BOOK: Coluccio Salutati, "Political Writings"

Coluccio Salutati: Political Writings. Edited by Stefano U. Baldassarri, translated by Rolf Bagemihl. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 64. Harvard University Press, 2014. 9780674728677. xxxv + 489 pp.

Selected State Letters

Salutati worked many decades as the chancellor of the Florentine republic, and wrote numerous official letters in this role; apparently almost 7500 are known (p. 397). This section contains nine of them, mostly addressed to various popes, kings, etc. I didn't find them terribly interesting to read, and I thought it would be useful if the notes said more about the context of each letter. I guess most of the recipients were rulers of stronger countries than Florence, therefore Salutati often adopts a sort of whining or supplicating tone, which I didn't like much.

There are some nice rhetorical features from time to time, such as the practice of piling up synonyms in groups of three; from the interesting introduction by editor (p. xxvi, n. 11) I learned that this sort of thing is called a “tricolon” and that many of Salutati's letters must have been meant to be read aloud. My favourite tricolon, in any case, remains ‘no, I haven't stolen, filched or purloined your thesaurus’ :)

One interesting recurring theme in these letters is his animosity towards Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, whom he likes to refer to as “the viper” (because of his coat of arms) or, sarcastically, as “the count of Virtue” (because he owned some land around Vertus, France; p. 426, n. 34).

On Tyranny

As Salutati explains in his preface, he wrote this treatise on the request of a student from Padua who wrote to him, praising his learning and asking him whether killing a tyrant is justified and whether it was fair for Dante to put Brutus and Cassius into the lowest circle of hell for their murder of Julius Caesar. Salutati starts with a discussion of the different types of government; his division struck me as somewhat odd and certainly different than what I vaguely remember of ancient Greeks' ideas on the subject. In 1.6, he divides governments into monarchical (the monarch rules on the basis of his own prudence and will), constitutional (the government is constrained by laws) and despotic (“that system of government which is exercised over slaves and beasts” and aims mostly at promoting the owner's property rights). He tries to explain this by a household analogy that sounds hilariously offensive by present-day standards: “The father of a family governs his son monarchically through his affection for him, his wife constitutionally according to the principles of right, but his slaves despotically as being his own property.” (1.7) He says that a tyrant can occur in any system of government and is defined by having no legal right to rule, or by breaking the laws that restrict his powers.

He then argues that it is lawful to kill a tyrant, mostly it seems by analogy with the fact that in private life it is legal to resist an attacker, burglar etc. (2.1). However, I was greatly disappointed by the examples he gave, mostly from early Roman history as reported by Livy and the like. The fine tradition of killing tyrants seems to have in practice been little more than an excuse for Roman noblemen to murder anyone who looked like he wants to do anything good for masses of the people, with the excuse that he must surely be a conniving demagogue who plans to dupe the masses into elevating him to tyranny. They justified the murder of Tiberius Gracchus that way, as well as of one Marcus Manlius who “used his private property to release debtors and redeem those who were enslaved for debt” (2.3)! Just when I thought I could not be any more disgusted by the ancient Romans, they go and prove me wrong. — Salutati also adds some major qualifications to the right of tyrannicide: if the people recognize some lawful prince, the decision to kill the tyrant should come from him; if not, then from the people as a whole; but it isn't lawful for an individual to do this on his own initiative (2.15, 2.17, 2.19). I'm not quite sure how he expected this to work; it's not like the tyrant will allow the people to hold a mass meeting and vote on whether they want to kill him or not. . .

Next there's a discussion on whether Caesar was a tyrant or not. Salutati spends most of this section citing opinions of Cicero and the like to the effect that Caesar was not a bad or cruel ruler, that he was magnanimous to the losers of the civil war in which he came to power, etc. This struck me as irrelevant since Salutati had previously defined a tyrant as someone who rules despite having no legal right to it; whether his rule is benevolent or not has nothing to do with this definition. But he does come back to this definition at the end of the section, where he claims that the Roman people, grateful for Caesar's handling of the civil war and its aftermath, lawfully and freely conferred upon him the various honours, offices, etc. that he thenceforth held (3.11–12), which means that he was no tyrant as he got his power legally.

Perhaps this is true, but if so, it just shows how inadequate his definition of a tyrant is. Many tyrants seize power in a way that is more or less technically legal — Hitler is perhaps the most famous example; and even nowadays we see all sorts of wanna-be-dictator strongmen popping up all over the world on the basis of elections, referendums etc. I think the true definition of a tyrant should consider how easy or difficult it is for the people to get rid of him. But then this would make it hard to consider monarchy (of the sort where a hereditary monarch really runs the country and isn't just a figurehead) a legitimate (non-tyrannous) form of government, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that someone like Salutati doesn't adopt this definition of tyranny.

There's an interesting passage where Salutati points out that the civil war between Pompey and Caesar “was not about whether some one man should rule and have supreme control of the state, but which of the two it should be. [. . .] It was a contest, not to preserve the commonwealth, but to destroy it.” (3.9) That is sad but probably true; but it still doesn't mean that the winner of the contest was not a tyrant. Ideally, instead of assassinating Caesar after he became a tyrant, they should have assassinated both him *and* Pompey before the civil war even started.

Anyway, Salutati thus argues that killing Caesar was wrong because he was no tyrant, but a benevolent ruler who brought peace to a country previously torn apart by civil war; a veritable “father of his country” (4.1, 4.20). He also follows the old idea that monarchy is the best form of government (4.16–17), provided of course that you have a good monarch, such as Caesar (in Salutati's view at least) obviously was. This reminded me a little of the dialogue Republics and Kingdoms Compared that I read a few years ago, and then ranted at interminable length about these things, so I shouldn't repeat myself too much here. But it seems obvious to me that even if you had a good monarch (which I don't for a moment believe possible anyway), it's the very principle of monarchy that is the problem. People get used to obeying one man, and sooner or later the present good monarch will be succeeded by a bad one, and people will still obey him, leading to all sorts of horrors. Rome itself is an excellent example — you start with monarchs like Caesar and Augustus, who were by all accounts good and capable rulers, and then within like 50 years you end up with degenerates like Caligula and Nero, who were allowed to get away with their abuses for years because by then people were already so used to obeying an emperor that somehow nobody thought to run them through with a sword as should have been done in the first year of each of their reigns. . .

So killing Caesar, in my opinion, was a good and necessary thing regardless of whether he was personally a good ruler or not. It was necessary simply as a statement that monarchy is wrong and shouldn't be accepted as a legitimate form of government. (Salutati himself hints at this sort of motivation in 4.6, but doesn't go into detail.) If they had kept murdering people like him quickly and regularly enough, perhaps they wouldn't have had Caligula and Nero the next century. The only problem I have with the assassination of Caesar is that I doubt that the assassins really cared much about the people as a whole. It seems that they were either supporters of Pompey's faction who were sore about having just lost the civil war, or simply high-ranking aristocrats who wanted the regime to remain basically oligarchic so they could keep running the country without having a pesky monarch above them. In any case they didn't care about the masses of the regular people. Caesar seems to have actually been popular with the people at the time of his assassination, and it was almost touching to read Salutati's description of the expressions of grief after his death, and of the people's anger at the assassins (4.4).

I was somewhat surprised and disappointed to see Salutati defend monarchy like this, considering that he himself came from a republic. Perhaps his thinking was influenced by the instability and civil strife that was so typical of republican city-states like Florence, and liked the idea of a monarch as someone who, by his power, prevents the state from descending into civil war. Throughout chapter 4, he emphasizes that Caesar's administration brought peace and that Rome entered a new civil war immediately after his assassination. But this is the wrong solution to the problem of civil wars. From what I remember of reading Tom Holland's Rubicon, the instabilities in the late Roman republic were coming from the fact that the people at the top of the social pyramid were getting too rich and too powerful. What would have been smallish groups of supporters shouting at each other or brawling in the streets a couple centuries earlier was now able to grow into armies fighting a civil war against each other. The solution to this is obviously to do away with this dangerous concentration of power — kill them, nationalize their property, whatever. Concentrating the power even more, in the hands of just one man, is the last thing you should do in a situation like this — you might get a little temporary peace, but then you'll also get Nero and Caligula, and eventually new civil wars anyway as the various usurpers start fighting for the throne.

The treatise ends with a short chapter on the treatment of Brutus and Cassius by Dante. In his Divine Comedy, he puts them in the lowest circle of hell, being eaten by Lucifer in the form of a three-headed monster (so there's room for Judas Iscariot as well). From what we've seen in the previous chapters, it's no surprise that Salutati approves of this, since treason is bad, monarchy is good, etc. (5.4, 5.6). Dante makes each of the devil's heads a different colour, so Salutati includes some discussion about their symbolical meaning (5.2–3)

Antonio Loschi's Invective Against the Florentines

This is the only piece in this book that is not by Salutati. Loschi worked for the duke of Milan, with which Florence had been at war several times in the late 14th century, so it's understandable that he had much to say against the Florentines. His invective reminded me a little of those by Petrarch that I had read some time ago (see my old post about that book), but I actually liked Loschi's invective better. It's relatively short and contains a good balance of fine rhetoric and actual specific points. In other words, at least he points to specific things that the Florentines had done (and that he objects to), unlike Petrarch, who, as far as I remember his invectives, was too often content to remain on the level of ‘my opponent is an idiot, and his feet smell bad’.

I don't know the details of the political situation at the time, so I can't comment on whether Loschi's claims are valid, but one recurring idea is that Florence interferes too much in other countries' affairs, and there's probably some truth to that, the same as it is true of any powerful country. He also complains about their alliance with the king of France and their attempts to get him involved in Italian affairs as well. I can sympathize with that; nobody likes to see foreigners interfering in his country's internal struggles.

A nice remark on this latter subject: “it is very easy for the French to enter Italy, but difficult to return thence victorious. Whence our popular proverb: Italy is the tomb of the French.” (¶16)

Reply to a Slanderous Detractor

Salutati's reply to Loschi is almost ten times the length of Loschi's invective. He starts by saying that the invective is so bad that he refuses to believe it's by Loschi — “so many are the mendacious insults, so many are the grammatical faults, unworthy of a man of his erudition, that riddle this invective, so many are the enraged but ignorant taunts that disfigure it” (p. 171 and ¶3). This is either a remarkable example of charity, or a delicious backhanded insult. I was reminded of the famous remark that “some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters”.

He also points out that the invective mostly just asserts things without providing any proof or argument, so the whole thing can be dismissed simply by denying that his claims are true (¶2). I guess he is on to something here, but then I never had the impression that invectives were supposed to do more than brazenly assert that your enemy's feet smell bad.

The bulk of his reply then consists of what would nowadays be called fisking. Salutati quotes the invective a few sentences or a paragraph at a time and then provides his reply to the quoted passage before moving on to the next one. Most of the time his reply is not really an invective by itself, which in a way is commendable but also made for somewhat boring reading.

Occasionally he does stoop to cheap and annoying tricks such as taking a very literal interpretation of some passage in Loschi's invective (e.g. something that employs hyperbole or metaphor) and then replying to that, even though it's obvious to everyone that this isn't exactly what Loschi had had in mind. See e.g. the dissection of Loschi's phrase “legions of cavalry” (¶78), where Salutati digs deeply into the etymology of these terms and into Roman practices of assembling their forces, arguing that applying the word “legion” to anything other than infantry is nonsensical.

And similarly in ¶141, when Loschi complains about the Florentine's “craftiness and ungovernable license to lie and engage in conspiracies”, Salutati replies: “what is this ungovernable license to plot and lie? Do tell me, who ever granted this license to the Florentines? [. . .] If license was granted us, why censure us? Surely it's not wicked for us or anyone else to exercise what is our right?” :))) [By the way, this is also a nice illustration of how much English has borrowed from Latin. . . Salutati is basically making a joke based on two senses of the Latin word licentia, and the same joke works in English as well.]

He also makes pedantically uncharitable remarks about Loschi's grammar from time to time (e.g. ¶129).

Often, however, he points out genuine weaknesses in the invective. For example, Loschi makes it seem as if the Florentines were trying to spread tyranny and slavery around, but meanwhile he is in the employ of the duke of Milan, who is an even bigger tyrant. Many of Loschi's calumnies against Florence can be rejected simply by pointing out that hey, it's renaissance Florence — a city prosperous both materially and culturally, and thus bound to come out looking pretty good when compared against pretty much any of their neighbours. While pointing this out, Salutati goes into a fine bit of righteous fury: “And you, you foul and vile being, you disgusting filth, offspring of filth, how dare you call Florence the dregs of Italy!” (¶115)

Salutati also goes into a considerable amount of detail about various recent conflicts, the Florentine alliance with France, etc., to show that Loschi got pretty much everything wrong. I wasn't really terribly interested in this stuff at this level of detail, but I imagine it must have meant a lot to Salutati, who had been in a way involved in all these events during his thirty or so years as the chancellor of the Florentine republic (“I stand armed with knowledge of facts, the truth behind events, and a just cause. I know the treaties, I know the alliances, I know the violations and betrayals:” ¶180).

His reply concludes with some fine rhetoric again. There is probably a fancy Greek name for this sort of thing, doing something while pretending not to be doing it: “I could call you [. . .] a Nero or a Caligula [. . .] I could call you a Sardanapalus of sensuality, a Xerxes of pleasure [. . .] For lust I can call you Priapus or Silenus or [. . .] that champion of venereal monstrosity, that wretched example of the worst perversion that was Varius Antoninus, known as Heliogabalus.” (¶177) He ends with a challenge to Loschi, saying that he is ready to continue the debate, and a few parting insults: “If you start to lie again, I'll not stand for it and I'll return to the fray. [. . .] And be careful at least not to offend my ears with more grammatical errors, of which you have already made a disgraceful number.” (¶183)

I don't think that Loschi wrote any reply to Salutati's reply, or at least I don't remember any mention of such a thing in the notes to this book, so I guess the debate ended there. Overall I have to say that there are some very nice passages in Salutati's reply, but most of it wasn't terribly interesting. If someone were to cut it down to be about the same length as Loschi's invective, it could be quite enjoyable.

A nice bit of invective from ¶40: “Your speech seems to smacks not only of stupidity, but blasphemy and heresy — a charge easy to suppose in the case of Ghibellines — and utter, helpless mendacity.”