Roughly two centuries after Petrarch had urged the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV to imitate the ancient Caesars, there appeared on the European stage a new emperor, Charles V, who most closely resembled the Caesars of old in “theory, authority, and power.” This was not a claim made lightly or rhetorically by a champion of an imperial revival as the elder Petrarch had been. Rather, it was the judgment of a former servant of the Florentine Republic who longed for its restoration, Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540). As the author of The History of Italy, the Political Discourses, and On the Discourses of Machiavelli, among many other writings, the humanist-statesman was the principal sixteenth-century architect of the Italian national narrative that blamed foreigners like the kings of France and Spain for all of Italy’s troubles after the French invasion of 1494.

He was also one of the central examples of a Renaissance historian who, following the ancient models of Livy, Tacitus, and others, embraced a hard-edged political realism in his analysis. His judgment of the power of Charles V was the result of more than three decades of political experience that spanned the period from 1512 to his death in 1540. His work included a term as ambassador to the Spanish court for the Republic of Florence (1512), courtier and military general for the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII, governor of Modena for the Republic of Florence, and officeholder under the restored Medici government in the 1530s. His assessment and fear of the imperial power and agenda of Charles V was thus based on his first-hand knowledge of the emperor’s actions and their consequences for Italy during the first half of his reign. It was also the result of a cold look at his vast political inheritance and pretensions in Italy.