The close connection between local history and the sentiment of glory
has already been touched on in reference to Florence. Venice would not
be behindhand. Just as a great rhetorical triumph of the Florentines
would cause a Venetian embassy to write home posthaste for an orator to
be sent after them, so too the Venetians felt the need of a history
which would bear comparison with those of Leonardo Aretino and Poggio.
And it was to satisfy this feeling that, in the fifteenth century, the
'Decades' of Sabellico appeared, and in the sixteenth the 'Historia
rerum Venetarum' of Pietro Bembo, both written at the express charge of
the republic, the latter a continuation of the former.
The great Florentine historians at the beginning of the sixteenth
century were men of a wholly different kind from the Latinists Bembo
and Giovio. They wrote Italian, not only because they could not vie
with the Ciceronian elegance of the philologists, but because, like
Machiavelli, they could only record in a living tongue the living
results of their own immediate observations and we may add in the case
of Machiavelli, of his observation of the past--and because, as in the
case of Guicciardini, Varchi, and many others, what they most desired
was, that their view of the course of events should have as wide and
deep a practical effect as possible.
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