The Modernity of Philippe de Commines (1447 to 1511)

Part of a Series in Philosophy of History

Saturday 18 October 2025 is the 514th anniversary of the death of Philippe de Commines, who died on Wednesday 18 October 1511. The birth date of Commines hasn’t been preserved by history, and I’ve seen at least four ways of spelling his name — Commines, Comines, Commynes, and Comminaeus (there may well be other spellings of which I’m not aware).

Despite this ambiguity of biographical information, and unlike a lot of other historians, we have a lot of images of Commines, and not just paintings, but a sculpture as well. There’s even a painting of Commines on his deathbed. We have all these images of Commines because he rose to become a successful and an important man, serving King Louis XI and Charles VIII of France, but, like so many important men, he experienced the dramatic ups and downs of the rota fortuna, the wheel of fortune described by Boethius at the beginning of the Middle Ages. We can’t say that Commines was born into obscurity, since his family was already coming up in the world, but he wasn’t considered sufficiently important at the time he was born that his date of birth was preserved. He was able to build on the rising influence of his father and grandfather, and he raised himself up to being the confidant of kings and something like a prime minister for a time.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve called Commines “the first truly modern writer,” comparing him to Montaigne, and the Oxford Companion to English Literature called Commines “the first critical and philosophical historian since classical times.” Recall from the episodes on Edward Gibbon and Friedrich von Schlegel that, during the Enlightenment, those historians who attempted to explain historical events, how they came about and perhaps even why they happened, was called a philosophical historian, so if Commines was a philosophical historian he wasn’t just another medieval chronicler or writer of memoirs that were little more than a chronicle. He was explaining, or at least attempting to explain events to his readers.

We can get a sense of the explanatory character of his writing in his description of an episode from 1465. Commines describes how two armies were observing a truce on two sides of a ditch, but the soldiers were allowed to converse across the ditch, and as a result every day about a dozen men defected from one side to the other. The traffic went in both directions. Commines wrote of this:

“…such liberty of communication is, in my judgment, very dangerous at such times, especially for that party which is most visibly declining: for naturally most people are intent, if not upon their advancement, at least upon their safety, which inclines them more easily to the strongest side. There are some, indeed, who are above temptations of this kind, but they are very few, and rarely to be met with. But if ever such communications are dangerous, it is when a prince himself makes it his business to oblige and cajole people; which is an excellent qualification in a prince who knows how to do it well, and renders him clear from that foolish vice and sin of pride and haughtiness, which all persons abhor.”

He’s talking about human psychology and how it influences historical events from the bottom up. The decisions of individuals to defect from one side to the other aren’t mysterious, they are predictable on the basis of the obvious preference to be on the stronger side. However, they might be dissuaded by a prince who knows how to cajole his men, so even the ability of a prince to persuade those nominally under his authority has to role to play in history, but if a prince shows pride and haughtiness, that will probably make things worse.

Some of Commines explanations, however, aren’t exactly the kind of explanations that we would find in a philosophical historian of the Enlightenment. Take, for example, the following from Chapter 19, at least in one edition I consulted, which is headed: “On the Character of the French People, and the Government of their Kings, with Reflections on the Misfortunes which occur to both great and small.” This occurs as a kind of digression from a description of the events of 1477, but that Commines would even have a chapter on the French people and their government is instructive. In any case, Commines writes:

“…if calamities befall a poor man, they are imputed to his poverty and imprudence, and nobody cares about him ; if he breaks his neck, or is drowned, it was because he had nobody with him, and none will give themselves any farther trouble about it. But when an accident happens to any great city it is otherwise; yet even that is not so much spoken of as anything which happens to princes. The reason therefore why the power of God is more conspicuous against princes and great men, is, because the poor and such as are in distress have enough to punish them whenever they offend; and are frequently chastised when they are innocent, either as a terror to other people, or for the forfeiture of their estates, or not improbably by the wickedness of the judge. But if the offenders are great, as princes, princesses, governors, or counsellors of any rebellious town or state, let their exorbitance be never so enormous, who will dare to inquire into their faults? who will inform against them? who will question them? who will punish them ?”

While this might not be an entirely modern sentiment, it’s a good description and you can decide for yourself whether it’s reasonable, and, if it is reasonable, to what standard of reasonableness it appeals — ancient, medieval, or modern. Whether or not we agree with the reasoning in this passage, it’s not merely a digression, because it serves to define and legitimize how Commines formulates his historical narrative, i.e., why he’s focusing on the actions of the great and not the actions of the poor and obscure. Just before writing the above Commines had said:

“If I should treat of the inferior states and conditions of human life, I should be too tedious, and therefore I shall confine myself to the greater, since by those the power and justice of God are more visibly made known.”

Recall that one of the reasons cited by Descartes for his neglect of history, and his suspicion that history could ever be a proper body of knowledge, was that historians leave out these inferior states and conditions of human life. Descartes wrote:

“…even if the most faithful of accounts of the past neither alter nor exaggerate the importance of things in order to make them more attractive to the reader, they nearly always leave out the humblest and least illustrious historical circumstances, with the result that what remains does not appear as it really was…”

Here we find Descartes’ countryman, a hundred years before, explicitly making the case for historians to neglect the inferior states of human life and to focus on the great. This wasn’t an arbitrary choice, and, if we take Commines at his word, it’s the more instructive choice, since the fate of great men is magnified and thereby made known to us. This isn’t unlike Socrates arguing in the Republic that justice is more easily observed in the large than in the small, which is why Plato begins the Republic as though the disputants were going to discuss what makes a just man, but they transition to discussing a just republic, and only at the end return to the individual to define justice for the individual analogously as they have defined it for a republic. Again, you might dispute the reasoning, but the reasoning that Commines presents is perfectly clear and perfectly legitimate for the project in which he is engaged.

In our own time, with the rise of social history, sometimes called history from the bottom up, and microhistory, sometimes called big questions in small places, a different kind of reasoning about historical events is at play. Some social history has been a conscious attempt to distinguish itself from the traditional historical interest in the great figures of history, and in this sense it’s reactionary. But some social historians had an interest in a different set of questions than the kind of questions Commines was asking and answering. For them, social history took their historical research in new directions.

So was Commines already a modern writer in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century? If he was, Commines presents us with some of the problems we previously encountered with Petrarch and Machiavelli — was he already modern or still medieval? In my episode on Petrarch I quoted Hans Blumenberg, who said that Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux was a moment that oscillates between epochs. In this sense, Petrarch was a man of both worlds, both medieval and modern. Petrarch’s life was entirely contained within the 14th century, so calling him modern is rather more a stretch than calling Commines modern.

One common convention among historians is identifying 1500–1800 as the early modern period, so by this criterion Commines lived eleven years into the beginning of the early modern period. The most obvious comparison for Commines is Niccolo Machiavelli, who was 22 years younger than Commines, but still born in the late 15th century and lived into the 16th century. In my episode on Machiavelli I discussed the modernity attributed to Machiavelli and how different scholars have defined this modernity. While Machiavelli is widely perceived to be already modern, exactly how he’s modern has been a point of dispute. These thinkers taken together — Petrarch, Commines, and Machiavelli, and others as well — constitute a transitional period during which the medieval world was in decline, but still very much in evidence, while the modern world was beginning to form but was still inchoate. As such, we would expect this transitional age to be partly medieval, partly modern, and partly ambiguous, possessing some properties distinctly its own. We could call this transitional period the “renaissance” as it was traditionally known, or we could call these thinkers humanists, as was also a traditional designation, though usually not a periodization. William J. Bouwsma in his 1951 paper “The Politics of Commynes” characterized this period as:

“…the transition from the religious, idealistic, or constitutional ideas of the middle ages to the secular, realistic, or absolutist views of the early modern era.”

This gives us two clusters of properties that we can expect to see commingled in this period. Both Commines and Machiavelli have been called modern, but each represents a distinct commingling of the ideas present in the period. Commines has often been compared to Machiavelli because of their anticipations of modernity, but I don’t think the comparison is particularly good one, except insofar as both were historians, both served at high level of government, and both represent some form and admixture of the properties of modernity. Machiavelli is by far the more modern. He’s explicitly and consciously amoral in his advice to princes, whereas Commines continues to appeal to traditional ideals. Commines wrote: “…the want of faith is the source of all mischiefs and villany.” We have no reason to believe that Commines wrote this cynically without meaning it. Unlike Machiavelli, he’s not telling us that a prince ought to appear good while learning how not to be good. He invokes a traditional moral perspective throughout his memoirs, and does so consistently without appealing to any other moral perspective.

Machiavelli embodied what Bouwsma called the secular, realistic, or absolutist views of the early modern era, while Commines still embodied the the religious, idealistic, and constitutional ideas of the middle ages. Despite living at pretty much the same time, Commines and Machiavelli seem to come from different worlds. And in a sense they were. Machiavelli was living in the political hotbed that was early modern Tuscany, where fast-moving events seemed to be pushing history more rapidly into the future than anywhere else in Europe. There’s a great line in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil where he talks about the tempo of Machiavelli’s prose, saying,

“Machiavelli , who in his ‘Principe’ makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence… cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo …” (section 28)

Nietzsche was right, and he had spent enough time in Italy himself to feel the difference in climate south of the Alps. Commines, on the other hand, who spent most of his life in the damp climate of the Low Countries, writes in a tempo much more reminiscent of his medieval forebears. But when these two worlds came into conflict, the worlds of Machiavelli and Commines, it wasn’t modernizing Italy that prevailed, but rather France, still medieval in many ways, as indeed Commines was still medieval in many ways. Despite the renaissance and humanism having already transformed Italy, apparently more culturally advanced than the rest of Europe, it was France under Charles VIII that invaded Italy in 1494, while both Commines and Machiavelli were both alive.

France was the great military power in Europe at the time, and Italy’s endless skirmishes between Condottieri, who were mercenaries hired by various city-states to fight on their behalf, didn’t prepare these Italian city-states to face the forces the French brought to bear. The nature of feudal institutions severely limited the maintenance of large standing armies that could conduct large-scale military operations over a period of years, but France was the largest state in Europe, had the largest population, had long been a land power, and was the most centralized monarchy of Europe. And the Condottieri had become accustomed to a polite form of warfare, since mercenary companies didn’t gain anything by slaughtering each other. Charles VIII’s essentially medieval army marched into already modernizing Florence on 17 November 1494, and there was little the Florentines could do about it.

The Italian campaign of 1494 was only the beginning of what we now call the Italian Wars, which continued until 1559. When Machiavelli wrote the final chapter the The Prince, “An Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians,” he was concerned with these Italian Wars, which had seen considerable destruction in Italy, but Machiavelli didn’t live to see the French driven out. We might, then, at this point, ask about what modernity can we attribute to mobilization, force projection, and combat power, since this is what the French possessed but the Italians didn’t. It’s almost as if we have in the Italian wars the conflict of two modernities. Modernity isn’t one, but many. Commines and Machiavelli testify to two forms of nascent modernity, and more forms of modernity would emerge as Europe continued to modernize. Today we have a multiplicity of modernities commingled together, giving us the modern world, but in the early modern period, it was modernity commingled with the medieval world that prevailed, and this was the world of Commines.

Video Presentation

[embed]

https://www.instagram.com/p/DP-410ijVui/

[embed]

[embed]

Podcast Edition

[embed]