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Updated: June 8, 2025
Those who wish for the strongest evidence which the best authorities offer us, can find it in the famous passages of Machiavelli's 'Discorsi, and in the unmutilated edition of Guicciardini. Outside the Roman Curia, some respect seems to have been felt for the best men among the bishops, and for many of the parochial clergy.
If we may venture to connect the works of the historian's leisure, according to the plan above suggested, this treatise forms a supplement to the Principe and the Discorsi. Both in his analysis of the successful tyrant and in his description of the powerful commonwealth he had insisted on the prime necessity of warfare, conducted by the people and their rulers in person.
Mur. Scr. R. It. xv. 826. Compare what G. Merula wrote about Azzo Visconti: 'He conciliated the people to him by equal justice without distinction of Guelf or Ghibelline. Discorsi. i. 17. It was the universal policy of the Despots to disarm their subjects. Prompted by considerations of personal safety, and demanded by the necessity of extirpating the factions, this measure was highly popular.
No English writers have written well of Pistoja, for first they always write from a Florentine point of view, and then they quit too soon. I plead guilty too. The key-note to Pistoja is given in that saying of Macchiavelli's, that the Florentine people "per fuggire il nome di crudele lascio distruggere Pistoia." Il Principe, cap. xvii. Cf. also Discorsi iii. 27.
Just there we seem to find the desire of the sixteenth century for unity that found expression in the deeds of Cesare Borgia, the Discorsi of Niccolò Macchiavelli. By Jacopo della Quercia. Duomo, Lucca
And as in the Principe, as its name indicates, Machiavelli is concerned chiefly with the government of a Prince, so the Discorsi treat principally of the Republic, and here Machiavelli's model republic was the Roman commonwealth, the most successful and most enduring example of popular government. Free Rome is the embodiment of his political idea of the state.
In one passage of the Discorsi he even pronounces his opinion that the Christian faith compared with the creeds of antiquity, had enfeebled national spirit. Privately, moreover, he was himself stained with the moral corruption which he publicly condemned. Guicciardini, again, in the passage before us, openly avows his egotism.
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