Book VI: Debate of the Perugian envoys with the Florentines.
Book VIII: The Florentine envoys to the Pope; the Pope’s reply and Barbadoro’s indignant rejoinder.
Book XII: The Milanese legates at Venice against the Florentines, and the Florentine reply.
Bruni puts orations oftenest into the mouths of envoys to develop issues which he has already summarized. Generally they are terser than the speeches of the fashionable dialogues; and sometimes, for he had often been an envoy himself, they are warm with actual debate. In this way his narrative is interpreted by exposition. Remaining narrative in plan, it indicates the animating considerations and interprets the outcome.
Book I, for instance, closes a summary of ancient history with a survey of Italian cities after the invasions, and Frederick II’s fatal widening of the breach between Empire and Papacy. Book II shows Florence in full republican career thwarted by factions; Book IV, the creation of the vexillifer justitiae as a republican means of checking the selfish ambitions of the nobles. The increasing use of mercenaries shown in Book VII leads to chronic difficulties detailed later. The last three books present the war with Milan not only in its succession of events, but also as a single enterprise.
Finishing his first book in 1416, his sixth in 1429, Bruni solemnly presented nine books to the Signory in 1439, and lived to finish his long labor before 1444.
De bello italico adversos gothos gesto historia (1441), an amplification of the summary in the first book of his History of Florence, has less interpretation. The steady, concise narrative, with little comment, has sometimes too little salience. But to attentive reading the story of battle after battle, now victory, now defeat, gradually gives some grasp of the military operations to hold Italy for Justinian. The main figure is Belisarius. Except in occasional concrete description, this history is more like Caesar’s, and is an experiment in that expository narrative later mastered by Macchiavelli. Belisarius is clearly exhibited not only as marvelous in military science, but as an intelligent organizer and administrator. When he feels himself let down by Justinian, and is approached by the Goths toward a joint kingdom, he will not commit himself to any disloyalty. His triumphal return to Justinian reports his intelligent discipline in Italy. Later his recall to Italy after other generals had meantime failed finds the task of reorganization hopeless in the disaffection of the imperial soldiers so long unpaid and ill led. With very little comment or review Belisarius emerges clearly from the narrative itself.
Bruni’s histories are evidence of a sober earlier humanism immune to the extravagances of Ciceronianism and to that allusive display that led to dilation. They go about their business. Oratory is kept subsidiary to the story and the message. This tradition of Latin history continues in the Scotorum historiae (1526) of Hector Boece, and again in the Rerum scoticarum historia (1582) of George Buchanan. Both wrote Latin history seriously as European scholars. Buchanan, sometimes arid and partisan, was nationalist, indeed, only in his later years. Meantime he had taught for many years in France, had written Latin tragedies, and had been saluted by Joseph Scaliger as the foremost of Latin poets. History, then, kept alive among the humanists the medieval tradition of international Latin. Its classicism, more restrained and more intelligent, less of style than of method, was the more valid imitation.