Lehal Library

the names of w ­ ell‑­to‑­do men from different guilds and different areas of town. This lottery would allow each major profession and each geographical area to be ade- quately and constantly represented. Every individual (of a certain social standing) could expect a brief share of power in order that no one could ever seize it permanently. The system was unworkable. Every two months a new government might take a different position on key issues. The potential for instability more or less obliged whichever family was in the ascendant to step in and impose continu- ity. From 1434 on, the Medicis – ​first Cosimo, then Piero, then Lorenzo – ​had been manipulating the electoral pro- cess to make sure that most of the names in the bags were friendly to themselves and that all of those actually selected for government would toe the Medici line. Hence, although the Florentines still liked to boast that they were free citi- zens who bowed the knee to no man, by the m ­ id-­fifteenth century they were in fact living in something very close to a dictatorship. When the rival Pazzi family tried to assas- sinate Lorenzo in the Duomo in April 1478, it was because they saw no legitimate way of putting him in his place as an ordinary citizen. Machiavelli thus grew up in a society where the distance between how things were actually run and how they were described as being run could not have been greater. He was close to his ninth birthday when the captured Pazzi conspirators, one an archbishop, were hung upside down from the high windows of the city’s main government building and left there for weeks to rot. He