Tumults and the Birth of Florence

This chapter focuses on the subject of the free or servile beginnings of Florence, and analyses the path taken by Machiavelli in the Discourses and the Histories. Despite historical appearances, which showed Florence to be totally servile and thus condemned to not being free, Machiavelli’s analysis demonstrates that the city was constructed by people who were partly servile and partly free, and its virtue expressed itself in the struggles against fortune, even if they generated political instability. The comparison between tumults that made Rome great and struggles that characterized the history of Florence was used by Machiavelli to distinguish between the different situations of the two cities and to show that Florence should not imitate the constitution of Rome but instead create its own way of exploiting the virtue generated by its own struggles.