Courtiers and Princes

Kings, princes, and popes alike used their courts to keep an eye on their leading courtiers (cardinals in the case of popes) and impress their other subjects. Briefly defined, the court was the ruler’s household. Around the prince gathered a community of household servants, noble attendants, councilors, officials, artists, and soldiers. Renaissance culture had been promoted by this political elite, and that culture now entered its “high,” or most sophisticated, phase. Its acclaimed representative was Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), an immensely talented Italian artist who sculpted the gigantic nude David for officials in Florence and then painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for the recently elected Pope Julius II.

Italian artists also flocked to the French court of Francis I (r. 1515–1547), which swelled to the largest in Europe. In addition to royal officials and guards, physicians, librarians, musicians, dwarfs, animal trainers, and a multitude of hangers-on bloated its size to more than sixteen hundred members. Although Francis built a magnificent Renaissance palace at Fontainebleau, where he hired Italian artists to produce paintings and sculpture, the French court often moved from palace to palace. It took no fewer than eighteen thousand horses to transport the people, furniture, documents, dogs, and falcons for the royal hunt. Hunting represented a form of mock combat, essential in the training of a military elite. Francis almost lost his own life when, storming a house during one mock battle, he was hit on the head by a burning log.

Two Italian writers helped define the new culture of courtesy, or proper court behavior: Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), in service at the Este court in Ferrara, and Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), a servant of the duke of Urbino and the pope. Ariosto composed an epic poem, Orlando Furioso, which represented court culture as the highest synthesis of Christian and classical values. The poem’s captivating tales of combat, valor, love, and magic ranged across Europe, Africa, Asia, and even the moon. In The Courtier, Castiglione’s characters debate the qualities of an ideal courtier in a series of eloquent dialogues. The true courtier, Castiglione asserts, is a gentleman who carries himself with nobility and dignity in the service of his prince and his lady.

Courtesy was recommended to courtiers, but not always to princes. The Italian politician and writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) helped found modern political science by treating the maintenance of power as an end in itself. In his provocative essay The Prince, he underlined the need for pragmatic, even cold calculation. Was it better, he asked, for a prince to be feared by his people or loved? “It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, [it] is much safer to be feared than loved.” Machiavelli insisted that princes could benefit their subjects only by keeping a firm grip on power, if necessary through deceit and manipulation. Machiavellian has remained ever since a term for using cunning and duplicity to achieve one’s ends.