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Updated: June 18, 2025
The only one whose dress indicates his Italian birth is Louis Guicciardini, a Florentine gentleman, who is here for the purpose of collecting materials for an extensive work on the Low Countries, and particularly on the powerful commercial city of Antwerp.
Thence he wrote a letter to Piero de'Medici, which is interesting, firstly, as showing the good relations prevailing between them; secondly, as refuting a story in Guicciardini, wherewith that historian, ready, as ever, to belittle the Borgias, attempts to show him cutting a poor figure.
Guicciardini, who recounts the whole matter at length, says that all Italy believed the Duke had been murdered, and quotes Teodoro da Pavia, one of the royal physicians, who attested to having seen clear signs of a slow poison in the young man. Pontano, de Prudentiâ, lib. 4, repeats the accusation. Guicciardini only doubts Lodovico's motives.
The weaving of tapestry, oil painting, the art of painting on glass, even pocketwatches and sun-dials were, as Guicciardini asserts, originally invented in the Netherlands. To them we are indebted for the improvement of the compass, the points of which are still known by Flemish names.
The picture, however, which Guicciardini draws of Antwerp in 1560, when it had reached the zenith of its prosperity and wealth, being that of a contemporary author, and entering into detail, is at once much more curious and interesting, and may be depended on as authentic.
In reading the Dialogue on the Constitution of Florence it must finally be remembered that Guicciardini has thrown it back into the year 1494, and that he speaks through the mouths of four interlocutors. Therefore we may presume that he intended his readers to regard it as a work of speculative science rather than of practical political philosophy.
The habit of security from abroad and of jealousy within; the essential nature of a number of rival trading centres, made such a thing not only impossible of execution, but for a while impossible of conception; confederacies had become possible only when Burlamacchi was decapitated by the imperialists; popular resistance had become a reality only when Feruccio was massacred by the Spaniards; a change of national institutions was feasible only when all national institutions had been destroyed; when the Italians, having recognized the irresistible force of their adversaries, had ceased to form independent States and larger and smaller guilds; when all the characteristics of Italian civilization had been destroyed; when, in short, it was too late to do anything save theorize with Machiavelli and Guicciardini as to what ought to have been done.
I was nothing, less than nothing, to her now that she was alone with her husband. Beside the care of his appetite for food, my labours upon Guicciardini the toil of a month of nights was as the work of an ant in the dust.
It was whispered by his enemies that here, upon the threshold of his public life, Guicciardini sold his honor by accepting a bribe from Ferdinand. Certain it is that avarice was one of his besetting sins, and that from this time forward he preferred expediency to justice, and believed in the policy of supporting force by clever dissimulation.
Knowing what sort of tyrant Alessandro was, and remembering 'hat Guicciardini had written (Ricordi, No. ccxlii.): 'La calcina con che si murano gli stati de' tiranni è il sangue de' cittadini: però doverebbe sforzarsi ognuno che nella citt
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