First Machiavelli had to confront accusations, never proven and certainly false, of complicity in an anti-Medici conspiracy early in Freedom was cold comfort for his physical and psychological pain. Depressed at being disparaged and treated as a criminal, he wrote to his nephew, Giovanni Vernacci, that I have had so much trouble. I have had to endure all sorts of other evils, both prison and other kinds.
But, by the grace of God, I am well and I manage to live as I can — and so I shall strive to do, until the heavens show themselves to be more kind. In letters of the spring and summer of , Machiavelli began to conceptualize the issues at the core of The Prince, which he wrote between August and December.
Two central themes of The Prince emerged from the correspondence. In order that after so long a time Italy may behold her redeemer, this opportu- nity must not be allowed to slip by. I cannot express with what love that redeemer would be received in all these regions that have suffered from these inundations of foreign invaders: What Italian would withhold homage from him?
This barbarous tyranny stinks in the nostrils of everyone. Was he implying that, while the Medici might learn rules for maintaining power, these lessons would not be lost on supporters of republics anywhere? In humorous exchanges they parried thoughts about love and the nature of desire.
If to some this behavior seems contemptible, to me it seems laudable because we are imitating nature, which is changeable; whoever imitates nature cannot be censured. Nowhere did he do so more inventively than in Mandragola c. In these same years Machiavelli wrote his Discourses on Livy and Art of War, the latter the only one of his major political works printed in his lifetime in Both were inspired by conversations in which he partici- pated in the gardens of the Rucellai family, the Orti Oricellari, where humanists and historians hosted by Cosimo Rucellai one of the two ded- icatees of the Discourses and a speaker in the Art of War discussed politics and history.
Indeed, the Rucellai gardens are the setting for the dialogues in the Art of War, which suggests how grateful Machiavelli was for these stimulating conversations after the years of enforced isolation. I weep and weeping nourishes the weary heart; I laugh and my laughter remains external; I burn and my burning remains within.
I am reduced to a condition where I can do little good for myself and less for others. I shall try to do my best to arrange it so that — still telling the truth — no one will have anything to complain about. For I believe that the following would be the true way to go to Paradise: But it was not an auspicious moment to return to government work. Machiavelli wrote to Vettori: Fatherly advice pours out: Study, do well, and learn, because everyone will help you if you help yourself.
Take off its bridle and halter and let it go wherever it likes to regain its own way of life and work off its craziness. The village is big, and the beast is small; it can do no one any harm. I have never longed so much to return to Florence as I do now. Simply tell her that, whatever she hears, she should be of good cheer, since I shall be there before any danger comes.
Kiss Baccina, Piero, and Totto. Live in happiness and spend as little as you can. Christ watch over you all. Sansoni, , p. Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, trans. Northern Illinois University Press, , p. To Francesco Vettori, March 18, ; Correspondence, p. Bernardo Machiavelli, Libro di Ricordi, ed. Le Monnier, , pp. Jill Kraye Cambridge University Press, , pp. To Ricciardo Becchi, March 9, ; Correspondence, pp. Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary from to , trans. Alice de Rosen Jervis London: Dutton, , p. Frankfurt, Peter Lang, Bertelli, Sergio and Gaeta, Franco.
Cambridge University Press, , pp. Rome, Salerno Editrice, , pp. Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, ed. New York, Columbia University Press, , pp. Princeton University Press, Gisela Bock et al. A Biography of Machiavelli, trans. His election as second chancellor, aged twenty-nine, without previous notarial, secretar- ial, or administrative experience, was doubtless a political success.
This gave Machiavelli his chance. With Savonarola gone, a reaction ensued and chancery staff were again expected to be nonpolitical: A month after his election as second chancellor, Machiavelli was given the additional duty of serving the Ten as their secretary. Machiavelli also shared in the general administrative work of the chancery, for example, preparing lists of citizens for elections or nomina- tions and minuting the meetings of consultative assemblies.
As secretary to the Ten, he became directly involved in Florentine diplomacy and military affairs and was employed as a negotiator, military supervisor, and diplomatic envoy with the title of mandatario mandatory. In either case, he had major responsibilities as negotiator, bearer of secret communications to foreign lords, and intelli- gence gatherer.
In Florence secured the services of a French captain, Charles de Beaumont, to lead the assault on the rebel city of Pisa, and in early summer Machiavelli was sent as secretary to the two Florentine civilian commissioners who oversaw the campaign. In came a second major diplo- matic commission: Florence sent Francesco Soderini, brother of Piero not yet gonfaloniere [Standardbearer] , and Machiavelli. This time the Florentine government, eager to know more of his aims and strength but not to agree to his demand that Florence appoint him its military captain, sent only Machiavelli, who as a mandatory could negotiate, listen, and collect and report information, but not sign treaties.
In August both Cesare and Alexander fell ill; Cesare survived, but the pope, aged seventy-two, succumbed. The new pope, Pius III, died just two months later, and a crucial election loomed. Borgia, now restored to health and in Rome, still posed a threat to Florence, which sent Machiavelli to observe the papal conclave. During tortuous negotiations regarding the restoration of Romagnol possessions to the papacy, Borgia was suddenly imprisoned by Julius. The danger soon evaporated when a Franco—Spanish truce was signed on February 11, Pisa and military affairs continued to preoccupy the Florentines through- out The following month he was dispatched to secure the services of an alternative captain, Francesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, but the negotiations fell through.
Soon afterwards Pandolfo Petrucci, frequently an enemy of Florence, began making unexpected noises about providing help for the recapture of Pisa; in July Machiavelli was sent to Siena to investi- gate, but the inscrutable Petrucci left him no wiser. He worked out the structure of the new force in , wrote the law instituting the militia in December, and supervised the recruitment, provisioning, and mustering of troops.
In August Machiavelli was entrusted with a second mission to the papal court. Pope Julius led a small contingent to take Perugia and Bologna, cities nominally subject to the papacy but long ruled by independent lords. In a new player entered the Italian theater, the German emperor Maximilian I, who had long pondered a march to Rome to receive the imperial crown from the pope and now revived plans for an Italian expedi- tion. In these uncertain circumstances, Florence needed a representative at the imperial court.
The legation to Germany became a heated partisan issue. The fall of Pisa in May was largely the result of the preoccupation of the major powers with the war of the League of Cambrai against Venice, depriving the Pisans of the foreign aid that had hitherto been their lifeline. In March, he made brief trips to the nearby independent cities of Lucca and Piombino to sound out possible peace negotiations. For Machiavelli, this meant another French legation from June to October Florence was becoming increasingly aware of its vulnerable position, tied to an alliance with France in the teeth of an impending anti-French league led by Julius.
Therefore, on his return from France, Machiavelli set about raising a cavalry militia to complement the infantry force already in place.
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In early he inspected fortresses in Florentine territory and was sent again to Siena to renew the truce with Pandolfo Petrucci. On the way he intercepted the pro-French cardinals in transit to the antipapal council and attempted to dissuade them from proceeding to Pisa. Although the French defeated the forces of the league at Ravenna on April 11, , they were forced by Swiss attacks on French positions in Lombardy to withdraw from Italy that summer.
Julius and the league, determined to punish Florence for not joining the war against France, sent a Spanish army into Tuscany to remove Soderini and restore the Medici. Within weeks the new Medici regime dismantled the repub- lican constitution and the militia, and on November 7 Machiavelli was dismissed from the chancery. He arrives at one place before he is known to have left the other; he endears himself to his soldiers; he has got hold of the best men in Italy, and these factors, together with continual good fortune, make him victorious and dangerous.
He nonetheless managed to produce occasional memoranda to his government on political and military topics and reports following the conclusion of legations. Many are undated and have gener- ated controversy with regard to chronology. Especially problematic are four texts: Telling here is their literary, rhetorical, generic style, more consistent with classicizing history than with the down-to-earth discourse of diplomatic dispatches or speeches made in Florentine assemblies; all four, moreover, have notable anachronisms, inconsistent with contemporaneous dating.
A passing allusion to the political uses of religion, later of great interest to Machiavelli, remains undeveloped: There is one striking exception: Conventional moral sentiments, quite unlike his later separation of politics and morality, are also in evidence: Florence was favored by right v. This condemnation of Borgia was later reversed in Prince 7, where Cesare is proposed as the model new prince. Nor has the later critique of Piero Soderini, seen in the Discourses as a weak and naively innocent leader 3. Alamanno Salviati, whom Machiavelli lauds as Francesco Guicciardini also does in chapter 22 of his Florentine Histories for rescuing the Florentine state from disaster in vv.
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The poem is intimately tied to the immediate political context: And since you cannot change your character nor give up the disposition that Heaven endows you with, in the midst of your journey she abandons you. The episode, which Machiavelli would reprise with the same arguments in Discourses 1.
Here Machiavelli rehearses several important themes of his later political thought. Meditate a little deeper on mortal craving; because from the sun of Scythia to that of Egypt, from Gibraltar to the opposite shore, we see the sprouting of this transgression. What province or what city escapes it? What village, what hovel? Everywhere Ambition and Avarice penetrate. Discipline can make up where Nature is lacking. Yet, though fully aware that his close association with Piero Soderini and the fallen popular republic put him in extreme jeopardy, even at this proverbial eleventh hour Machiavelli did not tell the Medici what they wanted to hear: The idea that a ruler should base his power on the people rather than the nobles became an important theme of The Prince as well.
See his letter to Ricciardo Becchi, March 9, Atkinson and David Sices, ed. Their Personal Correspondence Dekalb, Ill.: Olschki, , p. Legazioni, commissarie, scritti di governo cited as Scritti di governo , ed. Fredi Chiappelli and Jean-Jacques Marchand, 4 vols. Laterza, —85 , up to ; Legazioni, commissarie, scritti di governo, general eds. Sergio Bertelli, 3 vols. See also note 5 below. Allan Gilbert translated selections from the legations to Borgia in late and to the papal court in in Machiavelli: Duke University Press, This passage is in 1: Scritti di governo, 2: Macmillan, , p. They are published in several places: Salerno Editrice, , pp.
I primi scritti politici — Antenore, , pp. Feltrinelli, , pp. See also the epigram on Soderini, written after his death in Einaudi, , pp. Rome, Salerno Editrice, Benedetto Accolti and the Florentine Renaissance. Cambridge University Press, Bartolomeo Scala, —, Chancellor of Florence: The Humanist as Bureaucrat.
Bologna, Il Mulino, Machiavelli senza i Medici — Florence, Sansoni, , pp. His fourteen-year career in the Florentine chancery placed him at the hub of government and politics and afforded him manifold opportunities, whether at his desk in Florence or as an emissary abroad, to observe and experience at close hand the problems of Florentine politics and territorial administration and European diplomacy and statecraft, problems on which he meditated and began to write during his career in government. The coup and his fate gave Machiavelli the time to write more discursively about his understanding of political affairs from a perspec- tive sharpened by the failure of the regime and personal loss.
Among the issues that preoccupied Machiavelli in the major works of his enforced retirement were military strength and force, political stability, and leadership, or rather their reverse: Contemporary witnesses repre- sented these struggles as the confrontation of two social groups: Strongest in the early years were the frateschi, the followers of the friar frate Savonarola and his religious- political vision, who came from all classes and included many citizens from elite families.
But the social division between ottimati and popolo and the political force represented by the aspirations of the latter should not be underestimated. What the constitutional reforms of did not provide was a permanent institutional place for the elite, a counterpart to the Medicean Council of Seventy. A smaller council, the Eighty, was established in as an institu- tion of review and advice, but it was nothing like the Seventy since its membership changed every six months and its powers were limited. Machiavelli was later to identify the failure to provide a permanent and powerful institutional place for the ambitious elite as a fatal weakness of the republican regime.
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From its inception, the new regime was threatened by internal dissension, external pressures, and unrest in the dominion. A number of reform projects were discussed in the consultative meetings pratiche of the Signoria, focusing on the introduction of a new and smaller council of ottimati.
He may have kept his distance from the friar as part of a family strategy to ensure political survival in all circumstances, a common practice in the faction-ridden Florentine political world. He was known as a man of deep personal piety and upright life, and his policy of broad consultation during an earlier two-month term as Standardbearer of Justice gave him a reputation for loyalty to the governo popolare that was no doubt crucial to his election.
In —7 ottimati hostile to Soderini tried to undermine him by advocating a turn away from France and accommodation with the Emperor Maximilian. Successes were few in the early years but increased over time, particularly with the victory over Pisa in , achieved in part by the militia force promoted and organized by Machiavelli. One area in which little improvement occurred, despite major reforms, was the criminal justice system. By law, the Signoria was required to summon the Eighty at least once a week. When the councils refused to approve tax bills, Soderini demanded that they present their own solutions and protested their evasion of responsibility in referring issues back to the Signoria.
Particularly dangerous to Soderini were the Mediceans. Although few citizens wanted the return of the Medici, the family was always a resource for internal and external enemies of the popular government.
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The impunity with which some opponents of the popular government cultivated these ties must have encouraged others to follow suit, if only as insurance in the event of a Medici restoration. Machiavelli later wrote in the Discourses 1. Cultivation of the popolo was one way to increase personal power in Florence, and it has even been argued that Soderini was attempting to estab- lish personal lordship.
He certainly exploited all the authority of his position to tackle the problems of the republic and deployed a variety of means, including the skillful outmaneuvering of opposi- tion and manipulation of emotion in the councils, to secure the implementa- tion of measures he favored. He also engaged in a degree of personal diplomacy in efforts to regain Pisa and hold Florence to the French alliance. When, as happened often, he encountered opposition to his proposals in the councils, he accepted that there was little he could do if they were rejected.
Machiavelli later argued again in Discourses 1. Crucial reforms undertaken by Soderini, such as the introduction of the militia and the new court of appeal, the Quarantia, had Savonarolan associations, as did other laws including sumptuary regulations of the dress of young men and women, limitations on dowries, and tougher penalties for gambling, swearing, and sodomy.
Those who have argued that Soderini was bent on establishing personal lordship see Machiavelli as part of a courtier-like group around the gonfalo- niere and even as his agent or abettor. Soderini and Machiavelli must have been in almost daily contact, but we are not privy to their conversations. In his memorandum concerning the rebellion in the Valdichiana, Machiavelli reported, with evident agreement, that he had heard the cardinal argue that among the things for which Pope Alexander and his son Cesare Borgia might be praised was their capacity to recognize opportunities and exploit them well.
Cardinal Soderini wrote to Machiavelli expressing his commiseration on the failure of the Arno scheme,24 thus implying that Machiavelli was somehow involved, but no evidence connects him to its origins. Fear of both tyranny and the lower classes made arming the city population unthinkable for many ottimati, and to assuage their fears the militia was limited to peasants from the surrounding contado. Rumors persisted that Soderini might use the militia as a personal force, and it became even more controversial when Don Michele di Coriglia, the ruthless former henchman of Cesare Borgia, was hired to train the soldiers.
Cases not settled by the internal security and judicial magistracies of the Eight of Ward or the Conservators of the Laws could be referred to the new court. Cerretani names Machiavelli among those who drafted the bill. But what they shared was not so much personal attachment to Soderini as loyalty to the governo popolare and hence to its elected head.
In , after the collapse of the republic, Francesco Vettori tried to persuade Machiavelli that, since he Machiavelli had never received favors or rewards from Soderini or his family, he should not feel obliged to visit them if he went to Rome. Perhaps fearing that the viceroy and his army might depart leaving the gonfaloniere in place, the young pro-Medici conspirators confronted, threatened, and forced Soderini into exile. After Prato was sacked and fear mounted of an attack on Florence itself, there was little he could do.
He had never been prepared to engage in a show of force with his internal enemies and sought above all to avoid violence and bloodshed in the city. On the road to exile, he wrote to his wife that his only wish for the future was to live a private life of peace and quiet. They were together in the last days of the republic, and one can only wonder what advice the secretary might have given Soderini. He had plenty to say once he himself was also in the political wilderness.
According to Machiavelli, Soderini failed to make bold moves against his enemies because he believed that to do so would have meant going outside the law; even if such actions did not involve violence, the people would have been so alarmed that they would never have permitted another gonfaloniere a vita.
Soderini and the republic prospered so long as his decent and patient ways were favored by circumstances, but when other methods were called for he and his patria were ruined. In the Discourse on Florentine Affairs after the Death of the Younger Lorenzo Machiavelli was still of the opinion that a broadly based republic was the most feasible government for Florence, that the Great Council should be restored, albeit with reduced powers, and that the govern- ment should have a constitutionally chosen head, a gonfaloniere, either for life or for two or three years.
But he also believed that some changes would be required if a new Florentine republic were to enjoy greater stability. Under his leadership many of the problems that had plagued the republic in its early days were resolved. Giorgio Cadoni, Lotte politiche e riforme istituzionali a Firenze tra il e il Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, , pp. Allan Gilbert, in Machiavelli: Duke University Press, , 3: Rizzoli, , 23, pp. Guicciardini, Storie, 23, pp. Guicciardini, Storie, 25, pp. Anthony Molho and John Tedeschi Florence: Conte Editore, , p.
For a contrary view: Aspiring Prince or Civic Leader? Keip Verlag, , pp. Olschki, , pp. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Carlo Dionisotti, Machiavellerie Turin: The English translation of Allan Gilbert Works, 3: Guicciardini, Storie, 28, pp. Athlone Press, , pp. Mann, , pp. Nascita di un pensiero e di uno stile Padua: Pesman Cooper, Pier Soderini, p. Einaudi, , p. Machiavelli and Republicanism, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy: Goldbach, Keip Verlag, The Savonarolan Movement in Florence — Oxford, Clarendon Press, Until he lived in a city dominated by them, and from to he was employed by a government to which they represented a threat and an alter- native focus of allegiance for discontented Florentines.
Published records of his diplomatic missions and personal correspondence from this period contain only a handful of references to them. Not necessarily, for the poem was initially dedicated to, and praised the achievements of, Alamanno Salviati, an ottimate member of an elite family with close ties to the Medici.
Machiavelli may have hoped, therefore, that by gaining the favor of the Salviati he might win that of the Medici as well. But if this was his aim, it seems not to have worked: This resolution may have persuaded Machiavelli that it was an appropriate moment to make another gesture toward Alamanno Salviati, to whom he wrote a letter in But this too met with no success. When, therefore, in the Medici returned to Florence with the aid of a Spanish army and Soderini was ejected, it was hardly surprising that Machiavelli lost his government posts.
But he did not seek to distance himself from Soderini in the months following the return of the Medici. Machiavelli argued that the loyalty of the Salviati group to the Medici was suspect, because they wished to retain popular support and would not fear a revival of the popular government. He therefore advised in the memorandum that, in order to secure their undivided loyalty, the Medici had to ensure that Salviati and his friends were hated by the people. Historians have labored to reconcile the author of The Prince with the author of the Discourses, but the problem is factitious.
Machiavelli was interested, not in discussing ideal types of government, but in exploring one of the principal questions Aristotle poses in the Politics: Did they discuss it with Machiavelli as well? Foreign policy and war were the chief topics of the Machiavelli—Vettori correspondence in , not any project to convert Florence into a principate. What made these the supreme models was not only their personal qualities but the fact that, when they appeared on the scene, the peoples they subsequently led to greatness had reached the nadir of their fortunes: The abject condition of modern Italy was, Machiavelli claims, similar to and indeed, if anything, more dire than that of those earlier peoples.
Pope Leo and his family did not accomplish the task set them by Machiavelli, and The Prince did not secure Machiavelli the rehabilitation he so desperately wanted. This is hardly surprising, for Vettori had convinced Machiavelli not to come to Rome to present it to Giuliano. He dedicated his next two major works to friends: Although Zanobi Buondelmonti played a leading part in the anti-Medici plot of , others who, like him, had gathered with Machiavelli in the Rucellai gardens were on better terms with the Medici. He conveyed to Machiavelli a request from Lucrezia that he rework and improve a treatise on the life of Alexander the Great that someone had given her.
Although by Machiavelli was on friendly terms with some of the Salviati, rather less is known about his deal- ings with Jacopo. The subject matter of the Art of War made it a relatively safe literary undertaking for an author known for controversial and passionately held views who was trying to regain a role in public affairs. In condemning mercenaries and singing the praises of the Romans as a model for a citizen militia, Machiavelli was not likely to offend his readers and was in any case repeating what he had already said, what other humanists had said before him, and what Vegetius, Frontinus, and Polybius had written centuries ear- lier.
The debt of the Art of War to those three classical authors is considerable; indeed, entire passages are sometimes paraphrased or even translated. The Medici regime, moreover, showed its awareness of the value of a militia by reestablishing one in Florence; and when Lorenzo was appointed captain- general of the Florentine forces in , the Otto di Pratica, the foreign-policy magistracy that elected him, recalled that it was Romans who captained the armies that had conquered most of the world and speculated that the Florentines might be able to follow their example, a hope, as has been justly remarked, that could have been expressed by Machiavelli himself.
They may not have read the Discourses in manuscript, or perhaps this passage was added in a later revision. In his long chapter on the dangers and frequent failures of conspiracies Discourses 3. An early example of the advantages Salviati patronage could bestow may have been the commission Machiavelli received in July to go to Lucca to represent the Florentine creditors, among them the Salviati, of the bankrupt Michele Guinigi.
Sometime in March Machiavelli was introduced to him by Lorenzo Strozzi, the dedicatee of the Art of War, and other members of the Rucellai gardens circle. Both men, furthermore, having decided that Florence could only have a republican government, argued that the Medici could not revert to the constitutional arrangements within which their forebears had exercised power in the previous century. The Discourse attributes the fall of the popular government of — to its inability to satisfy the ambitions of leading families; it also warns the Medici that the people are hostile to them and will be won over only if the Great Council is restored.
In seemingly reassigning to the Medici the role of lawgiver he had asked them to assume in The Prince, Machiavelli went beyond anything Guicciardini recommends in his Dialogue. But Machiavelli now added the hope that, once Leo and Giulio were gone from this life, the institutions of their making would function on their own as a republic. But his suspicions about ottimati who cynically declare their allegiance to the cause of liberty in order to get popular support are similar to the views expressed by Machiavelli in his memoir to the palleschi, the Mediceans, in which he urged the Medici not to trust the loyalty of patricians like Jacopo Salviati.
In the second book, however, Bernardo is made to assume the mantle of an advocate of the sort of mixed constitution Guicciardini favored and Machiavelli had come to accept. The Florentine Histories presented Machiavelli with a new and knotty problem: His solution to the dilemma was a subtle blend of several elements. He adverts to their liberality, but indicates that one of its uses was to win partisans and build factions that are the essence of a corrupt society.
Concluding his laudatory portrait of Cosimo Florentine Histories 7. And when he writes that Lorenzo was more renowned for prudence than anyone in Florence or Italy had ever been, and more mourned in his patria, he was again making use of a topos, that of outdoing, which had been much deployed by Latin and humanist encomiasts and with which most of his readers would be perfectly familiar. Machiavelli made no effort to hide the fact that Cosimo was a very successful faction leader, who used his family, amici friends , and wealth to seize power and retain it. He might blame them for doing nothing to cure the disease, because he believed that rulers had to assume responsibility for the sins of those they ruled, and the high opinion he professes to have of their leadership qualities made this failure all the more egregious.
This stood him in good stead in , while he was writing the Florentine Histories, when other close friends of his, in particular Zanobi Buondelmonti and Luigi Alamanni, joined a plot to assassinate Cardinal Giulio. Despite the fact that Buondelmonti allegedly mentioned his name as one who might be approached by the plotters, Machiavelli was not implicated in the affair. In Jacopo Salviati tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Clement to appoint Machiavelli as secretary to his son Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, whom Clement was sending as legate to Madrid, but the pope refused.
But Machiavelli never regained the truly important positions he had held until Yet, except on military matters, the Medici largely disregarded his ideas, and after his death their termination of the republic and institution of the principate in —2 represented an even more decisive rejection of his political views.
Legations in Opere, pp. The letters are translated by James B. Clarendon Press, , p. Lorenzo Strozzi, Le vite degli uomini illustri della casa Strozzi Florence, , pp. Francke Verlag, , p. Cesare Cristofolini, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato Turin: Rosemary Devonshire Jones, Francesco Vettori: Florentine Citizen and Medici Servant London: Athlone Press, , p.
Clough, Machiavelli Researches Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, , pp. Bartolomeo Cerretani, Dialogo della mutatione di Firenze, ed. Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, , p. Bullard, Filippo Strozzi, p. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Studi e Testi , , pp. Clough, Machiavelli Researches, pp.
Cavalli Naples, , p. Francesco Guicciardini, Dialogo e discorsi del reggimento di Firenze, ed. Laterza, , p. The Dialogue is in Guicciardini, Dialogo e discorsi, pp. Machiavelli — The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance. Culture and Politics, ed. Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann. London, Warburg Institute, , pp. The Impact of War, —, ed. Leiden-Boston, Brill, , pp. Lotte politiche e riforme istituzionali a Firenze tra il e il Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence. From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance.
Gouwens, Kenneth, and Sheryl E. The Valori Family in the Florentine Renaissance. Paris, Sorbonne, , pp. Florence, Cadmo, , pp. A History of Florence — The Government of Florence under the Medici to Oxford, Clarendon Press, ; revised edition, Machiavelli cites this saying in The Prince 9. Many of the states he discusses nevertheless are, or include, newly acquired realms, and in most of the chapters Machiavelli discusses princely rulers rather than, say, political structures, constitutions, and the like.
After two chapters 12 and 13 condemning mercenary armies, the rest of the book is focused on the new Prince, on how he must have real expertise in military affairs, avoid dependence on fortresses for his security, and make sure he controls his subordinates. Thus, one might think he would imagine the Prince as a farmer who plants seeds or a father who engenders and then cares for a child. This chapter will explain why Machiavelli would prefer to think in such terms, why the vision of the Prince as an architect and mason had such a hold on him. More fre- quently, however, and more suggestively, as he imagines historical events as going through a cycle, as being born, growing, and — although he hesitates to say so — dying, he rehearses a conceptual vocabulary that went back to the ancient Greek historian Polybius d.
Machiavelli may be using such verbs because he wishes to stress the logical, cause-and-effect, nature of events, especially since his project in The Prince is to offer rational explana- tions for history and then to formulate general rules to guide princely action. However, as Machiavelli explains effects by supplying causes for them, the verb nascere that he uses to tie the two together never stops having its literal meaning: How can we account for such a preference? The best answer may be that, whether the Prince is planting the seed of the state in the ground or inseminat- ing Fortune with his own seed, he effectively loses control over the process.
By contrast, if the creation of the state involves the laying of foundations, then the Prince-as-architect has full responsibility over its design just as the Prince- as-mason does over its actual construction. Through this metaphor, in other words, the Prince takes charge of the world of history. Machiavelli might, of course, acknowledge that the making of foundations must be adapted to the nature of the terrain, depends on the availability of building materials, and involves a host of subordinate workers who may have very different agendas than the Prince does.
In fact, we can specify one particular myth that his metaphors suggest. While uniting some aspects of both Odysseus and Achilles, this hero was seen as transcending both of them in virtue and was especially admired as the founder of the state that Machiavelli and the rest of the Renaissance took as the model for their own.
In general, pastoral — including Virgilian pastoral — embraces pleasure, assumes a benevolent, even protective, natural world that exists apart from the world of time and history, and presents characters who play and sing rather than work. Unlike pastoral swains who never worry about tomorrow, the heroes of epic dwell in a potentially hostile universe and live lives of unremitting effort and constant strife; they are obsessed with time, often looking back to the past with nostalgia, but driven forward in a quest for the future.
Machiavelli structures his thought in The Prince in terms of this Virgilian opposition between pastoral otium and epic negotium.
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He may create spectacles to satisfy his people, but he cannot stop to enjoy them himself. Never idle, he is always busy founding the state, working to maintain it, striving desperately to avoid its collapse. In fact, Virgil actually pays more attention to the fall of cities. This is the Rome, of course, for which and in which Virgil is writing his poem.
In all the examples just cited, Virgil clearly links Aeneas and the Trojans to the imperial city their descendants will found. There are, however, many differences between the Prince and his Roman predecessor. Although Machiavelli does say the Prince should be pious, a show of religi- osity is all that is required. In fact, Machiavelli is convinced that princes who are truly pious will, like the unarmed prophet Savonarola 6.
Each is, however, pious in his own way. Aeneas, as we have noted, builds walls and even designs a city that points toward the ultimate urbs, Rome itself. The Prince, by contrast, is seen as a maker of foundations. Although Machiavelli presents this question at the start, he spends the bulk of the chapter reviewing the relation- ship the Prince has with his subjects, returning to the issue of building fortresses only in the last paragraph. There he begins by endorsing the build- ing of fortresses because it has been done from ancient times.
However, he immediately supplies no fewer than three examples of princes whom he praises for having wisely torn down fortresses in order to ensure their hold on their states. He then generalizes that fortresses are useful, or not, depend- ing on circumstances: An earlier passage reveals what he really thinks: To accomplish this goal, he will act to establish a citizen army, institute laws and ordini, enforce a sometimes brutal form of justice, create a system of rewards for his citizens to increase their loyalty to the state, and put on spectacles to entertain them.
And yet, despite his insistence that they are not to be thought of as mud but as the stone blocks moved by a Prince with Amphion-like abilities, it may well be that he cannot envisage a house or castle or city actually being erected on the foundation they supply precisely because his work also contains a very different vision of them. Machiavelli sums it up in chapter 17 of The Prince: This can be said of men in general: To put the matter less metaphorically: Those foundations only seem to be solid; in reality they are always threaten- ing to disintegrate, forcing the Prince to build and rebuild them over and over again.
Not surprisingly, to talk about that destruction, Machiavelli consistently uses the verbs rovinare and ruinare and the noun ruina, which appear more than forty times in The Prince. Although Machiavelli does not write here or elsewhere of physical ruins, his use of rovinare, ruinare, and ruina cannot help but suggest them.
Normally, when Machiavelli uses some form of these words, he is talking about the fall, that is, the failure or death, of people, and in particular, of princes. Any life he might have between these two states, a life, that is, in which he would build the walls of his house and city, and then live in them, is simply omitted. Reinforcing this sense of an absent center between extremes is the one quotation that Machiavelli takes from The Aeneid and uses in his discussion of princely pietas.
In chapter 17 he argues that cruelty is the best policy for rulers, especially new princes, because too much mercy will lead to political chaos. Note what Machiavelli does not do here: Instead, he cites the words of Dido, whose Carthage is just being built when Aeneas arrives, the sight of which is, ironically, the only glimpse Aeneas has of the building of a great city, like the Rome his descen- dants will create.
It is, however, a Carthage that will eventually be turned into ruins. These last two landmarks tend to become one, for ruins, in their most extreme form, amount to little more than foundations. He devotes the longest chapter of The Prince, the nineteenth, to a description of the deca- dence, not the triumph, of Rome, discussing a long series of emperors who failed as rulers and were murdered.
No sooner has he made his foundations than they seem to metamorphose into the ruins that threaten the end of his state. Machiavelli often imagines Fortune as a woman, whom the Prince can beat into submission, although what gets built as a result of that beating remains unclear. Homer recounts it in The Odyssey That does not mean he indulges in the carefree happiness of pastoral as he enjoys the moment and its pleasures. In fact, the verb godere to enjoy , always seems slightly suspect to Machiavelli. He rejects, for instance, the supposed wisdom of his fellow Florentines, who sum it up in a favorite proverb: Machiavelli is warning against temporizing here, but his language implicitly pits princely action, the decisive action he admires in the Romans, against the notion that one might stop and enjoy anything.
Such a moment did not occur, of course, because those rulers did not remain united, nor is it ever a possibility for the Prince, who must always be vigilant, alert, and active. If the Prince cannot stop and smell the roses of pastoral, that does not mean he is unhappy. To sum up, then: Forced to move his stones into place over and over again, he resembles Sisyphus, but not the Sisyphus of Homer and Virgil, Dante and Lucretius, the Sisyphus who suffers the pains of hell. Sansoni, ; all translations are my own. Morano, , chap. Horace, Ars poetica —6. Although Machiavelli does not refer to Amphion, he no doubt knew the myth from Horace or Dante Inferno Rebhorn, Foxes and Lions: Cornell University Press, , chap.
Il Mulino, , pp. Gallimard, , p. Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature. Machiavelli, o la scelta della letteratura. Machiavelli and the Renaissance, trans. Manchester University Press, Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought. New York, Atheneum, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy. New York, Collier, From the Counter-Reformation to Milton. University of Chicago Press, The Discourse of Il Principe.
Malibu, Undena Publications, Fortune Is a Woman: Berkeley, University of California Press, Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric. This was not a purely theoretical inquiry. The second decade and the rest of the huge work were lost, and books 41—45 were discovered shortly after Machiavelli died. But the Discourses are not a systematic commentary on Livy.
That the Discourses followed The Prince also seems likely in view of the critical, deconstructive dialogue they establish with that work. Their differences lie rather in the way Machiavelli wrote about themes they both address. Three of these differences are particularly noteworthy. Early in the Discourses 1.
The inevitable degeneration of good forms into bad opposites introduces a principle that recurs throughout the Discourses and is clearly about more than forms of government. Machiavelli later Discourses 3. The Discourses are predicated on the impermanence of forms, and thus on time and change. A second idea of The Prince subjected to critical scrutiny and historical perspective in the Discourses is the myth of heroic founders.
The need for constant refounding suggests to Machiavelli the superiority of republics over princes: He ponders in Discourses 1. The only words that approximate this frequency have a wider variety of often non- political meanings: Yet the next few lines argue the impossibility, in terms of human psychology, that a prince could ever be capable of both amoral methods and moral objectives: Good men are unwilling to use evil measures, even for good ends, and bad men, perfectly willing to use evil measures to acquire power, will not turn that power to good ends.
Each of the three books, Machiavelli says in Discourses 1. Among the most memorable chapters of the Discourses is 2. Amidst many digressions and detours, the unifying theme of the Discourses is the precariousness of republics and their vulnerability to the ambition of noble and elite classes. The motor driving the history of republics, their forms of government, and their capacity for survival, defense, and expansion is the perpetual antagonism between the nobles and the people: In Prince 9 Machiavelli had already distinguished the aims of these classes: It appears early in the book: The people, Machiavelli says in 1.
This is the kernel of the analysis that he subse- quently develops throughout the Discourses: The very means with which they pursue this end undermine the institutions of the state itself; they are the more dangerous class because they inevitably corrupt and destroy republics. Only from constant discord between the classes can laws emerge to safeguard liberty by giving the people the power to keep the nobles in check. In Florence, by contrast, Machiavelli asserts that these features of a vigor- ous popular republic were either lacking or incompletely achieved.
But both causes converge on elite subver- sion of the state. Elite subversion of the state acquires another dimension in Discourses 1. And because this seems virtuous [pare virtuoso], it easily fools everyone and nothing is done to prevent it, until, forging ahead without opposition, [a citizen] attains such power that private citizens and the magistrates alike fear him. The privatization of politics begins with acts of seeming friendship and culminates in forms of extra-legal power that over- whelm the state.
Tyranny, as Machiavelli analyzes it in chapters 29, 34, 35, and 40 of book 1, is not simply the excessive authority of one man: Tyranny originates instead from the temptation by either class to have recourse to a protector. Machiavelli is not arguing here the theoretical superiority of one or the other form of government. His point is analytical: The passage alludes to what Machiavelli no doubt feared the Florentine grandi were in the process of doing and what the Medici principate achieved some years after he died.
Both Rome and Florence, despite their differences, fell victim to dangerously powerful citizens: Machiavelli believed that the decline of Roman liberty that resulted from the spread of different forms of private power reached its nadir in the late republic and not, as the civic humanists had held, under the emperors. What makes the Discourses so compelling is the effort to understand how and why strong states and peoples destroy themselves. In the Discourses, by contrast, the evolution and transformation of political institu- tions and social structures govern historical change in processes that, while not easily predictable, have a logic and an etiology that can be understood, at least in retrospect.
Livy, Ab urbe condita, ed. Harvard University Press, , 1: See also appendix 2, by Cecil H. Counted from the Intratext website: Emanuella Lugnani Scarano Turin: UTET, , p. Princeton University Press, , 2: Liberty and Greatness in the Discourses on Livy. A Study of the Discourses on Livy.
Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, 4 vols. Milan, Naples, Ricciardi, — Storia del suo pensiero politico, 2nd edition. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, , 1: Three editions with excellent commentary: Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Francesco Bausi, 2 vols. Rinaldo Rinaldi, 2 vols. It is widely recognized that Machiavelli considered force and military strength to be determining factors in relations among states. Scholars also concur that his involvement with the new Florentine militia ordinance of was an important forma- tive experience during his chancery days and that the idea of a conscript army or citizen militia was a key element in his classically inspired republicanism.
Having from early on understood that it would be impossible to arm a faction-ridden city, Machiavelli accepted the compromise of a peasant militia drawn from the immediately surrounding countryside the contado. What was radically novel in his proposal was the idea of creating a permanent military organiza- tion throughout the territory based on part-time soldiers who would continue to be enrolled and trained even in peacetime. Poor showings by hired mercenaries at the Pisan front in the summer and fall of paved the way for the militia. After some clever maneuver- ings by gonfaloniere Piero Soderini and his brother Francesco, the cardinal of Volterra, the proposal was piloted through the legislative councils.
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