Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in 1469 in Florence, the son of a debt-burdened lawyer with a good library and no obvious prospects for his son. He received a humanist education in Latin and the Roman classics — Livy above all — but no university degree, and almost nothing is documented about him until 1498, when at twenty-nine he was appointed Second Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, in the convulsion that followed the execution of the Dominican preacher Savonarola. For the next fourteen years Machiavelli ran the Republic's foreign correspondence and was sent on diplomatic missions to almost every court that mattered: to Louis XII of France, to the Emperor Maximilian, four times to the papal court, and on the assignments that shaped his thinking most decisively, to Cesare Borgia, the warlord son of Pope Alexander VI, whom he watched at close range in 1502–1503 consolidate the Romagna by a combination of force, deception, and well-timed atrocity.

He saw, in that period, Pope Julius II march at the head of his own armies, the French sweep through Lombardy, the Italian city-states played against one another by powers they could not match, and the Republic's reliance on mercenary captains who refused to fight. He proposed and partly organized a Florentine citizen militia. In 1512 the Spanish army of the Holy League restored the Medici to Florence; the Republic fell; Machiavelli was dismissed from his office, accused (almost certainly wrongly) of conspiracy, imprisoned, and subjected to the strappado — the torture in which the prisoner is hoisted from the ceiling by his bound hands and dropped short of the floor. He survived six drops, was released under a general amnesty, and retired to his small farm at Sant'Andrea in Percussina, seven miles south of the city.

There, in 1513, he wrote The Prince and sent it as a job application to the Medici, hoping the manuscript would persuade Lorenzo de' Medici to take him back into government. (A famous letter to his friend Francesco Vettori describes the routine: birdliming and chess by day, then in the evening "I take off my muddy everyday clothes, dress in regal and courtly garments, and enter the ancient courts of ancient men.") The Medici did not hire him. The Prince was not printed until 1532, five years after his death. The slim treatise — analyzing how new rulers acquire and hold power, arguing that a prince must learn how not to be good and use that knowledge as necessity dictates, taking Cesare Borgia as a working model — was placed on the Catholic Index in 1559, attached his name to the adjective Machiavellian, and has been read for five centuries by readers who often have not read anything else he wrote.

The reputational gap matters. The Discourses on Livy, written in roughly the same period and addressed to a pair of republican friends, is a long, deliberate argument for republics over principalities, for the political virtue of an armed citizenry, and for the institutional value of internal class conflict between the people and the great — positions that are difficult to reconcile with the cartoon Machiavelli of stage and pamphlet. He also wrote The Art of War, a comedy called The Mandrake that is still revived, and a History of Florence commissioned by the Medici Pope Clement VII.

He died in 1527, weeks after the Sack of Rome and the second fall of the Medici — the moment when, had he lived, the Republic he had served might finally have called him back.