’, Rivista storica degli archivi toscani I (1929): 213–47; Id., Opuscoli di storia letteraria e di erudizione: Savonarola – Machiavelli – Guicciardini – Giannotti (Florence: Bibliopolis, 1942), vii.

56 Ridolfi, Opuscoli di storia letteraria e di erudizione, chapter on Giannotti, 55–164.

57 In this article all quotations come from Giovanni Silvano’s 1990 edition and the English translations are mine: see Donato Giannotti, Opere. Ed. Furio Diaz. Vol. 1. Opere politiche (Milan: Marzorati Editore, 1974); Théa Stella Picquet, Della repubblica fiorentina (Rome: Aracne, 2011). For Albonico’s comments on various transcription errors in Picquet’s edition based on his philological analysis of Giannotti’s autographs and the letters sent by Giannotti as secretary to the Dieci di libertà e pace, see Simone Albonico, ‘Donato Giannotti e gli ultimi giorni della repubblica fiorentina’, in Varchi e altro Rinascimento. Studi offerti a Vanni Bramanti, ed. Salvatore Lo Re and Franco Tomasi (Manziana (Roma): Vecchiarello Editore, 2013), 217, n.3.

58 Starn, Donato Giannotti and His Epistolae, vii; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment.

59 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, xii.

60 Giuseppe Bisaccia, La repubblica fiorentina di Donato Giannotti (Florence: Olschki, 1978); Giorgio Cadoni, L’utopia repubblicana di Donato Giannotti (Milan: Giuffrè, 1978); Id., Crisi della mediazione politica e conflitti sociale: Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini e Donato Giannotti di fronte al tramonto della Florentina libertas (Rome: Jouvence, 1994).

61 Albonico, ‘Donato Giannotti e gli ultimi giorni della repubblica fiorentina’; Hélène Soldini, ‘Della republica de’ viniziani de Donato Giannotti, un projet editorial avorté’, in Varchi e altro rinascimento. Studi offerti a Vanni Bramanti, ed. Salvatore Lo Re and Franco Tomasi (Manziana (Roma): Vecchiarello Editore, 2013), 579–94.

62 Paolo Simoncelli, Fuoriuscitismo repubblicano fiorentino, 1530–1554, Volume 1 (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2006), 15.

63 Francesca Russo, Donato Giannotti : pensatore politico europeo (Naples: Guida editori, 2016), 221.

64 Alois Riklin, ‘Division of Power Avant La Lettre: Donato Giannotti (1534)’, History of Political Thought 29, no. 2 (2008): 257–72.

65 William Connell’s offers further confirmation of Giannotti’s lifelong republicanism and the expansion of his ideas to include other polities, most daringly the papacy itself. Connell’s edition of Giannotti’s manuscript Della republica ecclesiastica, ed. William Connell (Turin: Einaudi, 2023), an exceptional work, dedicated to Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, highlights that it proposed nothing short of a republican reversal of the papal monarchy. I am very grateful to Bill Connell for sending me a copy of the work just in time for me to mention it here, but not in time for me to digest it and include it more fully in this argument. The story of how the author came across Giannotti’s manuscript is enough to make one believe in the occasional benevolence of Fortune.

66 J.N. Stephens, The Fall of the Florentine Republic 1512–1530 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 72.

67 Starn, Donato Giannotti and His Epistolae, 14–15.

68 Ibid., 17, 155, see Ep. XXXII.

69 It was first published by Antonio Blado d’Asolo in Rome, 1540. Felix Gilbert, ‘The Date of the Composition of Contarini’s and Giannotti’s Books on Venice’, Studies in the Renaissance 14 (1967): 172–84; Id., ‘The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought’, in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 463–500; Stephen Bowd, ‘The Republics of Ideas: Venice, Florence and the Defence of Liberty, 1525–1530’, History 85, no. 279 (2000): 404–27.

70 For an extensive analysis of Giannotti’s work on Venice, see Hélène Soldini, ‘Les républiques de Donato Giannotti. Une biographie d’un républicain florentin du XVIe siècle’ (Unpublished PhD dissertation. European University Institute, Florence, 2014), vol.1, part 1.

71 ‘per la sua mala ventura, e per la cattività di quelli che lo perseguitorno’: Giannotti, Opere politiche, Lettera a Zanobi Bartolini, 155.

72 Ibid., 157–66. Diaz (Ibid., 14) cites Rudolf Von Albertini when he describes Giannotti’s abstract, utopistic approach; Von Albertini’s original 1955 work in German, which included a significant section on Giannotti, acquired increased influence after its Italian translation, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), 145–65.

73 For further reading and analysis, see Simoncelli, Fuoriuscitismo repubblicano fiorentino.

74 John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 464.

75 Giuseppe Bisaccia, ‘L’autografo della “Republica fiorentina” di Donato Giannotti’, La Bibliofilia 78, no. 2/3 (1976): 196–97.

76 Ridolfi, Opuscoli, 100.

77 ‘Coglionazzo che io sono stato a credere et scrivere questa minchioneria come se io non havessi conosciuto l’ambitione la viltà l’avaritia di quelli ribaldi che oggi sono capi di quella violenta et scellerata tyra[n]nide’. For analysis see Bisaccia, ‘L’autografo della “Repubblica fiorentina”’, 197; Soldini, ‘Les Républiques de Donato Giannotti’, vol. 1, 187. Paolo Simoncelli also uses this quotation, with a slightly different translation, at the start of his chapter, ‘Florentine Fuorusciti at the Time of Bindo Altoviti’, in Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker: The Patronage of Bindo Altoviti, ed. Alan Chong, Donatella Pegazzano, and Dimitrios Zikos (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2003), 285.

78 Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 100.

79 Starn, Donato Giannotti and His Epistolae, Ep. XVII, 109–11.

80 ‘e farne un’altra copia per mandarla al reverendissimo Ridolfi, a che egli fu destinato da principio’: Bisaccia, La repubblica fiorentina di Donato Giannotti, 216.

81 Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 71.

82 Gennaro Sasso and Giorgio Inglese, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Milan: Rizzoli editore, 1984), vii. For earlier arguments, see Cecil H. Clough, ed., The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli. Introduction by Leslie J. Walker, 2 Vols, First Published 1950. Trans. Leslie J. Walker. Vol. I. (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), vol.1, xxiv.

83 Davide Muratore, La Biblioteca del Cardinale Niccolò Ridolfi (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2009), 319. An inventory of 1564 in the private family archive documents that Ridolfi’s nephew, Filippo, owned a copy of the Florentine Histories which passed to his sister, Clarice Ridolfi Altoviti, but there is no sign of other works.

84 Byatt, ‘Niccolò Ridolfi and the Cardinal's Court’, esp. 259–68.

85 Cantimori’s view is cited by Sergio Marconi, ‘Giannotti, Donato’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 54 (Rome: Treccani, 2000). See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 284.

86 Soldini, ‘Les Républiques de Donato Giannotti’, esp. 183–84.

87 Starn, Donato Giannotti and His Epistolae, 25.

88 All translations from Giannotti’s treatise and letters are my own. Giannotti, Della repubblica fiorentina, 75.

89 Hankins, ‘Rhetoric, History, and Ideology’, 153.

90 Ibid.

91 Ibid.

92 ‘ … Et io la vedevo mentre il Machiavello la componeva, il quale per la dimestichezza havevo seco mi faceva parte di tutte le cose sue’, Donato Giannotti, Opere, ed. Furio Diaz. Vol. 2. Lettere Italiane (Milan: Marzorati Editore, 1974), 34–35. This was the same letter in which Giannotti also divulged the methods which Machiavelli had used to portray the Medici in the Florentine Histories; for an interpretation of this letter, see this article, notes 120–121, as well as Simoncelli, Fuoriuscitismo repubblicano fiorentino, 29 n.59, and Black, Machiavelli (London/New York: Routledge, 2013), 224–45.

93 Machiavelli, ‘A Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence’, in Machiavelli. The Chief Works and Others, vol. 1, 109–110.

94 For a review of this position and the debate, see John P. McCormick, ‘Faulty Foundings and Failed Reformers in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’, American Political Science Review, 111/1 (2017): 204–16, esp. 205, n.4.

95 Machiavelli, ‘Discourse on Remodeling’, 109–110.

96 Giannotti, Opere politiche, 158.

97 Giannotti, Republica fiorentina, ed. Giovanni Silvano. Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance; no. 237 (Geneva: Droz, 1990), Preface to Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, 70.

98 Giannotti, Opere politiche, 157.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid., 158. For a more detailed analysis of Giannotti’s letter to Zanobi Bartolini, see Francesca Russo, Donato Giannotti, 52–57. On Bartolini, see Roberto Cantagalli, Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 6, 1964.

101 Starn, Donato Giannotti and His Epistolae, 33.

102 Riklin, ‘Division of Power’, 262.

103 ‘una republica non debbe inclinare nel regno, similmente, non debbe pendere nello stato de’ pochi, o vero aristocrazia’; Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 160.

104 ‘debbe pendere nella popularità’ and ‘bene vivere commune che è il fine della città’; Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 160.

105 ‘Onde, per l’una cosa et per l’altra, concludo che i populari sappiano meglio comandare et che a loro si aspetti l’imperio’. Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 163.

106 Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 165.

107 Machiavelli, Discourses, 131–34. As a general rule, Machiavelli states, radical transformation and the organisation of a state ‘for the common good’ is usually undertaken by one person (132).

108 ‘[E]lla è una monarchia: perché voi comandate all'armi, comandate a' giudici criminali, avete le leggi in petto; né so più quello che più si possa desiderare uno in una città’. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Chief Works, and Others. Vol. 1, 113.

109 Ibid.

110 Felix Gilbert, ‘The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought’, 494.

111 Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 83–84.

112 Ibid., 186.

113 Ibid., 186.

114 Ibid., 187.

115 Ibid., 75.

116 Ibid., 83.

117 Riklin, ‘Division of Power’, 263.

118 Ibid., 259.

119 Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 4.

120 Ridolfi, Opuscoli, 64.

121 ‘come io la scriverei se io fossi libero da tutti i respetti’. For a comparison of the use of the term ‘rispetti’ see Istorie fiorentine, IV.24: ‘La paura per tanto che il Duca ebbe di questo gli fece porre da parte i respetti’. This is translated as ‘scruples’ in Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 170.

122 Robert Black, Machiavelli, 244–45.

123 Albonico, ‘Donato Giannotti e gli ultimi giorni’, 218; Ridolfi, Opuscoli, 62–65.

124 ‘Dal 1492 in qua non ha scritto altro. Voleva bene seguitare per insino a questi ultimi tempi, et ci haveva su grande animo; et harebbe fatto bene, perchè si era trovato a tutte le attioni per insino al 1512’, Giannotti, Lettere italiane, 35; Ridolfi, Opuscoli, 63.

125 Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 70.

126 Ibid., 205–6. The treacherous nature of the French king’s conduct later in 1527–29 is underlined by Giannotti’s quip that only the blind would have failed to see it coming, and anyone ready to trust the king – by inference Florence’s leaders during the siege – is worse than foolish.

127 Ibid., 75.

128 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, viii.

129 Giannotti would later return to the theme of tyrannicide in a dialogue entitled Dialogi de’ Giorni che Dante consumò nel cercare l’Inferno. See among others, Manfredi Piccolomini, The Brutus Revival. Parricide and Tyrannicide during the Renaissance (Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).

130 Bisaccia, ‘L’autografo della “Repubblica fiorentina”’, 213.

131 See note 66 above; Soldini, ‘Les Républiques de Donato Giannotti’, vol. 1, 200–203.

132 Bisaccia, ‘L’autografo della “Repubblica fiorentina”’, 213–16.

133 Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 69.

134 Ibid., 256. On the closing chapter and the inverted order of the books, see Soldini, ‘Les Républiques de Donato Giannotti’, vol.1, 346.

135 ‘But these matters will not be discussed because they belong to the discussion of conspiracies, which has been examined most prudently by others’; Giannotti, Republica Fiorentina, 256.

136 Whitfield, ‘Politics of Machiavelli’, 438–39.

137 The reference to Baron is cited by Alfredo Bonadeo, ‘The Role of the “Grandi” in the Political World of Machiavelli’, Studies in the Renaissance 16 (1969): 9–30, 22, n. 28; Hans Baron, . ‘Machiavelli: The Republican Citizen and the Author of “The Prince”’, The English Historical Review 76, no. 299 (1961): 226, n. 1.

138 Machiavelli, The Discourses, 163 (I.18), 247 (I.55).

139 Giannotti, Della republica fiorentina, 100.

140 Ibid., 8–9, 100.

141 Ibid., 100–101.

142 Whitfield, ‘Politics of Machiavelli’, 441; Stefano Dall’Aglio, L’Assassino del duca. Esilio e morte di Lorenzino de’ Medici (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2011).

143 My translation; Francesco Erspamer, ed., Apologia e lettere di Lorenzino de’ Medici (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1991), 4. For Lorenzino’s subsequent relations with Giannotti and Cardinal Ridolfi, see Dall’Aglio, Assassino del duca.

144 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: University Press, 2002), 55–56.

145 Ibid.

146 Machiavelli, Discourses, II.2, 275.

147 Scott Baker, Fruit of Liberty, 3.

148 Felix Gilbert, ‘Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought’, 463–500, here 491.

149 Giannotti, Opere politiche, 413–32; Russo, Donato Giannotti, 257–65. For an account of the fate of the reforms to Siena’s popular government and its fall, see Shaw, Popular Government and Oligarchy in Renaissance Italy, 296–97.

150 William Connell, ‘Introduzione’, in Giannotti, Della republica ecclesiastica, XV. Giannotti translated it later into Latin, Ecclesiasticae Historiae Epitome (BNCF, ms. II.IV.185; see Connell, XIV–XV), passages of which were redacted by the censor, although it remained unpublished.

151 William Connell, ‘Introduzione’, LXI.