A Brief Biography

Francesco Patrizi’s experience of politics, diplomacy and government, for a man destined to become the greatest and most characteristic political philosopher of the humanist movement, could hardly have been bettered. A comparison with Machiavelli’s career may help underscore the point. Machiavelli has often been praised (not least by himself) as a man of action, no mere armchair theorist. Before setting up as a political writer, he had been a second-tier official in the Florentine republic with extensive experience in diplomacy and in the military affairs of the republic. He was able to observe the workings of government at close hand, across the open balustrade separating the office of the Florentine chancery from the apartments of the Priors in the Palazzo Vecchio.
 

Patrizi’s political experience, by contrast, was far more extensive and varied, and he held a number of high offices with real executive powers.  He was born into the most important hereditary bloc of political families in Siena, the Nove, which remained the dominant force in Sienese politics for most of his lifetime. He held numerous offices in the Sienese republic, including the priorate – the republic’s governing body – and other executive posts in the city’s territories. He headed at least six major ambassadorial missions in the decade before the coup that led to his exile. He also enjoyed a prominent social position in the city. He married, had four children, and maintained a large household with an urban palazzo and rural properties. He was a professor of literature in Siena’s public Studio (or university) and private tutor to Achille Petrucci, offspring of the city’s most important political family of the quattrocento and a future civic leader.

 

After his exile from Siena in 1457, Patrizi supported himself briefly as private tutor to the son of the Milanese ambassador, and in that capacity met leading statesmen and princes from Tuscany and northern Italy. When his friend Enea Silvio Piccolomini became Pope Pius II in 1458, he took holy orders and was made the Bishop of Gaeta.  Soon thereafter, Pius appointed him governor of Foligno and its territories, a key post in the Papal State. After Pius’ death in 1464, his position in Foligno became untenable owing to a popular uprising, and he retired to administer his diocese in Gaeta, a port city in the Kingdom of Naples. The Kingdom was ruled by Ferdinand I of Naples (known as Ferrante), the most powerful monarch of the peninsula. In Gaeta Patrizi finished his two major political treatises, De institutione reipublicae (finished 1471/72) and De regno et regis institutione (1483/84). His life in that small city was mostly a retired one, but even so he was called upon to advise the heir to the throne, Alfonso of Calabria, and to represent the Kingdom as the Aragonese orator (or ambassador) on two major public occasions, the marriage of Alfonso with Ippolita Maria Sforza in Milan (1465), and the ceremonies for the coronation of Pope Innocent VIII (1484).

References

James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2019)

Idem, Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023). Chapter 1 of this work contains a fuller biographical treatment of Patrizi.