Niccolò Machiavelli

Life

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence in May 1469, the son of a lawyer of modest means who owned a good library. Little is recorded of his early life. In 1498, shortly after the fall and execution of the preacher Girolamo Savonarola, he was appointed second chancellor of the Florentine republic and secretary to the council responsible for diplomacy and war. For the next fourteen years he carried out missions to the French court, the papacy, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the Italian states, and he observed at close quarters the campaigns of Cesare Borgia, whose methods he later analyzed in The Prince. He also organized a citizen militia for Florence, having concluded that mercenary troops were unreliable.

In 1512 Spanish forces restored the Medici family to power in Florence and the republic was dissolved. Machiavelli lost his office, and in 1513 he was accused of involvement in a conspiracy, imprisoned, and tortured. Released under an amnesty, he withdrew to a small family property outside the city. There he wrote The Prince, dedicated to the Medici in hope of a return to public life, and began the much longer Discourses on Livy, a study of republican government.

He never regained a significant position, though in his later years he was commissioned to write a history of Florence and received some minor employment. He also wrote comedies, of which The Mandrake is still performed. He died in Florence in June 1527, a few weeks after the Medici had again been expelled.

Literary significance

Machiavelli is usually regarded as the founder of modern political thought because he set out to describe how power actually works rather than how rulers ought to behave. The Prince, printed in 1532, was condemned by the Church and attacked across Europe, and his name became an adjective for cunning and treachery. Readers of the Discourses have long argued that his deeper loyalty was to republican liberty, and the relationship between the two books remains a central question in the study of his work. He also wrote a history of Florence, a treatise on the art of war, and plays and poems in a clear and vigorous Italian prose that is admired in its own right.

Where to start

The Prince is short and is in our catalog in W. K. Marriott’s translation. It is the right place to begin, with the Discourses on Livy as the book to turn to for the fuller picture of his thinking.