Francesco Guicciardini was born on March 6, 1483 in Florence, into an old Florentine family that kept close links with the Medici and with the intellectual circles of the city. The data we know about his youth come from the Italian historian's own pen who collected them in the work Ricordanze . In this way we know that he studied law and jurisprudence at the universities of Pisa, Ferrara and Padua and that after his return to his native city he settled as a lawyer. In these years he will write his first works, of which the History of Florence stands out. (1509) which covers the period from 1378 (when the ciompi revolt took place) to 1509 (signing of the peace of Lodi).
More interested in politics and diplomacy than in law, he was appointed Florentine ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic in 1511, a position he held until 1514 when he returned to Florence to work at Medici service. During his stay in Spain he wrote Diario del viaggio in Spagna and Relazione di Spagna . A short time later, Pope Leo X asked him to take charge of the government of Modena in 1516 and of Reggio in 1517. During these years he participated as Commisario Generale of the Vatican army in the war that pitted the Italian states against France. In subsequent years he would continue to occupy important positions within the pontifical administration (government of Parma in 1521 and of Romagna in 1524) and managed to become an outstanding adviser to the new Pope Clement VII, to whom he advised union with the French and Venetians against Emperor Charles V, a union that would give rise to the League of Cognac. During the conflict, he was again entrusted with the command of the papal forces, without being able to avoid the Sack of Rome by the imperial troops.
After the war he was appointed governor of Bologna in 1531 but Paul III, proclaimed Pope in 1534 after the death of Clement VII, forced him to abandon this position. Guicciardini returns to Florence to work again with the Medici, who had regained power, first for Alexander and then for Cosimo. The last years of his life, from 1536 to 1540, he dedicated to the elaboration of his great work History of Italy , the only piece of writing that he did for the public and not for himself. He died on May 22, 1540 in the small town of Santa Margarita de Montici on the outskirts of the Florentine city.
Guicciardini's most important historical work is, without a doubt, his History of Italy that collects the events that occurred in the Italian peninsula between the years 1494 and 1532. Organized chronologically year by year, it analyzes the loss of power of the Italian city-states in favor of the great continental monarchies (Spain and France) that through the military invasion and diplomatic agreements managed to break the peace and balance of the region. It must be clarified that the Italian historian does not conceive of Italy as a national unit (in the sense that we would understand it today) but rather as a picture, similar to the one already designed by Machiavelli, in which different "peoples" with similar features coexist. His analysis focuses on events on the peninsula, which he treats as an intertwined whole.
Guicciardini breaks with the medieval Italian historiographical tradition (which he himself had practiced in his History of Florence ) and abandons the localist study of a specific city, expanding the scenario not only to the whole of the Italian peninsula but also to the actions carried out by the French and Spanish. For him it is not possible to separate the events that occur, for example, in Florence with those that take place in Rome. The wars that plague Italy have as their origin, in his opinion, multiple factors but in any case their main cause lies in the disputes and interests of the different cities that, in the end, are the ones that invite foreign monarchs to intervene in their affairs. .
If Guicciardini had used in the History of Florence the traditional technique of presenting the virtues and vices of the characters described, which allowed him to classify them according to a moral scale, in the History of Italy abandon this approach. Since man is no longer good or bad, but only selfish, his actions will be guided by the calculation of the consequences that will derive from one or another decision. And since the result may not always coincide with what was initially planned, human behavior is usually modified to adapt to new circumstances. In this way, nothing prevents that, if someone makes a "morally" acceptable decision and the expectations placed on it are not met, then they adopt another one that is not so tolerable according to moral canons.
Guicciardini's conception of history is closely linked to his interpretation of human behavior. He believes that events are likely to repeat themselves (he adopts a certain cyclical theory) even when the particular conditions that surround man at each moment make them seem unique and unrepeatable. He thus expresses it in one of his Recommendations:“ Everything that has been in the past and we see in the present will also be in the future; only the names and wrappers of things change, so that whoever does not have good eyes does not recognize it and does not know how to use this observation to draw a rule and formulate an opinion ”. The Italian historian denies, however, that valid conclusions can be drawn from the past for their application in the present, since the context in which they occur is not comparable, a more pessimistic reflection than that of Machiavelli. The lesson men can draw from history is to anticipate the effect their actions will have on their dignity and their own name in posterity.
One of the most outstanding features of Guicciardini's thought is the role he attributes to Fortune. Knowing (first hand) how quickly luck changes hands and how easy it is to rush from the heights of power to a position of inconsequentiality, his works reflect the inability of man to control his future. . The appeal to Fortune - even without defining it precisely - permeates all of his writings. In one of his famous Recommendations, he states:“ Whoever seriously reflects will not be able to deny that luck has a lot of power in human affairs, since every day we see them shaken violently by casual events that men cannot foresee or avoid.; and while human skill and precautions can smooth out many things, they always need luck to help them ”. He denies, in the same way, the existence of immutable laws that govern the designs of the human being and does not even attribute any importance to Providence, since man is only guided by his interests and is subject to the vagaries of Fortune.
To elaborate his writings, Guicciardini resorts both to first-hand documentary sources and to the works of other historians. Imbued with the spirit of classical historiography (as evidenced by the inclusion of speeches in the narration of events), he focuses on military and diplomatic history, even apologizing when he abandons it to enter other fields.
Guicciardini's historical conception cannot be understood without taking into account his experiences in the public arena and without contextualizing it in the time in which he lived. The Renaissance had a decisive influence on the way intellectuals saw the world and, like Machiavelli and many others, it was they who best captured the essence of the new phenomenon in their writings. The individual (with all his virtues and, especially, with his defects) reemerged as the protagonist of history and his selfish nature became the motor, at least for the Florentine historian, of the course of events, whose guide was none other than Fortune.