“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
You might agree with this statement if you fancy yourself a “Machiavellian.”
Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli lived over five centuries ago but his influence
among unscrupulous politicians reaches into the modern age.
He is mostly known for writing The Prince -- the handbook that established him as the
"father of modern political theory."
Through its teachings -- power is the ultimate goal through any means necessary.
Formative Years
Machiavelli was born in Florence on May 3, 1469 to Bernardo di Niccolò Machiavelli,
a lawyer, and his wife, Bartolomea di Stefano Nelli.
He was the oldest son of his parents with two elder sisters, and a younger brother.
The Machiavelli family was an established, middle-class family; not particularly affluent
but with means to live a comfortable life.
Machiavelli was born during a tumultuous time in history.
One in which Popes regularly waged war against Italian city-states and political alliances
frequently changed.
This led to the rise and fall of many short-lived governments and shifting power centers.
France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire all battled for regional control and influence.
Not much is known about Machiavelli’s early life growing up in this environment.
And, few details were written or passed down about his boyhood.
We do know he began his elementary education at the age of seven and studied grammar, rhetoric,
as well as Latin.
Apparently he was well-versed in the ancient classics and among these, he highly prized
his copy of Livy's history of the Roman Republic.
Political Career
Machiavelli's first entered politics in 1498 and helped the political faction remove Girolamo
Savonarola, the then-dominant religious and political figure in Florence.
In the same year Machiavelli was appointed to the second chancery of the republic and
he also served as secretary to the sensitive government agency dealing chiefly with warfare
and foreign affairs known as the Ten of Liberty and Peace.
In his official capacity, Machiavelli participated in both domestic politics and diplomatic missions
to foreign governments.
These posts afforded him many opportunities over fourteen years to closely examine the
inner workings of government and to meet prominent individuals, among them the Duke of Valentinois
Cesare Borgia, whose fight for political power was a major inspiration for The Prince.
Machiavelli quickly gained political prominence and influence.
By 1502, he was a well-respected assistant to the republican head of state, Piero Soderini.
In 1512, the Medici, backed by Pope Julius II, used Spanish troops to defeat the Florentines.
After the Medici victory, the city-state and republic were dissolved and Machiavelli was
left without a seat in office.
The next year in 1513, the Medici accused him of conspiracy against them and imprisoned
and tortured him.
The form of torture was brutal.
Using ropes, Machiavelli was hung by bound wrists from the back, forcing the arms to
bear the weight of the body.
This form of torture is extremely painful and results in dislocated shoulders.
Machiavelli denied all of the allegations against him and was released after three weeks.
He retreated to his country home in Percussina and spent the time out of office authoring
his political writings that sealed his place in history.
During his exile, Machiavelli joined intellectual groups and wrote several plays, among them
La mandragola (Mandragola).
The play remained popular for many years with audiences.
His next effort, a military treatise published in 1521, entitled Libro della arte della guerra
(The Art of War), was the only historical or political work published during his lifetime.
“Discourses upon the First Decade of T. Livius” and The Prince were completed between
1513 and 1517.
Both were not published until after Machiavelli's death, in 1531 and 1532 respectively.
Though he was writing and having regular correspondence with others, Machiavelli’s true passion
in life was politics and he tried many times to win back favor with the Medici.
Machiavelli lamented his position in a letter to a friend, writing:
“When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study.
On the threshold, I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and I put on the
clothes an ambassador would wear.
Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died.
There, I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing and was born
to savour.
I am not ashamed to talk to them and ask them to explain their actions and they, out of
kindness, answer me.
Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety.
I forget every worry.
I am no longer afraid of poverty or frightened of death.
I live entirely through them.”
In 1520, Machiavelli was made the official historian of Florence and was subsequently
entrusted with minor governmental duties.
His prodigious Istorie fiorentine (History of Florence) carefully plays down his republican
platform with the Medicean bias expected of him.
In 1525, Pope Clement VII recognized his achievement with a monetary stipend.
Two years later, the Medici were again ousted, and Machiavelli's hopes for advancement under
the revived republic dissolved.
They didn’t trust him.
Disheartened by his country's internal struggles, Machiavelli fell gravely ill and died, a disillusioned
man, his dream of an operational republic unrealized.
The Prince
Machiavelli wrote The Prince beginning in 1513 and completed it the following year.
It wasn’t published until after his death in 1532 and the first English translation
appeared in 1640.
The handbook was essentially a practical guide for how Lorenzo de’ Medici could restore
Italy (he dedicated the book to him).
It’s interesting and ironic that the fiercely republican Machiavelli would write a how-to
guide for an autocratic leader.
Some critics have suggested The Prince is actually satire.
Machiavelli was acutely aware, however, of foreign threats to Italy and thus deemed it
necessary for a strong prince to thwart French and Spanish authority.
In addressing the ruling Medici family, he primarily uses Borgia as an example of a shrewd
but effective leader.
Since handbooks of conduct meeting monarchal needs had become immensely popular by the
1400s, the external form of The Prince was neither startling nor particularly remarkable
to Machiavelli's contemporaries.
Yet, from its initial appearance, The Prince proved no mere manual of protocol nor, for
that matter, of even conventional strategy.
In its chapters, Machiavelli delineated a typology of sovereignties and the deployment
of available forces military, political, or psychological to acquire and retain them.
The Prince is the first political treatise to divorce statecraft from ethics; as Machiavelli
wrote: “How one lives is so far removed from how one ought to live that he who abandons
what one does for what one ought to do, learns rather his own ruin than his preservation.”
Adding to his unflinching realism the common Renaissance belief in humanity's capacity
for determining its own destiny, Machiavelli posited two fundamentals necessary for effective
political leadership: virtu and fortuna.
Virtu refers to the prince's own abilities (ideally a combination of force and cunning);
fortuna to the unpredictable influence of fortune.
In a significant departure from previous political thought, the designs of Providence play no
part in Machiavelli's scheme.
On issues of leadership hitherto masked by other political theorists in vague diplomatic
terms, Machiavelli presented his theses in direct, candid, and often passionate speech,
employing easily grasped metaphors and structuring the whole in an aphoristic vein which lends
it a compelling authority.
Reaction to The Prince was initially but only briefly favorable, with Catherine de' Medici
said to have enthusiastically included it, among other of Machiavelli's writings, in
the educational curriculum of her children.
But, within a short time the book fell into widespread disfavor, becoming viewed as a
handbook for atheistic tyranny.
The Prince, and Machiavelli's other writings as well, were placed in the Papal Index of
Prohibited Books in 1559.
Further denigrated toward the close of the sixteenth century in Discours sur les moyens
de bien gouverner et maintenir en paix un royause, ou autre principaute.
Contre Nicolas Machiavel, florentin by Innocenzo Gentillet in France, The Prince was held responsible
for French political corruption and for widespread contribution to any number of political and
moral vices.
Gentillet's interpretation of The Prince as advocating statecraft by ruthlessness and
amoral duplicity was disseminated throughout Britain through the works of such popular,
highly influential dramatists as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.
In the Prologue to Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Machevilli addresses the audience at length,
at one point encapsulating the Elizabethan perception of Machiavelli by saying, "I count
religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance."
Here and in the works of Marlowe's contemporaries, Machiavelli was depicted as an agent of all
that Protestant England despised in Catholic, High- Renaissance Italy.
Hostile English interpreters so effectively typified Machiavelli as an amalgam of various
evils, which they described with the still-used term " Machiavellian," that fact and fabrication
still coexist today.
Rarely, until the nineteenth century, did mention of The Prince elicit other than unfounded
and largely unexamined repugnance, much less encourage objective scrutiny of its actual
issues.
As Fredi Chiappelli has aptly summarized: "Centuries had to elapse before the distinction
between moral moment and political moment, between technical approach and moralistic
generalities, and even between the subject matter of the book and the author's person
were finally achieved."
Modern critics, noting these crucial distinctions, have engaged in a prolonged and animated discussion
concerning Machiavelli's true intent in The Prince.
An anomalous seventeenth-century commentator, philosopher Pierre Bayle, found it "strange"
that "there are so many people, who believe, that Machiavel teaches princes dangerous politics;
for on the contrary princes have taught Machiavel what he has written."
Since Bayle's time, further analysis has prompted the most prolonged and animated discussion
relating to the work: the true intent of its creator.
Was the treatise, as Bayle suggested, a faithful representation of princely conduct which might
justifiably incriminate its subjects but not its chronicler?
Or had Machiavelli, in his manner of presentation, devised the volume as a vehicle for his own
commentary?
Still more calculatedly, had the author superseded description in ably providing a legacy for
despots?
A single conclusion concerning the author's motive has not been drawn, though patterns
of conjecture have certainly appeared within Machiavelli's critical heritage.
Lord Macaulay, in emphasizing the writer's republican zeal and those privations he suffered
in its behalf, has contended that it is "inconceivable that the martyr of freedom should have designedly
acted as the apostle of tyranny," and that "the peculiar immorality which has rendered
The Prince unpopular ... belonged rather to the age than to the man."
Others have echoed this suggestion, examining the work in its historical context: John Addington
Symonds has deemed it "simply a handbook of princecraft, as that art was commonly received
in Italy, where the principles of public morality had been translated into terms of material
aggrandisement, glory, gain, and greatness."
Many have urged that Machiavelli intended the treatise as a veiled satiric attack on
the methods of Italian tyranny or, by abstruse methods, its converse" a paean to patriotism
and sensible government, grounded in a clear-sighted knowledge of the corrupt human condition.
According to Harold J. Laski, The Prince "is a text-book for the house of Medici set out
in the terms their own history would make them appreciate and, so set out, that its
author might hope for their realization of his insight into the business of government."
While ultimately unable to agree on the underlying purpose of The Prince, nearly all critics
have nonetheless been persuaded of its masterful composition, even when unwilling to endorse
its precepts.
Macaulay has affirmed that the "judicious and candid mind of Machiavelli shows itself
in his luminous, manly, and polished language."
And Francesco De Sanctis has determined that "where he was quite unconscious of form, he
was a master of form.
Without looking for Italian prose he found it."
For sheer volume and intensity, studies of The Prince have far exceeded those directed
at Machiavelli's Discourses, though the latter work has been acknowledged an essential companion
piece to the former.
All of the author's subsequent studies treating history, political science, and military theory
stem from this voluminous dissertation containing the most original thought of Machiavelli.
Less flamboyant than The Prince and narrower in its margin for interpretation, the Discourses
contains Machiavelli's undisguised admiration for ancient governmental forms, and his most
eloquent, thoroughly explicated republicanism.
Commentators have noted the presence of a gravity and skillful rhetoric that at times
punctuate The Prince but are in full evidence only in that work's final chapter, a memorable
exhortation to the Medicis to resist foreign tyranny.
The Discourses also presents that methodical extrapolation of political theory from historical
documentation which is intermittent in The Prince.
Max Lerner has observed that "if The Prince is great because it gives us the grammar of
power for a government, The Discourses are great because they give us the philosophy
of organic unity not in a government but in a state, and the conditions under which alone
a culture can survive."
It has been deemed not at all incongruous that an intellect immersed in historical circumstance
and political impetus should so naturally embrace comedy as well.
For Machiavelli regarded comedy exactly as he conceived history: an interplay of forces
leading unavoidably to a given result.
Machiavelli's Mandragola, his only work in the comedic genre, clearly reflected this
parallel.
De Sanctis has remarked that "under the frivolous surface [of Mandragola] are hidden the profoundest
complexities of the inner life, and the action is propelled by spiritual forces as inevitable
as fate.
It is enough to know the characters to guess the end."
The drama's scenario concerns Callimaco's desire to bed Lucrezia, the beautiful young
wife of a doddering fool, Nicia, who is obsessed with begetting a son.
Masquerading as a doctor, Callimaco advises Nicia to administer a potion of mandrake to
Lucrezia to render her fertile, but also warns that the drug will have fatal implications
for the first man to have intercourse with her.
He slyly suggests to Nicio that a dupe be found for this purpose.
Persuaded by her confessor, a knavish cleric, to comply with her husband's wishes, the virtuous
Lucrezia at last allows Callimaco into her bed, where he has no difficulty convincing
her to accept him as her lover on a more permanent basis.
Tales of this sort" replete with transparent devices, mistaken identities, and cynical,
often anticlerical overtones" were already commonplace throughout Europe by the Middle
Ages, though critics have remarked that Machiavelli lent freshness to even this hackneyed material.
Sydney Anglo has commended his "clear, crisp repartee" and ability "to nudge our ribs at
improprieties and double-meanings," despite characterization that is "rudimentary, haphazard,
and inconsistent, with even protagonists going through their motions like automata."
Macaulay, on the other hand, has applauded the play's "correct and vigorous delineation
of human nature."
A decided influence on the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Sir Francis Bacon and on
the thought of such modern political theorists as Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Georges
Sorel, and Robert Michels, Machiavelli has been called the founder of empirical political
science, primarily on the strength of the Discourses and The Prince.
Taken in historical perspective, it is understandable that The Prince should have dwarfed Machiavelli's
other works.
For with this slim treatise the author confronted the ramifications of power when its procurement
and exercise were notably peremptory" not only in his own country but throughout Europe
as well.
Commentators have come to weigh the integrity of Machiavelli's controversial thought against
the pressing political conditions which formed it.
Some, like Roberto Ridolfi, have endeavored through their studies to dislodge the long-
standing perception of Machiavelli as a ruthless character: "In judging Machiavelli one must
... take account of his anguished despair of virtue and his tragic sense of evil....
On the basis of sentences taken out of context and of outward appearances he was judged a
cold and cynical man, a sneerer at religion and virtue; but in fact there is hardly a
page of his writing and certainly no action of life that does not show him to be passionate,
generous, ardent and basically religious."
"Far from banishing religion or ethics from politics," Peter Bondanella has stated in
European Writers, "Machiavelli created a new religion out of politics, with all its fateful
implications for modern intellectual history."
Personal Life & Legacy
In 1502, Machiavelli married Marietta Corsini.
The couple had six children together; four sons and two daughters.
Machiavelli died in the city on June 21, 1527, in Florence, Italy.
He was interred in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.
Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince is one of the most celebrated and notorious books in
the history of Western political thought.
It continues to influence discussions of war and peace, the nature of politics, and the
relation of private ethics to public duties.
Ostensibly a sixteenth-century manual of instruction on certain aspects of princely rule and behavior,
The Prince anticipates and complicates modern political and philosophical questions.
What is the right order of society?
Can Western politics still be the model for progress toward peace and prosperity, or does
our freedom to create our individual purposes and pursuits undermine our public responsibilities?
Are the characteristics of our politics markedly different, for better or for worse, than the
politics of earlier eras?
Machiavelli argues that there is no ideal, transcendent order to which one can conform,
and that the right order is merely the one that has the capacity to persist over time.
The Prince's emphasis on the importance of an effective truth over any abstract ideal
marks it as one of the first works of modern political philosophy.