Metamorfosi di un condottiero. Castruccio Castracani da Machiavelli ad Algarotti

This paper starts from the hypothesis that Francesco Algarotti, a well-respected scientist and writer in Enlightenment-era Europe, wrote the biography of Castruccio Castracani, published as part of Lettere militari in the Zatta edition of 1759, because he was driven by the only seemingly peripheral endeavours of the Turkman known as Thāmasp Qoli Khān, later Nādir Shāh Afshār, whose fame had begun to spread among Europeans with his audacious plan to conquer territories on the border of the Hapsburg and Russian empires. Keen to measure himself against Machiavelli’s La vita di Castruccio Castracani, a book based on both reality and the author’s imagination, Algarotti indeed drew many parallels between the lives of Castruccio and Nādir and at the ‘Mars school’, created in Potsdam by Frederick II of Prussia, he planned his biography, procuring first hand accounts and reports, at times partial and incomplete, of the military campaigns which were in progress. Algarotti, like many of his contemporaries, saw Koulican as the peacemaker of those far-off countries, considered wholly advantageous to the geographical and economic power balances in Europe. With the passing of time, after the ferocious taking of Dehli in 1739, the despotic intentions of Nādir became clearer to Algarotti. In those years, in his unpublished Saggio critico del triumvirato di Crasso, Pompeo e Cesare he had explored the concealing talents of Caesar, whose coup d’état transformed the res publica into a dictatorship. From the unfinished biography of Nādir, it is possible to examine reconstructions of the battles between Koulican and the Afghans under Ashrāf as well as those against the Ottomans under Topāl Othmān Pashā from an intertextual perspective of the history of ideas. Written in lexically precise prose and a conversational tone, they were much appreciated by specialists and non-specialists alike and later became two Discorsi militari, published in 1764.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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