The Prince

After the Medici returned to power in 1512, Machiavelli was dismissed, and following his imprisonment and release in early 1513 he withdrew to the countryside to write. In a letter to Francesco Vettori dated December 10, 1513, he said he had written a small book on principalities (opusculo de principatibus), discussing what a principality is, what kinds there are, how they are acquired, how they are kept and why they are lost, and that he was still enlarging and polishing it. Cary Nederman believes the book was written at the end of 1513 (and perhaps into early 1514), composed in haste by an author who, among other things, sought to regain his standing in Florentine politics; Giorgio Inglese notes that most scholars place its completion by the spring of 1514.⁠[1][2][2][3][2][1][2]

The book was originally intended for Giuliano de’ Medici; after Giuliano’s death the dedication was changed to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici. Cary Nederman believes Lorenzo almost certainly did not read it when it came into his hands in 1516. In the dedication the author says he has distilled into a little volume his knowledge of the actions of great men, acquired through long experience of contemporary affairs and continual study of antiquity, and closes by noting that he suffers, undeservedly, a great and continued malignity of fortune.⁠[1][3][3][3][3]

Before it was printed, the book circulated in manuscript among a limited circle of readers, many copies being made by the author’s colleague Biagio Buonaccorsi. A letter of July 29, 1517, from Niccolò Guicciardini to his father cites the example of Oliverotto da Fermo “as Machiavelli says in that work of his on principalities,” the first explicit record of its circulation. In March 1523 the philosopher Agostino Nifo published in Naples a Latin tract, De regnandi peritia, largely an adaptation of The Prince that omitted or toned down its more controversial aspects.⁠[2][4][2][2][2][4]

The book was not published during the author’s lifetime. In 1532 it was first printed in both Rome and Florence, and its common title, Il principe, comes from the edition of the Roman printer Antonio Blado. The earliest edition held by Cambridge University Library is the 1540 edition of the Aldine press in Venice.⁠[3][1][4][2][4]

A French translation was published in 1553, and the book’s ideas were soon criticized in France.⁠[4]

The book soon came to be seen as a handbook for amoral political power-brokers, at odds with the prevailing view that good government should be Christian in both its ends and its means, and attacks on Machiavelli and his ideas became increasingly common. 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 Machiavelli’s works in Italy itself, and editions for the Italian market were often produced in the Protestant cantons of Switzerland.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

The Latin translation made for northern European readers by the Italian radical Protestant exile Silvestro Tegli was published in Basel by Pietro Perna in 1560 and frequently reprinted, becoming the main channel through which the book spread across Europe.⁠[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. In Italy, Giovanni Botero published Della ragion di Stato in 1589, and the Spanish Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra also wrote a refutation; both sought to bring Christian ethics back into a realistic account of power.⁠[4][4][4][4]

In 1584 an edition appeared that purported to have been printed in Palermo by the heirs of Antoniello degli Antonielli but was in fact printed in London by John Wolfe. The Italian scholar Bertelli suggested that Wolfe printed it to supply readers in Italy, where the book had been banned.⁠[4][4]

The first English translation, by Edward Dacres, who had translated the Discourses on Livy a few years earlier, was published in 1640, as Charles I’s “personal rule” was beginning to crumble; it was reissued several times in the 1660s before being supplanted by a new translation by Henry Nevile.⁠[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 Machiavelli 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 was edited and expanded by him; Frederick became king during the publication process, which made its commentary on current affairs diplomatically sensitive, and efforts to prevent an unauthorized edition were unsuccessful.⁠[5][5][6][6][5][5]

The harshest twentieth-century criticism of the book came from the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who in a 1958 work called Machiavelli a “teacher of evil” on the grounds that the author 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.⁠[1][1]

The year 2013 marked the five hundredth anniversary of the book’s composition, and the Italian Collections at Cambridge University Library presented a feature on the early editions, translations and scholarship in its holdings.⁠[4]

The book consists of a dedication and 26 chapters. Chapters 1 to 11 discuss the kinds of principalities (hereditary, new and mixed) and the ways of acquiring them: by one’s own ability and arms, by the arms of others and good fortune, by crime, or by the favor of fellow citizens; Chapter 7 centers on Cesare Borgia, who gained a principality through his father, Pope Alexander VI, and lost it after his father’s death. Chapters 12 to 14 discuss mercenary, auxiliary, native and mixed armies.⁠[3][3][2][2][2][2]

From Chapter 15 onward the book discusses the qualities for which princes are praised or blamed. In Chapter 15 the author says he will follow the real truth of the matter rather than the imagination of it, because how one lives is so far from how one ought to live, and that a prince who wishes to maintain himself must know how to do wrong and use it or not according to necessity.⁠[3][3][3][3][2]

Chapter 17 discusses cruelty and clemency, concluding that it is best to be both loved and feared but, since the two are hard to combine, much safer to be feared than loved; Chapter 18 discusses how princes should keep faith, arguing that a prince must know how to act both as a man and as a beast and should imitate both the fox and the lion, the fox to recognize snares and the lion to frighten wolves, and that a wise prince cannot and should not keep faith when doing so would work against him and the reasons for his promise no longer exist.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

Chapter 24 explains why the princes of Italy lost their states, Chapter 25 discusses fortune, and Chapter 26 is an impassioned exhortation to the Medici to lead Italy’s liberation from foreign rule, arguing that the present was the most fitting time ever for a new prince to arise.⁠[2][2][3]

Chapter 25 opens by noting that many believe the affairs of the world are governed by fortune and God so that human wisdom cannot direct them; the author says he is sometimes inclined to that view but, so as not to extinguish free will, holds that fortune is the arbiter of half of our actions and leaves the other half, or perhaps a little less, to us.⁠[3][3][3][3]

He compares fortune to a flooding river that sweeps away plains, trees and buildings and that no one can resist, but notes that this does not mean people cannot build defences and barriers in fair weather; fortune shows her power where no ability has been prepared to resist her. He describes Italy as an open country without barriers or defences.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

He goes on to argue that those whose methods suit the times succeed and those whose methods do not fail, yet people find it hard to change the ways their nature inclines them to; he cites Pope Julius II, who acted impetuously in all his affairs and always succeeded because the times suited him. At the end of the chapter he writes that it is better to be bold than cautious, because fortune is a woman and is more easily mastered by the adventurous than by those who proceed coldly, and is therefore always a friend of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent and command her with more audacity.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

Cary Nederman holds that for Machiavelli fortune is not the traditional goddess who brings both good and ill but a malevolent source of misery and disaster that can be resisted only by those who have prepared in advance with virtù and wisdom; the ideas of this chapter can be traced to his 1506 letter to Giovan Battista Soderini and the tercet poem Di Fortuna.⁠[1][1][2]

Sayings like “fortune favors the bold” appeared in Latin literature long before this book and do not originate with it. In the Roman playwright Terence’s Phormio, the slave Geta, urging Antipho to stay alert, says “fortis fortuna adiuvat” (fortune helps the brave); in Book 10, line 284 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Turnus, rallying his men against the landing enemy, says “Audentis Fortuna iuvat” (fortune helps the daring), which Dryden translated as “Fortune befriends the bold”; and in a letter to Tacitus (Book 6, Letter 16), Pliny the Younger records that his uncle, sailing toward danger during the eruption of Vesuvius, told the helmsman “Fortes fortuna iuvat.”⁠[7][8][9][9][10][10]

Cary Nederman holds that the book attacks the traditional moralistic view that a ruler’s authority rests on his moral goodness and defines politics as the effective use of coercive power, as in its statement that since there cannot be good laws without good arms, it will speak of arms rather than laws. He reads the virtù of the book as the range of qualities a prince must acquire to maintain his state and achieve great things, centered on a flexible disposition that can move between good and evil as fortune and circumstances dictate.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Assessments of the book diverge widely: the school associated with Benedetto Croce sees the author as a realist advocating the suspension of everyday ethics in politics; Quentin Skinner holds that he regarded acts deemed vicious by convention only as a “last best” option; Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that the book’s real purpose was to show the people how princes behave; Garrett Mattingly regarded the author as a satirist; and Mary Dietz argues that some of its advice, such as arming the people, was designed to “trap” the prince and undo him if followed.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]