Niccolò Machiavelli

• 1. The Man Behind A Curse Word

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  Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a slim book of advice for rulers around 1513, and it has unsettled readers ever since. He called it De Principatibus. The world came to know it as The Prince. He did not live to see it printed. The book appeared in 1532, five years after his death, and from that point his name began to mean something dark. To be Machiavellian is to be cunning, duplicitous, and willing to act in bad faith. Some scholars have even traced the English nickname Old Nick, a word for the Devil, back to him. Yet the same man who advised princes to be feared rather than loved was a devoted republican. He recruited farmers into a citizen militia. He wrote bawdy comedies that audiences loved. He spent evenings dressing in fine clothes to imagine conversations with the dead. So who was the Florentine official whose name became a synonym for evil? Why did one short treatise terrify Catholic and Protestant kings alike? And how did a man banned by the Church end up shaping the thinking of the men who founded the United States?

• 2. Secretary Of The Republic

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  Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was born in Florence on the 3rd of May 1469, the third child and first son of the attorney Bernardo and his wife Bartolomea di Stefano Nelli. His father had been born illegitimately, which meant Bernardo could never become a full citizen of Florence or take part in its politics. That same disqualification passed down to Niccolò, who could not obtain full citizenship rights either. Much of what historians know of his childhood comes from his father's diary, the Libro di Ricordi, which was found only in the 20th century. He was nine years old when the Pazzi family conspired to murder Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici inside a church. The plotters were caught and hanged. Shortly after the friar Savonarola was burned at the stake for heresy, the young Machiavelli entered public life. He was appointed to the second chancery, the office that produced official Florentine documents, and soon became secretary of the Dieci di Libertà e Pace, the council that handled diplomacy and warfare. His rise puzzles scholars. He was only 29, with no experience in law or public office. He became indispensable to Piero Soderini, the republic's gonfaloniere, acting as his right-hand man. Colleagues grew jealous and gossiped about him constantly. Around the year 1501 he married Marietta Corsini, with whom he would have seven children. His real education, though, came from watching other men wield power up close.

• 3. Lessons From Cesare Borgia

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  Cesare Borgia carried out a brutal act of revenge at Sinigaglia on the 31st of December 1502, strangling his rebellious commanders Oliverotto Euffreducci and Vitellozzo Vitelli. Machiavelli was there to watch it happen, and he chronicled it in a work he titled The Description. The son of Pope Alexander VI fascinated him. In one letter Machiavelli called this lord splendid and magnificent, a man who in pursuit of glory knew neither danger nor fatigue. Studying Borgia and his father gave Machiavelli a front-row view of how a new ruler seizes and holds a state. His diplomatic errands took him across Italy and beyond. In 1503 Florence sent him to Rome to observe the conclave that chose Julius II, a bitter rival of the Borgias, as pope. He watched Cesare's power collapse and recorded the fall in his poem First Decennale. He observed Pandolfo Petrucci tighten his grip on Siena, later noting that Petrucci governed his state more with those who were suspected of him than with others. Sent to Pistoia in 1501 and 1502 to calm two warring factions, he failed, and the leaders were banished, an outcome he had opposed from the start. From the disturbances of Pistoia and the rebellion of Arezzo he drew a lasting conviction. He came to advocate firm punishment of rebellious cities, the very counsel he would later put into his political writing.

• 4. An Army Of Farmers

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  By February 1506 Machiavelli could parade four hundred farmers, fitted with iron breastplates and armed with lances and small firearms. He had conceived of a militia for Florence at the start of the sixteenth century and set about recruiting it himself. He distrusted mercenary armies, judging them inferior, and wanted instead loyal professional soldiers, a preference he drew from studying antiquity. The experiment had real success. In 1509, Florentine citizen-soldiers under his direction conquered Pisa. His triumph did not last. In August 1512 the Medici, backed by Pope Julius II, sent Spanish troops to crush the Florentines at Prato. Soderini resigned and fled into exile, and the republic was dissolved. Machiavelli was ordered to stay in Florence for a year and to pay a surety of one thousand florins. Then his name turned up on a list of possible sympathizers in a plot against the Medici, and he was falsely implicated. He was tortured with the rope, a method in which the prisoner is hung by his bound wrists behind his back until the shoulders dislocate. He denied any involvement and, after three weeks, was released. He left the city for a farm that would become the unlikely birthplace of his most famous ideas.

• 5. Evenings With The Dead

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  After his release Machiavelli retired to his estate at Sant'Andrea in Percussina, near San Casciano in Val di Pesa, and turned to study and writing. He kept up a long correspondence with his close friend Francesco Vettori, and in one letter he described a strange nightly ritual. When evening came, he wrote, he took off his work clothes covered in mud and filth and put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, he entered the ancient courts of rulers who had long since died. There, he said, he was warmly welcomed and fed on the only food he was born to savour. Four hours would pass without anxiety. He forgot every worry and was no longer afraid of poverty or frightened of death. In that same letter he described a new project, one of his whimsies, that he meant to fill with everything he knew. It would become Il Principe. From 1516 he frequented the Orti Oricellari gardens, where humanists and philosophers debated anti-tyrannical themes, and there he befriended Bernardo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti. To those two men he would dedicate his Discourses. Despairing of returning to office, he wrote plays that, unlike his political theory, were popular and widely known in his lifetime. He never stopped angling for a way back into politics.

• 6. A Teacher Of Evil

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  Better to be widely feared than to be greatly loved, Machiavelli argued, because a loved ruler is held only by obligation while a feared one rules by fear of punishment. He drew a sharp line between the hereditary prince, who needs only excessive force to lose his throne, and the new prince, who must first stabilize his power before he can build anything lasting. The virtues usually recommended to rulers, he insisted, actually hinder them. A prince must be willing to act unscrupulously at the right moment, even to exterminate entire noble families to remove any challenge to his authority. He told the prince to be the fox to avoid the snares and a lion to overwhelm the wolves. He subverted Cicero's counsel against duplicity, and demanded the effectual truth, the verita effetuale, in place of the imaginary republics and principalities imagined by Plato and Aristotle. Many early readers were shocked, and in 1559 the Catholic Church placed The Prince on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The book lionized ferocious statesmen like Cesare Borgia and Septimius Severus. Scholars such as Leo Strauss have called Machiavelli a teacher of evil, since he urged princes to prefer cruelty, violence, and deception over justice, mercy, and wisdom. The phrase often pinned on him, that the ends justify the means, he never actually wrote.

• 7. The Republican In Disguise

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  The Discourses on Livy, composed around 1517 and published in 1531, is a far larger work than The Prince, and it more openly explains the advantages of republics. Nominally a discussion of early Ancient Rome, it strays into contemporary politics to make its points, presenting itself as a set of lessons on how to start and structure a republic. Machiavelli was an ardent supporter of republican politics, and it is well attested that he preferred a republic to a principality. He thought republics more trustworthy and more flexible, able to elect leaders who could adapt to the times. Yet his republic is harsh. He held that no republic or kingdom could have good orders unless it was founded by a man who was one alone, uno solo, with absolute power. He excused Romulus for murdering his brother Remus to gain that power, because Romulus established a civil way of life. He praised the Roman dictatorship for producing great effects. Thinkers like Guicciardini and Montesquieu criticized his support for punitive violence. The Discourses became one of the central texts of modern republicanism, and through it Machiavelli reached the people he never met. In 1520 Giulio Cardinal de Medici commissioned him to write The Florentine Histories, and Machiavelli, ever hopeful, saw it as a path back into political life.

• 8. The Long Shadow

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  Roughly fifteen editions of The Prince and nineteen of the Discourses were in circulation before both were placed on the Index in 1559, a measure that nearly stopped their publication in Catholic regions outside France. The new printing press carried his ideas across the modern west, and rulers read him closely. Reginald Pole reported that Thomas Cromwell spoke highly of The Prince in England, and that the book had influenced Henry VIII. The Catholic emperor Charles V owned a copy. In France his name became linked with Catherine de' Medici and the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. The Huguenot Innocent Gentillet attacked him in a work published in Geneva in 1576, calling his writings the Koran of the courtiers. Frederick the Great of Prussia wrote an Anti-Machiavel to rebut him. Yet his influence ran the other way too. Scholars argue he shaped the Founding Fathers of the United States through his favoritism for republican government. John Adams praised him in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, ranking him with Algernon Sidney and Montesquieu as a defender of mixed government. In the twentieth century Joseph Stalin was said to have annotated his own copy of The Prince. The communist Antonio Gramsci drew inspiration from him, and the fascist Benito Mussolini wrote an essay titled Preludio al Machiavelli. Machiavelli died on the 21st of June 1527 from a stomach illness he had suffered since 1525, at the age of 58, and was buried at the Church of Santa Croce. In 1789 a monument rose over his tomb, sculpted by Innocenzo Spinazzi, with an epitaph carved by a Doctor Ferroni still waiting there for visitors to read.