Free The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy

to foment war and to cement any alliance as the price of their return, represented a permanent external danger, while those who had been left behind, their friends and relations (since all could not be banished), represented a permanent internal danger, which grew more acute, naturally, in time of war.
    Not only Pistoia, but nearly every Tuscan town has its story of a corrupted garrison or commander ready to open the gates to the besieging foe: il traditore. Life in these thriving commercial towns was fearfully insecure; betrayal was normal. Anyone—any discontented citizen, noble, or prelate—was a potential traitor, and, for this very reason, the traitor, the man of two faces, was held in horror and repulsion inconceivable to a non-Italian. The fact that treason was commonplace made it appear more terrible, a trap in the midst of the everyday, like those mines left by the Nazis during the last war in the country houses of Fiesole they had occupied—mines that were concealed in an armchair or a lemon tree in the garden or a book on the library shelf, to explode, often, months afterward, when life had returned to normal. The road to treason, moreover, was paved with good intentions, and the doubleness of treachery was made easier by a double standard. Dante, for example, put the traitors in the lowest circle of hell, yet he himself, an exiled White Guelph, living at the court of Can Grande in Verona, in a nest of Ghibelline fuorusciti, invited the Emperor to redeem fallen Italy and would have been glad, no doubt, to turn his native city over to the Imperial forces if he had been in a position to do so.
    This curious double standard reappears in a new form in Machiavelli, that other Florentine genius, also condemned to exile, whose works have troubled the world like a tantalizing enigma; his advice to Lorenzo de’ Medici as the potential princely despot (not the great Lorenzo, but the contemptible Duke of Urbino, who sits in his helmet, thinking, on one of Michelangelo’s Medici Tombs) seems now straightforward cynical counsel and now a kind of double talk, to be understood almost in a reverse sense, as a masked and bitter criticism of politics as they are. As Pistoia became ‘pistol’, ‘Old Nick’ (Niccolò Machiavelli) became in English a synonym for the devil, that is, for the original traitor and fuoruscito from Heaven; yet it is hard to read Machiavelli himself without feeling that in his dry recipes for tyranny there is a hidden ingredient working, a passion for liberty, which comes out, like one of the slow-acting poisons of the period, in the History of Florence and the Discorsi. But if Machiavelli’s work is ‘suspicious’, not to be taken by a tyrant altogether at its smiling face-value, it is all the more a product of its treacherous place and time.
    The swift changes of Italian politics in the Middle Ages and Renaissance make any general distinctions false at almost any particular moment of the period in question. The Guelph party, generally speaking, was the party of the pope and Italian business interests; the Ghibellines were attached to the Holy Roman Emperor, across the Alps in Germany, and represented the old feudal nobility. When the emperor crossed the Alps, the Ghibelline power became dominant and many towns changed colour, driving their Guelphs into exile; when he went home, it was the Ghibellines’ turn to go. A strong pope meant a strong Guelph party and vice versa. But these distinctions were blurred by local rivalries, by the intervention of the Normans or the Angevins, by religious issues, by the hatred felt for some particular tyrant or condottiere, by the buying and selling of conquered towns. And the crooked policies pursued by both pope and emperor, plus the creation of a throng of anti-popes and anti-emperors, confused the situation still further.
    The distinction between Guelph (commercial) and Ghibelline (feudal) is still clear, however, to the eye if Florence is contrasted with