Contemporary Figures of Machiavelli

Borgia- Spanish noble family, originally named Borja. The election of Alfonso de Borja as Pope
Calixtus III (14551458), the first Spanish pope, made the familys fortune and attracted its leading
members to Italy since Pope Calixtus relied on his kinsmen and his Spanish advisers to help him
administer the papacy. His nephew Rodrigo became a cardinal and papal vice-chancellor and was
enriched by many ecclesiastical benefices, eventually winning election as Pope Alexander VI in 1492.
Alexander earned the reputation of being the most corrupt pope of the Italian Renaissance. Two of
Alexanders several children became important historical figures in their own right. The first of these
was Cesare Borgia (14751507), who became a cardinal and commander of the papal army under his
father. Cesare received many valuable ecclesiastical appointments but was never ordained as a priest
and was later permitted to marry a French princess. He also received the French duchy of Valentinois
and is often referred to by contemporaries (Niccol Machiavelli, for example) as Duke Valentino. In
the opening years of the 16th century, backed by his fathers authority and assisted by a French army,
Cesare set out to create a hereditary Borgia principality in the province of Romagna, which was
nominally a part of the Papal States. Ruthless in his use of violence and deceit, Cesare eliminated
potential rivals by military conquest and murder. The unexpected death of his father in 1503 caught
him at a vulnerable moment, and the election of the anti-Borgia Pope Julius II caused his enterprise to
collapse. Cesare was arrested and sent to Spain by order of King Ferdinand of Spain. Although he
managed to escape in 1506, he was killed in a minor skirmish the following year.

Pope Julius II- is known as the warrior pope, engaging in a complex set of diplomatic and military
adventures that threw most of Italy into turmoil but generally advanced the temporal power of the
papacy. His assertive personality and militarism were sharply criticized in the famous satire Julius
exclusus, published anonymously but usually attributed to the Dutch humanist Erasmus. Julius called
the last general council of the Latin church to meet before the Reformation, the Fifth Lateran Council,
which met in Rome and continued under Juliuss successor, Leo X. Although his private life was far
more respectable than that of his predecessor Alexander VI, and his warlike actions were aimed at
extending the political authority of the papacy in Italy rather than at exploiting papal power in the
interests of his own kin, Julius did continue the tendency of Renaissance popes to function as secular
leaders at the expense of their pastoral responsibilities.

Medici Family- Florentine mercantile and banking family that played a significant part in local
politics and from 1434 dominated the political system of Florence through a combination of careful
political alliances and outright corruption of the electoral system. Although officially they were just
one of the wealthy merchant families who shared political leadership, between 1434 and 1494 the

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Medici exercised an increasingly overt hegemony over the city. In 1494 after proving weak in the face
of the French invasion of Naples, the current Medici leader was exiled; in 1512 the Medici were
restored to power by a papal and Spanish army, and after they had been again ejected by a popular
uprising in 1527, they were again brought to power by foreign troops in 1530. This time they
suppressed the old republican constitution and openly became despotic princes as dukes of Florence
(1532) and later as grand dukes of Tuscany.

Maximilian I -The first member of the Habsburg dynasty to gain a pan-European reputation, he
brought his family to unprecedented power through a series of brilliant dynastic marriages. Maximilian
was the son of Frederick III, one of the most futile of the weak emperors of the later Middle Ages. As
emperor, Maximilian had very limited power over any territory except the scattered hereditary lands of
his own dynasty. He tried with only limited success to persuade the Imperial Diet (Reichstag) to accept
some direct taxation, but they insisted that each state would collect the common penny itself. He did
establish a central judicial court that gained some recognition throughout the country, and he pro-
claimed an internal peace intended to end warfare among the states and brigandage in the countryside.
The electoral princes and other great nobles, however, though they talked about the need to establish
internal peace and to strengthen the kingdom, had no intention of letting Maximilian centralize power
in his own hands, and since he was chronically short on cash and already overcommitted by the
expense of his military efforts in Italy, he was unable to remedy the inherent weakness of the imperial
office. His greatest success in Germany did not come to fruition until after his death, when his
grandson Charles V became emperor and with the ability to draw on his Netherlandish and Spanish
resources was able to play a more powerful role in German politics.