Machiavelli - The Essential Writings of Machiavelli

M ACHIAVELLI

Niccol Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, to the notary Bernardo Machiavelli and his wife, Bartolomea de Nelli. The fathers meager salary was supplemented by income from renting out his land near San Casciano, a small village south of Florence. (Machiavelli was to write his major political and literary works there while in exile.) Machiavelli grew up in Florences Santo Spirito district, where in his short story Belfagor the archdevil took residence. Machiavellis father kept a diary for fourteen years, from 1474, when Niccol turned five, which provides us with the only information about Machiavellis early years. The diary underlines the straitened circumstances of the family, but also provides an interesting insight into Machiavellis literary education. We learn that he studied Latin and that the family had an unusually large selection of books for the time: among them volumes by Livy Cicero, Aristotle, Julianbooks that Machiavelli would analyze and comment on in his later works.

Machiavelli emerges from obscurity in 1498, when he was nominated Secretary of the Second Chancery, an office that handled matters relating to Florences territories and external affairs. His fortunes rose over the next decade, when he acted as diplomat, ambassador, and negotiator for Florences high-level relations with other Italian states and foreign powers. His analytical reports and discourses from these diplomatic missions give testimony to his political acumen and the extent of his experience.

At what seemed the height of his political careerhe had become the foremost adviser to Piero Soderini, Gonfalonier of FlorenceMachiavellis fortunes changed. In 1512 Soderini was ousted from office, the Medici returned to power in Florence, and Machiavellis illustrious political career came to an abrupt end. He came under suspicion of conspiracy against the Medici, and was imprisoned and tortured. He was subsequently exiled from Florence and sought refuge on the farm near San Casciano that he had inherited from his father.

As Machiavellis letters from this period attest, he lived in misery. But these years of exile were to be a period of incredible productivity. This period151220produced the works for which he is remembered today: The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War , and his plays The Woman of Andros and The Mandrake .

In 1520 Machiavelli grasped at the first real opportunity to reinstate himself as a central figure in Florentine politics. Lorenzo de Medici had just died, and his cousin Giulio de Medici (who was to become Pope Clement VII in 1523) became virtual ruler of Florence. Giulio de Medici, aware of Machiavellis expertise, sent him on a minor diplomatic mission to the city of Lucca. There Machiavelli wrote an astute analysis of Luccas political system and also the famous Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca . Giulio de Medici was impressed and offered Machiavelli a position at the University of Florence as the citys official historiographer. The product of this appointment was Machiavellis last great work, Florentine Histories .

His career was showing every sign of reaching its former glory when the Medici government fell, and Machiavelli, in the final months of his life, found himself again out of favor. He died on June 21, 1527.

C ONTENTS

by Albert Russell Ascoli

THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS OF MACHIAVELLI

I NTRODUCTION

Albert Russell Ascoli

In his second and lesser known play, Clizia , Niccol Machiavelli imagines history, following the late Greek historian Polybius and ultimately Plato, as a cyclical process: If in the world the same men were to return, as the same events recur, a hundred years would not pass before we would find ourselves once more together, doing the same things as we do today Machiavelli, who believed strongly in the utility of reading the past in order to understand, and to shape, the present, nonetheless speaks in the verbal mode of condition-contrary-to-fact, suggesting the improbability of his hypothesis and ironically undermining his claims even as he makes them. It is this voicewise, self-critical, sometimes quite bitter, and often very funnythat the present volume offers up to be heard, as it rarely is by an English-language public, in something very near its full range, power, and beauty.

We no longer believe that history moves in cycles, and we are beginning to lose faith in the model of relentless forward progresstechnological, economic, sociopoliticalthat has predominated, at least in the imperial West, since the Enlightenment. And we have responded to this loss of our principal models of historical understanding by forgetting the pastor chopping it into postmodern fragmentsor turning it into grotesque fantasies of hermetic codes that unlock a violently repressed past (which, oddly enough, then looks very like the present). If there is an idea of history we have not forgotten, it is the Christian, or Marxian, idea of historys endof the Apocalypse, or of the withering away of the state. Under such conditions, Machiavelli still has much to offer, whether he is seen as constituting the origins of our current circumstances, as the father of modern politics and a sponsor of what is known in some quarters as secular humanism, or instead viewed as someone experiencing, and recording, a crisis in world order and sociopolitical institutions not entirely unlike the one we ourselves now face.

Unlike his contemporaries Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the epic poet Ludovico Ariosto, Niccol Machiavelli (14691527) does not tempt us with the possibility of flight into a past both simpler and more beautiful than our own world. Rather, he has consistently been figured as the originator of ideas and practices that have led directly to the present state of things. On the one hand, his exaltation of the Roman Republic (as against the later Empire), his links to the last stirrings of anti-Medicean Florentine republicanism, and his violent critique of the Catholic Churchs role in Italian politics have been understood as throwing open the gates to a secularization of the political that led to English parliamentary government and thence to the American and French revolutions. And this view finds real support in his work, particularly on the pages of his long commentary on Livys Roman Histories, The Discourses , where, for example, he exposes Julius Caesars power grab (and the literary propaganda machine that legitimized it) and argues, against all received wisdom of the time, that the people understand the world better than the Prince.

On the other hand, he has been linked, and not without reason, to the degradation and delegitimization of a politics decoupled from moral imperatives and transcendent religious principles. Already in Elizabethan England he is the murderous Machiavel dramatized in the diabolical shenanigans of Shakespeares Richard III, not to mention Iago, and frequently tiedironicallyto the Protestant demonization of the corrupt papacy. For Hannah Arendt, and even more for Leo Strauss, he is the patron saint not of modern democracy, but rather of demagogic totalitarianisms, from Fascism and Nazism to Stalins Soviet Union. Here also, and more obviously, there is a great deal of supporting evidence: for example, in the famous dicta from The Prince that all armed prophets were successful, while unarmed prophets came to ruin; a man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony; a wise [prince] will not keep his word; and so on. Or in the exemplary role conferred on the bloody state-building of Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI. Or in the mockery of Roman Lucretias chastity and suicideout of which Livy says the Roman Republic arosevia the adulterous seduction and corruption of Florentine Lucrezia in his darkly comic play The Mandrake .