ABSTRACT
To hold Pisa with fortresses, that is by force, and Pistoia by factions was an ancient rule of the Florentines, but now it appeared that force had not been enough to hold Pisa, and the factions seemed about to dispossess them of Pistoia. During Machiavelli’s mission to France, in August 1500, the hatreds of the ancient factions dividing that city, finding in the weakness and disunity of the Florentine government a favourable occasion, had broken out in violent conflict. The Cancellieri rose in arms and drove out the Panciatici, burning, looting and killing. In the surrounding country the same thing happened, ‘almost as in an ordered war, with aid from outside’. 1 Such disorders were not to the Republic’s credit and not without danger while beyond her frontiers the greedy Borgia champed at the bit. Internally, the city was already weary of war, suspicious, and financially impoverished; and now the division of minds, which had nourished the divisions of the Pistoiese, was in its turn fomented by them. As the Panciatici were supporters of the Medici and the Cancellieri supporters of the popular state, so the principal citizens of Florence favoured or openly took sides with one faction or the other. In addition, outside Florentine territory, Giovanni Bentivoglio, lord of Bologna, favoured the Cancellieri, while the Vitelli and the Orsini, soldiering under Caesar Borgia, sided with the Panciatici.
