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After touching on the sack of Prato and the consternation which ensued in Florence, Vettori describes the return of the Medici in 1512. Giuliano, the son of Lorenzo, was the first to appear: after him came the Cardinal Giovanni, and Giuliano's son Giulio. The elder among their partisans persuaded them to call a Parlamento and assume the government in earnest.
But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting those scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now that I have released myself altogether from his literary precedent, that he still has his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim kindred with him and set his name upon my title-page, in partial intimation of the matter of my story.
Therefore people came in crowds; and it may be said for certain that in the eight years of his papacy, the population of Rome increased by one third. Vettori prudently refuses to sum up the good and bad of Leo's character in one decisive sentence.
Up to that time he had always shown himself liberal and easy, or, rather, prodigal in squandering the little that he owned; he had moreover managed so to dissemble as to acquire a reputation for most excellent habits of life. Vettori adds that his power in Florence helped him, and that he owed much to the ability displayed by Bernardo da Bibbiena in winning votes.
All the good that can be said of him politically has been briefly and admirably summed up by Francesco Vettori; the picture of Leo's pleasures is given by Paolo Giovio and in the anonymous biography; and the shadows which attended his prosperity are drawn with inexorable truth by the same Pierio Valeriano.
The party so formed, including even such distinguished citizens as the Guicciardini, Baccio Valori, and Francesco Vettori, proved the chief obstacle to the restoration of Florentine liberty in the sixteenth century. Compare v. 4 and vii. 4-6 for his character of Cosimo.
Some of the most precious compositions of the latter are letters addressed from Florence or San Casciano to Francesco Vettori, at the time when the ex-war-secretary was attempting to gain the favor of the Medici.
It was edited again by Maggi in 1550, by Vettori in 1560, by Castelvetro in 1570, and by Piccolomini in 1575. It had inspired the De Poeta of Minturno and the Poetics of Scaliger. But with all the changes which were worked in the literary criticism of the renaissance by the recovery of Aristotle's Poetics, renaissance theories of poetry were nevertheless tinged with rhetoric.
In his general estimate of Leo, Vettori confirms all that we know about this Pope from other sources. He insists more perhaps than other historians upon the able diplomacy by which Lodovico Canossa, Bishop of Tricarico, made terms with Francis after Marignano, and traces Leo's fatal alliance with Charles V. in 1520 to the influence of Jeronimo Adorno.
Even when they only write for a few friends, like Francesco Vettori, they feel an inward need to utter their testimony on men and events, and to explain and justify their share in the latter. And yet, with all that is characteristic in their language and style, they were powerfully affected by antiquity, and, without its influence, would be inconceivable.
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