Macchiavelli maintains that the Church and the priests were responsible for the moral ruin of the peninsula--but were not the Church and these priests themselves products of Italy?
He should have said that characteristics which were inherent in the Germanic races were foreign to the Italians.
Luther could never have appeared among them.
While our opinion of Alexander VI and Caesar is governed by ethical considerations, this was not the case with Guicciardini, and less still with Macchiavelli.

They examined not the moral but the political man, not his motives but his acts.

The terrible was not terrible when it was the deed of a strong will, nor was crime disgraceful when it excited astonishment as a work of art.

The terrible way in which Ferdinand of Naples handled the conspiracy of the nobles of his kingdom made him, in the eyes of Italy, not horrible but great; and Macchiavelli speaks of the trick with which Caesar Borgia outwitted his treacherous condottieri at Sinigaglia as a "masterstroke," while the Bishop Paolo Giovio called it "the most beautiful piece of deception." In that world of egotism where there was no tribunal of public opinion, man could preserve himself only by overpowering power and by outwitting cunning with craft.

While the French regarded, and still regard, "ridiculous" as the worst of epithets, the Italian dreaded none more than that of "simpleton." Macchiavelli, in a well-known passage in his _Discorsi_ (i.