HISTORY: EDWARD JAMESreviews The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior: Leonardo, Machiavelli and Borgia – A Fateful CollusionBy Paul Strathern Jonathan Cape,456pp. £25
IN JUNE 1502, the Republic of Florence sent two envoys to meet with the commander of the papal forces, who was aggressively campaigning in the Romagna, and who, it was feared, might turn his attention westwards to Florence. By the time they caught up with him, he had taken the town of Urbino, and the fate of its Duke was still unclear.
The commander took a tough line with the diplomats, although one of the envoys thought he was probably bluffing. In the end, it seems to have been agreed that the commander would spare Florence if the city gave up one of its most famous citizens to serve as the commander’s military engineer.
The commander was Cesare Borgia, son of the infamous Pope Alexander VI; one of the two envoys was Niccolò Machiavelli, later the author of the notorious book The Prince; and the military engineer was Leonardo da Vinci. For a relatively few months the fortunes of these three people were linked in “fateful collusion”.
The early years of the 16th century were a tumultuous time in Florence and in Italy. The French had invaded Italy in 1494, and the rule of the Medici in Florence had been replaced by a Republic, which managed to preserve its freedom for just 18 years until the restoration of the Medici. During those 18 years, Machiavelli was a leading government official, employed on missions to France and to the Papacy as well as to Cesare Borgia, and in 1509 he was largely responsible for the capture of Pisa. This book essentially covers the first few years of the 16th century. It was a time of intrigue and war, and of larger-than-life personalities with larger-than-life ambitions.
Pope Alexander VI’s corruption and debauchery are well-known; less known, perhaps, are his staggering plans to dominate northern Italy and to create a Borgian, rather than a papal, state. His son Cesare was an ideal agent: not a great general, perhaps, but unsurpassed at the time in sheer cunning, laced with utter ruthlessness.
His agents, such as Don Michele (an expert garrotter) and Ramiro de Lorqua, were even more ruthless than he was, and Machiavelli regarded the murder of Lorqua, whose decapitated body was discovered laid out in the main square of Cesena on the morning of Christmas Day 1502, as one of Borgia’s masterstrokes.
The death of this man was widely applauded, and Borgia was able to blame him for the cruelties that he himself had ordered.
The Borgia ambitions came to nothing. Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia were both struck down – by malaria, or perhaps (as everyone thought) by poison: the Pope died in August 1503, and his son was slow to recover.
Oddly enough, perhaps, Cesare Borgia was confirmed in his military post by the short-lived Pope Pius III and by the next Pope, Julius II, a bitter enemy of Alexander VI. In the end, however, Borgia was arrested and shipped off to Spain (where his father had been born). He escaped from prison twice, but was killed in 1507 in a minor skirmish while serving the King of Navarre.
There is no doubt that Paul Strathern tells the story clearly and vividly. Anyone wanting an easy and readable introduction to the political events of the decade would be satisfied.
Where the book falls down, however, is in his reconstruction of the “fateful collusion”. Far too little is known, above all of what Leonardo was doing and what his relationship with Machiavelli and Borgia really was, and all too often Strathern is thrown back on his bottomless imagination.
“We can only speculate,” he writes on page 175, “but there is a strong possibility that during Machiavelli’s illness Leonardo would have looked after him . . . We can only imagine what Machiavelli and Leonardo might have talked about as they sat together on rickety chairs of an autumn evening before a fire in some drafty corner of Borgia’s court, dining off scraps and nuts, washed down with watered wine.”
This is not history, I am afraid; history deals with evidence. Leonardo is accompanied throughout with a strong whiff of fiction. We are on much safer ground with Machiavelli’s relationship with Cesare Borgia, thanks above all to the reports which Machiavelli wrote back to his government.
Whether we could call Borgia Machiavelli’s “friend”, as Strathern does, is another matter, and there has also been a lot of debate among historians over whether Machiavelli even admired him. There is no doubt that he was awed by this decisive man, on whom Fortune seemed to smile, and in The Prince he takes him as a model for any man who wished to gain and keep power. But Machiavelli was a republican, who detested autocrats, as Strathern acknowledges at the end, and The Prince could even be taken as satire.
SOMEONE LIKE BORGIA might be able to throw the foreign invaders out of Italy, but no sane Florentine would want to be ruled by him. However, as Strathern points out, Machiavelli and Leonardo (the Leonardo of the notebooks rather than of the paintings) did share a vision of the world, even though they probably did not acquire it during conversation in some drafty corner of Borgia’s court. Both in their different ways saw the world afresh, and as it really was, stripped of cliché and received wisdom and sentiment; both were as much harbingers of the Enlightenment as representatives of the Renaissance.
Edward James is professor of medieval history at UCD, and president of the Irish Historical Society