Machiavelli and the Fortress City

Fortress Power in Machiavelli’s Political Thought

Machiavelli raises the topic of fortress construction throughout his political work, consistently advancing a critique of privatization—of popular disempowerment and the elevation of private interest—while highlighting different elements of the relation between space and power. His most concise and critical assessment of fortification appears in Book II of Discourses on Livy, wherein he finds fortresses either militarily useless or politically ruinous: “It should, then, be considered whether fortresses are constructed to defend against one’s enemy or against one’s subjects. In the first case they are not necessary, in the second they are harmful.” ¹³ Following this pronouncement, he sets aside the matter of military value, turning attention immediately to the relation between subjects and state. The construction of a fortress to control the people signals a failure of government:

Where a principality or a republic fears its subjects and the possibility of their rebellion, such a fear must arise first of all from the hatred that its subjects harbor for it, hatred for its evil conduct; this evil conduct arises either from the belief that it can hold its subjects with force, or from the lack of prudence of the one who governs them. One of the things that makes him believe he can then rule them by force is having fortresses nearby. ¹⁴

Machiavelli applies the label “evil conduct” not out of a moral objection but as a characterization of actions that disregard or alienate the people. Elites who retreat to fortresses either rely on force to govern, stoking the hatred of the people through their acts of repression, or govern without prudence, lacking the caution to account for popular will.

Such “evil conduct” is perpetuated by the creation of fortresses; “they make you more bold and violent toward your subjects, and then they fail to give you the security within which you were convinced would exist.” ¹⁵ The desire of rulers to construct fortresses indicates they lack the ability to govern and suggests that they will inflict violence upon their subjects. Corrupted rulers and their heirs may “become wicked,” a category reserved for vile princes who lack virtù and murder their fellow citizens to acquire power. ¹⁶

Machiavelli addresses the wicked heirs of Francesco Sforza, the infamous condottiere who rose to power as the duke of Milan, as evidence of this wickedness. Upon taking control of Milan, Sforza constructed a fortress, thinking it would secure his rule. However, the fortress established distance between Sforza and the people, which tempted his heirs to mistreat their subjects: “thinking that by means of this fortress, they could live securely and would be able to offend their citizens and their subjects, they spared their subjects no kind of violence, making themselves so despised that they lost their state when the enemy first attacked.” ¹⁷ They imagined that the fortress could counteract the loss of popular support and, growing distant from the people, became cruel.

Francesco Sforza embodies the force of privatization in Machiavelli’s thought. In The Prince, Sforza represents the dangers of employing mercenaries. Those skillful mercenary captains such as Sforza “will always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their masters, or by oppressing others against your intent.” ¹⁸ Mercenary captains privatize the foundation of the state, the “good arms” that sustain good laws, leaving it dependent on the armies and desires of others. As Yves Winter argues, Machiavelli’s contempt for mercenaries and his “recommendation to recruit a popular militia . . . is part of his populism—his political project of mobilizing the plebs as a political force against the Italian nobility.” ¹⁹ Fortresses give physical form to mercenary rule; their walls take the place of good arms and good laws as the foundation of state power. In doing so, they turn the state away from its people and toward the private interest of rulers, tempting rulers to exercise ever-greater cruelty. Bonds of trust between citizen and state are severed by the material fortifications dividing ruler and ruled.

Fortresses in Machiavelli’s thought in the Discourses represent what Wendy Brown, writing on the construction of walls today, calls the “affect of walling.” ²⁰ Built environments of threat and cruelty “perversely institutionalize the contested and degraded status of the boundaries they limn.” ²¹ For Brown, the power of fortresses rests less in their ability to define physical boundaries than in their capacity to terrorize and inflict cruelty upon those who live in their shadows. Fortresses do more to mark “danger” than they do to definitively separate spaces. Crowds, gatherings, and assemblies of the people are delegitimized as a source of danger and subject to the cruelties of fortified rule. Popular power is constrained by the physical manifestation of private force.

The historical significance of fortresses further illuminates their connection to privatized power. The fortress, in the words of Creighton and Higham, “represented simultaneously the status, wealth, power and defensive needs of the landowning classes . . . in essence, ‘private’ forms of defence, under an umbrella of imperial, royal or princely authority.” ²² These defensive structures increasingly serve as offensive weapons in campaigns to constrain and enclose public life and restrict the power of the demos. For Machiavelli, a society that refuses to build fortresses possesses an altogether different sense of political intelligibility. In contrast to Florentines, Romans, “did not think of building fortresses”—fortress construction was unthinkable. ²³ The difference of intelligibility extends into every part of political subjectivity: “because they possessed a different kind of ability, a different kind of judgement, and a different kind of power, they did not build them.” ²⁴ For Machiavelli, the Roman embodiment of virtù, spanning thought, ability, judgment, and power, led them to reject the construction of fortresses.

In contrast to the Discourses, The Prince does not unconditionally oppose fortress construction but warns against its privatizing function. Machiavelli’s assessment of fortresses in The Prince appears in chapter XX as one of “many things that princes employ every day,” alongside disarming one’s subjects and rule through factional strife. ²⁵ His consideration of these other governing techniques sets the stage for the assessment of fortresses. He warns against disarming the people: “But when you disarm them you begin to offend them. You show that you distrust them, either for cowardice or for lack of loyalty. And both of these opinions generate hatred against you. Since you cannot be unarmed, you will have to turn to mercenary soldiers.” ²⁶ Disarming the people breaks the bonds between citizen and state that produce popular power, leading the prince to instead hire the private power of mercenaries. The assessment of factions is similarly critical, “when the enemy approaches, divided cities are always lost immediately. The weaker factions will always join the external forces, and the others will not be able to stand up to them.” ²⁷ Rule through faction divides popular power, and allows the interests of weaker factions to exert undue influence over the entire city.

Upon reaching the discussion of fortresses, a pattern has developed in Machiavelli’s assessment of governing practices: Undermining popular power and vesting power instead in embodiments of private interest ends in ruin. His assessment of fortresses transposes this argument to the built environment:

Fortresses, then, are either useful or not, depending upon the times: if they benefit you in one way, they injure you in another. This argument may be dealt with as follows: the prince who is more afraid of his people than of foreigners should build fortresses, but one who is more afraid of foreigners than of his people should do without them. The castle of Milan that Francesco Sforza built there has caused and will cause more wars against the Sforza family than any other disorder in that state. However, the best fortress that exists is not to be hated by the people. Although you may have fortresses, they will not save you if the people hate you, for once the people have taken up arms, they never lack of foreigners who will assist them. ²⁸

While initially wavering on the merits of fortresses, Machiavelli concludes that they embody a fear of the people and a failure of government. The reference to Francesco Sforza again denotes the consolidation of privatized power—his castle of Milan embodied mercenary rule and motivated the people’s hatred. The “best fortress,” the governing practice able to guarantee a state can endure, is one in which the prince does not hide behind walls but cultivates bonds between people and the state. A final assessment resolves any equivocation: “I shall reproach any prince who, trusting in fortresses, considers the hatred of the people to be of little importance.” ²⁹

Machiavelli’s greatest willingness to support fortress construction appears in the final book of Art of War where he outlines the architecture of a fortified town that will not exclusively serve private interests. ³⁰ He advises those fortifying towns “not to make any place of retreat in them where the besieged may retire when the walls are either beaten down or possessed by the enemy.” ³¹ Places of retreat undermine the credibility of a ruler, the reason being “that the governor of a besieged town ought not to do anything at the very beginning of the siege which will certainly lessen his reputation, for the diminution of that will make all his orders little regarded and discourage the garrison.” ³² Such places of retreat provide private safety to the ruler while exposing the people to the harm of the siege. Should places of retreat become too abundant, they also risk a fragmented garrison, fighting for individual rather than collective defense. To restrict or even eliminate spaces of retreat creates a shared space between all members of the city and emphasizes the collective dimensions of politics. Unlike private castles reserved for rulers, the defenses of the fortified town provide for the well-being of the people.

This democratizing vision of space is further extended in the proposal that only low houses should be constructed within the walls of the fortress: “I would have no retreating places nor anything else on the inside but houses; those, too would be so low that the governor, in the middle, seeing every part of the walls at one glance, might know where to send relief immediately when necessary.” ³³ Machiavelli offers this advice in strategic terms, envisioning greater visibility and control of one’s forces. However, it also means that the fortified town serves a public function for an equally housed people and eliminates the private defenses of an aristocratic class. Rather than use the citizenry as a protective buffer for the private space of a ruling elite, Machiavelli seeks to more evenly share defense across social classes.

Fortresses take on a more ambiguous role in Florentine Histories, in which they are utilized as tools to expand political or military power and slow the advance of enemies. Fortifications in this context regulate the speed of movement and define spaces of maneuver in struggles between rival parties and between rulers and people. The role of these fortifications can be seen in Machiavelli’s account of the rise of Uguccione della Faggiuola: “Uguccione for his part never ceased increasing his power. He had seized many fortified places in the Valdarno and the Val di Nievole by force and deceit; but when he went to besiege Montecatini, the Florentines judged that it was necessary for them to go to its aid if they did not want that fire to burn their whole country.” ³⁴ In an effort to stem the growing power of Uguccione, “the Florentines fortified their towns around them,” creating a noticeable counterweight. ³⁵ Though this military function of fortresses differs from the assessment in the Discourses, Machiavelli returns focus to the alienation of citizens. The greatest challenge to Uguccione’s power came not from external armies but from a citizen, that is, from Castruccio Castracani who “from citizen of Lucca became lord of it.” ³⁶

Fortified places further define the relations between contending forces in Machiavelli’s narration of the enduring conflict between Francesco Sforza and Filippo Visconti. The career of Niccolò Piccinino, Visconti’s military leader, tracks closely with processes of fortification. The acquisition of fortresses provides evidence of his growing power: “of the twenty fortresses that were being guarded in those states on behalf of the pontiff, not one remained that did not come under the power of Niccolò.” ³⁷ Fortifications enabled Piccinino to alter the tempo of armed conflict. Such is the case when he “fortified himself as if he wished to stay . . . a long time until he took a new course.” ³⁸ This fortified posture tilted the conflict in Piccinino’s favor. Although fortifications buttressed Piccinino’s power, popular resolve posed the greatest obstacle to his advance: “Although Niccolò had driven the Genoese out of the mountains and had taken the valley of Polcevera from them, where they had fortified themselves, and had pushed them back within the city walls, nonetheless he found such difficulty in advancing further, because of the obstinate spirits of the citizens in defending themselves, that he was compelled to withdraw.” ³⁹ His military campaign stalls when it encounters a fortress built out of the people—the “best fortress” of The Prince.

In chronicling tumults between Ghibelline and Guelf, elites and the people, and princes and republics, fortifications in Florentine Histories give spatial form to political, military, and social struggles. Fortifications channel these lines of antagonism into particular configurations of space and time. Fortified places serve as sites of retreat, instruments of division between rival parties, signs of ascendant power, and places named for imprisonment. ⁴⁰ Fortifications defer, delay, and deter action until a more conducive set of circumstances can be achieved. For Machiavelli, these differentials of speed between political rivals are inseparable from the differentials of power between private interests and popular government. The process of privatization takes spatial form through fortifications.

My reading of Machiavelli suggests a need to alter the interpretation of fortresses in his political thought. Fortresses evoke immobile structures made of seemingly inert materials—stone and earth. As materially fixed objects, they would seem to be static political entities. Sheldon Wolin suggests as much when he argues that fortresses reflect a political imaginary committed to fighting against a changing world:

The symbol of man’s [sic] illusions was the armed fortress. The fortress, in all of its seeming solidity, dramatized the false hope that there could be points of fixity, an unchanging basis of political and military security in a restless world. . . . Deceived by the impressive exterior of his fortress, the ruler comes to believe himself invincible and is tempted into cruel and extreme acts. The illusion of security thus releases the psychological springs of ambition and domination. ⁴¹

For Wolin, the fortress provides an illusion of fixity in a world replete with dynamism. It embodies the fantasy of overcoming the condition of becoming. To construct fortresses is to attempt to secure existing power relations and freeze them in place. Following Wolin’s reading, Bonnie Honig suggests that the armed fortress symbolizes a stabilized, secured “world of illusion” that denies the mere possibility of change. ⁴² For Honig, the fortress represents a sense that human agency might overcome fortuna, the force of variation in the world. Wolin and Honig see the temporal logic of fortification as one in which the future is permanently defined by the present. Their readings see fortress power as purely defensive, a power preserving the present political order by warding off forces of becoming.

While Wolin and Honig provide an illuminating interpretation of Machiavelli’s critique of fortresses in the Discourses, where despotic rulers inflict cruelty against their subjects, this vision of immobilizing power does not fit Machiavelli’s larger oeuvre. Machiavelli contends that fortress power is not a matter of imposing stasis and immobility. Art of War and Florentine Histories tell of fortifications constructed in support of maneuver and the recalibration of speed. Machiavelli is interested in power as a field of relations in which fortification intensifies privatizing forces while enervating popular self-government. Fortress power, by Machiavelli’s account, is a dynamic form of power that establishes privatized government and functions through the modulation of speed. Such a reading suggests, following Michel Foucault, that Machiavelli “was among the few . . . who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships.” ⁴³ In his consideration of fortresses, Machiavelli goes beyond viewing power merely in terms of the prince. Fortifications do not suspend power relations; they alter differentials of force between governor and governed.

Privatization, for Machiavelli, represents not only the pursuit of personal interest, but also the condition of being, as Hanna Pitkin suggests, “absorbed in . . . immediate and direct relationships, unable to perceive the larger whole.” ⁴⁴ It involves an enclosure of both space and the political imaginary, restricting one’s vision of concern to the horizon of the self. By providing an intensely antisocial space of encounter within the city, fortresses represent an assault on “living structure[s] of relationships among citizens.” ⁴⁵ Privatization atomizes citizens and removes the possibility of the common and the collective from political subjectivity. The privatization enacted by fortress power erodes public space to the point that it denies the existence of the public altogether. This view of fortress power situates Machiavelli as an indispensable voice in the genealogy of fortification. The fantasy enacted through armed fortification is not one of temporal suspension but that of unrestrained privatized power. The fortress represents something akin to what Honig’s recent work calls a “private object.” ⁴⁶ Private objects usurp the place of public things, objects held in common that call into question any authoritative account of political life and remain available for democratic contestation. The fortress, as private object, strengthens private interest against the functioning of the republic—res publica, the public thing—thereby extending privatized rule.

By departing from an analysis of the fortress as an immobilizing source of ontological security, Machiavelli offers a new starting point for critique of the fortress city and the spatial politics of privatization. The complex functioning of fortification places it alongside, rather than opposed to, disciplinary and biopolitical practices of security designed to regulate the circulation of bodies and populations. In an often overlooked line discussing the origins of disciplinary institutions, Foucault notes an explicit point of contact between fortress power and disciplinary power. Early disciplinary institutions adopted the fortress as their model: “The factory was explicitly compared with the monastery, the fortress, a walled town.” ⁴⁷ Whereas the monastery, as the spatial form of pastoral power, has influenced the understanding of subsequent constellations of power, the fortress has been treated as a spatial form with which disciplinary power breaks. In the early formation of disciplinary power, however, the fortress continued to inform understandings of power. Machiavelli directs our attention to this new trajectory for the fortress—a privatizing, modulating construct.

Furthermore, fortresses embody spatial configurations that hinder democratic society. As I explore in the next section, Machiavelli’s critique of fortresses is closely related to his concern for popular self-government. By considering the significance of fortresses for his democratic theory, I identify the spatial politics of “Machiavellian Democracy.” ⁴⁸

Machiavellian Democracy in the Fortified City

In his groundbreaking work Machiavellian Democracy, John McCormick draws attention to Machiavelli’s support for class-conscious democratic practices, including class-specific assemblies and political trials of prominent citizens. These extra-electoral institutions counteract the tendency of elections to favor wealthy and already-influential citizens. McCormick reads Machiavelli’s political thought as a meditation on class conflict between wealthy, powerful citizens and the common people. ⁴⁹ Emphasizing the first book of the Discourses, McCormick convincingly argues that Machiavelli’s desire to empower the people beyond mere representation distinguishes Machiavelli from his Renaissance republican contemporaries and raises problems for neo-republican interpretations. McCormick refers to such a constitution as Machiavellian Democracy, which “empowers the people to halt the grandi’s insolent behavior, punish those who are especially guilty of it, and establish new laws that reset the grandi’s institutional boundaries for future action.” ⁵⁰ Machiavellian Democracy places checks on representatives who become exceedingly powerful and vests the people with binding powers to restrain the influence of wealthy elites.

A keen awareness of class relations pervades Machiavelli’s work. In describing the society of Renaissance Florence, Machiavelli generally opts for the term grandi, “the great” to name a wealthy and influential elite class. Grandi has strong associations with the history of illegitimate, oppressive rule in Florence. Grandi “had been used interchangeably with ‘magnati’ or ‘magnates’ to describe the oppressive military aristocracy that Florence’s guild community defeated in the republic’s early history.” ⁵¹ Though grandi conveys Machiavelli’s wariness of those who fashion themselves “great” members of the republic, he employs other terms to describe the elite, including nobili (nobles) and ottimati (aristocrats). John Najemy suggests that the general term “elite” best describes the characteristics of the wealthy, powerful class in Florence. For Najemy, the heroic overtones of grandi can be misleading, “nobility,” from nobili, would imply a legal status that did not exist in Florence, and “aristocracy,” the common translation of ottimati, suggests a class structure lacking the relative mobility possible in Florence. ⁵² Following Najemy, I adopt “elite” to refer to Machiavelli’s uses of grandi, nobili, and ottimati. ⁵³

Machiavelli distinguishes between the elite of Renaissance Florence and the popolo, “the people.” Its precise definition is more complicated—the popolo can refer to all Florentines or a specific subset of the Florentine lower classes. For example, artisans and salaried workers were often distinguished as “popolo minuto.” ⁵⁴ By drawing on the term, I hope to evoke its intensely political connotation: “The most politically charged meaning of ‘popolo’ referred to the popular governments produced by . . . alliances of non-elite major guildsmen and minor guildsmen.” ⁵⁵ McCormick notes the way in which Machiavelli’s reference to the popolo invokes the plebeians of the Roman republic, drawing particular attention to Machiavelli’s appreciation for and desire to reconstruct a powerful citizen assembly modeled on the Tribune of the Plebs. ⁵⁶ In addition to the people as plebs, Machiavelli also writes of the people as multitude, valuing the multiplicity of subjects in the state. Stefano Visentin describes Machiavelli’s polyvalent conception of the people as one that “not only create[s] a radical discontinuity with medieval tradition, but also presents a radical alternative to mainstream modern political theory.” ⁵⁷

Machiavelli’s affirmation of the powers of the people is by no measure a naïve endorsement of populism. It considers the relative powers and desires of each class—the pursuit of domination on the part of the elite and the desire of the popolo not to be dominated—and finds in popular self-government a stronger guarantee of freedom than the protections offered by aristocratic republics. ⁵⁸ The popolo will not seek to accumulate power in the same way as elites; they will seek to limit the powers held over them. ⁵⁹ In McCormick’s characterization of this arrangement, “where the people guard liberty, it seems as if there exists a greater possibility that liberty can be shared, that each class’s definition of liberty can be partially satisfied.” ⁶⁰ Machiavelli’s defense of the people as the “guard of liberty” guarantees both freedom and the durability of the republic. The empowerment of common citizens sustains a long-lasting republic by providing a check on the appetites of elites. Assessments of popular self-government as fickle, chaotic, and unwise have failed to establish a fair basis of comparison between popular self-government and aristocratic or monarchical forms. Such assessments take as their examples the least organized popular self-governments and the most perfectly executed examples of aristocratic and monarchical rule. Popular self-government is not without challenges: public opinion may waiver, good government can take practice, and disputes may arise between citizens, yet the empowerment of the popolo and their active participation in the conditions of their own governance provide, on balance, a more durable and freer polity than princely or elite rule. A careful comparison of different regimes would reveal “a people that exercises power and is well organized will be stable, prudent, and grateful no differently from a prince, or better than a prince, and will be considered wise.” ⁶¹

Machiavelli plays a formative role in agonistic democratic thought. Filippo Del Luchesse emphasizes the distributed, agonal power relations in Machiavelli’s “radical idea of the fundamental dynamic between the three subjects of politics . . . i.e. the one, the few and the many.” ⁶² Del Lucchese sees Machiavelli as a unique thinker of constituent power, affirming social conflict contained within the formation of order. The confrontation between prince, elite, and popolo produces a republic with “constituent power as a living force within social order.” ⁶³ The usual figures of constituted power—law, order, and institutions—lack the static qualities associated with the exhaustion of constituent power. Machiavelli offers, instead, “a conflictual theory of law and politics” in which constituent power dwells in an unsettled order that retains the possibility of democratic transformation. ⁶⁴

While McCormick and Del Lucchese carefully attend to the power relations defining Machiavelli’s work, they overlook the spatial organization of these power relations. For Machiavelli, fortresses embody elite power and express class opposition between popolo and grandi. Fortresses defined the politics of Renaissance Florence from the earliest organization of elite families. They represented a form of private and privatizing power, strengthening the governing interests of elites and giving material form to the class relations of the city. ⁶⁵ The defining desire of the elites for Machiavelli was a “desire to command and to oppress the people,” the same desire that is further instilled through the construction of fortresses. ⁶⁶

These private defenses not only diverted attention from ideas of public or common good, they also fortified, that is amplified and strengthened, the interests of wealthy families of Florence against the political will of the popolo. Najemy describes the elites of Florence in terms closely related to their creation of the built environment—they were a “warrior class in fortified enclaves.” ⁶⁷ Within these families, palaces and towers were an indispensable resource for securing class power. Elite families passed palaces and towers from one generation to the next through a system of fractional inheritance. Such a system guaranteed that the edifice in question would continue to be owned by members of the family. Multiple members of the family would have access to it, securing enhanced status for as many as possible bearing the family name. ⁶⁸ A political map of Renaissance Florence would be incomplete without the inclusion of the fortifications that defined power relations within the city.

The spatial dimension of the people is intimated in Visentin’s work on the figures of popular power in Machiavelli. Spatial metaphors pervade his unraveling of Machiavelli’s political thought: Politics arises with the “breaking of spatial uniformity within the community,” and the “polymorphous nature of the people . . . continuously reshapes the spatial coordinates which determines the framework of political actions.” ⁶⁹ Machiavelli’s reading of the fortress is indispensable to this topography of popular power. In the figure of the fortress, Machiavelli pushes the spatial metaphors within his political thought to their limit point—a point at which they manifest as material constructs within the cityscape. The construction of fortresses translates the desire to dominate into the built environment of the city. It strengthens the elite appetites for power, and builds a city that embodies conditions of domination.

By shaping the spatial organization of social conflict in Florence, fortresses inhibited the functioning of Machiavellian Democracy. Fortresses alter the field of constituent power, amplifying private power and diminishing the possibility of popular self-government. The fortress, in both its material embodiment and its metaphorical function, serves an antidemocratic politics that bolsters elite power over the people. Fortresses play a pivotal role in the class relations of a polity, yet they remain largely overlooked by democratic theorists’ examinations of Machiavelli.

Machiavelli sees one form of fortification as an alternative to privatized rule. This “best fortress,” which I examine in the next section, builds strength not from walls and arms but through popular mobilization. In this practice of building a fortress out of the people, Machiavelli offers a valuable democratic practice to confront the accumulation of private power through fortification.

Building a Fortress out of the People

The corrective to the privatizing threat issued by fortifications appears in Machiavelli’s implicit formulation of popular self-government offered while addressing fortresses in The Prince. Machiavelli acknowledges the amplifying aspects of fortification while beginning to evacuate the terms of its privatizing implications. He prepares the concept of fortification for resignification, taking this familiar term for Renaissance princes and applying it, as metaphor, to new political ends. This allows him to capture the affects invested in fortification and bring them into the service of virtù. Consequently, his answer to the fortress question emphasizes the special character of the city in which they are inserted, while carving out a new role for the concept of the fortress:

The best fortress that exists is not to be hated by the people. Although you may have fortresses, they will not save you if the people hate you, for once the people have taken up arms, they never lack for foreigners who will assist them. . . . I shall reproach any prince who, trusting in fortresses, considers the hatred of the people to be of little importance. ⁷⁰

Machiavelli distinguishes the effects of the material fortress from its metaphorical import. He focuses not on the location of particular fortresses or whether he considers them defensible. Instead, he directs his concern toward the spatial practice of fortification in which built environments have political effects on the relations between citizens and state.

Building the “best fortress” is a matter of fortifying publics rather than privatizing urban space. This proposal is not simply a warning against harming one’s subjects or an appeal to achieve legitimacy through popular support. The “best fortress” represents a subtle resignification of fortification as a practice of strengthening popular power. This description of the best fortress, fraught with the tensions between fortification and popular will, appears as an instance of what Yves Winter calls the “jagged surface of Machiavelli’s text.” ⁷¹ Machiavelli’s political thought contains numerous paradoxes, posing more questions than it resolves. As Winter observes, this jagged surface “opens radical and egalitarian paths of thought, lines that may not have been intended by the author or even fully discernible to him.” ⁷² The proposal to build a fortress out of the people offers an unexplored “jagged surface.” To fortify the public proves even more provocative today when ostensibly democratic societies frequently accept the privatization of urban space. I aim to pursue this radical and egalitarian opening, exploring it first in Machiavelli’s terms, then in terms of radical democratic politics and urban theory that at times go beyond the specific recommendations of Machiavelli. ⁷³ Such a move seeks to fully pursue the creative energies inspired by Machiavelli’s response to privatized, militarized cities across gaps of time and space.

The fortification of publics invokes an agonistic understanding of politics in which the fortress serves as a metaphor for enduring collective political life. This best possible fortress formulates the relation between people and state differently than theories of contract or divine right. Rather than a social contract, in which the political sphere is envisioned as a settled agreement between parties, fortification evokes power relations constantly modified through the formation of durable publics. Building a fortress out of the people is one of “many things that princes employ every day.” ⁷⁴ As Vatter observes, “what falls to the wayside are the twin ideas of an irrevocable order of things and of a final revolution.” ⁷⁵ Machiavelli sees the relation between governors and governed as a process of fortification that is at once political and spatial. Here, fortification does not mean the construction of guarded walls but refers to the process of building egalitarian architecture and political infrastructure to provide for the flourishing of the citizenry.

Building a fortress out of the people involves simultaneous pursuits of spatial and socio-political justice. The spatial dimension calls for dismantling fortifications of the built environment, and the sociopolitical dimension seeks robust configurations of popular self-government. The aim of both is to enable the enduring freedom of the people. ⁷⁶ The problem of building enduring political freedom is a recurring one in Renaissance Florence, where offices would last mere months and balíe were called to respond to crises. ⁷⁷ In response to this challenge, Machiavelli envisions a practice of fortification that taps the dynamic energies of the people, allowing cities to navigate the flux of politics. Whereas the process of galvanizing the public seeks to inspire political energy in response to an event, fortifying the public cultivates similar energies while pursuing spatial and political arrangements that enable this energy to endure. ⁷⁸

In a provocative recommendation for the enrichment of public life, Machiavelli suggests, “well-organized republics have to keep the public treasury rich but their citizens poor.” ⁷⁹ Examining this claim offers insight into Machiavelli’s notion of the public. The maxim forms part of Machiavelli’s assessment of the Gracchi’s agrarian law reforms in ancient Rome, but it arises within a chapter on the challenge of containing citizens driven by ambition. The agrarian laws’ redistribution of land alarmed elite citizens, and the power of these ambitious citizens quickly tore apart the republic. Machiavelli observes, “The ambition of the prominent is so great that if it is not resisted in various ways and by various means in a city, it will soon reduce that city to ruin.” ⁸⁰ He does not lay blame on the Gracchi, suggesting instead that their “intentions were more praiseworthy than their prudence.” ⁸¹ Whereas other conflicts between the plebeians and the senate elicited praise from Machiavelli, the reform of the agrarian laws differed from those other tumults in the intensity of elite ambition. ⁸² Machiavelli’s recommendation to keep the “public treasury rich” refers to the need to keep those citizens consumed by ambition from accruing power in quantities that would allow them to unravel the republic.

Revisiting the topic of public finance in Florentine Histories, Machiavelli addresses the dispute that arises over the catasto in Florence. The catasto, a sweeping assessment of citizens’ wealth for the purpose of implementing more progressive taxation, has been credited by Gene Brucker as “the richest source for the social and economic history of any European community prior to the French Revolution.” ⁸³ Echoing Brucker’s praise of the archival significance of the catasto, Rebecca Jean Emigh suggests that the survey of Florentine society appears at a unique moment in the history of the relation between numerical data, the state, and society. ⁸⁴ Machiavelli’s interest in the catasto arises not from its achievement in the state’s capacity for seeing and knowing its citizenry but from the way it “placed a partial restraint on the tyranny of the powerful.” ⁸⁵ It funded the public treasury more equitably than the previous system, which levied burdensome taxes on the popolo and guild classes. ⁸⁶ And while it angered elites, it reduced differentials in wealth and power within the republic without bringing about the open revolt of the most ambitious elites. For Machiavelli, the catasto was more than a census that allowed the state to make visible the number and possessions of its citizens. It made the private wealth of the elite visible. “Approved by the generality but received with very great displeasure by the powerful,” the catasto mobilized popular support against private power. ⁸⁷

Furthermore, the catasto noted the role that control over the built environment played in delineating class. As Brucker explains:

The indications of elite status in this urban society are well known, and they are documented in the catasto records. Most dramatic were the new palaces. . . . These palazzi were the most visible symbols of high rank, and they encouraged or forced those who aspired to that distinction to emulate Cosimo de’ Medici, Luca Pitti and Giovanni Rucelllai in building new, or remodeling old, mansions. ⁸⁸

The catasto brought into public view the power asymmetries between elite and popolo, embodied most clearly in the palaces and fortifications of elite families. It challenged the notion that the elite should serve as the model for civic life, reversing the trends toward the privatization of urban politics and a built environment of fortified enclosure.

In his discussion of agrarian reforms and the catasto, Machiavelli offers a vision of the public as the field of popular power able to constrain elite desires. Though the “praiseworthy” intentions of the Gracchi may mean that blame should be placed elsewhere, the Gracchi were nonetheless incapable of navigating the desires of ambitious elites. They required greater awareness of the horizons of political possibility. In contrast to the Gracchi, the Florentine debate over the catasto ends with the abandonment of absolute “equalization” and satisfaction with the fact that “a mode had been found to make them [taxes] just.” ⁸⁹ Machiavelli’s public is not a universal, general category but one composed of concrete political encounters. ⁹⁰ The catasto enables a calling together of a public. It gathers the citizenry to the cause of contesting private wealth and urban fortification. The aim here is one of building a durable public, one that strengthens political freedom in the present while moving toward a freer future.

The relation between architectural form and public life in Renaissance Florence further illuminates the concept of a fortified public. Richard Trexler describes the political significance of the physical spaces of the city: “The streets, squares, churches, and palaces were legitimating stages to which varied classes and groups sent ‘embassies’ that, witnessed by the city . . . formed and transformed civil, diplomatic, and religious bonds.” ⁹¹ Machiavelli’s delight in the daily encounters within the Florentine republic has been well documented. ⁹² This life of playful public encounter took form architecturally through unique designs of outdoor public seating. Benches ordained the Florentine communal piazza and were later included in the facades of palaces. These “open air spaces . . . functioned as social clubs and living rooms for citizens from overlapping spheres of influence—places to receive news, debate politics, and make one’s identity known.” ⁹³ The emergence of stone benches in Florence marked a transition from fortified architecture to a culture of public engagement. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century patrician families adorned the facades of their palaces with benches to signify their commitment to republican government and a relationship of openness between governors and governed. The instrumental affirmation of Florentine political culture through the construction of public spaces periodically gave way to more democratic ruptures, providing “a breeding area for dissent and revolt.” ⁹⁴ Small-scale interactions between citizens, enabled by these spaces for informal gathering, shaped Machiavelli’s understanding of active civic life. Such spaces of public encounter play a vital role in sustaining democratic society. While they cannot guarantee spatial justice, they nonetheless provide a platform to envision it.

We find such spaces at other historical moments as well. Machiavelli’s work on built environments resonates with studies of architecture and radical democracy. Built environments utilized by socialist and democratic organizations in early twentieth-century Italy deepened democratic practice. ⁹⁵ These “houses of the people,” spaces for the gathering of industrial workers, enabled more equitable forms of worker organization and municipal government. ⁹⁶ As “an important intervention in the symbolic landscapes,” a house of the people “was part of a polemical challenge to the authority and dominance of the church, the state, and private capital.” ⁹⁷ These features of the built environment gave physical form to emerging political possibilities. ⁹⁸ Through these fortifications of the public—small-scale spaces of organizing and democratic assembly—greater degrees of popular self-government could be achieved.

What might the fortification of publics look like today? It would entail dismantling the fortresses that have become so deeply entrenched in the urban fabric and neoliberal political consciousness: halting the construction of gated communities, bringing an end to “defensive architecture,” and shifting the focus from urban development that builds casinos, business parks, and centers for transnational capital. Furthermore, it would involve redirecting the priorities of municipal government to a program of spatial justice. Fortifying the public calls for building public housing instead of private prisons. This vision of the city includes, but is not limited to, the establishment of community land trusts, investment in equitable public transit, and improvement of infrastructure.

In addition to a political platform to defend and expand public spaces, fortifying publics requires practices that sustain the enthusiasm of the people—of activists, workers, community members, and those citizens marginalized from the functioning of the state. Fortifying public life involves guaranteeing the existence of public space and translating public assembly into organized political power. Today, virtual spaces augment physical public spaces, providing new pathways of social mobilization. Social media alone cannot replace the role of public space, but it can extend the reach and influence of an organized people. ⁹⁹ Furthermore, the existence of public spaces is not sufficient to guarantee that democratic society will endure. Public space is, nonetheless, an integral component in the formation of a polity that empowers the people against a narrowing elite. Public space infuses the republic with vitality, thereby providing a starting point for the formation of organized popular power. The moments of encounter between citizens catalyze subsequent collective thought and action. Such moments allow for acts of political imagination where politics may be thought beyond the narrow conditions imposed by a fortified present. Gathering together in public, reading and strategizing in the late hours of the night, and establishing new lines of connection across organizations play important roles in the battle for a new politics of spatial justice. As in the culture of public seating in Florence and the houses of the people in the early 1900s, public encounters and assembly prove indispensable to thriving democratic politics.

In Lefebvre’s famous formulation, “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand . . . [it] cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities.” ¹⁰⁰ The fortification of publics is the right to the city made durable. It is neither a nostalgic return to Lefebvre’s “traditional city,” nor is it an attempt to reconstruct a Fordist city in the midst of neoliberalism. Rather, it involves a radical critique of privatized architecture as expressed in the built environment of cities and the larger contours of global inequality. It involves democratic organization that transforms the right to the city as “cry and demand” into durable social bodies animated by collective desire for spatial justice.

Conclusion

Machiavelli’s political thought marks a point of rupture in the genealogy of fortification. He observes the significance of fortresses as constructs of privatizing power. Furthermore, fortresses and fortifications do not serve as material embodiments of immobilizing power. They intensify active and dynamic power relations. Fortresses do not freeze present power relations in place; they enlarge power differentials. This clarification of Machiavelli’s understanding of fortresses plays an important role in defining the practice of fortification in relation to other modern forms of power. Rather than representing a predecessor to disciplinary power and bio-power, fortress power exists alongside and often in concert with the regulations of bodies and populations. Fortress power is distinct from, but not opposed to, these other forms of power in late modernity. Machiavelli opens the way for considering fortress power as weaving together a complex spatial, social, and political order.

This order takes shape most clearly in the present-day fortress city. Machiavelli offers insight into the spatial and temporal organization of power in this model of urban life. Building on Machiavelli’s thought, we see that power relations within the fortress city outline pathways of circulation rather than lines of strict division. They function in conjunction with practices of surveillance and mobile forms of control to constitute the fortress city. Contemporary fortress power no longer works by enforcing immobility. Instead, as Graham observes, “the imperative is the permanent anticipation, channeling and monitoring of flows so that proper ones can be distinguished from improper ones.” ¹⁰¹ Walls appear and proliferate, modulating the speed of circulations in urban systems.

The fortress poses a far more complex challenge to the functioning of democratic politics than totalization and immobility. Fortress power does not simply shut the people out of the functioning of polity; it keeps them moving through the orbit of private interest. The fortress city is an intensely anti-democratic construct. It undermines public assembly, redraws the lines between public and private space, and envisions an atomized, fragmented society. The challenge for democratic politics becomes one of building a fortress out of the people, creating resilient publics attuned to the relationships between space and power.

This genealogy of fortification provides a starting point from which to examine the proliferation of fortifications on multiple scales—urban, regional, transnational, and global. Moving beyond Machiavelli’s thought will require a close examination of the practices of border fortifications and the ways in which these new practices of bordering redefine the conditions of relationality implied by globalization and the international. New bordering practices are not a separate phenomenon from the privatization of urban space. These exercises of power share a common logic of fortification, one with a history that extends at least as far back as Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s problematic—the relation between the built environment and operations of power in both micro- and macro-domains—proves more urgent than ever.