Whereas Bruni had written at the apex of Florentine power, Machiavelli’s public career was marked by the desperate situation created by what he called “the calamity”: the invasion of Italy first by the French in 1494 and later by the imperial forces of Charles V in 1527. As a diplomat and later secretary to Florence’s ruling Council of Ten, Machiavelli observed and tried to influence the shifting alliances between the Italian city-states. When the Medici family returned to power and ousted him from office, he turned to reflections on politics and history. In addition to Il principe (1532; The Prince), his most famous work, he wrote the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (1531; Discourses on Livy), the Istorie Fiorentine (1532; Florentine Histories), and Dell’arte della guerra (1521; The Art of War). Machiavelli presented his thoughts on history as “a new route” that would provide instruction to the statesmen of his day by marshaling examples from ancient history. As he writes in the Discourses on Livy,

Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples are and ever have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to happen in the future in any republic, and to apply those remedies that were used by the ancients, or, not finding any that were employed by them, to devise new ones from the similarity of the events.

History thus would become political science. Machiavelli, however, did not always respect his data in cases in which the historical situation did not lend itself to the maxim of statecraft he was trying to inculcate.

Francesco Guicciardini

Machiavelli’s younger contemporary Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) shared some of Machiavelli’s attitudes but not his rationale for studying history. “It is most fallacious,” he wrote, “to judge by examples; because unless these be in all respects parallel they are of no use, the least divergence in the circumstances giving rise to the widest possible divergence in the conclusions.” Instead, in his Storia d’Italia (1537–40; “History of Italy”), Guicciardini attempted to explain why Italy had been unable to resist foreign incursions. Writing the history of such a diverse area was itself an innovation, for which Guicciardini’s diplomatic experience served him well; but he also drew from the repertoire of classical historians the technique of the character, or psychological, sketch of the leading actors. Since Guicciardini, like almost all Renaissance historians, believed that historical change resulted from the virtù (or lack of it) of individuals, the ability to draw a brilliant character—at which he excelled—enhanced the explanatory power of his work.

Giorgio Vasari

It is thus not surprising that biographies flourished in the Renaissance. Some were of individuals, but a more typical genre was multiple biographies. Petrarch, again, was a pioneer with his De viris illustribus (begun 1338; Illustrious Men). A still more famous example was Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori (1550; Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), by Giorgio Vasari. Vasari did not simply compile a series of biographical sketches; he grouped them into three periods, which were marked by a progressive improvement in artistic technique. He concluded that “it is inherent in the very nature of these arts to progress step by step from modest beginnings, and finally to reach the summit of perfection.” He noted that in his own day “art has achieved everything possible in the imitation of nature, and has progressed so far that it has more reason to fear slipping back than to expect ever to make further advances.” This last clause hints at the belief in historical cycles which was common in Renaissance thought. Vasari acknowledged that the arts of the ancients had also risen and then declined.

It is easy to make the Renaissance too modern. It was an era in which beliefs in magic and in numerology had wide currency. It is also possible to exaggerate the level of interest in history during this period. Thus, the archetypal “Renaissance man,” Leonardo da Vinci, seems to have had little interest in acquiring historical knowledge. Renaissance humanists, however, made positive contributions to the study of history, and the humanist approach to the past helped to create the great upheaval of the Reformation.

Church history

Centuriae Magdeburgenses and Annales Ecclesiastici

Martin Luther (1483–1546), the German theologian who set the Reformation in motion, at first glance bears little resemblance to Petrarch, much less to Machiavelli. But while his piety was intense, he embraced much of the new learning. Nobody was more insistent on returning to the sources, which for him meant the New Testament. Any belief or practice not found there, he thought, must be a human invention, introduced during the long period of papal perversion of the Christian faith.

Protestantism thus entailed a reinterpretation of church history as well as of the Bible. As a consequence, history, which was not part of the curriculum in medieval universities, came to be taught in Protestant ones. (The early association of history and German universities became important later.) Luther’s followers also set about publishing their version of church history. Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523) published a manuscript of Valla’s treatise on the Donation of Constantine, impudently dedicating it to the pope. A team of scholars (a novelty) toured Germany, Denmark, Scotland, and Austria looking for documents on which to base their Centuriae Magdeburgenses (1559–75; “Magdeburg Centuries”), a 13-volume work that constituted a denunciation of the course of church history up to 1300. The Centuriae Magdeburgenses was in some ways regressive; the compilers could not think of any more satisfactory arrangement for their material than by centuries, and their credulity toward documents damaging to the papacy was as invariable as the critical acumen they deployed to discredit every basis of papal authority. Nevertheless, they unearthed large quantities of data. The Centuriae Magdeburgenses called forth an equally voluminous and tendentious Roman Catholic response, the Annales Ecclesiastici (“Ecclesiastical Annals”), by Caesar Baronius (1538–1607), also in 13 volumes and also organized by centuries. This in turn was refuted by Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), who was outraged that Baronius had attempted to write ecclesiastical history without knowing either ancient Greek or Hebrew.

Legal history

France was the earliest beneficiary of the rise of Italian humanistic scholarship, but it differed from Italy in ways that facilitated fruitful extension of the new learning. The Protestant stimulus to historiography was much stronger in France, and there was also no inquisition or Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) to suppress free inquiry. Whereas Italian humanists tended to regard the Middle Ages as an embarrassing interlude between the glories of ancient Rome and their own time, France had been the intellectual centre of Europe during that period. Furthermore, any serious treatment of medieval history required sorting out Germanic elements from Roman ones, a problem that the French were better able to undertake.