Francesco Guicciardini

Francesco Guicciardini
Born	6 March 1483(1483-03-06) Florence, Italy
Died	22 May 1540(1540-05-22) (aged 57) Arcetri, Italy
Occupation	Historian, statesman

Francesco Guicciardini (Italian pronunciation: [franˈtʃesko ɡwitˈtʃardini]; March 6, 1483 – May 22, 1540) was an Italian historian and statesman. A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance. Guicciardini is considered as the Father of Modern History, due to his use of government documents to verify his "History of Italy." He was the uncle of Lodovico Guicciardini who wrote a description of the Low Countries in 1567.

Early life

Guicciardini was born in Florence in the year 1483; humanist Marsilio Ficino held him at the font of baptism. His family was illustrious and noble; and his ancestors for many generations had held the highest posts of honor in the state, as may be seen in his own genealogical Ricordi autobiografici e di famiglia. After the usual education of a boy in grammar and elementary classical studies, his father, Piero, sent him to the universities of Ferrara and Padua, where he stayed until the year 1505.

The death of an uncle, who had occupied the see of Cortona, induced the young Guicciardini to hanker after an ecclesiastical career. Guicciardini, whose motives were confessedly ambitious, then turned his attention to law, and at the age of twenty-three was appointed by the Signoria of Florence to read the Institutes in public. Shortly afterwards he engaged himself in marriage to Maria, daughter of Alamanno Salviati, prompted, as he frankly tells us, by the political support which an alliance with that great family would bring him.

He was then practicing at the bar, where he won so much distinction that the Signoria, in 1512, entrusted him with an embassy to the court of the King of Aragon, Ferdinand the Catholic. "No one could remember at Florence that such a young man had ever been chosen for such an embassy," he wrote in his diary.

Start of career beyond Florence

Guicciardini started his career as a diplomat and statesman. His conduct upon that legation was afterwards severely criticized: his political antagonists accused him of betraying the true interests of the commonwealth, and using his influence for the restoration of the exiled house of Medici to power.

His Spanish correspondence with the Signoria reveals Guicciardini's power of observation and analysis which was a chief quality of his mind; in Ferdinand, hypocritical and profoundly dissimulative, he found a proper object for his scientific study. Guicciardini's autobiographical memories show that he was ambitious, calculating, avaricious and power-loving from his earliest years; and in Spain he had no more than an opportunity of studying on a large scale those political vices which already ruled the minor potentates of Italy.

Guicciardini issued from this first trial of his skill with an assured reputation for diplomatic ability, as that was understood in Italy. To unravel plots and weave counterplots; to meet treachery with fraud; to parry force with sleights of hand; to credit human nature with the basest motives, while the blackest crimes were contemplated with cold enthusiasm for their cleverness, was reckoned then the height of political sagacity.

Papal service

In 1513 Giovanni Medici, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, became Pope Leo X and brought Florence under Papal control. This provided opportunities for Florentines to enter Papal service, and in 1515 he began working for the papacy. Leo X made him governor of Reggio in 1516 and Modena in 1517. This was the beginning of a long career for Guicciardini in Papal administration, first under Leo X, and then his successor, Clement VII. "He governed Modena and Reggio with conspicuous success," according to The Catholic Encyclopedia, and he was appointed to govern Parma. In that city, according to the Encyclopedia, "in the confusion that followed the pope's death, he distinguished himself by his defence of Parma against the French (1521)."

In 1523 he was appointed viceregent of Romagna by Pope Clement VII (1478–1534). These high offices rendered Guicciardini the virtual master of the papal states beyond the Apennines, during a period of great bewilderment and difficulty. In 1526 Clement gave him still higher rank as lieutenant-general of the papal army. While holding this commission, he had the humiliation of witnessing from a distance the sack of Rome and the imprisonment of Clement, without being able to rouse the perfidious Duke of Urbino into activity. The blame of Clement's downfall did not rest with him; for it was merely his duty to attend the camp, and keep his master informed of the proceedings of the generals. Guicciardini had anyway previously counselled the pope to declare war, as he notes in a letter to himself written in 1527.

Guicciardini went to Florence, but by 1527 the Medici had been expelled from the city and a republic set up. Because of his close ties to the Medici, Guicciardini was held suspect in his native city, and he fled in 1529 to the Papal Court.

Despite Guicciardini's regrets about his earlier counsel to the pope, Clement did not withdraw his confidence, and in 1531 Guicciardini was advanced to the governorship of Bologna, the most important cities in the northern Papal States. This post he resigned in 1534 on the election of Paul III, preferring to follow the fortunes of the Medici princes. Although Guicciardini served three popes through a period of twenty years, or perhaps because of this, he hated the papacy with a deep and frozen bitterness, attributing the woes of Italy to the ambition of the church, and declaring he had seen enough of sacerdotal abominations to make him a Lutheran.

Service to the Medici

The same discord between his private opinions and his public actions may be traced in his conduct subsequent to 1534. As a political theorist, Guicciardini believed that the best form of government was a commonwealth administered upon the type of the Venetian constitution; and he had judged the tyranny of the Medici at its true worth. Yet he did not hesitate to place his powers at the disposal of members of that house. In 1527 he had been declared a rebel by the Signoria on account of his well-known Medicean prejudices; and in 1530, deputed by Clement to punish the citizens after their revolt, he revenged himself with cruelty.

Statue of Guicciardini in the Uffizi, Florence.

When, therefore, he returned to inhabit Florence in 1534, he did so as the creature of Alessandro de Medici. Guicciardini defended him at Naples in 1535, before the bar of Charles V, from the accusations brought against him by the Florentine exiles. According to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica:

He won his case; but in the eyes of all posterity he justified the reproaches of his contemporaries, who describe him as a cruel, venal, grasping seeker after power, eager to support a despotism for the sake of honors, offices and emoluments secured for himself by a bargain with the oppressors of his country. Benedetto Varchi, Jacopo Nardi, Jacopo Pitti and Bernardo Segni are unanimous upon this point. [...] To plead loyalty or honest political conviction in defence of his Medicean partisanship is now impossible, face to face with the opinions expressed in the Ricordi politici and the Storia Fiorentina. Like Machiavelli, but on a lower level, Guicciardini was willing to roll stones, or to do any dirty work for masters whom, in the depth of his soul, he detested and despised.

After the murder of Duke Alessandro in 1537, Guicciardini espoused the cause of Cosimo de Medici, a boy addicted to field sports, and unused to the game of statecraft, hoping to effectively rule Florence this inexperienced princeling. However Cosimo dismissed him and Guicciardini retired in disgrace to his villa at Arcetri, where he spent his last years in the composition of the Storia d'Italia. He died in 1540 without male heirs. His nephew, Lodovico Guicciardini, was also an historian known for his 16th-century works on the Low Countries.

History of Italy

Title page of an old edition of Storia d'Italia

Guicciardini is better known as the author of the Storia d'Italia ("History of Italy"), a vast and detailed picture of his country between the years 1494 and 1532.

According to 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica,

The style is prolix, precise but at the expense of circumlocution, the details as distinct as the main narrative. The whole tangled skein of Italian politics of an involved and stormy period is unravelled with patience and insight. The author is an impartial spectator, a cold and curious critic. This want of feeling impairs the interest of his history. He does not seem to be aware that he is writing a great historical tragedy from his own times. He takes as much pains on a petty war with Pisa as in probing the papacy. Whatever he touches, lies already dead on the dissecting table. He fails to understand the vigour of the forces contending in Europe for mastery; this is very noticeable in what he writes about the Reformation. The Storia d'Italia was still undoubtedly the greatest historical work that had appeared in the early modern era".

Publication of his works

Up to the year 1857 Guicciardini's reputation depended on the History of Italy, and on a few ill-edited extracts from his aphorisms. At that date his representatives, the counts Piero and Luigi Guicciardini, opened their family archives, and committed to Giuseppe Canestrini the publication of his memoirs, in ten volumes. The documents and finished literary work thus given to the world have thrown light on Guicciardini, as author and citizen.
From the stores of valuable materials contained in those ten volumes, it is enough here to cite:

• Ricordi politici e civili, already noticed, consisting of about 220 maxims on political, social, and religious topics;
• Observations on Machiavelli's Discorsi, which bring into relief the views of Italy's two great theorists on statecraft in the 16th century, and show that Guicciardini regarded Machiavelli somewhat as an amiable visionary or political enthusiast;
• Storia Fiorentina, an early work of the author, distinguished by its animation of style, brilliancy of portraiture, and liberality of judgment;
• Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, also in all probability an early work, in which the various forms of government suited to an Italian commonwealth are discussed with subtlety, contrasted, and illustrated from the vicissitudes of Florence up to the year 1494.

To these may be added a series of short essays, entitled Discorsi politici, composed during Guicciardini's Spanish legation.
Taken in combination with Machiavelli's treatises, the Opere inedite offer a comprehensive body of Italian political philosophy before Fra Paolo Sarpi.

Works

The following list contains alternate names used for his works in Italian and English:

• Storie fiorentine (first "History of Florence"; 1508–1510)
• Diario di Spagna (1512)
• Discorso di Logrogno ("Discourse of Logrogno"; 1512)
• Relazione di Spagna (1514)
• Consolatoria (1527)
• Oratio accusatoria (1527)
• Oratio defensoria (1527)
• Del reggimento di Firenze or Dialogo e discorsi del reggimento di Firenze ("Dialogue on Florentine Government" or "Dialogue on the Government of Florence"; 1527)
• Considerazioni intorno ai "Discorsi" del Machiavelli sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio ("Observations on Machiavelli's Discourses"; 1528, or possibly 1530)
• Ricordi or Ricordi politici (as the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica refers to it) or Ricordi civili e politici (the name given by Giuseppe Canestrini when he first published the book in 1857) or Ricordi politici e civili (as the Catholic Encyclopedia refers to it); in English, usually "the Ricordi" but called "Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi)" in one translation and "Counsels and Reflections" in another (1512–1530).
• Le cose fiorentine (second "History of Florence"; 1528–1531)
• Storia d'Italia ("History of Italy"; 1537–1540)

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

• Guicciardini: all the texts