Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, in the parish of S. Trinita in Florence. His father, Bernardo di Niccolò di Buoninsegna, was a doctor of law of modest means, and his mother was Bartolomea de’ Nelli. In his autograph documents the vernacular form of his surname is Machiavegli, and his Latin signature was “Nicolaus Machiavellus.”⁠[1][2][1][1]

His father’s household record book for 1474–1487 records that he studied grammar from 1476 and arithmetic from 1480, and from 1481 took Latin lessons from Paolo Sasso da Ronciglione, a teacher of grammar at the Studio fiorentino; as a youth he already knew the histories of Justinus and Livy. In his youth he copied and signed a manuscript of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (now in the Vatican Library). There is no certain evidence that he attended the University of Florence, but his writings show that he received an excellent humanist education.⁠[1][1][1][2]

The Medici were expelled from Florence on November 9, 1494, and the friar Savonarola gained influence. Machiavelli drew close to the aristocratic factions that later openly opposed Savonarola. On December 2, 1497, he drafted a petition on behalf of his family in a dispute over the patronage of a church, his earliest surviving dated autograph; in a letter of March 9, 1498, to Ricciardo Becchi he wrote with contempt of Savonarola, who had already lost power.⁠[1][1][1]

After Savonarola was executed on May 23, 1498, Machiavelli was nominated on May 28 and formally appointed on June 19 as secretary of the Second Chancery of the Florentine Republic, and from July 14 he also served as secretary of the Ten (Dieci), the magistracy responsible for war and the security of the dominion. Over the next fourteen years he traveled on Florence’s behalf to the main Italian states, the French court and the court of Emperor Maximilian, leaving a large body of official dispatches.⁠[1][2][2][2]

In May 1499 he wrote his earliest surviving political prose, the Discorso sopra Pisa, on how to recover the rebellious city of Pisa. From July 12 to 24 of the same year he carried out his first important diplomatic assignment, a mission to Caterina Sforza Riario, Countess of Forlì, to negotiate the renewal of her son Ottaviano Riario’s mercenary contract.⁠[1][1]

In July 1500 he witnessed the collapse of the Swiss and Gascon mercenaries led by Charles de Beaumont outside Pisa, and was then sent with Francesco Della Casa to King Louis XII of France to press the ally for a greater military commitment against Pisa while resisting his heavy demands for tribute. The mission lasted from July 18, 1500, to January 1501; in a letter of November 21 he recorded his advice to Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, Louis XII’s chief minister, which he later repeated almost word for word in Chapter 3 of The Prince.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In the autumn of 1501 Machiavelli married Marietta Corsini.⁠[1]

At the end of June 1502 he assisted Francesco Soderini on an embassy to Cesare Borgia (Duke Valentino), who had just seized Urbino, and in a letter of June 26 described him as “very splendid and magnificent.” From October 5, 1502, to January 21, 1503, he undertook a second legation to Borgia to offer Florence’s support, witnessed the cunning and cruelty with which Borgia eliminated his rebellious captains, and described the events at Senigallia on December 31 in a letter written soon afterward. The experience of these missions was later reworked as a whole into Chapter 7 of The Prince.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

On September 20, 1502, Piero Soderini was elected gonfaloniere for life of the Florentine Republic. Machiavelli served him with loyalty and became his most trusted collaborator, while also criticizing his lack of resolve.⁠[1][1][2]

From October 26 to December 18, 1503, he was in Rome to observe the conclave that elected Giuliano Della Rovere as Pope Julius II, and in a letter of November 14 he analyzed Cesare Borgia’s mistakes at that juncture.⁠[1]

From January 19 to March 1, 1504, he assisted the ambassador Niccolò Valori at the French court in Lyon in consolidating the alliance. In October of that year he completed a long poem in Dantean tercets chronicling Italian events from 1494 to 1504, which was printed in February 1506 under the title Decennale and was soon pirated.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

Machiavelli was devoted to creating a militia of the republic’s own citizens and subjects rather than mercenaries or foreign allies. From December 1505 to March 1506 he personally oversaw the recruitment and training of the first contingents; the first review, of 400 infantrymen, took place on February 15, 1506; on April 1 Micheletto, a former lieutenant of Cesare Borgia, was hired as captain, to the dismay of the Florentine aristocracy; by early November about 5,000 men had enrolled. On December 6, 1506, Florence passed the militia ordinance on the basis of a document he drafted, and on January 12, 1507, he was appointed secretary of the Nine officials of the militia.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

From August 25 to October 26, 1506, he accompanied Pope Julius II through Umbria and Romagna on the campaign to bring Perugia and Bologna to obedience. The unexpected surrender of the Perugian tyrant Giampaolo Baglioni to the poorly armed pope prompted his reply to Giovan Battista Soderini, the Ghiribizzi al Soderino, which argued that success comes only when a person’s way of proceeding matches the character of the times; these ideas passed into the tercet poem Di Fortuna and, with notable adjustments, into Chapter 25 of The Prince and Book III, Chapter 9 of the Discourses on Livy.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In June 1507 he was designated for a mission to Emperor Maximilian I but, because of aristocratic opposition, was replaced by Francesco Vettori; at the end of 1507 he went to Tyrol as Vettori’s aide to assess the danger to Florence of Maximilian descending into Italy. After returning home in June 1508 he wrote the Rapporto di cose della Magna, which highlighted Maximilian’s political and personal limitations and the “disunity” that kept Germany weaker than France and Spain.⁠[1][1][1]

In the campaign to recover Pisa, Machiavelli supervised operations, conducted negotiations, drafted a summary of the battle plan and, on June 4, 1509, countersigned the city’s surrender. This marked the high point of the Florentine Republic and of his own career; in a letter of congratulations his friend Filippo Casavecchia called him “the greatest prophet” ever known.⁠[1][1][1][1]

From June to October 1510 he went on his third mission to France, tasked with persuading Louis XII not to break with the pope, a mandate frustrated by Julius II’s aggression against the Este, France’s allies; after returning he wrote the Ritratto di cose di Francia, which identified the solid relationship between the crown and the barons as the main cause of French power. On September 10, 1511, he left again for France, staying until mid-October, but his efforts to promote peace produced no significant results.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In August 1512 Spanish troops accompanying Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici entered Tuscany, the Florentine infantry was crushed and Prato was sacked on August 29; Piero Soderini fled on August 31, and the Medici took power on September 16. The militia that Machiavelli had organized failed to stop the Spanish and papal troops. On November 7 he was removed from office, on November 10 he was sentenced to a year of confinement within Florentine territory, and on November 17 he was barred from entering the government palace for a year.⁠[1][1][2][1]

On February 12, 1513, he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the anti-Medici conspiracy organized by Agostino Capponi and Pietro Paolo Boscoli, and was tortured with the strappado. The scholar Cary Nederman considers the suspicion to have been mistaken. From prison he sought help from the Vettori brothers and Giuliano de’ Medici; Capponi and Boscoli were executed, while he was released in the amnesty that followed the election of Giovanni de’ Medici as Pope Leo X on March 11, 1513, and then withdrew to the Albergaccio farm at Sant’Andrea in Percussina.⁠[1][1][2][1][1][1][1]

From March 13, 1513, to January 31, 1515, he corresponded with Francesco Vettori on politics. His letter of December 10, 1513, describes his life on the farm: returning to his study in the evening, putting on courtly dress and conversing with the ancients; in it he said he had composed a small work on principalities (opusculo de principatibus) and was still enlarging and polishing it. This work became The Prince, first intended for Giuliano de’ Medici and later dedicated to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici. Cary Nederman believes that one of the author’s aims in writing it was to regain his standing in Florentine political affairs.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][2]

Between the summer of 1514 and the following spring Lorenzo consulted him on military matters, and Giuliano also considered employing him; but in February 1515 the Medici power center in Rome firmly refused any rehabilitation, and Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici had Giuliano told “not to get involved with Niccolò.” In a letter to his nephew of August 18, 1515, he wrote that the times had made him “forget himself.”⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

From 1516 or 1517 he joined the circle of young men of letters who met in the Orti Oricellari gardens around Cosimo Rucellai. He dedicated the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, written in the form of a commentary on Livy, to Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti; Cary Nederman believes the work was begun perhaps in 1514 or 1515 and completed in 1518 or 1519, and that it sets out the principles of republican government under the guise of a commentary on the ancient Roman historian.⁠[1][1][2][2]

In these years he held almost no public office, apart from a trip to Genoa in March–April 1518 on behalf of Florentine merchants involved in a bankruptcy, and devoted himself mainly to literature: he wrote the satirical poem L’Asino and the novella Belfagor arcidiavolo, and translated Terence’s comedy Andria. His comedy La Mandragola was staged in Florence around 1520, and Pope Leo X soon asked to see it in Rome.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

After Lorenzo’s death on May 4, 1519, the Medici family’s distrust of him seemed to ease. In March 1520, through the good offices of Lorenzo Strozzi, he was received by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici; from July 9 to September 10 of that year he went on a semi-official mission to Lucca, during which he wrote the Life of Castruccio Castracani. On November 8, 1520, the Studio of Florence engaged him on a modest salary to compile annals of Florence, which became the Florentine Histories.⁠[1][1][1][1][2]

In May 1521 he went to the Franciscan chapter at Carpi on behalf of Florence’s Otto di pratica, and there formed a friendship and began a correspondence with Francesco Guicciardini, then governor of Modena. In August of the same year his dialogue on military affairs, The Art of War, was published by the Giunti in Florence with a dedication to Lorenzo Strozzi, advocating a return to the Roman model of an armed citizenry and of infantry in place of mercenaries.⁠[1][1][1][1][2]

The first four books of the Florentine Histories were completed before December 1522 and the remaining four by March 1525. In June 1525 he presented the eight books in Rome to Giulio de’ Medici, who had become Pope Clement VII on November 19, 1523. The work covers Florence from its founding to 1492, with the city’s internal factional conflict as its main subject.⁠[1][1][2][1]

Amid the war between the League of Cognac and Emperor Charles V, on May 18–19, 1526, he was appointed provveditore and chancellor of the Procuratori alle mura, a magistracy whose founding provision he had drafted; from July he joined Guicciardini, the pope’s lieutenant general, in trying to reorganize the troops, and from September 9 to 14 took part in the siege of Cremona.⁠[1][1][1]

Rome was sacked on May 6, 1527, and on May 17 the Medici were again expelled from Florence and the republic restored. The new government did not recall him to the chancery, and on June 10 it kept the Medicean Francesco Tarugi as secretary. Machiavelli died in Florence on June 21, 1527, with a few friends, including Buondelmonti, Alamanni, Strozzi and Nardi, at his side, and was buried the next day in the family grave in Santa Croce, a grave of no particular distinction.⁠[1][1][1][1][2][3]

The Discourses on Livy was published in 1531 and The Prince in 1532, both posthumously. The Prince was printed in 1532 in both Rome and Florence, and its common title, Il principe, comes from the edition of the Roman printer Antonio Blado.⁠[2][2][4][1]

In 1559 The Prince was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books (Index librorum prohibitorum), after which it became very difficult to print his works in Italy itself, and editions for the Italian market were often produced in the Protestant cantons of Switzerland.⁠[4][4]

During the French Wars of Religion, the Huguenots associated Machiavellianism with the allegedly tyrannous and corrupt practices of the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici. In 1576 the Huguenot lawyer and theologian Innocent Gentillet wrote his Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner, which circulated as the Anti-Machiavel and was widely translated and reprinted. The Prince and its political maxims met almost universal condemnation in sixteenth-century Europe, and “anti-Machiavellism” became a cultural phenomenon in its own right.⁠[4][4][4][4]

King Frederick II of Prussia wrote the Anti-Machiavel, a chapter-by-chapter refutation of The Prince that set out an ideal of benevolent statesmanship based on rational principles. He wrote it because he disagreed with Voltaire’s presentation of the Florentine official as a great man of his time in a draft sent to him in 1738. The book was published in 1740 in The Hague under Voltaire’s supervision, and Voltaire edited and expanded the original text.⁠[5][5][5][6][6]

In the late eighteenth century, under Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany, Florence reassessed Machiavelli’s thought. In 1782 George Nassau Clavering-Cowper, 3rd Earl Cowper, published the complete works in six volumes with the printer Gaetano Cambiagi; after a public subscription, the Roman sculptor Innocenzo Spinazzi made a monumental tomb for him in the south aisle of Santa Croce, completed in 1786 and inaugurated in 1787. The allegorical figure of Politics on the tomb holds a medallion with his portrait and a pair of scales symbolizing balance, and the base bears the inscription “TANTO NOMINI NULLUM PAR ELOGIUM” (no praise is sufficient for such a great name).⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

The harshest criticism of Machiavelli holds that he advocated an immoral or amoral politics. The political philosopher Leo Strauss, in a 1958 work, called him a “teacher of evil” on the grounds that he counseled rulers to abandon the common values of justice, mercy, temperance, wisdom and love of their people in favor of cruelty, violence, fear and deception.⁠[2][2][2]

Machiavelli held that there is no moral basis in politics for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate uses of power, and that the real concern of politics is the acquisition and maintenance of power; he used the word virtù for the qualities a prince needs to “maintain his state” and “achieve great things,” above all the ability to vary his conduct as fortune and circumstances change, while Fortuna (fortune) is the enemy of political order.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

His ideas have been controversial since the sixteenth century: he was denounced as an apostle of the Devil, yet was also read and applied sympathetically by authors and politicians advocating “reason of state.” The school associated with Benedetto Croce sees him as a realist who advocated suspending everyday ethics in politics; Quentin Skinner holds that he regarded acts deemed vicious by convention as a “last best” option; in the first half of the twentieth century some saw him as a “Galileo of politics” distinguishing the “facts” of political life from the “values” of moral judgment; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that the real purpose of The Prince was to show the people how princes behave, thereby exposing the immorality of one-man rule.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

The Italian scholar Giorgio Inglese considers Machiavelli the founder of modern political thought, the first to conceive of the “art of the state” as a practice with its own principles irreducible to those of ethics; Cary Nederman holds that he stood between innovation and tradition and cannot simply be classified as either an “ancient” or a “modern” thinker.⁠[1][2][2]