The essential writings of Machiavelli

M
ACHIAVELLI

Niccolò Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, to the notary Bernardo Machiavelli and his wife, Bartolomea de’ Nelli. The father’s meager salary was supplemented by income from renting out his land near San Casciano, a small village south of Florence. (Machiavelli was to write his major political and literary works there while in exile.) Machiavelli grew up in Florence’s Santo Spirito district, where in his short story “Belfagor” the archdevil took residence. Machiavelli’s father kept a diary for fourteen years, from 1474, when Niccolò turned five, which provides us with the only information about Machiavelli’s early years. The diary underlines the straitened circumstances of the family, but also provides an interesting insight into Machiavelli’s literary education. We learn that he studied Latin and that the family had an unusually large selection of books for the time: among them volumes by Livy Cicero, Aristotle, Julian—books that Machiavelli would analyze and comment on in his later works.

Machiavelli emerges from obscurity in 1498, when he was nominated Secretary of the Second Chancery, an office that handled matters relating to Florence’s territories and external affairs. His fortunes rose over the next decade, when he acted as diplomat, ambassador, and negotiator for Florence’s high-level relations with other Italian states and foreign powers. His analytical reports and discourses from these diplomatic missions give testimony to his political acumen and the extent of his experience.

At what seemed the height of his political career—he had become the foremost adviser to Piero Soderini, Gonfalonier of Florence—Machiavelli’s fortunes changed. In 1512 Soderini was ousted from office, the Medici returned to power in Florence, and Machiavelli’s illustrious political career came to an abrupt end. He came under suspicion of conspiracy against the Medici, and was imprisoned and tortured. He was subsequently exiled from Florence and sought refuge on the farm near San Casciano that he had inherited from his father.

As Machiavelli’s letters from this period attest, he lived in misery. But these years of exile were to be a period of incredible productivity. This period—1512–20—produced the works for which he is remembered today:
The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War
, and his plays
The Woman of Andros
and
The Mandrake
.

In 1520 Machiavelli grasped at the first real opportunity to reinstate himself as a central figure in Florentine politics. Lorenzo de’ Medici had just died, and his cousin Giulio de’ Medici (who was to become Pope Clement VII in 1523) became virtual ruler of Florence. Giulio de’ Medici, aware of Machiavelli’s expertise, sent him on a minor diplomatic mission to the city of Lucca. There Machiavelli wrote an astute analysis of Lucca’s political system and also the famous
Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca
. Giulio de’ Medici was impressed and offered Machiavelli a position at the University of Florence as the city’s official historiographer. The product of this appointment was Machiavelli’s last great work,
Florentine Histories
.

His career was showing every sign of reaching its former glory when the Medici government fell, and Machiavelli, in the final months of his life, found himself again out of favor. He died on June 21, 1527.

C
ONTENTS

B
IOGRAPHICAL
N
OTE

I
NTRODUCTION
by Albert Russell Ascoli

E
DITOR’S
N
OTE

THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS OF MACHIAVELLI

P
OLITICAL
W
ORKS

T
HE
P
RINCE

Selections from
T
HE
D
ISCOURSES

Selections from
T
HE
A
RT
OF
W
AR

Selections from
F
LORENTINE
H
ISTORIES

P
OLITICAL
E
SSAYS
AND
T
REATISES

D
ISCOURSE
ON
P
ISA

O
N
P
ISTOIAN
M
ATTERS

O
N
THE
N
ATURE
OF THE
F
RENCH

O
N
H
OW
TO
T
REAT
THE
P
OPULACE
OF
V
ALDICHIANA
A
FTER
T
HEIR
R
EBELLION

H
OW
D
UKE
V
ALENTINO
K
ILLED
THE
G
ENERALS
W
HO
C
ONSPIRED
A
GAINST
H
IM
365

D
ISCOURSE
ON THE
A
FFAIRS
OF
G
ERMANY
AND
I
TS
E
MPEROR

A C
AUTION
TO THE
M
EDICI

L
ITERATURE

R
ULES
FOR AN
E
LEGANT
S
OCIAL
C
IRCLE

T
HE
P
ERSECUTION
OF
A
FRICA

B
ELFAGOR

T
HE
L
IFE
OF
C
ASTRUCCIO
C
ASTRACANI
OF
L
UCCA

T
HE
M
ANDRAKE

L
ETTERS

I
NTRODUCTION

Albert Russell Ascoli

In his second and lesser known play,
Clizia
, Niccolò Machiavelli imagines history, following the late Greek historian Polybius and ultimately Plato, as a cyclical process: “If in the world the same men were to return, as the same events recur, a hundred years would not pass before we would find ourselves once more together, doing the same things as we do today”
¹
Machiavelli, who believed strongly in the utility of reading the past in order to understand, and to shape, the present, nonetheless speaks in the verbal mode of “condition-contrary-to-fact,” suggesting the improbability of his hypothesis and ironically undermining his claims even as he makes them. It is this voice—wise, self-critical, sometimes quite bitter, and often very funny—that the present volume offers up to be heard, as it rarely is by an English-language public, in something very near its full range, power, and beauty.

We no longer believe that history moves in cycles, and we are beginning to lose faith in the model of relentless forward progress—technological, economic, sociopolitical—that has predominated, at least in the imperial West, since the Enlightenment. And we have responded to this loss of our principal models of historical understanding by forgetting the past—or chopping it into postmodern fragments—or turning it into grotesque fantasies of hermetic codes that unlock a violently repressed past (which, oddly enough, then looks very like the present). If there is an idea of history we have not forgotten, it is the Christian, or Marxian, idea of history’s end—of the Apocalypse, or of “the withering away of the state.” Under such conditions, Machiavelli still has much to offer, whether he is seen as constituting the origins of our current circumstances, as “the father of modern politics” and a sponsor of what is known in some quarters as secular humanism, or instead viewed as someone experiencing, and recording, a crisis in world order and sociopolitical institutions not entirely unlike the one we ourselves now face.

Unlike his contemporaries Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the epic poet Ludovico Ariosto, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) does not tempt us with the possibility of flight into a past both simpler and more beautiful than our own world. Rather, he has consistently been figured as the originator of ideas and practices that have led directly to the present state of things. On the one hand, his exaltation of the Roman Republic (as against the later Empire), his links to the last stirrings of anti-Medicean Florentine republicanism, and his violent critique of the Catholic Church’s role in Italian politics have been understood as throwing open the gates to a secularization of the political that led to English parliamentary government and thence to the American and French revolutions.
²
And this view finds real support in his work, particularly on the pages of his long commentary on Livy’s Roman
Histories, The Discourses
, where, for example, he exposes Julius Caesar’s power grab (and the literary propaganda machine that legitimized it) and argues, against all received wisdom of the time, that the “people” understand the world better than the “Prince.”

On the other hand, he has been linked, and not without reason, to the degradation and delegitimization of a politics decoupled from moral imperatives and transcendent religious principles. Already in Elizabethan England he is “the murderous Machiavel” dramatized in the diabolical shenanigans of Shakespeare’s Richard III, not to mention Iago, and frequently tied—ironically—to the Protestant demonization of the corrupt papacy. For Hannah Arendt, and even more for Leo Strauss, he is the patron saint not of modern democracy, but rather of demagogic totalitarianisms, from Fascism and Nazism to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Here also, and more obviously, there is a great deal of supporting evidence: for example, in the famous dicta from
The Prince
that “all armed prophets were successful, while unarmed prophets came to ruin”; “a man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony”; “a wise [prince] will not keep his word”; and so on. Or in the exemplary role conferred on the bloody state-building of Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI. Or in the mockery of Roman Lucretia’s chastity and suicide—out of which Livy says the Roman Republic arose—via the adulterous seduction and corruption of Florentine Lucrezia in his darkly comic play
The Mandrake
.

What these two apparently contradictory views share is the notion that in Machiavelli can be found the first stirrings of modernity—of secularization, of dispassionately scientific thought, of human agency and foresight (“prudence”), rather than divine providence, as the driving engines of politics and society. What they share as well is a strong tendency to wrench Machiavelli’s words and works out of their original historical context and to turn his always qualified, always historically grounded precepts into abstract, universal rules of conduct. Moreover, both views identify Machiavelli with one text—usually
The Prince
, sometimes
The Discourses
—when in fact he wrote across a broad spectrum ranging from diplomatic reports, to political-historical treatises, to a dialogic primer in
The Art of War
, to a collection of fascinating personal letters, to poetry and drama, and even to a treatise on the Tuscan language (in which he stages a dialogue between himself and his illustrious precursor Dante Alighieri, whose work he both loved and mocked). There is a strong case, then, for looking at Machiavelli’s oeuvre as a whole and for reading it in the flickering light of his personal biography and of the turbulent era which gave rise to him, and which he, as much as anyone, is responsible for blazoning in the historical imagination of the West. In particular, there is a case to be made for seeing his experience of a radical historical and ideological crisis as analogous to the unsettled world that we now confront.

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in 1469, the same year that Lorenzo de’ Medici (called the Magnificent) assumed unofficial control of Florence, following in the footsteps of his father and especially his grandfather, Cosimo the elder.
³
Machiavelli was a member of the oligarchic elite that ruled Florence, but not of its upper echelon (unlike his friends Francesco Vettori and especially Francesco Guicciardini, author of the first great
History of Italy)
. He came of age, politically speaking, between 1494 and 1500, when, in rapid succession, (1) the vulnerability of the Italian peninsula—divided into small, independent, fractious states—was exposed by the invasion of Charles VIII, King of France; (2) the Medici family—now headed by Lorenzo’s feckless son, Piero—was unseated from power and temporarily exiled from Florence by a combination of religious zeal (centered on the “unarmed prophet” himself, Girolamo Savonarola), of anti-Medicean, pro-republican sentiment, and of King Charles’s almost unwitting collaboration; (3) Savonarola rose to power and then fell, burned at the stake, in 1498, having failed in his Utopian quest for religious and political reform; and (4) a new, moderate republican government was instituted under the leadership of one Piero Soderini, with Machiavelli assuming the role of second secretary to the ruling council, ultimately becoming Soderini’s chief political, diplomatic, and military adviser.

Machiavelli’s vocation—his true calling, as he himself understood it—was in the role of active participant in the world of Florentine and Italian politics. His writings from the period when he served the re-founded republic (from 1498 to its fall in 1512) are largely confined to official dispatches, reports, and briefings; his only serious literary endeavors were two chronicles of Florentine political life over two decades, written in the rhyme scheme
terza rima
, invented by Dante for the
Divine Comedy
(ca. 1320). Only with the ignominious collapse of the republic—provoked by an invasion by troops of the other European superpower, Spain, and with the collaboration of Pope Julius II (Michelangelo’s patron)—and the triumphant return of the Medici, whose head, Giovanni de’ Medici, would shortly be crowned Pope Leo X, did Machiavelli’s career as “Machiavelli” begin in earnest. In a justly famous—caustic, pathetic, and brilliant—letter of December 10, 1513, Machiavelli, from his exile on the fringes of Florence, speaks of writing what would become
The Prince
—declaring its content to be the fruit of his private colloquies with the (books of the) ancient philosophers, historians, and poets, and its purpose to be that of acquiring favor with the Medici (who were, reasonably enough, deeply suspicious of this counselor to their enemies, whom they had recently arrested and briefly tortured before banishing him) and thus regaining active employment.

That purpose was never fully realized, though his relations with the Medici gradually improved to the point of his receiving a commission from Leo’s Medicean successor as pope, Clement VII, to write the
Florentine Histories
. Instead, in the fifteen years between his exclusion from the precincts of power and his untimely death (in 1527, at the age of fifty-eight), Machiavelli would write
The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War
, the
Histories
, and his two plays, along with various poems, a misogynistic short story (“Belfagor”), essays, a biography, and many, many letters. In these, he offers an inside view, at once melancholy and incisive, poignant and satirical, of the daily life of Renaissance Florence, revealing what for us today has become a kind of museum—an architectural and artistic monument, a memorial to the great artists and writers of its past (from Dante and Giotto to Alberti, Donatello, and Lorenzo, to Michelangelo and Machiavelli himself)—as a raw, raunchy, vital, profoundly human place. At the same time, he invents (or so it is claimed) the scientific study of politics, takes lengthy strides toward modern ideas of the writing of history, and makes a crucial contribution to the refounding of a secular dramatic theater, which would reach its zenith less than a hundred years later, in the England of Shakespeare.

All of these works, most of which are represented in this collection in whole or in part, deserve their own, separate consideration, which, alas, they cannot receive in an introduction of this kind. Together they represent a powerful, anguished response to a crisis not only in Machiavelli’s own life and in the life of his beloved Florence, but in that of the Italian peninsula and of Europe generally. The elements of that crisis are well known: the rise of the nation-state (France, Spain, England), which would soon render the independent states of Italy obsolete; the discovery of an unknown world that both unsettled traditional understandings of human society and unleashed a frenzied pursuit of imperial dominion and economic hegemony; the fragmentation of Christianity with the Lutheran-Protestant revolt (whose first warning shot—the Lutheran theses—was directed at the gaudy worldly papacy of Leo and was heard in the same year we believe Machiavelli completed
The Prince
, 1517); and so on and on. Machiavelli’s writings, especially the ones on politics and history represent an extreme response to an extreme situation—and they betray the angry if often bitingly funny awareness that traditional theocentric ways of thinking and established institutions (whether Florentine republicanism or the Catholic Church itself) were incapable of coping with a menacing tide of drastic changes.

It is tempting to find in this experience, Machiavelli’s experience, an allegory of our recent history and present state: the decay and evident inadequacy of protodemocratic institutions; wars between superpowers that carry along the rest of the world in their wake; globalization driven by economic exploitation and the exportation of an imperial culture; fierce, at times violent, attacks motivated by religious intolerance (most obviously between Protestants and Catholics, but the expanding Muslim world, in the form of the Ottoman Empire, was an increasingly present worry for Europe); a world in which terror is a weapon of first resort. No doubt, Machiavelli would tell us if he could, such parallels have their limitations, but also their uses.

Which brings me to a last point, one that encapsulates my own admiration of and wariness about this courageous, dangerous, ever-innovative author: Machiavelli’s political thought places us at the very top of the intellectual and ethical “slippery slope” one hears so much about—that is, in a world of politics, society, and culture no longer grounded in sacred truths or moral imperatives, no longer able to count on long-cherished principles of order and understanding. But, we should ask ourselves—as Machiavelli’s best readers have asked themselves since his own time—does he invent this slippery slope, or does he simply reveal that it has been the uncertain ground beneath our feet all along? Does he create or does he expose the perils of a historical world of contingency where our neighbors’ (and perhaps even our own) intentions are frequently bad, where justice is often an empty, crowd-pleasing spectacle, where human rights and freedom are not divinely given and “unalienable” but, if they exist as such at all, hard won and easily lost?

There is no easy answer to this question—which is in some ways
the
question we face today—but the reading of Machiavelli in all of his many facets, in the complexity of his thought and of his imagination, demands of us that we address it before it is too late.

—

A
LBERT
R
USSELL
A
SCOLI
is Gladys Arata Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has held research fellowships from the NEH and ACLS, and was awarded the Rome Prize for study at the American Academy in Rome in 2004–5. His publications include
Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance
(Princeton, 1987) and
Dante and the Making of a Modern Author
(forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2007). With Victoria Kahn he co-edited
Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature
(Cornell, 1993), which includes his essay “Machiavelli’s Gift of Counsel.”