Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, civil servant, historian and political thinker of the Renaissance. His short book The Prince, written in 1513, advised rulers to judge their actions by results rather than by conventional morality, and made his name a byword for cunning and ruthlessness. His longer Discourses on Livy, a defence of republican liberty, shows another side of him, and together the two works are often taken as the beginning of modern political thought.

Machiavelli was born on 3 May 1469 in Florence, the son of Bernardo Machiavelli, a lawyer of modest means with a fine library, and Bartolomea de' Nelli. He received a humanist education in Latin and the classics, and his lifelong reference points were the historians of ancient Rome, above all Livy. Of his early adult life almost nothing is known.

His career began in 1498, a few weeks after the friar Girolamo Savonarola, who had dominated the city since the expulsion of the Medici in 1494, was burned in the main square. Machiavelli, then twenty-nine, was appointed head of the second chancery of the Florentine republic and secretary to the Ten of War, the committee in charge of foreign affairs and defence. In 1501 he married Marietta Corsini, with whom he had several children.

For fourteen years he travelled on missions for the republic, which was weak and surrounded by stronger powers in a Renaissance Italy torn by the wars between France and Spain. He went several times to the French court of Louis XII, to the emperor Maximilian, and to Pope Julius II. Most influential of all was his time in 1502 and 1503 with Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, who was carving out a state for himself in the Romagna. Machiavelli watched how Borgia won loyalty, used fear and eliminated rivals, and later held him up as a model of a new prince undone only by bad fortune.

Convinced that mercenary armies had brought Italy to ruin, he persuaded the government to raise a militia of Florentine citizens and peasants, and led its first great test, the recapture of Pisa in 1509. Around 1503–1504 he was also involved in a failed scheme to divert the river Arno during the war with Pisa, a project associated with Leonardo da Vinci.

In 1512 a Spanish army sacked nearby Prato, Florence's militia collapsed, and the Medici returned to power. Machiavelli was dismissed. Early in 1513 his name was found on a list kept by conspirators against the Medici; he was arrested, tortured with the strappado and imprisoned, though he denied any involvement. He was released in a general amnesty when Giovanni de' Medici became Pope Leo X that March.

He retired to his small farm at Sant'Andrea in Percussina, south of the city. In a famous letter of December 1513 he described spending his days among woodcutters and in the tavern, and his evenings in his study, dressed in courtly clothes, conversing with the ancients. There he wrote The Prince, which he hoped would win him the favour of the Medici; it was eventually dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici, duke of Urbino. In the years that followed he wrote the Discourses on Livy, The Art of War, the only major political work printed in his lifetime, and the comedy La Mandragola (The Mandrake), a sharp satire of Florentine society that was a great success.

From 1520 the Medici gave him minor commissions, including a history of Florence for Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, who as Pope Clement VII received the finished Florentine Histories in 1525. When the Medici were expelled again in May 1527, after the sack of Rome, the restored republic regarded him as their man. He died in Florence on 21 June 1527 and was buried in the church of Santa Croce.

The Prince is a guide for a new ruler who must win and hold a state. Machiavelli presented it as dealing with things as they really are rather than with imagined republics and principalities. A prince who tries always to be good will be ruined among so many who are not, so he must learn how not to be good and use that knowledge as necessity demands. It is safer to be feared than loved, if one cannot be both, but a prince must avoid being hated. He should seem merciful, honest and religious, and may break his word when keeping it would harm him.

Two terms run through the book. Virtù is not moral virtue but the energy, skill and boldness that let a ruler master events. Fortuna, chance, governs perhaps half of human affairs, but can be resisted, like a river held back by dykes built in calm weather. The final chapter calls on the Medici to unite Italy and drive out the foreign "barbarians".

The Discourses, a commentary on the first ten books of Livy's history of Rome, argue that republics are, over time, more stable and successful than principalities. Rome grew great, Machiavelli wrote, because its constitution mixed the powers of consuls, senate and people, and because the conflict between nobles and common people, far from being a weakness, produced laws that protected liberty. Free states need citizen armies, a civic religion that binds people to the common good, and periodic renewal of their founding principles. Whether The Prince and the Discourses express one consistent view, or two opposed ones, remains a central question among scholars.

The Prince was printed in 1532, and in 1559 the Catholic Church placed his works on the Index of Prohibited Books. In England and elsewhere "Machiavel" became a stage villain, and "Machiavellian" a word for unscrupulous scheming. Others read him differently: Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought The Prince a disguised warning to the people, and republican writers in England and America drew on the Discourses. Francis Bacon praised him for describing what people actually do rather than what they ought to do, and later political thinkers kept returning to his separation of politics from traditional moral and religious standards. He is a central figure of Renaissance Philosophy and of the literature and history of Italy, and is widely regarded as a founder of modern political science.