The essential writings of Machiavelli - By Niccolo Machiavelli & Peter Constantine Page 0,1

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