sold his honor by accepting a bribe from Ferdinand.[1] Certain it is
that avarice was one of his besetting sins, and that from this time
forward he preferred expediency to justice, and believed in the policy
of supporting force by clever dissimulation.[2] Returning to Florence,
Guicciardini was, in 1515, deputed to meet Leo X. on the part of the
Republic at Cortona. Leo, who had the faculty of discerning able men and
making use of them, took him into favor, and three years later appointed
him Governor of Reggio and Modena. In 1521 Parma was added to his rule.
Clement VII. made him Viceroy of Romagna in 1523, and in 1526 elevated
him to the rank of Lieutenant-General of the Papal army. In consequence
of this high commission, Guicciardini shared in the humiliation
attaching to all the officers of the League who, with the Duke of Urbino
at their head suffered Rome to be sacked and the Pope to be imprisoned
in 1527. The blame of this contemptible display of cowardice or private
spite cannot, however, be ascribed to him: for he attended the armies of
the League not as general, but as counselor and chief reporter. It was
his business not to control the movements of the army so much as to act
as referee in the Pope's interest, and to keep the Vatican informed of
what was stirring in the camp. In 1531 Guicciardini was advanced to the
governorship of Bologna, the most important of all the Papal
lord-lieutenancies. This post he resigned in 1534 on the election of
Paul III., preferring to follow the fortunes of the Medicean princes at
Florence. In this sketch of his career I must not omit to mention that
Guicciardini was declared a rebel in 1527 by the popular government on
account of his well-known Medicean prejudices, and that in 1530 he had
been appointed by Clement VII. to punish the rebellious citizens. On the
latter occasion he revenged himself for the insults offered him in 1527
by the cruelty with which he pushed proscription to the utmost limits,
relegating his enemies to unhealthy places of exile, burdening them with
intolerable fines, and using all the indirect means which his ingenuity