Fighting against Time: The Expression of Urgency in the Letters of Francesco Guicciardini of February 1525 to May 1526

Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) is one of the most important Florentine historians, thinkers, and statesmen of the Renaissance era. A friend of the more famous Niccolò Machiavelli, Guicciardini was very active during the period of the Italian Wars when the great European monarchies were fighting over Italian territory. Between the French defeat at Pavia on February 24, 1525, and the signing of the League of Cognac on May 22, 1526, he served as adviser to Pope Clement VII. Guicciardini urged the Pontiff to conclude an alliance with France and the other Italian states to fight against the territorial expansion of Emperor Charles V. One can see hints of these encouragements in the speeches written by the author at that time, but their audience remained very narrow. Abundant correspondence, on the other hand, was the statesman’s preferred means of action to convince his various interlocutors of the validity of his ideas and to push them to take action. This paper shows that while urgency permeates the correspondence, which unfolds in a variety of forms, it is the lack of a proportionate response to the nature of the times to which Guicciardini partly attributes the failure of his policy.