In addition to chronicling such petty quarrels, Machiavelli regaled his absent friend with amusing tales of their erotic adventures. One companion, whom Machiavelli refers to discreetly only by the nickname “count Orlando,” is “obsessed again with a young lad from Ragusa, and has made himself scarce,” while another is “slobbering, totally consumed by Gostanza, hanging on her every word—her sighs and her glances, her scents and soft, feminine ways.” Machiavelli was too honest to exempt himself from this chronicle of amorous folly. “I have met a creature,” he confessed to Vettori, “so kind, so graceful, so noble, both in nature and in bearing, that neither my praise nor my love would be as much as she merits.” Though he acknowledged that some might ridicule such a passion in a man approaching fifty (he was actually forty-five at the time), he defended himself on the grounds that, having been disappointed in other walks of life, he was entitled to find consolation in the arms of a woman: “I have found nothing but pain in these other matters, but in love only good and pleasure.”
His descriptions of domestic life, by contrast, seem utilitarian, sometimes even grim, as if in the bosom of his family he felt his diminished prospects most keenly. “When dinnertime comes, I sit down with my little troop to eat such food as my poor farm yields. Having eaten, I return to the inn where I usually find the innkeeper, a butcher, a miller, and a couple of kiln workers. With them I waste the rest of the day playing cricca and backgammon.” When he speaks of his wife and children his tone tends to be unsentimental, as in this brief mention of a family tragedy in a letter to his nephew: “Marietta gave birth to a baby girl, who died after three days. Marietta is well.”
This bare-bones account, however, does not furnish an accurate picture of his emotional state. Later in the letter he confesses, “Physically I feel well, but ill in every other respect,” an admission all the more poignant for being understated. Much of Machiavelli’s gloom—for which he sought distraction in love affairs and seedier encounters—stemmed from feelings of inadequacy occasioned by his unemployment. For a time he could take some satisfaction in having stood up manfully to his ordeal, but soon the vocabulary he uses to describe his situation suggests feelings of decay or emasculation. Imagery of rot, infestation, and impotence crop up with increasing frequency, often in close proximity to references to the family he can barely support. Typical is this passage from a letter to Vettori he wrote in 1514:
Thus I will remain, crawling with lice, unable to find a solitary man who recalls my service or believes I might be good for anything. But it is impossible for me to continue like this, because I am coming apart at the seams and I can see that if God does not show me more favor, one day I shall be forced to leave my home and find a place as a tutor or secretary to a governor, if I can find nothing else, or exile myself to some deserted land to teach reading to children. As if already dead, I will leave my family behind. They will do much better without me because I am nothing but an expense . . . . I’m writing to you not because I want you to worry or trouble yourself for me, but only to unburden myself, and not to write anymore about these matters since they are as odious as can be.
These, then, were the pressures—psychological, economic, and professional—bearing down on Machiavelli in the months following his imprisonment. Sick at heart, feeling useless and forgotten, short of money and with time weighing heavily, he cast about for a project that would remind those in charge in the Palazzo della Signoria of his singular talents. His outlook on life was shaped by the gnawing sense of inadequacy that accompanied the loss of his job. “The duty of a father,” wrote Leon Battista Alberti in his Books on the Family, “is not only, as they say, to stock the cupboard and the cradle. He ought, far more, to watch over and guard the family from all sides.” On many of these counts, particularly in regard to the cupboard, Machiavelli knew he had fallen short of the mark.
For Machiavelli the only way to shore up his dwindling funds and to restore his self-esteem was to find a way back into government service. “[S]ince I do not know how to talk about either the silk or the wool trade, or profits or losses, I have to talk about politics,” he explained. The first step was to mend fences with the Medici family, especially Giuliano, the effective boss of the city, acting as his brother’s agent. Even before his release from prison he had been trying to arouse the sympathy of Giuliano, hoping to rekindle some spark of affection in his old patron with his witty poems. A few weeks later he penned a third sonnet for the lord of the city:
I send you, Giuliano, some thrushes, not
because this gift is fine, but that for a bit Your Magnificence
may recollect your poor Machiavelli.
And if you have near you somebody who bites, you can hit him
in the teeth with it, so that, while he eats his bird, to rend others
he may forget.
But you say: “Perhaps they will not have the effect you speak of,
because they are not good and are not fat; backbiters will not eat them.”
I will answer such words that I am thin, even I, as my enemies
are aware, and yet they get off me some good mouthfuls.
A few game birds and a bit of doggerel were unlikely to win the favor of Florence’s new bosses. Similar presents must have piled up quickly on the threshold of a powerful man’s palace, and it is difficult to imagine that Giuliano paid much attention to either the gifts or the giver. To get ahead in Florence usually demanded a greasing of wheels, and Machiavelli was hampered not only by past associations but by his poverty. Still, he tried to make a virtue of necessity, making up in wit what he lacked in other areas. These creatures of skin and bone, like his verses, are a gift of a poor man to a great lord, meager but well meant.
Machiavelli knew that a far more substantial offering would be needed to make an impression on the busy lord of Florence. Even as he was packaging his game birds and little poem to send to the palace on the Via Larga, he was contemplating a far more ambitious undertaking, a little book addressed to Giuliano in which he would distill all he had learned over his years of tireless labor on behalf of the government of Florence. Not surprisingly, given Machiavelli’s blunt personality, it would not contain the usual flowery phrases and pious platitudes, but instead insights and difficult truths that others, less honest but more tactful, would neglect to tell him. Machiavelli was a political animal through and through, and in the end had nothing of substance to offer his potential patron other than the fruits of his own peculiar genius.
The work that was beginning to take shape in his mind was The Prince, perhaps the most controversial political tract ever written, but for all its notoriety the work had quiet beginnings.v In his own telling, it was both a labor of love but also of consolation:
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.
Machiavelli went on to explain to his friend, “I am dedicating it to his Magnificence Giuliano,” in the hope that “these Medici princes will put me to work.” (As it turned out, Giuliano died before Machiavelli completed the work; the final version is dedicated to Giuliano’s nephew Lorenzo, son of the late Piero de’ Medici.) He had, he thought, much to offer and much to prove: “[T]hrough this work, were it to be read, I hope to demonstrate that during the fifteen years I have been studying the art of the state I have neither slept nor played games. Anyone should be happy to avail himself of one who has profited so much at the expense of others.”
The Prince was born in a moment of crisis and out of desperation. As he sat down to write, his career lay
in ruins, and the loss of his salary threatened to plunge him into humiliating poverty. If nothing else, alone in his study, surrounded by ghosts of history, the contemplation of eternal truths made him forget his current misery.
* * *
i The most serious of these were the revolt of 1466 against Piero and the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478, both led by disgruntled members of the ruling class.
ii This final punishment was never enforced since his successors in the Chancery frequently had to suspend the ban in order to consult with him on issues that had been left uncompleted on his desk.
iii Machiavelli’s house and the village of Sant’ Andrea in Percussina still survive much as they were. The house itself, along the road that was once the main thoroughfare through southern Tuscany, leading to the rival city of Siena, is a comfortable but rustic building of stone. It remains as it did in Machiavelli’s day surrounded by grapevines and olive trees from which the master of the house made wine, vinegar, and olive oil, both for his own use and to sell in order to supplement his meager income.
iv Andrea Dazzi, a popular but second-rate literary figure.
v The letter to Vettori in which he announces “this little study of mine” was written in December 1513, but he indicated it was already nearly complete, which means he must have begun it shortly after his release from prison.
X
THE PRINCE
“[S]ince it is my intention to write something useful to those of understanding, it seems best to me to go straight to the actual truth of things rather than to dwell in dreams.”
—THE PRINCE, XV
MACHIAVELLI INSISTED HE WROTE THE PRINCE TO convince the new Medici rulers of Florence to offer him employment, but it is surely one of the most ill-advised job applications of all time. Attempting to ingratiate himself with his would-be bosses by offering to give them a quick tutorial in the secrets of statecraft was presumptuous and unlikely to win over even the most self-effacing lord. “[I]t is customary for those hoping to win the favor of a prince to present him with those things he values most, or that give him most delight,” Machiavelli begins, standards by which his own work fell woefully short. Not only is it plain and unadorned, as he himself admits, but it is chock-full of unpleasant truths and blunt assertions that no prince would welcome, no matter how much he might secretly agree with its conclusions. Unlike most of his predecessors, Machiavelli makes little effort to flatter his patron, assuming the brilliance of his insights will be sufficient to recommend his services.
The unsuitability of the manuscript to achieve his stated goals should absolve Machiavelli of the charge that he was a dishonest schemer, cynically manipulating those around him for his own ends. He would not, or could not, alter the substance of his thought even for the sake of salvaging his career. Machiavelli’s lack of guile in his own life stands in stark contrast to the course he urges on his patron, which is to practice the art of deception whenever honesty might prove inconvenient. In fact few works of political philosophy are more sincere than The Prince. Whatever one thinks of the analyses and prescriptions Machiavelli presents, they were not tailored to suit his audience but were instead the result of a compulsion to set down on paper ideas and attitudes that had long been brewing in his mind and that, in this moment of personal and professional crisis, he could no longer suppress.
Despite its tone of scientific objectivity, The Prince is a plea for a strong leader written by a man who was acutely aware of the precarious and humiliating situation he was in.i In a patriarchal society, inability to provide for one’s family was unforgivable, and Machiavelli felt keenly the shame of his poverty. Disappointed in his hopes, burning with unfulfilled ambition, he wrote a pugnacious work that makes a fetish of strength and oozes contempt for anything that smacks of weakness or vacillation. “I am wasting away and cannot continue on like this much longer without becoming contemptible because of my poverty,” he tells Vettori, words that show how much damage his enemies had been able to inflict.
But The Prince was not merely a response to personal disappointment. The humiliation he felt after his disgrace was just a particularly acute form of a chronic condition. As an impoverished gentleman, Machiavelli was dependent on the patronage of richer and more powerful men; his first extant letter was a defense of the “pigmy” Machiavelli against the “giant” Pazzi, who used their greater wealth and influence to ride roughshod over their neighbors. Throughout his years in the Chancery he was forced to bow to men who were his social superiors but intellectual inferiors. Feelings of inadequacy, a sense that he was barely hanging on to respectability, characterize Machiavelli from his youth. This insecurity was only exacerbated by his recent travails. Like most of the creative geniuses of the age, including Michelangelo and Leonardo, he belonged to the client class, and like them was conscious of his own gifts and chafed at his dependence on the largesse of his patrons. It is the client’s uneasy position that is reflected in The Prince, its belligerence compensating for feelings of impotence.
Though it would be unfair to dismiss Machiavelli’s book as the bitter ranting of a bitter man, it is clear that thwarted ambition gave added urgency to opinions that had long been gestating in his mind. The strength of his convictions came from the intellectual and emotional synergy between his particular circumstances as a marginal figure within the Florentine ruling class and Florence’s marginal position in the community of nations. The sting of personal failure combined with the often humiliating conditions he faced in foreign courts—where he was dismissed as an underpaid messenger of a second-rate power, Sir Nihil, as he put it—created in him a contempt for weakness and a worshipful attitude toward those who refused to cower beneath the blows of fortune.
The desire to land a job may have motivated Machiavelli to begin The Prince, but once he sat down to write, the form and content were determined by his own obsessions. The ruthless man of action he conjures offers the perfect antidote to his miserable existence. Casting himself in the role of adviser to the prince, he hoped to hitch his failing fortunes to another’s rising star.ii “Take, then, this little gift, Your Magnificence,” Machiavelli urges Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence, “in the spirit in which I offer it. Should you read diligently and consider it with care, you will discover therein my deepest desire, which is that You will rise to that greatness which fortune and your own qualities promise. And if Your Magnificence will, from the pinnacle on which you reside, cast from time to time a glance to these lowly places, you will know how unjustly I suffer from a great and continual malice of fortune.”
It is not surprising then that the image of the ideal prince he conjures in the pages of this book is characterized by superhuman strength of will, cunning, and ruthlessness—attributes he observed firsthand while serving at the court of Valentino and that stood in stark contrast both to the reality of his own life and of the republic he served for so many years. In The Prince Machiavelli seeks redress, or at least finds consolation, for failures both public and private. One might climb further into the thickets of Freudian analysis by claiming that in The Prince Machiavelli ritually slays his father, or at least replaces that feckless figure with a man his opposite in every way—strong, where he was weak; ruthless, where he was kind; able to bend the course of history to his will, while Bernardo could barely provide for his own family.
• • •
The genius of Machiavelli transformed what could have been a narrowly focused appeal for a political messiah, a strongman to deliver Florence and the rest of Italy from the hands of foreigners, into a universal meditation on the nature of good and evil. Indeed, this slender volume penned by an obscure Florentine civil servant announces the coming of the modern world. Here is a radically new sensibility, one freed from the superstitions and unexamined assumptions that had governed civic life for thousands of years. In The Prince Machiavelli sets forth a boldly original conception of history and of human society, with a disdain for conventional morality that scandalized his contemporaries and
made his name infamous to future generations. Man, in Machiavelli’s formulation, was no longer inscribed within a divinely ordered universe but was, terrifyingly, thrown upon his own resources, forced to grope as best he could through an unforgiving and incomprehensible landscape.
Like all works of revolutionary impact, The Prince is a victim of its own success. Many of its most original insights have become commonplace; many of the battles Machiavelli waged against the orthodoxies of his own day seem trivial simply because he routed his enemies so decisively. Like any explorer charting unknown territory, Machiavelli made mistakes, mistakes that were seized upon and corrected by others who followed in his footsteps. But even his harshest critics were guided by the first crude map he had sketched. It is a testament to Machiavelli’s gifts as a writer and his penetrating analysis of human motives that a work born from the tangled geopolitics of sixteenth-century Italy can still be read with pleasure and consulted with profit.
The best way to measure the originality of The Prince is, paradoxically, to place it once again inside the familiar tradition to which it belonged. Far from being unique, The Prince actually adheres to a time-tested form. When Machiavelli sat down to write his book he had a long list of examples to fall back on. He was clearly familiar with his predecessors’ work, borrowing from them themes and even chapter headings like “How to Avoid Flatterers” and “Concerning Liberality and Parsimony.” Machiavelli’s purpose in writing this book was to offer a corrective to those who had come before him, to urge his patron not to be deceived by those philosophers who opined on subjects they knew nothing about and imagined worlds that never were.iii Instead, he admonished the young Medici lord, he should heed the advice of a man who had seen politics up close and knew how it really worked: “Since I know that many have already written on these matters, I do not wish to seem presumptuous in writing on them myself, particularly as I intend to depart substantially from what others have said. But since it is my intention to write something useful to those of understanding, it seems best to me to go straight to the actual truth of things rather than to dwell in dreams.” In sticking to “the actual truth of things” rather than dwelling “in dreams,” Machiavelli shatters cherished beliefs about man’s place in the world. He discounts, though he never actually denies, the existence of an immortal soul, focusing instead on flesh-and-blood creatures who lived and breathed, toiled and triumphed, suffered and died. Machiavelli was one of the first philosophers since ancient times to treat people not as children of God but as independent adults, forced to make choices without guidance from an all-seeing Father and to suffer the consequences of their mistakes.iv
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