School of War - Ep 145: Christopher Lynch on Machiavelli at War

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Christopher Lynch, Professor of Political Science at Missouri State University and author of Machiavelli on War, joins the show to talk about renaissance warfare and Niccolò Machiavelli. ▪️ Times      •      01:20 Introduction      •      01:56 Machiavelli’s world     •      03:52 French invasion     •     07:08 Republicanism      •      13:42 Mercenary armies      •      22:50 Time in office     •      27:30 Battle     •      33:17 Resurrecting Rome and Greece     •      38:00 Catastrophic endings     •      41:31 Exile and writings      •      45:54 Good guy or bad guy? Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Niccolo Machiavelli is famous today, of course, as a political philosopher, but he was also a working policymaker in the Florence of his day, a military innovator and a serious thinker about strategy. We're going to get into those issues today, talk about Machiavelli and his world, the high renaissance, a time of incredible human flourishing, but also widespread violence, instability, and war. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. A date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a staleing. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Christopher Lynch, who is the author most recently of Machiavelli on War. He is a professor of political science at Missouri State University, head of the Department of Political Science there. He was a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department. Chris, thank you so much for joining the show.

Thanks for having me. So we're going to talk about Machiavelli today, a major contributor to not only political philosophy and Western political thought, but also to military thought. He has a book called Art of War. I don't think it's particularly widely read today amongst professionals. So maybe we'll make a little progress towards reviving its fortunes here. Would you start us off by telling us a little bit about Machiavelli's world, the world of the late 1400s, the Florence that he comes into a kind of power in? What's going on?

What is Machiavelli's world like? Yeah, it's a lot different from ours in many ways and similar in many ways. What's a little bit hard to get your head around is that Italy was not a unified country. It was made up of a whole bunch of smaller powers. There were really five major powers within Italy. And the politics of his day was really largely determined by those five great powers, which sort of gone clockwise around Italy. It's Milan, Venice, the papal states, that means the area that the Pope controlled.

Kingdom of Naples and the South in Florence, determined by those five powers and then three outside powers, the French, the Spanish, and the Holy Roman Empire. In Machiavelli's youth, things were relatively stable within Italy. The Medici family had been running things in Florence and had a sort of a vast banking empire that, you know, allowed them to balance powers within Italy pretty well. Well, when the French invade, for their own complex reasons, in 1494, it throws everything up in the air. The balance of power within Italy is thrown off. And it really ends up becoming what become called the Italian wars that go on now for another 100 years, basically,

where Italy becomes kind of the football field on which especially France and Spain, compete for a long time. And it's just starting at Machiavelli's time. So let's talk about that French intervention, which changes Machiavelli's life, along with the lives of basically all the times. You describe it in the book as a kind of 9-11 for the Italians of the day. What's behind it? Why do the French come into Italy? They have various purposes of their own. There are really sort of three different invasions during the time that's relevant to us, the 1494 one. Charles Ith of France has old claims to Naples

and has some desire to fight something like a holy war and sort of hearkening back to the days when crusades were the thing. But then internal sort of jockeying for power within Italy leads Milan, one of the five major powers I mentioned, to want to invite in the French to kind of help them against Naples, one of their big rivals. Right. So that internal jockeying for power leads one of the major Italian powers to say, hey, France, come and help us. And some French, you know, sort of adventurism and old dynastic claims inspires them to, to accept. accept that. And then Charles invades. And as Machiavelli says, take, quoting someone else, takes Italy with a piece of chalk. What he means by that is when places have been taken, they, soldiers would mark them

with, with chalk. And as soon as Charles had some initial successes, based primarily on his enormous siege trains that he would bring with him to knock down what were basically holdovers from, medieval warfare, you know, castles who had these thin walls that his, his artillery could really take out very quickly. So he marched down to Naples and from Milan, you know, Genoa and Milan all the way down, in a matter of months and takes Naples in a matter of days or weeks, depending on Niagara County. But then things get complicated and he ends up exiting and is sort of ignominiously escorted out, as it were by assembled Italian troops who wanted to crush him but what weren't able to. And he leaves and French power lingers for a few years after that. And then later there,

Louis, the 12th, his successor, makes a couple more invasions that are longer lasting. Louis stays there for 13 years ultimately and is driven out or leaves eventually as well. But it was a very disruptive all of these. I mean, you can imagine it would, it's just a huge throwing into chaos. What, as I said, had been a fairly balanced internal structure for Italy. And this French intervention or series of interventions, you know, initially in 1494, it bursts into an Italy and upon a Florence that has been Medici controlled for some time. Yeah, like almost 70 years. Yeah. And broadly speaking, and please explain how this works, this French role now in Italy is good for the cause of republicanism in Florence.

Well, it's mixed. It's mixed. It's really complicated because what happens, I mean, it's good in the sense that it sparks the beginning of republicanism. It's not like the French were Republican ideologues and wanted republicanism to happen. Instead, what happened is the Medici had been sort of pals with French. and would use the French as protectors within Italy. And, you know, sometimes the French would send their own generals

and help out different quarantine causes. But a less wise successor to Lorenzo the magnificent, one of the last really good, talented Medici rulers, Piero de Medici, he, when the French wanted to invade, he hemmed in hot. He didn't really throw himself all the way. in behind French forces and he didn't strongly oppose them and join Italian resistance to him. Doing one of the things Machiavelli says you just don't do,

you pick your friends and enemies and readily go with one or the other. And as a result, the French really punished Piero by really taking away main dominions of Florence within Tuscany, chief among them, Pisa, and the French, the people of Florence basically then punished Piero by throwing him out of power and then establishing the Republic, as you know, suggested. And then that goes on for, you know, from 1494 all the way until Machiavelli ends up being out of power in 1512. He doesn't come right into power right away in those first four years. It's he doesn't come into power after 1498. And then the nature of this republic, I think you've,

put it really well in the book. If you look at the nature of the franchise and who actually counts as a citizen, it's very restricted and very limited. I mean, even amongst males, very, very restricted. It's not anyone's idea in the 21st century of a democracy and barely of republicanism, maybe as we might conceive of it. But as you point out, it's basically the, the widest franchise since what, Athens? Yeah. Yeah. And the widest since Athens and until the French Revolution. I mean, it's, it is a very historically speaking, it was very Republican. But as you say, from our point of view, it looks like sort of an aristocratic republic. How does how does Niccolo then come onto the scene? You know, I think most people to the extent that they think much about Machiavelli,

they know them as a as a philosopher and advisor to to princes and republics. They think of the prince and discourses on Livy books that he writes sort of following a political career. I don't think many people, I confess, it's true of me as well, given much thought to his career as an actual policymaker, but it is a busy and consequential career that your book really interestingly lays out the connections between the themes of his actual policy work and then later the themes of his philosophizing. How does he come into this Republican government? Yeah, it's important to, you know, give due attention to his practical career, partly because he places a lot of emphasis on that. You know, he says in his two famous books that you mentioned, you know, not,

not his primarily military books, at least on the surface, you know, there are two things that constitute the knowledge I'm conveying, my knowledge of ancient histories and my experience and practical affairs. And it's putting those two things together that leads to my unique insights. So, you know, he himself points to these practical affairs, his experience therein very strongly, but it's also important because it really is his role, his status, the quality of his judgment regarding military things has been really misunderstood until very recent years. He's been portrayed up until about 20 years ago as, you know, this armchair general who was infatuated with ancient Roman practice and unrealistically wanted to recreate Rome in Florence and didn't

didn't realize that nation states were on the offing and principalities were going to rule the day. It's just none of this is correct. Scholars have started to realize this in the last 20 years. I hope, I don't know if my translation of his art of war had any influence there, but I made the argument back then. And some very able scholars, Andrea Gleady and Michael Hornquist and others have really, you know, shown that he really knew what he was talking about. He came into power. It's not really clear. No one really knows how his name surfaced.

There's speculation. But he came into power during the Republican period as Savonarola, who your listeners may have heard of. I mean, he's the prime example for Machiavelli and his famous The Prince as the unarmed prophet who inevitably failed because he was unarmed. He ends up being burned in the piazza. When he goes out of power, his underlings go out and Machiavelli ends up coming in and he ends up running, you know, sort of the, defense establishment within Florence. He was running a defense establishment of an entity that had no military. So it's not easy to do what that meant was managing mercenaries in effect.

And, you know, his travails in that realm led him to recognize we need our own weapons and our own military. So he spent tremendous amount of time and effort in literature. really forming out of nothing a native military. So we can talk about some of the details of that if you'd like. That really is his main focus. And he eventually, you know, leads that military himself in a couple different ventures. Well, yeah, let's linger on this and on these questions. I think they're really interesting. And you present his desire to replace a system of mercenary employment with a, you know, domestic, homegrown military power as a sort of commonsensical and obvious development,

I expect most listeners would probably not along to that. But obviously, we're talking about a period in Italy. Machiavelli writes furiously about where this is not the norm, where mercenaries are the name of the game, where cities typically don't. I'm sure there are exceptions you can tell us about. But for instance, the norm. And so there must have been arguments for the norm.

There must have been causes that that ended up being the norm. Machiavelli becomes a great critic of these things. Why is Italy dominated by mercenaries? Yeah. I mean, there's a couple different reasons. Machiavelli would ultimately trace, and in his book, it's actually his longest book, The Florentine Histories, and one of the chapters of my book is on that. His book is really long. My chapter is short so you can get it on the sheet by reading it. He really locates the cause of the predominance of militaries, of mercenary militaries, to the papacy, to the pope and the huge influence on the, that the Pope has had in Italian affairs. Now, he maybe exaggerates that. And he also exaggerates the degree to which mercenaries are bad. And if you pay attention to it, he actually thinks, well, given the system that they had at

the time, which I'll explain the cause again a little bit more, but given the system they have at the time, you really need to use mercenaries because that's all you got. And the problem is using them for a long time and relying exclusively on them. So what he wanted to do is get Florence to the point where they could, sure, continue to use some mercenaries and definitely have some professional, homegrown professionals. He's not opposed to people getting paid and being professional soldiers. A lot of historians mistake that. They think he's against mercenaries, and that makes him naively against professional soldiery. Not at all.

He recognized France had good professional. He recognized Swiss did. So he wasn't against that. But basically it was the reason it came about, he says that mercenaries predominate is that as the Holy Roman Empire sort of started to withdraw for various complex reasons from Italy in like the 11,200s, 1,300s, the Pope sort of filled the void. And then there's, you know, the big rivalries between the Pope and the Pope and the Emperor. But as the Pope filled the void and as priests end up being de facto rulers, they didn't know anything about war. And so they had to hire it out. And they did.

And that led to a kind of atrophy of the, what would be sort of the natural military base of a nobility, you know, got on horseback. And that just didn't take root. It was worse in Florence than pretty much anywhere else. But it was in Italy, but it was prevalent throughout Italy, this dependence on mercenaries. So, you know, if you just step back and consider the matter clinically and without much context, you put yourself in the position of being a leading policymaker in a city-state like Florence, and you have military goals and you need military capacity. You know, hiring forces from elsewhere is obviously an option.

Raising them at home is obviously an option. And there are arguments for and against. There were powerful arguments against raising a demand. Speaking here in the 21st century, I think most people, certainly most American listeners would be like, well, obviously, you want to put yourself. but the threat of a mercenary force upon which your military policy relies that then at any moment can decide it's not getting paid enough or can be paid more by somebody else and turn on you.

Like that threat is pretty clear. But interestingly, there are arguments, sort of interesting arguments against the domestic force, right? Like what is the threat forrence posed by domestic military? Yeah. I mean, there was, you know, an acute allergy, especially in the part of the rich nobility called the automati in in Florence against having a homegrown military because there was not irrational fear that it would be used as an instrument of domestic oppression by whoever the

political authority was. So, you know, this, this concern dated back to in Florence for, for over 100 years, back to when they did. So Florence did have a military more than 100 years before Machiavelli's time that was, based on the nobility within the city. Now, in Machiavelli's time, he's in a republic. The nobility, the ultimatty, they got money, right? They don't have any military background. They don't have any military training.

And their money is their power. And money's how you move mercenaries. And there's also as a complex system of debt that if you hired mercenaries, you had to borrow and the interest system that was based on that and various complex taxation really made this a moneymaker for the for the nobility so they're making money off the mercenary system and they're afraid that if there's homegrown troops especially in a republic you know where the people them are are more or less in charge you could see how they'd be saying no way we don't want to to give weapons to the native forces that could use them against us.

Can I ask kind of a dumb question? Why aren't the same, why aren't the Ottomati also concerned about the prospect of the ruling power, whoever it may be, the person paying the mercenaries, using the mercenaries against aristocratic interests? Why is the domestic threat greater? Well, I mean, up until recently, up until, you know, the Republican period, I mean, up until then, the de URA powers, the official political powers were not the ones with the money. The rich people had the money, and they had direct relationships with, and this was the Medici family.

They had direct relationships with specific mercenary captains. So they would, they'd actually, you know, steer government to make use of these mercenaries so that they were really kind of controlling government in the Republican period. You know, I guess I don't really know the answer to that question. You know, why were they? I mean, I guess I'll have to think about it, but I guess I'll speculate rather than base this on solid knowledge. But, you know, I would speculate that the system was still. fairly similar, right? That you had the people with the money had outsized influence on the actual choices and employment of these mercenaries such that they could pull the plug if they wanted

to pull the plug. Now, I happen to know that that's not strictly the case. I mean, when the senioria, the main body, the sort of executive committee of the general counsel of the assembled full makes a decision. It is the authoritative body. So I don't know, I'll have to think more about why they were not worried about mercenary. Well, I guess they were partly still. It's, it was now as I'm thinking about there are there's plenty of instances where they thought, oh gosh, you know, we're worried that Francesco Svortez is going to take over. We're worried that Cheseray-Borje is going to invade. So, so they were worried much of the time, but it was a matter of picture poison. Yeah. They were more sure.

that the people, if they had a chance, would, you know, use force against them than they were that some mercenary who can be bought off. Yeah. That sounds right. I mean, at least from coming from me, this is pure speculation. The mercenaries don't give a fig about the Florentine political structure or, you know, they have interests, but it's nothing to do with substantive concerns about what Florence is or anything like that.

Whereas, you know, sort of like in Thucydides, like putting heavy arms in the hands of the Maidelinians immediately leads to some pretty significant trouble. You know, we're going to give these people weapons. We're going to train them. Like, don't you know they have sort of dedicated political interests that are not necessarily ours? Like, I could see that. It's like the mercenaries are a problem, but this is like out of the frying pan into the fire,

maybe. That's right. Yeah. So, yeah, the people are a known inveterate enemy. And the mercenaries, well, maybe there'll be enemy. Maybe they won't. But we can deal with that with money. But the people, they, they, as Machiavelli says, there are two humors, he calls them,

two, you know, different elements. We'd call them classes that are just endemic to any political structure, the people and the great. And the people just want not to be oppressed and the great want to oppress. That's the dynamic that is the background for all this. Wonderful, Machiavellian directness in that observation. So, okay, so into this environment, it comes Machiavelli. He obviously, as you document and analyze and explain really well in the book, takes one side of this argument. He obviously rejects these objections and then works for years to develop an indigenous Florentine force.

He has, and this is intermingled with the main foreign policy challenge, at least the most persistent foreign policy challenge he has throughout this period, which is the reconquest of Pisa, right? So talk about those two things and how they go together. Just talk about Machiavelli's time in office and his effectiveness. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he started off in an office that traditionally had had very little power. It was pretty bureaucratic. And it officially, the second chancery it was called, there are two chanceries. One deals with what we think of as really foreign.

See, countries like France and faraway places. But the second chancery was in charge of an element of their foreign policy that was very important. And that was their dominions throughout Tuscany. So he comes into this office, doesn't have a lot of power historically before he came into office. And then he's a media predecessor. It had started to grow a bit. There was more real policymaking, not just bureaucratic stamping of things, but some real policymaking. He steps into that role and he expands it further.

And then when there's an additional switch to the constitution of, of Florence to go from it being more of a pure republic to being a republic that has a strong lifetime appointed executive. This guy, Piero Sotorini, comes in 1502, a few years into Machiavelli's tenure. And he, Machiavelli ends up getting very close to Piero Soterini. And Sotorini increasingly relies on him as the years go on. So Machiavelli ends up, you know, not just being this bureaucrat, but, you know, being responsible for really much. much of Florence's foreign policy, to the point where it extends beyond Florentine dominions, he ends up on missions to France, multiple missions to France and other places.

So he ends up with a quite expansive role. But as you say, the main thing that Florence was just so bothered by was the loss of the city of Pisa. There was a large sort of emotional and symbolic significance to their life. long-time domination of Florence, but it really does ultimately stem from an important strategic fact. Florence was landlocked. Florence needed access to the sea for all sorts of reasons, commercial primarily. I mean, this was a commercial republic. It needed to have a vibrant commerce and it needed access to the sea and Pisa was their access. So when Pisa rebels at the time of

the French invasion that I mentioned before, becomes really important for Florence to retake it. They make many attempts, a few before Machiavelli comes into office and then several, three and most prominent ones, using mercenary forces and they fail and fail and fail. And then after all of these failures with mercenary forces, some of which Machiavelli literally witnessed, he was there watching mercenaries not do what they wanted them to do. He was able to persuade Piero Sotorini to kind of on the QT start forming a a homegrown militia. Then as that becomes more acceptable to people, it becomes an official law. And in 1506, he starts a military of thousands. And it is important to note, given the politics

that we were talking about before, these are not people within the walls of Florence. This is a military raised from the distretti, they're called the districts that they were in control of within Tuscany. So they would recruit these people and put them in a militia. They'd have to train every month, but they were had over them, people who were somewhat native to the place, but then over them would be foreign mercenary leaders, right, that Machiavelli, you know, knew these are the ones you need to have in charge, the ones who really know what they're doing, and ones who aren't loyal to a particular place within the Tuscan dominions or within Florence such that they would become the kind of political threat that everyone feared.

Tell us about what warfare is like during this period, whether mercenary or militia or maybe actually the tactics and weapons differ from one to the other. But at the turn of the 16th century, by the way, just to make a brief digressive point, it is remarkable to observe that what we are talking about, the Renaissance here, really, if you've done in terms of art history, I mean, this is the high Renaissance. This is the precise period of Leonardo. Michelangelo, Raphael, all of this tremendous ferment humanism, learning, revival of classical traditions. And it is a period of tremendous violence and savagery and instability. It's just kind of why. I don't know where to go with that, but it's... Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, if we were visual also,

not just audio, I'd show you around my office here where I have paintings by Paolo Uccello and Tim Torretto and it combines what you're talking about, the high Renaissance, art, these fabulous paintings of these just incredibly violent battles. Yeah. And we have the Battle of Rebena over here and the Battle of Nataro River, which is actually the cover of my book. But yeah, so this is the high renaissance. It's a time of, you know, incredible change, militarily speaking. There's a, you know, a hundred years before this, there was the real predominance exaggerated deliberately, knowingly exaggerated by Machia Belli, but nonetheless true, predominance of on horseback mercenary forces, which had themselves,

even before that, been part of the Crusades as the Crusades kind of dry up, they don't have anything to do, but they don't want to disarm and they become, you know, something of a menace, especially in Italy, but that elsewhere in Europe as well. But, you know, the soldier on horseback, a, you know, successor of the medieval knight with a small coterie of foot soldiers in support of him was, you know, the standard within 100 years of Machiavelli. But then, you know, things started to change and a couple things happened. One, as Machiavelli says, the Swiss came down from the mountains and they came down from the mountains with these enormous pike squares.

they would arrange themselves into squares and they were mobile. They were on foot. They had these pikes that would protrude out from the square and they'd protrude sort of three levels deep. You'd have three levels of pike points. They were so long, 19 feet or so. And they could come down onto a field of battle and, you know, horse are, you know, any one horse is bigger than any, you know, even small group of men and sort of historically terrifying, but they

would stick together very tightly and they could come and drive off a, you know, what would have been the predominant force at the time cavalry now. How do they drive them off? You know, I mean, they're slower. They're on foot, but they were able to come down into a field or come onto a field. And they had real defensive power if cavalry would charge or they would use crossbows or, you know, the arquebuses, the primitive hand-held firearms they had at the time to stop them. They get stopped in the field. That was not the end of the world to them. They would put their pike butts down on the ground and the foot behind it and would be able to receive the attempted charges of the cavalry and keep them at bay. and then once they're no longer being besieged, they can start moving again and go after them

and then ultimately take whatever position they need to take. So it really shifted things on the field of battle. At the same time, artillery is becoming increasingly effective. Siege artillery was very effective by Machiavelli's time, as demonstrated by Charles especially, took to pass Machiavelli's time, partly using insights of his to develop fortifications that could resist that kind of siege. artillery, but even field artillery was starting to be developed. And it was just very difficult to figure out how to combine all of these, right? How do you combine the different elements of the military, infantry cavalry, artillery, and then the different weapons that they can each be

deploying. And it really took decades to figure out how to put them together. And, you know, And it does eventually settle into what Gustavus Adolphus and Riesa and I saw and others later will end up using. But Machiavill is very much part of that whole transition and tracked it very carefully and basically reflected the developments in his writings. It's another real misunderstanding. A lot of people think thought this happily this idea is starting to go away. They thought he naively hated firearms and it was against them and wanted to, you know, cast them into the sea. not at all. He put them in proportion with the other elements of the military about according to the practice of the time and it got modified during his lifetime according to the practice of the time.

He was pretty much cutting edge on that stuff. This is really, really interesting. Sort of the way you lay it out, it sort of makes me think of today to an extent where there is a ferment and a kind of confusion and trial and error about integrating new technologies into, we would say the current argo, you know, coherent operating concepts or something like that, how to make these things work together on a battlefield. So can I, another question from the dumb question department, your description of the Swiss, the pivotal Swiss impact on all of this.

That's not exactly, or maybe you'll tell me it is, and there's something I'm missing here, but it doesn't seem like the introduction of a new technology so much as the reintroduction. It sounds like phalanxes and legionaries to me, and cavalry, I'm out in a limb here because ancient warfare is not my... No, no, you're right. But cavalry was auxiliary. Cavalry was reconnaissance, you know, decisive as the Greeks first toyed around with and then the Romans really conquered a good chunk of the world with.

There was heavy infantry, properly organized, properly trained, properly formed, was decisive. And it sounds like with the Swissers, the Renaissance, the Swiss are reviving something classical? Is that what's going on? Yeah. Well, I mean, yes, I know. They weren't so much self-class. conscious imitators of antiquity, but you're absolutely right. Machiavelli saw them as a,

you know, sort of potential resurrection of the Roman legion and the manipules that would make up that legion. But really, they were more, as you, I think you just indicated, they were more like, you know, Greek hoplites and then they were like Roman legions and cohorts. But DeMachiavelli wanted to, you know, basically make them more like the Romans, a more flexible, a spread out more along a protracted front and not just an enormous pike square that operated as sort of like a big moving, slow moving tank. So, you know, he saw them as a as a disruptor of the previous way of doing war, but not as a, you know, simple, straightforward model. He wanted to modify them and did seek to modify them and make them more flexible and deployed

more in a linear rather than a block manner. But he still used, he still used them as blocks to some degree. And as his career goes on, and he's working on this militia project, I mean, he ends up at a point where maybe battlefield commander is slightly overstating things, but only slightly, right? I mean, he is in overall operational control of pivotal campaigns against PISA. Yeah, I mean, there's this, the single biggest foreign policy desire for his city, as we already identified, was retaking the PISA. He really does command the forces that he made, that he developed in the eventual final reconquest of Pisa. Now, it is important to note he never did and never as far as I know aspired to command troops on.

a field of battle in a major open field now. This did not happen. I'm not saying it did. I don't think he, you know, had any aspirations in that regard. And it would have been realistic if he had. What he did do was command these troops, you know, which the numbers to us seem just minuscule, but, you know, 3,000 troops to take this city. But really, it was an investment. They invested the city, you know, encircled the city and cut it off. This, this was a lot of, this, was what was absolutely crucial. They had attacked PISA many times before with mercenary forces. And they knew that they could besiege the city. They had besieged it before, but the mercenaries wouldn't, you know, do the crucial breach that was very costly of, you know, filling the breaches

with human bodies that could get killed and go up against what are called double peace and ramparts. So what they decided to do was just starve it and exploit political differences within Pisa to bring it to its knees. And the main political differences being between the richer city dwellers and the poorer surrounding Contadini, the peasants around. But, you know, they had surrounded them before, but they didn't effectively completely cut them off from all resupply. And Machiavelli's forces did under his command. He was not the official commander. He was the de facto commander. And I do, I think, establish in my book that he really was the de facto commander in everyone's mind, including the official commissioners they were called, sent from Florence to oversee the military operations that they were answering to Machia Valley, not the other way around.

And then there were mercenary captains that he was in charge of that, you know, he was paying. and partly directing, and then the troops themselves were, had been raised by him. So, yeah, he was really there and it was a successful operation. It was a tremendous, you know, feathering his cap and the cap of his boss, Piero Sotorini, to pull this off. Well, well, nothing lasts forever. And it's what? It's that this project comes to an end.

And it's, at least on some level, Machiavelli's career in power begins to come to an end with the defeat of this. There's, I confess, Chris, like the ins and outs, the details of this period require, require a you, require somebody full time year after year to grasp it. But there is a Venetian dimension to this and another foreign intervention and Machiavelli, the Republic and Machiavelli's career essentially come to an end, as does the militia. It is that the project ends in catastrophe now. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, this is one of the sort of an after effect of,

one of the French invasions. Spanish troops are fighting different assembled Italian troops, and including, well, at any rate, and they, the Spanish troops are actually defeated in a very important battle in 1512. They go from that defeat, and these are professionals, mixed professional French, Spanish soldiers mixed with various mercenaries. And they show up outside of Florence, defeated Hungary military. And they have, some of those old Medici rulers with them, the ones that had been kicked out during Florence's Republican period. And the Spanish want, they want, they want spoils and they want, you know, money and they want food. And the Medici, who are with them, want back into power. And Machiaveli's

militia actually was sufficient. This is an argument that I make that goes against the grain of the sort of received opinion. The received opinion is Machiavelli's military was woefully on the, able to deal with this professional military when it came. My argument, echoing Machiavelli's own in the discourses, is, well, it actually was sufficient, even deployed partially at Prado, this town outside of Florence. It basically was garrison strength because other parts of the military were at a nearby town where they thought they were going to be able to get the Spanish to engage and they didn't. Still others were brought back into Florence's own walls. So it was a small garrison strength version of his military. And they held off the Spanish troops sufficiently to get them

to negotiate and say, hey, we actually won't make you return the Medici to power. We just want you to buy us off. And after, and because they successfully held them off, Pierre Sotorini and other Florentines got cocky and they didn't do the deal. They didn't say, okay. And then the Spanish said, well, now we're really mad. And then they did, you know, really storm at initial, you know, cost to them, but then just wiped out the militia there. And then that, that complete defeat of that contingent at Prado led Florentine, the Florence itself to fall to the Spanish. And then the Medici who are with them coming to power and Machiavelli and Soderini and the Republic are out. But like I say, you know, it did its job. Machiavelli didn't think it could go.

out into the field of battle and beat Spanish professionals. That was the idea. The idea is you can hold them off enough to make a deal. And it did do that. Couldn't hold off indefinitely. So Machiavelli goes into political exile. It's a rough period in his life, certainly initially. Where does, you're also the editor and translator of Machiavelli's art of war.

When does that get composed? And where does that fit into, you know, explain its roles to us. Obviously, there's a role of bringing everything you and I have just been talking about together and explaining Machiavelli's policy views, if you will. But obviously, as really the heart of your work focuses on, it points towards deeper and broader considerations as he embarks upon a career really as a thinker about Italy and the human project and much broader considerations.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Art of War was published in 1521. So he's thrown out of power in 1512. And during this time, he's also writing the books that he becomes famous for afterwards. But he prudently does not have them published during his lifetime. He arranges for them to be published later. But during his lifetime, he published the Art of War. And it was fully published, printed and with his name on it.

And, you know, it was sort of like, you know, picture someone having been, you know, in a deputy secretary of defense and this person having a real expertise. But imagine he's also kind of has these philosophical ambitions at the same time. He's going to make his reputation based on his metier, on what he's known for knowing about. And he can go ahead and publish that during his lifetime as Machiavelli did. And it's fairly technical. But there are elements of the big political, philosophical things, elements in the art of war

of the big political, philosophic things that he ends up having published after his lifetime in the Prince and Discourses. But then in the Prince and Discourses, you know, that's where he really does try to take that. But really the literal, most important concept in his thinking is having arms of one's own. He means that quite literally in the art of war and in his own practice for Florentine policy development, but he also has a symbolic or metaphorical meaning of that. And having your own arms for him means not relying on anyone else for anything, including especially your thoughts about things. Don't rely on received opinion or authority, especially church authority. His hostility to religion can't be just reduced to the havoc that the papacy rates on

Florence on Italy and Florence that we talked about earlier, but you know, that's part of it. It also has to do with, you know, sort of a fundamental philosophical stance that he has that you really ought to think on your own. And that's how the way he kind of deploys that thought is through his depiction of commanders. So the best military commanders are ones who do not let other people do their thinking for them. They do the thinking themselves based on the situation that they see based on their knowledge and past experience, but not based on any sort of completely rigid doctrines. You need doctrines to, you know, form military, sure, but your commanders need to be able to think on their own. He has that be really very much what he's teaching for practical

military purposes, but it too is a kind of metaphor for thinking on your own and relying on yourself. And it's also part of his just depiction of, hey, life, life is, life is tough. War is a good, you know, way to think about how human life is, or at least how you ought to plan as though life is where we're all fighting each other. You know, so he really emphasized that and had that be the way he talked about things in general. He does, he does have another whole side, actually, just to advertise my next book coming out with Nathan Tarkoff. We're translating for Oxford University. Trust all of Machiavelli's stories, poems. and comic letters.

Oh, yeah. This is, it's sort of the whole realm of sex and love. Yeah. He's as outrageous within that realm as he is within the realm of war and politics. And when he's in what, when he's in love, he could care less about war. When he's at war, he can care less about love. But each of them have, you know, huge weight for him and kind of alternating between them is what he does and suggests he's the happy life.

Well, just in our last few minutes. here just to dip our toe into some of these deeper waters. The only other time we've discussed Machiavelli on the show was with Matt Cronick, who's a good friend of the podcast and teaches international relations and strategy at Georgetown, but also has a sideline in Machiavelli studies. I put the question at one point directly to him, like, where do you come down on this whole Machiavelli's teacher of evil versus Machiavelli's well-meaning, a reviver of classical antiquity in the face of medieval corruption?

and he gave his answer. What's your answer, Chris? Mine is it's neither. You could say it's both or you could say it's neither. I guess I'll go with neither. So, you know, he did not mean to have some of his nastiest sayings and examples, you know, necessarily be literally put into practice. He wasn't necessarily prescribing that.

In fact, he knew everyone who's been in politics and war knows you can't be a nice. guy and succeed. So there's really nothing new about saying you got to be tough. And sometimes you've got to lie and force and fraud is what it's about in war. You know, he advocated those things. And he did it though for ultimately because he did want to defeat the reigning paradigm of the day, which was Christian classical world that was dominating. And he wanted to replace it with something else. But that's something else. I think he genuinely thought would be good for people. He said he was doing it for the common good of each and each and everyone.

And I think that that is really what he thought. So he's trying to make things better. But he was really actually most interested in, you know, sort of making the case for what I was saying before, a life dedicated to really thinking on your own. So he wanted to bring a kind of new justification for why you really ought to think. And that justification is because if you don't, you're going to get. killed. So here's how to start thinking. So in a way, he kind of ends up being like the ancients in their preference for a philosophic life, but not one based on kind of moral virtue. Instead, one based on knowing what you have to do in order to survive, not so much because he wants

people to go around killing each other and voicing each other left and right, but because he wanted people to think. So that's my version of the answer. Christopher Lynch, author of Machiavelli on war, a translator and editor of Machiavelli's Art of War, co-author of a forthcoming, or co-translator of a forthcoming volume of Machiavelli's perhaps more humanistic works. This has been really, really interesting. And perhaps you'll come back and we'll talk more about early modern warfare and political philosophy at some other time. I'd love to.

Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.