Niccolò Machiavelli is the most criminally misunderstood writer in history, and I am always mad about it.
Let's do some goddamn history.
When his name comes to mind, the typical caricature is one of: manipulation, cruelty, a hunger for power, and ends justifying the means,
but none of those traits actually describe Machiavelli or any of his writings.
And while he's most typically associated with political theory,
I'll argue here that he's just as influential for how he looked at history.
So not only is he NOT a lying, scheming madman on a Game of Thronesian quest for unlimited tyrannical power,
but he's also a perfect history maker, which is why I'm here making this video in the first place.
So let's hop into Florence at the turn of the 1500s
and see how our main man Niccolò would come to write the works that would earn him so much lasting infamy.
The first thing to know about Machiavelli is that this man loved the Florentine Republic more than life itself.
And the only thing he might have loved even more than that is the Roman Republic.
Born in 1469 (nice) and raised to become a lawyer,
Niccolò entered the Florentine civil service in the mid-1490s,
working as a secretary, then a diplomat, and soon earning his seat on the Republic's war Council.
For the next two decades, Machiavelli worked to keep Florence afloat in a time
when Italy was overrun by French, Spanish, and German invaders.
He built up the city's alliances, established a citizen militia to break Florence's reliance on mercenaries,
and he hatched a scheme with Leonardo da Vinci to capture the city of Pisa
by diverting the flow of the Arno River to give Florence an open route to the sea.
That plan didn't really pan out, but oh man, if it did that would have been great.
Just imagine the Pisans waking up one day and saying,
Uh...
hey guys, where did our river go?
Hydraulic hijinks aside, Machiavelli's career must have felt much like an ancient Roman staring down a horde of incoming Goths,
as he fought tirelessly to keep Florence strong and safe from invasion by whatever means necessary.
And Florence was in a double unique position at the time.
Since 1494 the city was governed as a full republic, after the de facto rulers in the Medici banking family were exiled.
But unfortunately for Machiavelli, this didn't last as the Medici were re-installed in a coup in 1512
and Machiavelli was arrested on suspicion of treason after two of his friends were caught planning a counter-coup.
Niccolò was subsequently tortured, but he maintained his innocence
and got out with a light sentence of lifetime banishment to the Tuscan countryside.
On paper, not a terrible outcome,
but for someone who wanted nothing more than to serve his city, this was really tragic.
During the last 15 years of his life, he got the commission to write a history of Florence
and even became known as one of the city's most prominent playwrights.
Worth noting - both his play and his history takes several thinly-veiled potshots at the Medici,
but his lasting fame owes to the world's longest cover letter for a job application - The Prince.
Originally written as a gift to Florence's current Medici ruler,
this book was Machiavelli's way of saying, 'look, I know my way around the political block -
I can be helpful to you if you hire me.'
And in this 80-ish page book, it's honestly a pretty quick read,
he lays out the ways in which princes acquire power, conquer new lands, structure their militaries,
interact with citizens and preserve the strength of their states.
Ultimately, the Medici were still way too suspicious of Niccolò to trust him with a government job,
but between you and me, I don't think he wanted to work for them anyway.
A few years later, he completed a much longer book.
Not about princes, but about the Roman Republic.
Machiavelli's 'Discourses on Livy' is essentially a political play-by-play of early Roman history,
discussing the intricacies of everything from founding a city, to building an army from scratch,
how to manage the competing interest of political factions and an honestly absurd amount more.
While advice for a modern monarch and a commentary on ancient history might seem like fairly unrelated topics at first,
they both share Machiavelli's unique approach to history as something to analyse.
First, let's take the Discourses, which roughly follow the accounts of the ancient Roman historian Livy.
Commentaries on old texts is a tradition going back to antiquity,
but Machiavelli organized all of his observations around the central questions of, 'why Rome succeeded' and 'where Rome failed'.
He starts with the basics of founding Rome and creating the Republic, describing the different types of Republics,
and why friction between the Senate and the plebeians made Rome stronger.
But when he examines whether it's better to place power in the hands of the people or the elite,
he completely diverts to cite Sparta and Venice as examples of successful aristocracies.
From there, the book is still mainly about Rome, and with good reason - there's a lot to talk about,
but all that history is structured around the discussion of the politics in a republic,
so it proceeds roughly by topic rather than by a strict chronology.
Of all the historians who talked a big game on how important it was to learn from the past to understand the present,
Machiavelli was the first one to actually empirically do that.
He takes specific historical examples, breaks them down, and analyses what went right and wrong in order to provide evidence for his claims.
He's not a historian in the traditional sense because he's not writing a historical narrative,
but he's so influential because he treats the past like it's all data in a lab,
where different types of government can all play out for us to look at and observe.
Through history, abstract political theory becomes much more concrete.
For instance, he repeatedly praises the Roman army's effectiveness in conquering the Italian peninsula
because it was staffed with citizens who actually cared whether they won or lost.
And he compares this at length to the modern Italian problem
of relying on mercenaries who are loyal to nothing but gold.
In another passage, he goes off about how stupid conspiracies are,
discussing everything from the thwarted Patsey conspiracy to assassinate Lorenzo de Medici,
to this one Roman senator who failed to kill Emperor Commodus because he insisted on shouting, "The Senate sends its regards!", before knifing him.
But while he was up there being a diva and not stabbing the Emperor, his guards just tackled the idiot to the ground.
Compare this to the assassins who killed Caesar - stab first, chant slogans later.
Even still, it didn't really work out so great for them, and I'm-
I'm getting off topic here.
There are a lot of examples to dig into.
The Prince follows much of the same structure and technique,
though it's formulated as a generalised advice book, rather than an ancient historical commentary.
It starts from the position of a prince who's just come into power and goes from there
to explain how they're supposed to expand, reform, and preserve their new state
through political plays and good military management.
The Prince's historical examples are much more wide-ranging and skew far more modern,
as Machiavelli spends most of the book explaining how Italy got to be in the mess that was the Italian Wars.
I won't get too far into it because this stuff is comedy gold for the next Pope Fights,
but basically, France invaded Italy in 1494 and didn't really achieve a whole lot,
but then Germany and Spain decided to get in on the action
and by the 1510s, every major power in Europe was throwing their armies around in the Italian peninsula,
and nobody was having a good time, especially not the Italians.
In The Prince, Machiavelli compares France's first foray into Italy with Rome's much more successful conquest of Greece,
wherein they played to local rivalries and struck decisively at the strongest threat in the region.
Later, he gives a political and military play-by-play of how the Papal States used this French commotion
to increase their own territory under the generalship of the Pope's son Cesare Borgia.
And this Cesare kiddo shows up on several occasions throughout The Prince
as an example of how to field a strong army made up of his own citizens,
rather than fickle mercenaries or foreign auxiliaries
and how to effectively incorporate new lands by killing off the former leading families
and cultivating a fearsome persona so that nobody tried to step to him.
* inhale *
Yeah, so this is where things start to get dicey for Machiavelli,
because it sure looks like he's being explicitly praiseful of tyrannical regimes.
Aside from eye catching lines like, 'it's safer to be feared than loved',
he at times advocates lying, breaking promises, and on several occasions full-on murder!
So it's not hard to see why The Prince earned a spot on the church's index of banned books,
and soon enough, the popular conception of Machiavelli was nothing but schemes and villainy.
But hold up a gosh-darn minute -
this is the same guy who wrote a 400 page love letter to Ancient Rome in which he says,
* coughs *
A republic is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgments than a prince.
For context, that quote comes from section 1, chapter 58, which is titled,
The Multitude is wiser and more constant than a Prince!
Perhaps it should not be a surprise that the avowed Roman Republic fanboy was indeed,
a fan of republics this whole time!
What a shock!
Machiavelli loved Rome so much,
he would spend at least four hours every night reading and writing about ancient Rome
while cosplaying in a toga.
To quote a letter from him to one of his friends,
'I entered the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died and asked 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'm no longer afraid of poverty, or frightened of death.'
'I live entirely through them.'
That is, well, one - pretty touching, and two - I'd say that this is case closed!
My boy Machi-Machi has been wildly mischaracterized and he's as far from a wannabe tyrant as can be.
But... that still doesn't explain why The Prince gives such cold, morally-detached advice on how to govern.
Republican preferences aside, if both books are backed up by historical analysis, their viewpoints shouldn't be conflicting right?
Well, here's the thing - they aren't.
See, Machiavelli studied law so he knew his rhetoric inside and out, and he was clever as a fox on top of that.
The Prince is not as straightforward a discussion of monarchy as it might seem.
For instance, is it not a little suspic(ious) that a book dedicated to the ruler of Florence has almost nothing to say about governing Florence?
Machiavelli didn't write down any of his actual advice about how the Medici should govern Florence
because "f*cking Leave" would have gotten him tortured again!
But Niccolò was a realist, who took things as they were rather than how he might have wanted things to be.
So if he couldn't stop princes from being power-hungry madmen like the Medici
he could at least expose the tricks that they used to stay in power.
This is why some parts of the Prince are dipped in a nice coat of irony.
He outright says his hope is to write a book that will be useful at least to those who read it intelligently.
That, dear viewers, is a 16th century glove slap.
Throughout history, most people who read The Prince did not do that.
People either praised Machiavelli as a political go-getter
or disparaged him as a kiss-up to tyrants because they read The Prince fully unironically,
which is really not how it was meant to be interpreted
Machiavelli's greatest trick was masking a scathing criticism of princes as a handy how-to book,
but even for all the satire and snark, Machiavelli accepts that princes do have their time and place,
and most of his advice for princely governance is actually pretty solid.
Their main responsibility isn't to morality or themselves, but to their state,
and states do best when laws are respected and people are happy.
But when things do get dicey, it's better to take decisive action and do a necessary evil
than to stand by while you get steamrolled by France - Florence had experience with this.
Machiavelli's core argument isn't that the ends justify the means, but that desperate times call for desperate measures,
and in the early 1500s, Italy was facing some pretty desperate times,
as its people were fragmented and beset upon by foreign armies one after the next,
and wouldn't you know, the very last chapter of The Prince is a direct call for some strong leader to unite Italy and drive out its invaders,
and this idea has a precedence in the Roman Republic,
where a dictator would be legally appointed in an emergency scenario to stop Rome from imploding.
This is a topic that he brings up on a fair few occasions
because it kind of happened a lot, this is Rome we're talking about,
but I find it rather interesting that Machiavelli's ideal prince is exactly compatible with his ideal Republic.
It's obviously impossible to say what Machiavelli would think of the events that followed his life,
but I'd venture that he wouldn't be mad to learn how one day,
his dear home of Italy would be united and liberated by a prince, and one lifetime later, governed as a republic.
Thank you so much for watching.
This is a special video for me, because learning about Machiavelli after playing Assassin's Creed 2 is one of the first ways that I got into history at all,
so this is really fun for me to bring it back full circle.
Also apologies for the way this video sounds, my microphone is being uncooperative,
and I've had a stuffy nose for pretty much the past two weeks straight.
Lastly, I wanted to shout out Team Trees, who's raising money to help plant trees all around the world
and preserve our natural ecosystems, which is a really great cause,
OSP has chipped in a hundred trees and we hope that you consider making a donation as well - link's below.
and I'll see in the next video.