Ubi est mors victoria tua?
ubi est mors stimulus tuus?
(1 Cor. 15:55)
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s fatherland,” proclaimed the Roman poet Horace.[1] Such was the sentiment shared by Niccolò Machiavelli in his exaltation of the fatherland (patria), expounded especially strongly in his critique of Christian religion, culminating in Discourses on Livy II.2. Machiavelli perceived a corrupted attitude among the citizenry toward their patria and laid blame at the foot of the altar: “For, had they borne in mind that religion permits us to exalt and defend the fatherland, they would have seen that it also wishes us to love and honour it, and to train ourselves to be such that we may defend it.”[2] While castigating the religion of his day as the source of weak and “effeminate”[3] attitudes toward the patria, he also claimed the mantle of Christian morality to argue that it was permissible and, indeed, laudable to defend and fight for the fatherland.[4] On this latter point, Machiavelli could have located vigorous support in the writings of many great minds throughout the history of Christendom. Yet, at the same time, he deliberately avoided doing so, and especially avoided the fact that a robust conception of the sacrifice and the virtue of dying for one’s patria had developed and reentered the social imagination over the course of the Middle Ages. This is likely no accident, as this conception was anything but Machiavelli’s own. To suffer death for one’s patria presupposed fighting for and defending it. Death inherently occupies a space between the temporal and the eternal; it is inescapably eschatological, inextricably bound up with questions of salvation, sacrifice, and martyrdom in Christian theology and imagination. For both Machiavelli and the medieval mind, sacrifice for the fatherland was a means of attaining glory—albeit in radically different ways.
Thus, it is worth exploring Machiavelli’s use of glory (gloria). In his writing, gloria shows itself to be fully secularized—brought into temporality, entirely divorced from the coherence of metaphysics, eschatology, or anything transcendental. Thereby, sacrifice was transformed into a purely social mechanism for attaining gloria. Machiavelli’s accusation of ‘effeminacy’ against Christianity is one as old as the religion itself. From Celsus to Nietzsche and neo-pagans of various stripes to this day, critics and enemies of the Catholic religion saw weakness in the message of the Gospel, in the bloodless sacrifice of the spotless victim, especially when contrasted with the strength of the soldierly imagery of pagan religion. As we shall see, glory—its attainment and its meaning—helps clarify these accusations.
Here I will turn to the antecedent medieval view of pro patria mori in combination with earlier humanists, such as Francesco Petrarch and Leonardo Bruni, to interrogate Machiavelli’s conception and usage of gloria. Such an excavation of antecedent medieval thought will, I hope, demonstrate that Machiavelli’s secularizing tendency was not simply accidental to practical aims or his original scope of investigation, but was rather underpinned by an implicit counter-ethic that divorced gloria from beatitude, constituting a break with prior political thought.
I. Delineating gloria
Gloria appears frequently throughout Machiavelli’s body of writing, as an ultimate value and a primary end toward which action is directed, though it is never explicated comprehensively or systematically.[5] “[G]lories and riches” are the ends toward which all men aim.[6] For Machiavelli, glory may be attained through political pursuits, military endeavors, courageous acts, and service to the public interest, amongst other avenues. It was not limited to an individual attribute, as Machiavelli referred to a gloria commune[7] and glory is ascribed to cities such as Florence, just as it also characterized the old Rome. From the outset, gloria in Machiavelli may be understood through its synonyms: fame (fama), honor (onore), praise (laude), and esteem (stima).[8] Its antonyms included: shame or disgrace (vergogna),[9] infamy (infamia),[10] and dishonor (disonore).[11] Since this theme is exceedingly broad, it is necessary first briefly to investigate its roots and adoption by Machiavelli before proceeding to uncover the novelty in his usage.
Most visibly in the Discourses II.2, Machiavelli contends with Christianity’s influence on gloria—alongside the central distinctions between the old pagan religion and the Christian religion of his day—leading to a revealing discussion of what he saw, ultimately, as a source for the corruption of the contemporary polity. The Christian religion “taught us the truth and the true way of life,” he wrote, before adding critically that it “leads us to ascribe less esteem to worldly honour.”[12] He then continued on to a quasi-anthropological analysis of ritual and symbolism to contrast Christian and classical pagan societies. Machiavelli described Catholic ritual as “delicate rather than imposing” while the pagan ceremonies were replete with “shedding of blood” and “ferocity or courage.”[13] Whereas “the old religion did not beatify men unless they were replete with worldly glory … our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action.”[14] This core truth of Christianity has made the world weak, Machiavelli thought, and surrendered the earthly city to the evil one, due to its preoccupation with attaining eternal paradise and glory. (It was Machiavelli’s lack of serious consideration of moral theology, or rather his rejection of it, which led Leo Strauss to call him a teacher of evil.) But at the same time, Machiavelli maintained that such notions were, in truth, misinterpretations, because “religion permits us to exalt and defend” the patria.[15]
Machiavelli’s highly charged and romantic presentation of the pagan religion, in contrast to his castigation of Christian virtues and the Christian subordination of the temporal, further clarifies his use of gloria. Notably, this passage is the only occasion in the Discourses in which Machiavelli found it necessary to modify ‘glory’ or ‘honour’ with ‘worldly.’ Elsewhere, gloria or onore stand alone and unmodified, but when considered in terms of drawing the contrast between religions, he added this layer of specificity. As such, this intervention marked a moment in which Machiavelli gestured more explicitly toward a classical (pagan) conception of gloria, a conception centered on the Roman idea that “immortality meant living on in the memory of the gens.”[16] As Antonius Johannes Vermeulen wrote in his study of the semantic development of gloria:
“In ancient Rome it possessed a clearly-defined, precise meaning: military-political glory restricted to the city of Rome with the public interest for its standard. In its final stage of depreciation gloria is reduced to the vague and general notion of honourable fame which a person or thing enjoys with many or all people. When said of inanimate things no moral criterion is implied, but when it is attributed to human beings an external criterion is sometimes applied, viz. the moral judgement of the boni.”[17]
Machiavelli’s project, then, may be explicitly read as a lament for the gloria of the classical age and effectively an attempt to desacralize it from its Christian context.
For even the nominally believing or practicing Christian of Machiavelli’s day, the meaning of gloria would have had an inescapable religious dimension to it, ranging from its prominence in the liturgy—e.g. the Gloria Patri and Gloria in Excelsis Deo—to the omnipresent exaltation of saints and martyrs in their heavenly glory. Thus, an escape from the conceptual contours drawn in the Christian imagination would have required a conscious effort.
To draw the link between the Catholic religion and a paralyzed, weak society, Machiavelli made the necessary contrast in that famous passage in Discourses II.2: “If our religion demands that in you there be strength, what it asks for is strength to suffer rather than strength to do bold things.” He regarded this as the product of the ‘pusillanimity’ of those who interpreted religion in terms of ozio and not virtù.[18] The connection between virtù and gloria is explicitly delineated by Machiavelli across his writing, especially saliently in the Florentine Histories V.1, where he described a cyclical nature in the social order: “From ruin, order is born; from order, virtue; and from virtue, glory and good fortune.”[19] (Machiavelli’s virtù is only imperfectly translatable as “virtue,” and is not “virtue” in a Christian sense—although occasionally used in a vaguely Christian moral sense, such as the discussion on praiseworthy qualities in The Prince XV—but on the whole it is used in the sense of ‘skill,’ ‘ability,’ or ‘valour.’[20])
That gloria proceeded from virtù is significant in Machiavelli’s scheme, in that it posed an interesting contrast to a Christian conception provided by St Augustine in his discussion of Cato the Younger’s virtues in De civitate Dei contra paganos V.12. There, Cato the Younger was praised for the unity between his glory and his virtue: “Wherefore even the praises of Cato are only applicable to a few; for only a few were possessed of that virtue which leads men to pursue glory, honour, and power by the true way—that is, by virtue itself.”[21] Earlier in De civitate Dei V.12, St Augustine noted the right ordering between virtue, glory, honor, and power, that is, to show virtue is not an instrumental affair, but instead that glory, honor, and power are to be ordered to the attainment of virtue. “That glory, honour, and power, therefore, which [the Romans] desired for themselves, and to which the good sought to attain by good arts, should not be sought after by virtue, but virtue by them.”[22] Gloriam ergo et honorem et imperium … non debet sequi virtus, sed ipsa virtutem. St Augustine then gave in the next line a maxim for true virtue—Christian virtue: “For there is no true virtue except that which is directed toward that end in which is the highest and ultimate good of man”—Neque enim est vera virtus, nisi quae ad eum finem tendit, ubi est bonum hominis, quo melius non est.[23] This contrast brings to the forefront another secularizing quality in Machiavelli’s gloria; it was brought down from Heaven back to earth—to borrow Ernst Kantorowicz’s quip—and stripped of its moral-religious significance.[24]
Despite his range of discussions on glory and the exaltation of the patria, Machiavelli rarely connected gloria with death. In Discourses III.45, Machiavelli treated the death of Roman consul Decius, who “sacrificed himself” in order to “attain the glory which he had been unable to acquire by a victory.”[25] Following the death of Decius, the consul Fabius went on the offensive to gain a victory, in Machiavelli’s retelling, “in order not to remain alive and yet gain less honour than his colleague had gained by death.”[26] This dichotomy was mirrored in Discourses III.42, where Machiavelli considered glory in connection to defeat. While glory was ordinarily attained through victory, it also could be gained in defeat “if you can … at once perform some virtuous action which cancels it out.”[27] This follows the schema sketched above, wherein gloria proceeded from virtù: defeat was ignominious, but there was a way that blemish could be overcome. From that, one may extrapolate that death contained a similitude to defeat for Machiavelli, and that the blemish of death must be removed through additional action in order to gain glory, or to speak more precisely, to earn praise from the people and historical posterity. This poses a significant problem for the Christian who professes, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55). Here appeared another crucial disintegrating tendency in Machiavelli’s thought: the only path to overcome the defeat contained in such a final sacrifice and attain gloria, was through an external addition of virtù, whereas a more medieval conception was able to locate an integral goodness in the sacrifice, for which eternal gloria was the reward. While both sought to justify action, the Machiavellian conception began from a deprecatory view of death and sought to redeem it pro patria with temporal praise and posterity, whereas a medieval conception dealt with the essence of death and integrated it with the realm of beatitude.
II. From gloria martyrum to pro patria mori
Patria, as it had been understood in classical antiquity, became virtually irrelevant in the ordinary language of the early Middle Ages. Political life came to be determined largely by the relationship between the lord and vassal, and when used by a common layperson, patria would refer to a village or local province—a narrow view of one’s home.[28] Nevertheless, an encompassing notion of patria continued to live on in the language and thought of the Church, but was transferred to the celestial sphere to denote Heaven as the communis patria, the common fatherland, for which the earthly city was a conduit. The citizen of the earthly city was taken to be a pilgrim on his way to “true and full felicity” in the city of God.[29] As such, it was martyrs for the faith, not yet pro patria, that were called sanctus upon their deaths. With the onset of the crusades, the descent of the patria to the earthly sphere began once again. Kingdoms in Latin Christendom imposed taxes pro defensione regni because whatever benefited the Holy Land, the regnum Christi regis, was one and the same as the interest of the Christian kingdoms.[30] It was common belief among crusaders that death on the battlefield would win them entry into Heaven, as one crusaders’ song proclaimed: “He that dies in this campaign / Shall enter into heaven’s bliss.”[31]
Although such martyrdom still resided in the (broadening) realm of death pro fide, quasi-religious notions of God’s favor toward one’s homeland, the king’s obligation to defend to the Church, and finally, the kingdom as a corpus mysticum would all contribute to bringing death pro patria into the fold of martyrdom.[32] An example of such political sentiments slipping into popular imagination appeared in texts such as the Song of Roland, where the Frankish warriors were told, “He is our King, well may we die for him: / So, though you die, blest martyrs shall you live.”[33]
Across the channel, similar notions were percolating in twelfth century. For Geoffrey of Monmouth, patria came to mean the “monarchy of the whole island” and he offered a story of St Dubrick of Caerleon telling his soldiers: “Fight for your patria and suffer even death for her if such should overwhelm you… let that death be atonement for, and absolution of, all […] sins…”[34] These deaths began to be described not only as deaths pro fide but also pro fratribus, for one’s brothers, and came to be seen as exercises of the virtue of charity. To die for one’s brothers, one’s countrymen, came to be justified as an ultimate act of charity—rather than faith, strictly speaking—but its Christian meaning saturated it with inseparable religious fervor.[35] Tolomeo de Lucca, the continuator St Thomas Aquinas’ De regimine principum, would elaborate on charity’s place, writing that the root of the love of fatherland (amor patriae) was that love which “prefers the common things to one’s own, not one’s own things to common ones,” and indicated that the amor patriae, “more than all other virtues, deserves to be rewarded with an honorable rank.”[36]
III. Petrarch, Bruni, and Machiavelli on gloria
The “final heroization of the warrior who died for the fatherland” may have come to a zenith with the humanists, but its influence only became effective after patria had been “ethicized by both theology and jurisprudence” over the course of the High and Late Middle Ages.[37] The expansion of gloria martyrum to encompass death pro patria under certain circumstances was partially the result of the transposition of spiritual and ecclesiastical notions into the realm of the secular body politic, but it was—arguably more so—the effect of the broader enveloping valence those notions took on in the integrated, sacramental worldview of Middle Ages. Despite the commonly referenced ‘secularizing’ tendencies of the Renaissance, the early humanists did not necessarily seek to divorce these notions of noble death and sacrifice from their eschatological and soteriological commitments, but instead supplemented them with classical concepts.
In his De vita solitaria, Francesco Petrarch pondered, if Julius Caesar, Augustus, the Scipios, or Pompey were to return to life again and be initiated into the Church, “would they suffer the name of their Christ to be held in contempt in the regions associated with their glory?”[38] Echoing St Augustine in De civitate Dei V.16, Petrarch asked: “If, wanting the light of true faith, they dared such great enterprises for an earthly country, what do you suppose they would not have dared prosperously, with Christ as leader, for their eternal country?”[39] For Petrarch, the glory in serving, defending, and dying for one’s earthly patria was intrinsically integrated with one’s salvific mission as a pilgrim striving for the communis patria in Heaven. For Petrarch, what was taken up by the princes of antiquity, just as for many princes of his own day, was also taken up for the glory of God. Elsewhere, Petrarch extolled the citizens who sought the preservation of the state, which was “not just a path to glory, but even a road to salvation.”[40]
In a letter to Marco Genovese, Petrarch turned to the “heavenly” words of Scipio Africanus, preserved by Cicero in De republica, to defend the idea that those who “serve the state can love piously”[41] and be rewarded in eternal life for it: “For all those who have preserved, assisted, and supported their fatherland, there is certainly a definite place in heaven where the blessed experience joy eternally.”[42] Yet, Petrarch, recognizing that those who have died pro patria “are exalted to the skies with much praise,” was far from writing a blank moral check to the patria.[43] If need be, “we are bidden to fight” for the earthly country, but “only if it is ruled by justice and lives by fair laws.”[44] To Petrarch, a man condemned himself when he shed blood for evil customs and “sacrificed his life to ensure that the deeds of wicked men and bad citizens” may continue. Such a sacrifice did not attain glory but resulted in the loss of life temporal and eternal.[45]
Leonardo Bruni, like his humanist counterparts, similarly glorified death pro patria.[46] In his famous Funeral Oration on Nanni Strozzi, Bruni described death in defense of the patria as “most glorious” when the subject of his oration “put the love of his fatherland before the love of his children.”[47] In his History of the Florentine People, he exemplified classical perspectives on glory in death, as in the battle of Montaperti, relating the heroic battle cry “that it was better in the end to die for the fatherland [pro patria mori] than to survive in ignominy.”[48] While this was indeed an imitation of Roman virtue to Bruni, he did not separate it from notions of one’s final end. In De militia, Bruni remarked that “devotion [pietas] to country and the acceptance of death for its salvation are praised to the skies.”[49] Thus he links piety for the patria to common salvation—derived from caritas, as shown previously, and bound up with its religious zeal. St Thomas Aquinas similarly and wonderfully framed it by connecting together piety, charity, and the patria: “piety is a protestation of the charity we bear toward our parents and country.”[50]
IV. Machiavelli’s secularization
In a letter to Francesco Vettori, Machiavelli claimed, “I love my native city more than my soul.”[51] Here the final piece in the puzzle of assembling Machiavelli’s secularized gloria falls into place. Whereas the Christian medieval conception of attaining gloria consisted in aligning it with virtue and subordinating it to the good of the soul, Machiavelli radically inverted such a conception. For Machiavelli, then, sacrifice for the fatherland was detached from the good of the human soul and subsisted in itself.
In an attempt to defend Machiavelli from modern critics, Maurizio Viroli called attention to two interpretations of Machiavelli’s preference for his city to his soul, with one obvious and the second betraying a misunderstanding between the soul, moral action, and the common good. Viroli, in the first interpretation, described Machiavelli as simply placing the good of the patria over the practice of religion in his hierarchy of values. The second interpretation, claimed by Viroli, was rooted in Hannah Arendt’s reading of the letter’s phrase, where Machiavelli demonstrated a love for the common good over the “individual good” of “the soul.”[52] “The question,” Arendt wrote in On Revolution, “was not whether one loved God more than the world, but whether one was capable of loving the world more than one’s own self.”[53] Arendt’s suggestive interpretation of the phrase was brazen in its secularity: the “soul” was effectively detached from its creator and no longer immortal. It was likened to a temporal individual good, juxtaposed with what is truly good for the world. Such an ambitiously secular reading of Machiavelli’s phrase would require more evidence to suggest he indeed sought such a radical inversion with respect to the direction of the soul—pointing inward, not outward toward the eternal. Nevertheless, Viroli offered this interpretation to defend Machiavelli, painting these words as exemplars of unselfish piety. It suffices to say the second view fails from the beginning by awkwardly juxtaposing the common good and the soul, and attempting to describe care for the soul as a self-centered, individualist act.
Further light could be shed on this with reference to the Florentine Histories and its the telling of the Eight in their conflict against Pope Gregory XI. The Eight “administered with such virtue and with such universal satisfaction” that they came to be referred to as Saints when “they had little regard for censures, had despoiled the churches of their goods, and had compelled the clergy to celebrate the offices.”[54] Machiavelli exemplified this piece of Florentine history by remarking positively, “So much more did those citizens then esteem their fatherland than their souls.”[55] Thus, with Machiavelli, the integrated idea of gloria—as virtue, good works, and sacrifices worthy of eternal salvation—disappears, to be replaced with an entirely temporalized conception, where gloria is located entirely in worldly civic virtù, praise, and memory.
If the good of the patria was preferred to the good of the soul, and such a separation betrayed Machiavelli’s secularizing project, then death pro patria would have lost its salvific luster. As such, any allusion to martyrdom would lose reference to the heavenly beatitude recognizable to the Christian medieval mind—from early humanists like Petrarch and Bruni, to the common layperson who attached their love for the patria with the religious fervor of caritas and pietas. Machiavelli’s decoupling of the good of the patria and the good of the soul appeared as if it were a twist on Cicero’s remark in his first Catilinarian oration: “My fatherland, which is much dearer to me than my life”—si mecum patria, quae mihi vita mea multo est carior.[56] But, importantly, Machiavelli substituted his soul for Cicero’s mere temporal life (vita). The classical, Ciceronian formulation could be brought into concordance with Christian thought, as indeed it was adapted by the jurists and theologians in the Middle Ages. Machiavelli’s not so much.
Thus, the heavenly gloria associated with death pro patria by medievals and early humanists demonstrated a properly ordered and integrated conception of worldly glory, in service of both the common good and the highest good—the unity of virtue and glory.
Machiavelli, while exhorting in Discourses II.2 the people of his day to cast away the religious misapprehensions that had prevented the celebration and defense of the patria, himself fatally corrupted the stream of thought he had gestured toward. With Machiavelli, a fully secularized formulation of gloria entered view, constituting a dangerous separatism that could not be bridged because it was as wide as the gulf between Heaven and earth. Today, Machiavelli’s condemnations of an effeminate and weak Christianity are being echoed once again, and like Machiavelli himself, today’s Machieavellians harken back to a pagan past and its ideals. Their critiques, echoing error-ridden streams of thought present already in Machiavelli’s time, not only pose spiritual peril and danger, but run roughshod over the historical and spiritual realities of the Catholic faith. The lament for past glory and the hope of its resurgence are at the center of neo-pagan attempts to counteract what are discerned to be effeminate characteristics of our contemporary problems. But these attempts fail because they inescapably understand gloria within the framework of a secularized separatism, instead of properly rooting it in the divinity of Christ, through whom all things were made and renewed, and to whom we owe the eternal beatitude we hope to attain forever and ever.
[1] Odes III.2.13.
[2] Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Discourses. Translated by Leslie Joseph Walker. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, 278-279.
[3] Machiavelli, Discourses, II.2.
[4] On the development of this view in the Catholic tradition prior to Machiavelli, see: Post, Gaines. “Two Notes on Nationalism in the Middle Ages.” Traditio 9 (1953): 281–320.
[5] See: Price, Russell. “The Theme of Gloria in Machiavelli.” Renaissance Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1977): 588–631; Zmora, Hillay. “A world without a saving grace: Glory and immortality in Machiavelli.” History of Political Thought 28, no. 3 (2007): 449–68.
[6] Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, XXV.
[7] Machiavelli, Niccolò. Florentine Histories. Translated by Laura F Banfield and Harvey C Mansfield. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, III.5.
[8] Price, “The Theme of Gloria in Machiavelli.” See also: Machiavelli, Discourses, I.10.
[9] Machiavelli, Discourses, II.24; Machiavelli, Prince, XXIV.
[10] Machiavelli, Discourses, I.10.
[11] See: Price, “The Theme of Gloria in Machiavelli.” 590.
[12] Machiavelli, Discourses, II.2.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid. (emphasis mine).
[15] Ibid.
[16] Vermeulen, Antonius Johannes. The Semantic Development of Gloria in Early-Christian Latin. Nijmegen: Dekker & van de Vegt, 1965, 30.
[17] Idem, 36.
[18] Machiavelli, Discourses, II.2; Walker translated ozio slightly idiosyncratically as “laissez faire,” but a more correct translation comes closer to “idleness” or the “leisure” of those who contemplate, as noted by Mansfield and Tarcov in their edition of Discourses. This meaning of ozio becomes more clear in light of its contrast to virtù, taken to mean “valour” or “ability.” See Price, Russell, “The Senses of Virtú in Machiavelli.” European Studies Review 3, no. 4 (1973): 315–45.
[19] Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, V.1.
[20] Price, “The Senses of Virtú in Machiavelli.”
[21] Augustine. The City of God: Translated by Marcus Dods, D.D. N.Y.: Modern Library, 1950, 163. “Paucorum igitur uirtus ad gloriam honorem imperium uera uia, id est ipsa uirtute, nitentium etiam a Catone laudata est.” (DCD V.12)
[22] Idem, 161. “Gloriam ergo et honorem et imperium, quae sibi exoptabant et quo bonis artibus peruenire nitebantur boni, non debet sequi uirtus, sed ipsa uirtutem. Neque enim est uera uirtus, nisi quae ad eum finem tendit, ubi est bonum hominis, quo melius non est.” (DCD V.12)
[23] Ibid.
[24] Kantorowicz, Ernst H. “Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought.” The American Historical Review 56, no. 3 (1951): 472.
[25] Machiavelli, Discourses, III.45.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Machiavelli, Discourses, III.42.
[28] Kantorowicz, Ernst. “Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought.”
[29] Augustine, The City of God, V.16.
[30] Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 235. By the middle of the 13th century, taxes would be levied ad defensionem patriae, and toward the end of the 13th century, the rationale for taxes—even church taxes—under Philip IV would come to be phrased “ad defensionem natalis patriae.”
[31] Quoted in Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 239.
[32] On the idea of the body politic as a corpus mysticum, an idea too broad and complex to summarize here, see generally Kantorowicz’s discussion of it in The King’s Two Bodies, especially as it relates to pro patria mori. For its historical genealogy as borrowed from the realm of the Church, see Henri de Lubac’s study, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages.
[33] “The Song of Roland.” Translated by Charles Kenneth Moncreiff. Accessed here: https://wps.ablongman.com/wps/media/objects/1497/1532958/songofroland.pdf.
[34] Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 241.
[35] Ibid. See also: Pope Urban II’s exhortation to Spaniards defending Tarragona: “none who shall be killed in this campaign for the love of God and his brothers shall doubt that he will find remission of his sins and the eternal beatitude according to the mercy of God.” Ibid.
[36] Ptolemy of Lucca. On the Government of Rulers: “De Regimine Principum”. Translated by James M. Blythe. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987, III.iv.3. Aquinas himself touches on this point in his discussion of love in ST I, q. 60, art. 5 co., “for it behooves the virtuous citizen to expose himself to the danger of death for the public weal of the state; and if man were a natural part of the city, then such inclination would be natural to him.”
[37] Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 248-249
[38] Petrarca, Francesco. The Life of Solitude by Francis Petrarch. Translated by Jacob Zeitlin. University of Illinois Press, 1924, II.iv.5.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Quoted in Mark Jurdjevic, Natasha Piano, and John P. McCormick, eds. Florentine Political Writings from Petrarch to Machiavelli. Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
[41] On the relation of pietas to patria and caritas, see Kantorowicz, “Pro patria mori.”
[42] Petrarca, Francesco. Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum Familiarium Libri). Translated by Aldo S. Bernardo. Vol. 1. New York: Italica Press, 2005, 3.12.6.
[43] Hankins, James. “The Unpolitical Petrarch: Justifying the Life of Literary Retirement,” in ET AMICORUM: Essays on Renaissance Humanism and Philosophy in Honour of Jill Kraye. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid.
[46] See Ianziti, Gary. Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, Ch. 6, 10.
[47] Bruni, Leonardo, Funeral Oration on Nanni Strozzi, in Florentine Political Writings from Petrarch to Machiavelli.
[48] Quoted in Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past, 131: “praestare denique pro patria mori quam tantae infamiae superesse.”
[49] Ibid.
[50] ST II-II q.101 a.3 ad.1: “pietas est quaedam protestatio caritatis quam quis habet ad parentes et ad patriam.”
[51] Niccolò, Machiavelli. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, Vol. II. Translated by Allan Gilbert. Duke University Press, 1989, 1010.
[52] Viroli, Maurizio, and Antony Shugaar. Machiavelli’s God. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, 36.
[53] Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1963, 289-90.
[54] Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, III.7.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Cicero, Orationes in Catilinam I.XI