Francesco Guicciardini 1483 – 1540

Francesco Guicciardini was an Italian Renaissance historian, statesman, and political philosopher and one of the founding figures of modern historiography. After a long diplomatic and administrative career in the service of successive Medici popes and of the Florentine Republic, he wrote his monumental History of Italy, a sober and disenchanted record of the Italian wars from 1494 to 1534. His shorter Maxims, the Ricordi, gather a lifetime's worth of compressed political and moral observation in a style of skeptical realism that complements and often qualifies the more famous teachings of his friend Machiavelli.

Francesco Guicciardini was born at Florence in March 1483 into a leading patrician family of the city. He took his doctorate in civil law at Pisa in 1505, served as Florentine ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain from 1511 to 1513, and from 1516 entered the service of the Medici popes, governing Modena and Reggio for Leo X and Romagna for Clement VII, and acting as lieutenant-general of the papal forces in the disastrous War of the League of Cognac that ended in the Sack of Rome in 1527. He spent his last years as adviser to the Medici dukes Alessandro and Cosimo and at his villa at Arcetri.

His works, almost all unpublished in his lifetime, include the Storie Fiorentine of his youth (1509), the Considerazioni sui Discorsi del Machiavelli, the Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, the long aphoristic Ricordi (final redaction 1530), and above all the twenty-book Storia d'Italia, the great history of the Italian wars from the death of Lorenzo to 1534, first printed in 1561–1564. He was a close friend and critical reader of Niccolò Machiavelli.

Guicciardini's history substituted close documentary narrative for humanist rhetoric and treated the disasters of Italy as the joint product of contingency and the calculated self-interest — il particulare — of the principal actors. His Ricordi gave realist political prudence its sharpest expression in the sceptical, pessimistic key that distinguishes him from Machiavelli's bolder reformism. He died at Arcetri in May 1540.