LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER V.

      THE FLORENTINE HISTORIANS.

       Table of Contents

      Florence, the City of Intelligence—Cupidity, Curiosity, and the Love of Beauty—Florentine Historical Literature—Philosophical Study of History—Ricordano Malespini—Florentine History compared with the Chronicles of other Italian Towns—The Villani—The Date 1300—Statistics—Dante's Political Essays and Pamphlets—Dino Compagni—Latin Histories of Florence in Fifteenth Century—Lionardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini—The Historians of the First Half of the Sixteenth Century—Men of Action and Men of Letters: the Doctrinaires—Florence between 1494 and 1537—Varchi, Segni, Nardi, Pitti, Nerli, Guicciardini—The Political Importance of these Writers—The Last Years of Florentine Independence, and the Siege of 1529—State of Parties—Filippo Strozzi—Different Views of Florentine Weakness taken by the Historians—Their Literary Qualities—Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolo Machiavelli—Scientific Statists—Discord between Life and Literature—The Biography of Guicciardini—His 'Istoria d'Italia,' 'Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze,' 'Storia Fiorentina,' 'Ricordi'—Biography of Machiavelli—His Scheme of a National Militia—Dedication of 'The Prince'—Political Ethics of the Italian Renaissance—The Discorsi—The Seven Books on the Art of War and the 'History of Florence.'

      Florence was essentially the city of intelligence in modern times. Other nations have surpassed the Italians in their genius—the quality which gave a superhuman power of insight to Shakespeare and an universal sympathy to Goethe. But nowhere else except at Athens has the whole population of a city been so permeated with ideas, so highly intellectual by nature, so keen in perception, so witty and so subtle, as at Florence. The fine and delicate spirit of the Italians existed in quintessence among the Florentines. And of this superiority not only they but the inhabitants also of Rome and Lombardy and Naples, were conscious. Boniface VIII., when he received the ambassadors of the Christian powers in Rome on the occasion of the Jubilee in 1300, observed that all of them were citizens of Florence. The witticism which he is said to have uttered, i Fiorentini essere il quinto elemento, 'that the men of Florence form a fifth element,' passed into a proverb. The primacy of the Florentines in literature, the fine arts, law, scholarship, philosophy, and science was acknowledged throughout Italy.

When the struggle for existence has been successfully terminated, and the mere instinct of self-preservation no longer absorbs the activities of a people, then the three chief motive forces of civilization begin to operate. These are cupidity, or the desire of wealth and all that it procures; curiosity, or the desire to discover new facts about the world and man; and the love of beauty, which is the parent of all art. Commerce, philosophy, science, scholarship, sculpture, architecture, painting, music, poetry, are the products of these ruling impulses—everything in fact which gives a higher value to the life of man. Different nations have been swayed by these passions in different degrees. The artistic faculty, which owes its energy to the love of beauty, has been denied to some; the philosophic faculty, which starts with curiosity, to others; and some again have shown but little capacity for amassing wealth by industry or calculation. It is rare to find a whole nation possessed of all in an equal measure of perfection. Such, however, were the Florentines.[1] The mere sight of the city and her monuments would suffice to prove this. But we are not reduced to the necessity of divining what Florence was by the inspection of her churches, palaces, and pictures. That marvelous intelligence which was her pride, burned brightly in a long series of historians and annalists, who have handed down to us the biography of the city in volumes as remarkable for penetrative acumen as for definite delineation and dramatic interest. We possess picture-galleries of pages in which the great men of Florence live again and seem to breathe and move, epics of the commonwealth's vicissitudes from her earliest commencement, detailed tragedies and highly finished episodes, studies of separate characters, and idylls detached from the main current of her story. The whole mass of this historical literature is instinct with the spirit of criticism and vital with experience. The writers have been either actors or spectators of the drama. Trained in the study of antiquity, as well as in the council-chambers of the republic and in the courts of foreign princes, they survey the matter of their histories from a lofty vantage ground, fortifying their speculative conclusions by practical knowledge and purifying their judgment of contemporary events with the philosophy of the past. Owing to this rare mixture of qualities, the Florentines deserve to be styled the discoverers of the historic method for the modern world. They first perceived that it is unprofitable to study the history of a state in isolation, that not wars and treaties only, but the internal vicissitudes of the commonwealth, form the real subject matter of inquiry,[2] and that the smallest details, biographical, economical, or topographical, may have the greatest value. While the rest of Europe was ignorant of statistics, and little apt to pierce below the surface of events to the secret springs of conduct, in Florence a body of scientific historians had gradually been formed, who recognized the necessity of basing their investigations upon a diligent study of public records, state-papers, and notes of contemporary observers.[3] The same men prepared themselves for the task of criticism by a profound study of ethical and political philosophy in the works of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Tacitus.[4] They examined the methods of classical historians, and compared the annals of Greece, Rome, and Palestine with the chronicles of their own country. They attempted to divine the genius and to characterize the special qualities of the nations, cities, and individuals of whom they had to treat.[5] At the same time they spared no pains in seeking out persons possessed of accurate knowledge in every branch of inquiry that came beneath their notice, so that their treatises have the freshness of original documents and the charm of personal memoirs. Much, as I have elsewhere noted, was due to the peculiarly restless temper of the Florentines, speculative, variable, unquiet in their politics. The very qualities which exposed the commonwealth to revolutions, developed the intelligence of her historians; her want of stability was the price she paid for intellectual versatility and acuteness unrivaled in modern times. '"O ingenia magis acria quam matura," said Petrarch, and with truth, about the wits of the Florentines; for it is their property by nature to have more of liveliness and acumen than of maturity or gravity.'[6]