Machiavelli Read online

  Come evening, I return to my house and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my ordinary clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and wrap myself in robes meant for a court or palace. Dressed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts filled with ancient men where, affectionately received, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse and ask them to explain their actions, and where they, kindly, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I have no fear of poverty, or even of death. I enter their lives completely . . . . I have written down what I have learned from these conversations and composed a little pamphlet, De principatibus, in which I delve as deeply as I can into the subject, asking: What is a principality? How many kinds are there? How may they be maintained and why are they lost?

  Thus was born The Prince, the most notorious and influential political tract ever written.vii It is difficult to imagine a quieter entry onto the stage of history for Machiavelli’s infamous title character. Indeed, they are something of an odd couple—the bloodthirsty tyrant, pitiless in the pursuit of power, devious, ruthless, and cruel, and the mild-mannered scholar in his threadbare robes and slippers—and it is safe to say that the contrast has done nothing to help Machiavelli’s reputation. He has been caricatured as a real-life Dr. Frankenstein, one of those intellectuals who pursues his version of the truth regardless of the consequences, blithely setting loose upon the world a monster he can’t or won’t control. People might have been more willing to forgive Machiavelli had he himself been a man of action. Instead, he comes across as one of those armchair dispensers of mayhem, the first in a long line of faceless bureaucrats who, from the safety of their studies, justify every cruelty with that all-purpose excuse—raison d’état (reason of state).

  It is a picture of the man so ingrained in the popular imagination that his name has been turned into an adjective to describe any cynical act or the pursuit of power without conscience. The image is not a new one. He was barely in his grave when one prominent churchman described him as “an enemy of the human race,” and it took only a few years more for the Pope—in a move that the anticlerical Machiavelli might have taken as a backhanded compliment—to consign the entire body of his writings to the Index of Prohibited Books. In fact one can attribute much of his posthumous fame to the quality and virulence of his opponents, who turned the obscure civil servant into the Devil incarnate,viii father of a philosophy stripped of ethics, conjurer of a world in which human society, bereft of religion and lacking the sanction of a benevolent God, is reduced to a war of all against all and dedicated to the blind pursuit of power.

  Machiavelli owes his sinister reputation above all to this one slender volume, written as a job application for the Medici lords of Florence. It is ironic that while The Prince failed in its immediate objective to restore him to the good graces of the lords of the city, it has secured him a permanent place in the history of ideas. It might have amused Machiavelli—as it almost certainly would not have amused his would-be patrons—to witness the curious reversal of Fortune that made this minor functionary far more famous than the lords from whose table he hoped to take a few small crumbs.ix

  When he sat down to write The Prince, his desk piled high with books of ancient history he treasured and his head filled with the lessons he had learned from years of practical experience as a diplomat, Machiavelli was forty-four years old, just on the far side of middle age for a man of the early sixteenth century.x He thought of himself as a failure, and few of his friends would have disagreed. Despite a respectable record in the upper ranks of the state bureaucracy, he had done little to distinguish himself from his anonymous colleagues toiling at their ledgers in the Palazzo della Signoria. To those who recalled him at all, it was primarily as the author of Florence’s worst military fiasco in recent memory.

  But, as he liked to observe when chronicling the lives of the great leaders of the past, there is nothing like a bit of adversity to test the mettle of a man—and Machiavelli had more than his share of this particular commodity.xi Facing financial ruin and with the prospect of a dull, unproductive retirement stretching out before him until such time as decrepitude and finally death overtook him, Machiavelli chose to resist the dismal grave fate seemed to have prepared for him. He had been tested but not broken, and the ordeal seemed to have renewed his faith that he had something original to offer the world. From the solitude of his hilltop farm the vast panorama of history spread out before him. Deprived of the lively give-and-take he loved so much, the voices of the dead haunted his mind, whispering those universal truths that until recently had been drowned out by the frenetic pace of his daily existence. In their company he seemed to pry out the secrets of the human heart, mining past and present to discover the laws that govern the fate of nations.

  * * *

  i The sonnet was addressed to Giuliano de’ Medici, one of the leaders of the newly restored Medici dynasty. It is doubtful whether the sonnet was ever sent to its intended recipient and, if so, what Machiavelli hoped to gain.

  ii One of the most common forms of torture, called the strappado, was to bind a prisoner by the arms and drop him from some high place, often dislocating the shoulders and causing various other painful injuries. As Machiavelli indicates, he had undergone this excruciating ordeal six times.

  iii Giuliano himself admitted that, outside of the two ringleaders, “the others who were accused and imprisoned have been set at liberty as innocent men” (Villari, The Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli, II, 34). The immediate occasion of his release was as part of a general amnesty following the election of Giovanni de’ Medici as Pope Leo X in 1513. The Medici would never have spared him had they really believed him to be a threat. All the available evidence suggests that while Machiavelli’s name appeared on the list of potential sympathizers, he was never actually contacted by the plotters.

  iv The Palazzo della Signoria (also called the Palace of the Priors or the Palazzo Vecchio, the Old Palace) was the capitol of the Florentine Republic. The Signoria (Lordship) was the chief executive, consisting of eight Priors and the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia (the Standard-Bearer of Justice or titular head of state). The Signoria served for only two months at a time. Frequent elections and rapid rotation through office made the government weak and easy prey for ambitious families like the Medici, who manipulated the system for their own advantage.

  v Though Machiavelli’s patriotism never wavered, his definition of country evolved over time. For the most part, he gave his loyalty to his native Florence, but in his famous epilogue to The Prince he expanded his horizons to encompass all of Italy.

  vi By the time Machiavelli completed the work, Giuliano de’ Medici was dead. As it has come down to us, The Prince is dedicated to Giuliano’s nephew Lorenzo, son of Giuliano’s older brother Piero.

  vii Competitors for this dubious distinction might include Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In both cases, however, one might argue that the ill repute into which they have fallen resulted more from the abuses of the political systems they spawned than the works themselves. The Prince, by contrast, remains notorious despite the fact that it is difficult to attribute the crimes of any one regime to its influence. This is not from lack of trying; in the sixteenth century, Cardinal Reginald Pole made the case that the court of Henry VIII used Machiavelli’s book to inspire its “criminal” break from the Church of Rome. Arguing almost the opposite case was Innocent Gentillet, a French Protestant, who argued in his Contre-Machiavel (“Against Machiavelli”) that his writings inspired the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Huguenots by the Catholic regime.

  viii In his 1827 work on Machiavelli, Lord Macaulay wrote: “Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.” The English pseudonym for the Devil, Old Nick, derives from Machiavelli’s first name.

  ix Lorenzo and Giuli
ano de’ Medici, the two men to whom Machiavelli dedicated The Prince, were singularly fortunate that their own mediocrity was redeemed by the talented servants who surrounded them. Giuliano was the youngest son of the famous Lorenzo the Magnificent; the Lorenzo to whom The Prince was dedicated was his grandson. Not only did Machiavelli dedicate his most famous work to them, but Michelangelo’s Medici tombs in San Lorenzo were built to house the remains of these two obscure members of the famous family. Michelangelo seemed to recognize this when he responded to criticism that the portraits looked nothing like their subjects, claiming “that a thousand years hence no one would be able to know that they were otherwise.”

  x Machiavelli’s older contemporary, the statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici, died at forty-three; Michelangelo, six years his junior, lived to be eighty-eight, a remarkable age for the time. A man of Machiavelli’s age might, on average, have anticipated a decade or more of productive life ahead of him.

  xi For instance, Machiavelli asserts that the more difficult it is to seize power, the more secure that power is once achieved: “Those who become princes by virtue of their abilities . . . acquire dominion with difficulty but maintain it with ease” (The Prince, VI, 26).

  I

  BORN IN POVERTY

  “I was born poor and learned early on to deny myself rather than to enjoy.”

  —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI TO FRANCESCO VETTORI, MARCH 18, 1513

  AS HE CONTEMPLATED THE WRECKAGE OF HIS ONCE promising career, Machiavelli consoled himself with the thought that he was, after all, no worse off than he had been when he had come into this world. Only his dreams of something better had been shattered. “I was born poor and learned early on to deny myself rather than to enjoy,” he recalled, finding comfort in the thought that he had nothing left to lose.

  At first glance Machiavelli’s characterization of his circumstances seems willfully misleading. The Machiavelli were an old and respected family and by most measures the particular branch into which Niccolò was born in the spring of 1469 was solidly middle-class.i Niccolò’s father, Bernardo, was a man of property. He owned a house near the Ponte Vecchio, one of a cluster of buildings occupied by various cousins, grouped about a small courtyard with a loggia known as the chorte di Machiavelli. This alone was enough to lift the family above the great majority of the urban poor, who owned little more than the ragged clothes on their back. Nor was this Bernardo’s only piece of real estate. Furnishing the city house with wine, oil, eggs, meat, and fresh vegetables was his farm in Sant’ Andrea in Percussina, situated some ten miles south of Florence along the road to Rome. Even in lean times the family could fall back on its own resources to feed and clothe itself.

  The status of the Machiavelli in Florence was measured by more than material possessions. Bernardo could claim descent from the minor nobility (through the Castellani family), a connection that, while it brought little in the way of tangible profit, conveyed real benefits in the form of prestige. In the countryside Bernardo’s superiority to his neighbors was marked by quaint ceremonial gestures that carried a distant echo of once vital feudal obligations: every Saint Peter’s Day, a member of the parish of San Piero a Nebbiavole offered in tribute a half pound of candle wax, and when the priest of the local church of San Michele a Mogliano died, Bernardo, in recognition of his role as fatherly protector of the community, was among those consulted in naming his successor.

  In the city the family was equally well established. For centuries the Machiavelli had belonged to Florence’s ruling elite. Niccolò’s ancestors had been prosperous bankers and merchants, dealing mostly in the lucrative wool and silk industries. Bernardo himself, though he never held elective office, was a friend of some of the most powerful and prominent men in the city. One of them, the Chancellor of Florence, Bartolomeo Scala (an intimate of Lorenzo de’ Medici himself), called Bernardo his “friend and familiar” and estemed his erudition so highly that he made him a principal character in his De Legibus, a philosophical dialogue on the origins of the law. Nothing indicates his high standing in the community as surely as this: Bernardo Machiavelli was someone in whose mouth Scala could place learned paraphrases of Plato and Cicero without fear that contemporaries would find the image ludicrous.

  In other words Bernardo Machiavelli was an intellectual. He had earned a reputation as an amateur scholar and expert on legal matters, something confirmed by the honorific messer used by his peers when greeting him on the Ponte Vecchio or Piazza della Signoria. He was the prototypical scholarly dilettante. Years after his death, when it was brought to Niccolò’s attention that strangers had been mistakenly buried alongside his father in the Machiavelli family crypt in Santa Croce, he quipped: “Well, let them be, for my father was a great lover of conversation, and the more there are to keep him company, the better pleased he will be.” Bernardo had both the inclination and the leisure to cultivate his mind, secure in the knowledge that his various properties would provide sufficient income to support his family.

  But despite this solidly bourgeois standing, Niccolò was not mistaken in characterizing his origins as less than promising. True, he never suffered the dire want of many of his neighbors for whom even a slight economic downturn meant hunger; nor did he ever have to endure the humiliation of begging charity from his richer relatives. But in the world of late-fifteenth-century Florence, both Bernardo and his son Niccolò lived uneasily on the margins of respectability. In fact the earliest surviving documents in Niccolò’s hand—two letters from 1497 written when he was twenty-eight years old—reflect a painful recognition of social insecurity. They involve a property dispute between his family and the powerful Pazzi clan. Hoping to counter the uneven odds, Niccolò put his case before the influential Cardinal Giovanni Lopez. In the first letter Machiavelli refers to his own kin as “pygmies . . . attacking giants.” In a follow-up letter to this same cardinal, he seems anxious to remind his correspondent that, despite appearances, the Machiavelli are at least as respectable as their more powerful rivals: “And whoever would wish justly to weigh the merits of our house against that of the Pazzi, all other things being equal, would declare ours the greater in liberality and manliness of spirit.” Of course, as Niccolò knew, the scales were never fairly weighted, and any contest between unequal combatants would favor the strong over the weak. As he remarks bitterly in his play La Mandragola, “a man who doesn’t have pull with the government of this city . . . can’t find a dog to bark at him, and we’re good for nothing but to go to funerals and to meetings about some marriage, or to sit all day dawdling on the Proconsul’s bench.” Surprisingly, at least for those who regard him as the preeminent exponent of ruthless power politics, Machiavelli’s natural point of view was that of the vulnerable. This marginality, the sense that he was on the outside looking in, was vital to Niccolò’s self-conception. This self-conception in turn was vital to the formation of his thought.

  • • •

  Niccolò Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, in the family house just south of the Ponte Vecchio. The modest residence stood on the Via Romana, which led from the city’s oldest and busiest bridge to the southern gates. From his bedroom window young Niccolò could watch not only the steady stream of farmers on their way to market, but also more exotic figures who were a reminder of the vast international reach of Florentine commerce: walking shoulder to shoulder with the humble peasants were long-distance merchants with their mules piled high with goods from Turkey, Arabia, and far-off India, as well as tourists—including numerous dukes, duchesses, cardinals, and even an occasional emperor or king—who had come to worship at the city’s many sacred shrines and delight in Florence’s unparalleled works of art and architecture.

  The house in the heart of the Oltrarno—the section of Florence on the south bank of the Arno River that is still among the most charming in the city—no longer stands, but the surrounding urban fabric is largely intact. The neighborhood in which the young Machiavelli grew up, identified by the ancient heraldic symbol of the shell
(Nicchio),ii is one of narrow streets and tiny, shaded squares, of small shops and unpretentious eateries. On summer days when the Arno became sluggish, a foul stench rose from the mud along the riverbank, a miasma made even worse by the dyers and tanners who used the waters to scrub away noxious liquids. It was then that plague-carrying rats multiplied, bringing contagion that ravaged the neighborhoods of rich and poor alike. Then, as now, it was not the most fashionable address in the city, but a few imposing palaces tucked in among more modest apartments were a reminder that powerful families lived among them. A few minutes’ walk from the main civic and religious centers, the Oltrarno was close enough to participate fully in the hustle and bustle of the thriving metropolis.

  Within this busy urban neighborhood there was little to distinguish the Machiavelli home from dozens of others in the vicinity. By the late fifteenth century the most powerful families of Florence—like the Medici, whose palace on the widest street of the city, the Via Larga, set the standard for those that followed—advertised their wealth and status by constructing splendid homes that dwarfed their neighbors,’ but the Machiavelli residence would not have made much of an impression on the passersby. No architect had imposed his newfangled ideas of classical order on the rather haphazard collection of medieval buildings; the conglomeration was decidedly unostentatious, suggesting shabby respectability rather than vaunting ambition.

  Like most Florentine families, the Machiavelli were unable to trace their origins back more than a couple of centuries, though, unlike some more pretentious or deluded lineages, they felt no need to invent fictitious pedigrees out of dragon slayers or Trojan heroes. In the centuries before Niccolò’s birth they had prospered as the city prospered, making a solid if not spectacular contribution to a metropolis that was becoming a center of trade, manufacturing, and finance.