GUICCIARDINI, FRANCESCO (1483–1540)

GUICCIARDINI, FRANCESCO (1483–1540) Florentine historian and political thinker. Francesco Guicciardini was the greatest historian of the Renaissance. His family rose to prominence under the Medici regime (a nascent principate operating behind a republican facade). During his lifetime the Medici were expelled from Florence and a republican regime restored (1494–1512), two members of the Medici family were elected to the papacy (Leo X and Clement VII), the Medici regained control of Florence (1512–1527) but lost it again briefly (1527–1530), and finally established themselves as hereditary princes. In external affairs, a French army invaded Italy in 1494, and the Valois monarchy subsequently attempted to establish hegemony there, but was challenged and ultimately defeated by the supranational Habsburg empire of Charles V, which from c. 1530 exercised hegemony in the peninsula. Guicciardini, who was trained as a lawyer, served the Medici papacy as a senior administrator, and was a participant in the vicissitudes of the Habsburg-Valois wars in Italy, which he narrated in his last and greatest work, the Storia d'Italia (History of Italy), composed in the late 1530s. Within Florence, the pressure of events and the conflict of interests created a political debate of such intensity that a cohort of Florentines led by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), and including Guicciardini, virtually founded the modern tradition of political thought. During the early modern period, Guicciardini was known throughout Europe for his History of Italy, and for his Ricordi (Maxims and reflections). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all of his writings were published, providing a much more complex picture of the man, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century new editions, translations, and studies continue to appear.

Guicciardini's early Storie fiorentine (Florentine histories) deals mainly with the Florentine experiment in broadly based republican government that began in 1494 and, despite many difficulties, was still in existence at the time of writing (1508–1509). Over three thousand Florentine males were permanent members of the voting assembly on which the political system was based—an extraordinarily high number in comparison to most other European states at that time, though a small fraction of the population. But political participation and influence were strongly correlated to social position, so most of the leading individual actors were members of prominent families, had aristocratic views, and favored a stronger role for the executive and the creation of a permanent senate to represent their interests, while a few supported the Savonarolan movement and others collaborated secretly with the Medici.

In 1512 Guicciardini drafted his first political treatise, the Discorso di Logrogno (Discourse composed in Logrogno), a set of proposals for refining the republican government. Guicciardini's outlook was broadly that of his fellow aristocrats, but his real concern was to ensure that perceptive and experienced men would prevail over the foolish and the inexperienced in the business of government. Like Machiavelli, Guicciardini tried throughout his life to gain an intellectual grasp of how political and military events are determined. They did not have modern social science to aid them, or any experience of parliamentary government by organized political parties, but they were imbued with ancient Greek and Roman literature on war, politics, and conquest, and their own experience of war and politics was much closer to that of the ancient world than it was to that of people living in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries. Hence they placed great emphasis on the character of individual leaders and their advisors, and the process of deliberation. Guicciardini did exercise power directly, but not in the context of Florentine politics. He was a senior administrator in the northern part of the Papal States (somewhat like a Roman proconsul, or a colonial governor), and his Ricordi are largely based on that experience. Each of them is a gem of insight into character and conduct, prudent choice of course of action, and the mutability of fortune.

Yet the problem of Florence never left Guicciardini's mind, and in the 1520s he returned to it yet again in his Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze (Dialogue on the government of Florence), which is set in late 1494. Four Florentine leaders debate the good and bad aspects of Medici rule and the prospects for the current broadly based republican regime, and the one with the most foresight (i.e., the one whom Guicciardini endows with his own hindsight) is also the most pessimistic. Machiavelli in the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (written c. 1514–1520) used the ancient Roman republic, the most successful conquest state in European history, as a standard against which to assess the situation of the states of modern Italy; Guicciardini responded with a short set of Considerations on Machiavelli's Discourses (written c. 1530), in which he emphasized the uniqueness of every historical situation and the consequent illegitimacy of analysis and prescription based on a paradigm case.

The theme of the History of Italy is not politics as such but European interstate conflict during the epochal period from 1494 to about 1530. The modern state was coalescing throughout western Europe, and the European state system was assuming the dynamic form it was to retain throughout the early modern period. Italy became the theater and victim of Habsburg-Valois conflict because its own sophisticated state system was too small in scale to withstand the impact of the large armies led there, or sent there, by the monarchs of France and Spain. One reason for the work's classic status is Guicciardini's ability to marshal the tumult of events into a vast narrative. Another is his profound insight into the complex, systemic way overall outcomes are determined, as numerous individual decision makers and their advisors throughout Italy and Europe, with all their personal idiosyncrasies, continually assess the intentions, capacities, words, and deeds of all the others, and choose their own courses of action.

Primary Sources

Guicciardini, Francesco. Dialogue on the Government of Florence. Translated with introduction and notes by Alison Brown. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994. In the same year a new, thoroughly annotated edition of the original text was published: Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze. Edited by Gian Maria Anselmi and Carlo Varotti. Turin, 1994.

——. The History of Florence. Translated by Mario Domandi. New York, 1970. Translation of the Storie fiorentine dal 1378 al 1509. The most recent edition of the original text is Storie fiorentine dal 1378 al 1509. Edited by Alessandro Montevecchi. Milan, 1998.

——. The History of Italy. Translated and abridged by Sidney Alexander. New York, 1969; Repr., Princeton, 1984. A number of good, annotated editions of the original, Storia d'Italia, are available from Italian publishers.

——. Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman. Translated by Mario Domandi. Introduction by Nicolai Rubenstein. New York, 1965; Philadelphia, 1972. Translation of Ricordi politici e civili.

Machiavelli, Niccolò, and Francesco Guicciardini. The Sweetness of Power: Machiavelli's Discourses and Guicciardini's Considerations. Translated with introduction by James V. Atkinson and David Sices. Dekalb, Ill., 2002.

GUICCIARDINI, FRANCESCO (1483–1540)

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