Politics in Apocalyptic Times: Machiavelli's Savonarolan Moment

38 Pages·2015·0.34 MB·English

Politics in Apocalyptic Times: Machiavelli’s Savonarolan Moment
Alison McQueen ([email protected])
Forthcoming, Journal of Politics

Abstract: This article accounts for the surprising final chapter of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince by
situating it in the context of the apocalyptic fervor that gripped Italy at the turn of the sixteenth
century. In Florence, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was at the center of this
enthusiastic movement. The final chapter of The Prince, the article suggests, is an apocalyptic
exhortation that reiterates Savonarola’s message in secular terms. Machiavelli gravitates toward this
apocalyptic solution because he has failed to render the apparent contingency of the political world
intelligible by containing it with analytical categories, ordering it with general rules, or analogizing it
with metaphors for fortune. Offering evidence of the failure of The Prince to deliver on these
epistemological aspirations, the paper argues that that the work’s concluding chapter amounts to a
final attempt to render the variability and contingency of the city’s political situation intelligible by
fashioning it into an apocalyptic story with which Florentines would have been intimately familiar.

Keywords: Machiavelli, Savonarola, apocalypticism, The Prince.
1
To know the virtù of an Italian spirit is was necessary that Italy be reduced to the condition
in which she is at present, which is more enslaved than the Hebrews, more servile than the
Persians, more dispersed than the Athenians, without a head, without order, beaten,
despoiled, torn, pillaged, and having endured ruin of every sort…One may see how she
prays to God to send her someone to redeem her from these barbarous cruelties and insults
(Machiavelli [1513] 1998, 102).

Introduction: The Puzzle of Machiavelli’s Exhortation
For both new and familiar readers of Niccolò Machiavelli, the final chapter of The Prince
comes as a surprise. This “Exhortation to Save Italy and to Free Her From the Barbarians,”
apparently directed at one of the Medici, announces a God-given opportunity to heal Italy’s wounds
and deliver her from a period of unprecedented suffering. Should he recognize this moment as an
occasion for the exercise of his rare virtù, Italy’s redeemer will be rewarded with “obstinate faith,”
piety, and tears (Machiavelli [1513] 1998, 105).1 Both the content of this promise and its religious
and poetic expression make it difficult to ignore. Yet its relationship to the remainder of The Prince is
deeply puzzling. The surprise of the final chapter, particularly for an earlier generation of
interpreters, results from the apparent contrast between the pragmatic, scientific, and amoral advice
of the first twenty-five chapters and the idealistic and fervently hopeful rhetoric of the Exhortation
(Gilbert 1939, 483; Cassirer 1946, 143-4; Strauss 1958, 73-81; Chabod 1960, 21-7, 145-7; Prezzolini
1967, 116-7; Baron 1991, 84-5; Wolin 2004, 182-3). Felix Gilbert goes so far as to suggest that there
is nothing in the preceding parts of the work that prepares the reader for its final chapter (Gilbert
1939, 483).

1 Rather than translating virtù as “virtue” and virtuoso as “virtuous,” as Mansfield does in this translation, this
article renders the words in their original Italian.
2
Perhaps the thing for which the reader is least prepared is the uncharacteristic effusion of
religious language. As Leo Strauss rightly notes, Machiavelli “mentions God as often [in the
Exhortation] as in all other chapters of The Prince taken together. He refers to the liberator of Italy
as an Italian ‘spirit’; he describes the liberation of Italy as a divine redemption and he suggests its
resemblance to the resurrection of the dead depicted by Ezekiel; he alludes to miracles wrought by
God in Italy” (1959, 73). What is more, Machiavelli’s shift from an analytical to a theological register
threatens to distract the reader from the final chapter’s disturbing silence about the difficulties and
obstacles that Italy’s redeemer must overcome (Strauss 1958, 73, 77; Lefort 2012, 200). Given
Machiavelli’s earlier pessimism about human nature, his insistence on the challenge of maintaining
stable princely rule in former republics, and his warnings about dependence on fortune, the hopes
expressed in the Exhortation seem extraordinary and unaccountable.
Some of Machiavelli’s most careful interpreters have had remarkably little to say about the
final chapter (Pocock 1975; Skinner 1981; Skinner 1988; Skinner 1998). Those explanations that
have been offered tend to fall into one of two groups. The first group acknowledges a disjunction
between the final chapter and the rest of the text, and then seeks to account for this shift.
Interpretations in this group take multiple forms, but tend to see the textual disjunction as either a
rhetorical choice or the result of the timing of the work’s composition. Let us begin with the
rhetorical explanations. A popular nineteenth-century interpretation subject to occasional
contemporary resurrections sees the Exhortation as an impassioned call for national unification (e.g.
von Ranke 1874, 171-2; Burd 1891, 23-27; Meinecke 1962, 25-48; Langton and Dietz 1987, 1283).2
On this account, the final chapter’s passionate rhetoric is the key to the purpose of the Prince—the
unification of Italy. The first twenty-five chapters pursue this goal by outlining the techniques of
power politics necessary to achieve it, while the Exhortation offers an emotional appeal toward the

2 Gilbert (1954) provides a more nuanced assessment of the place of nationalism in the final chapter.
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same end. The disjuncture is the product of a shift in style and tone, but not in aims. This view is
subject to a variety of substantive objections. For instance, it has difficulty wrestling with the fact
that Machiavelli seems far more focused on Italy’s liberation from foreign invaders than he is on
Italian unification. The latter concern is never mentioned explicitly (Baron 1991, 86). An even more
serious stumbling block is the fact that Machiavelli formulates the advice of the first twenty-five
chapters as general rules that are as accessible to Italy as they are to its enemies. His analysis of the
errors made by Louis XII in the king’s Italian campaign, for example, could be used as easily by
those wanting to divide and subjugate Italy as it could by those who wanted to unify and free it
(Cassirer 1946, 143; Baron 1991, 86). This seems like strange decision for a writer whose ultimate
goal is Italian unification.
Another cluster of interpretations in this vein center on the timing of The Prince’s
composition. They argue that the Exhortation is a late and hasty addition that was written in
response to political conditions that arose after the rest of the work was completed (Bertelli 1960,
109-110; Baron 1991; Jaeckel 1996; Martelli 1979, 230-250; Martelli 1982; see also the responses by
Chabod 1960, 34-6, n. 2; Sasso 1988; Najemy 1993, 177-84). While they tend to focus on different
details of Florentine and Italian politics and posit dates of final composition ranging from 1515 to
1518, the most powerful explanations in this group rest on the premise that Machiavelli could not
have mustered the redemptive optimism of the final chapter in the dark and uncertain political
circumstances that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Florentine republic and the
return of the Medici in 1512 (Martelli 1979, 230-250; Martelli 1982). However, this reading fits
uncomfortably with Machiavelli’s own claim that the best opportunity for a redemptive intervention
is when Italy is at its most devastated, “without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn,
pillaged, and having endured ruin of every sort” (Machiavelli [1513], 102). This would seem to make
the period shortly after the upheavals of 1512 a more likely time for Machiavelli to have issued his
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Exhortation than the comparative calm of the subsequent years of Medici rule (Sasso 1988; Najemy
1993, 177-84).3
A second set of interpreters argues that there is in fact no disjuncture between the
Exhortation and the rest of the text when the work is understood correctly. On this account, the
mistake that many in the first group make is to assume that the first twenty-five chapters are the
product of a detached and proto-social scientific realism, in contrast to which the final chapter
appears unaccountably overwrought. The problem disappears when we properly understand the
nature of Machiavelli’s project. For instance, Maurizio Viroli (1998, 73-80; 2010, 122-3; 2014, 4-22)
argues that Machiavelli structures The Prince according to the rules of classical rhetoric. The
Exhortation is the work’s peroration, an attempt to appeal to its readers through pathos and to
rouse them to political action. Indeed, “far from being a disjointed, unsuccessful alteration of the
mode of the text, it is a splendid, necessary, and perfectly connected conclusion of a text like The
Prince, if we understand what sort of text The Prince is” (Viroli 1998, 74). Viroli’s argument offers a
strong explanation of the tone and style of the final chapter. However, it fits less well with the
structure of the rest of the work; one searches with difficulty for the narratio or refutatio that Viroli’s
explanation requires The Prince to contain.4
Garrett Mattingly (1958, 491) and Mary Dietz (1986, 795-6) also account for the final
chapter by arguing that the rest of The Prince is not the realist or scientific work that many readers
take it to be. Appealing to Machiavelli’s admitted preference for republican government and his
private evaluation of the political competence of the Medici, Mattingly argues that The Prince is a

3 1512 not only saw the Medici return to power with the aid of the Pope and a Spanish army; it also saw the
unusually bloody Battle of Ravenna, which was won by the French, the subsequent descent of the Swiss into
Italy, and the expulsion of the French by the Swiss and the Venetians.
4 Viroli does offer a plausible case that the dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de Medici can be read as an exordium
“designed to fulfill the important requirement of rendering the reader well disposed and attentive” by
establishing the author’s credentials (Viroli 1998, 77). However, while individual chapters occasionally
contain a narratio (a preparatory summary of relevant historical facts and the issues at stake) or a refutatio (a
refutation of counterarguments), the work as a whole seems to lack a unified instance of either.
5
satire shot throughout with “mordant irony and sarcasm.” The Exhortation, on this account, is
either the product of “an irony turned inward, the bitter mockery of misdirected optimism” or a
suggestion to Machiavelli’s republican compatriots that the “first sharp combat was not to be against
the barbarians” but against tyrants closer to home (Mattingly 1958, 491). Like Mattingly, Dietz
insists that Machiavelli’s republican commitments mean that we cannot take The Prince at face value.
However, unlike Mattingly, she reads the work as a serious and strategic attempt to bait Lorenzo de’
Medici into committing political errors that would ultimately destroy his ability to control Florence.
The final chapter of the work is intended to appeal to Lorenzo’s vanity and to make him “not only
Machiavelli’s puppet, but the dupe of his own grandiose expectations of earthly power and political
immortality” (Dietz 1986, 796). While both of these interpretations have the advantage of
reconciling the Exhortation with Machiavelli’s avowed republican commitments, they have difficulty
explaining why he would have expressed in his private correspondence sentiments so similar to
those in the final chapter. In letters to friends written in both 1513 and more than a decade later,
Machiavelli sincerely echoes both the Exhortation’s passionate tone and its themes of desperation,
imminent political collapse, God-given opportunities, and the expulsion of barbarians.5
This article offers an alternative interpretation of the Exhortation that seeks to avoid these
difficulties while accounting for the effusion of religious language that other readings are forced to
treat as merely decorative or strategic. Like those who insist on a disjunction between the final

5 Concerned about the growing power of the Swiss, Machiavelli echoes the dire worries of the Exhortation in
an August 1513 letter to Francesco Vettori: “I am ready to start weeping with you over our collapse and our
servitude that, if it does not come today or tomorrow will come in our lifetime” (Machiavelli et al. [1513]
1996, 260). More than a decade later, as an alliance of northern and central Italian states and France sought
to expel Spain, Machiavelli returns to the theme of God-given opportunities (“God has brought things to
such a pass…”) and urges Francesco Guicciardini to use his political influence to “Free Italy from long-
lasting anxiety; eradicate those savage brutes, which have nothing human about them save their faces and
voices” (Machiavelli et al. [1526] 1996, 386). This evidence also poses problems for Strauss’ interpretation of
the final chapter as Machiavelli’s attempt to redeem and excuse the “immoral policies” recommended in the
preceding chapters (1958, 80) and for Lefort’s interpretation of the final chapter as propaganda intended to
provide “the prince with the themes the latter should use to mesmerize his subjects” (2012, 201).
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chapter and the rest of the work, the view outlined here holds that The Prince aspires to render the
political world intelligible by subjecting it to systematic analysis. Yet like those who see no
disjunction, I read the final chapter as a naturally developing conclusion to the text. Having failed to
understand and master the political world through systematic analysis, I argue that Machiavelli
ultimately turns to an apocalyptic emplotment of the crises of Italy’s present and the expectations
for her future.6 I take an apocalyptic emplotment to be one that casts the crises of the present as a
necessary narrative prelude to a permanent escape from contingency (and often also from
disagreement, conflict, and perceived persecution); discerns in the crises of the present signs of this
imminent transformation; and expects the arrival of an extraordinary figure who will usher in this
new world.7
In order to support this reading of Machiavelli, the article situates The Prince and its final
chapter within the context of Renaissance Italian apocalypticism. In Machiavelli’s time, many
Florentines were gripped by the expectation of a divine scourge that would violently transform the
city into a New Jerusalem. They understood understood the domestic political woes and foreign
threats plaguing their city as part of an apocalyptic story in which the devastation of the present was
both the suggestive sign and the necessary narrative prelude to a collective rebirth at the hands of an
extraordinary figure. While, as I explain in the first section of the article, the Dominican friar
Girolamo Savonarola was at the center of this enthusiastic movement, the apocalypticism that
captured the Italian and Florentine imagination was much broader and deeper than the preaching of

6 Following Hayden White, I take emplotment to refer to the means by which narrators reveal “a sequence of
events fashioned into a story…to be a story of a particular kind” (e.g. a tragedy, comedy, romance, or satire)
(1973, 7). See also: Ricoeur (1995, 239). For discussions of apocalyptic emplotment, see: Kermode (2000)
and Cornell (2011).
7 These features are present in the Judeo-Christian accounts of the apocalypse (e.g. Daniel 7-12, Revelation),
where oppression and persecution are taken as both the narrative prelude to and the suggestive signs of an
imminent transformation that will conclude with the establishment of the Kingdom of God. In these
accounts, the targets of persecution are generally religious and/or cultural minorities and the perpetrators are
political and imperial powers. The agent of the final transformation is a messiah who will preside over a final
judgment and wage a culminating war against the forces of evil. See, for instance, Pagels (2012).
7
a single man. The final chapter of The Prince, I suggest in the second section of the article, is an
apocalyptic exhortation that in its emplotment and expectations amounts to a secular political
reiteration of the Savonarolan message.8 I argue in the third section of the article that Machiavelli
gravitates toward this apocalyptic solution in The Prince because he has failed to render the apparent
contingency of the political world intelligible by containing it with analytical categories, ordering it
with general rules, or analogizing it with metaphors for fortune. Offering evidence of the failure of
The Prince to deliver on these aspirations, I argue that the Exhortation may amount to a final attempt
to render the variability and contingency of Italy’s political situation intelligible by fashioning it into
an apocalyptic story with which Machiavelli’s contemporaries would have been intimately familiar.
This reading of Machiavelli sits uneasily with what are often taken to be his deeply republican,
radically democratic, or agonistic commitments. Rather than reflecting a betrayal of these
commitments, I suggest that Machiavelli’s apocalyptic turn reveal the troubling hold of apocalyptic
stories even over those well equipped to resist them.

The Savonarolan Moment
Prophecy flourished during the Italian Wars of the late fifteenth through mid-sixteenth
centuries. (Niccoli 1990, 3-29). The climate of crisis, along with the fact that prophecies could now
be printed and easily disseminated, meant that prophetic predictions became part of popular culture.
One group of popular prophecies, for instance, predicted that a 1484 planetary conjunction of
Saturn and Jupiter would unleash a number of unimaginable events (Niccolo 1990, 136-9; Weinstein
2011, 39-40). However, much of this prophecy was more overtly apocalyptic in character.
Fashioning the events of the recent past, present, and imminent future into a story modeled on

8 This piece of the argument builds on the work of those who have stressed a prophetic dimension (e.g.
Ascoli 1993, 252-7; Najemy 1993, 206-14; Jurdjevic 2014, 30-2), a providential logic (e.g. Martelli 1982), and a
messianic expectation (e.g. Vatter 2013) to the final chapter of The Prince. I want to insist that these features
of the final chapter are tied to its apocalyptic emplotment.
8
those in Daniel and Revelation, apocalyptic prophecy predicted an imminent and violent end to the
known world and the arrival of a future of peace and tranquility.
Prophecies of this kind had flourished during the Middle Ages. This was in no small part
due to the efforts and influence of Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-century Calabrian abbot, who
proposed a Trinitarian model of history in which humankind would realize its ultimate destiny after
a period of false leadership by a priestly Antichrist and terrifying apocalyptic tribulations (Reeves
1969, 16-27; Reeves, 1976, 1-28; McGinn 1985, 145-204). Adapting patterns of emplotment and
imagery taken from Scriptural apocalypses and refracting them through the lens of a rich prophetic
tradition, the apocalyptic prophets of Machiavelli’s day offered visions of despair and hope for
Italy’s future. Such visions are also present in the final chapter of The Prince and, as I will go on to
argue in the following section, help to account not only for its general religious flavor but also for
many of its most striking narrative features and prophetic promises.
While he was by no means the city’s only messenger of the end times, Girolamo Savonarola
was at the center of the apocalyptic movement in Florence.9 A Dominican friar from Ferrara,
Savonarola saw himself as a “knight militant” for Christ, fighting to reform a corrupt Church and
transform a world mired in sin. He began his Florentine apocalyptic preaching in 1490, attracting a
large following in a city that would soon be rocked by political crisis (Weinstein 2011, 75-93). After
the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492, his son Piero assumed power in Florence and proceeded to
exclude many of the city’s most powerful citizens from his inner circle, leading to fears that his

9 Savonarola does not seem to have been deeply familiar with Joachim of Fiore’s works. At times, Savonarola
went out of his way to deny such a familiarity, perhaps because the Church hierarchy saw Joachimite ideas as
ones with revolutionary potential. Savonarola was more deeply engaged with worldly affairs and his sermons
and writings lack anything like Joachim’s sophisticated understanding of sacred history. Nevertheless,
Marjorie Reeves notes that the friar did draw on the well-established Joachimist “juxtaposition of tribulation
and renewal,” as well as the prophecies of a Second Charlemagne that had developed among the Calabrian
abbot’s more resent followers. She concludes, reasonably enough, that while he may not have been a close
reader of Joachim’s works, “there can be little doubt that [Savonarola] belonged within the [Joachimite]
prophetic tradition” (1976, 90).
9
power would eventually become tyrannical (Najemy 2006, 375-80). This domestic unrest was
compounded by a foreign threat. In the early 1490s, rumors of a French invasion were spreading
through Italy. Charles VIII was coming to make good his inherited claim on the Neapolitan
kingdom, with a force whose size and strength were unimaginable to Italians. In 1494, Piero’s
clumsy attempts at negotiating Charles’ passage through Florence to Naples failed badly; within
days, he was ousted and the French marched into Florence. This is the historical context in which
Savonarola’s apocalyptic message took hold.
The friar’s early sermons predicted a divine scourge, an apocalypse without worldly
redemption in which Florence would be God’s primary target. In a 1491 Lenten sermon, Savonarola
warned Florentines that their city would no longer be known as Florentia, but “turpitude and blood
and a den of robbers” (as quoted in Weinstein 1970, 94). Reflecting back, Savonarola recalled the
mood of these early apocalyptic sermons with a single evocative line: “I am the hailstorm that shall
break the heads of those who do not take shelter” (as quoted in Ridolfi 1959, 32). The friar’s initial
focus in these sermons was on the corruption of the Church, which he took to be a sign of an
imminent apocalypse.
As rumors of the French invasion began to circulate, Savonarola’s apocalyptic messages
became more overtly political. Charles VIII, Savonarola explained, was the apocalyptic scourge the
friar had predicted. The French invasion was only the beginning of the terrifying sequence of
apocalyptic events of which the friar had warned. With a tone of reproach, he told his listeners:
“long before anyone had heard the noise or smelled any of today’s wars, moved by people from
beyond the Alps, great tribulations were announced to you. You also know that not two years have
passed since I told you: ‘Behold the sword of the Lord falling on the earth quickly and swiftly.’ Not I, but God
predicted it to you. And, look, it has come to pass and it is here” (Savonarola [1494] 2003, 89). If the
Florentines did not change their ways, he warned, they should not be surprised “afterwards, when