Everybody knows what Machiavelli said. The ends justify the means. It is better to be feared than loved. His name is an adjective for cunning, and his little book, The Prince, is a manual for tyrants.
The first sentence is not in his work in any language. The second is there, with a condition in front of it and a limit after it that are almost always cut. And the man who wrote them was not a tyrant or an adviser to one. He was a salaried clerk of the Florentine republic, sent to watch kings, popes and Cesare Borgia, and to write home about what they actually did.
The clerk
Florence was a republic that would not let anybody keep power. Its chief magistrates held office for two months and went home. So the city kept a chancery that did not rotate, and the chancery was its memory.
In June 1498, at twenty-nine, Niccolò Machiavelli was elected to run the second chancery, and weeks later was made secretary to the Ten, the committee that ran the wars and sent the missions. He held both jobs for fourteen years. He was never an ambassador. He was a mandatario, a salaried man sent to listen, to report, and to commit Florence to nothing. He never sat in the government and never made a decision of state that was his to make.
Cesena, 26 December 1502
In the autumn of 1502 he was sent to the court of Cesare Borgia, who was carving out a state in the Romagna. He stayed three and a half months, broke, ill, and unable to get an audience. Borgia, he reported, never made his plans until the moment he gave the orders.
On the morning of 26 December he wrote home: Messer Ramiro was found to-day cut into two pieces in the public square, and his body still remains there. Ramiro de Lorqua had been Borgia's governor of the province. On the day, Machiavelli wrote that the cause was not precisely known.
Eleven years later, in The Prince, he explained it: Borgia had used a cruel governor to pacify the province, then had him killed so that the cruelty would not be laid at his own door. The reason came afterwards. Whether he learned it at that court or supplied it, the record does not say.
The rope
In 1512 a Spanish army sacked Prato, ten miles from Florence. The militia Machiavelli had raised ran. Within weeks the republic fell, the Medici came back, and on 7 November he was dismissed.
In February 1513 his name was found on a list kept by two young men plotting against the Medici. No document decides whether he was in the plot. He was held twenty-two days and put to the rope: hoisted by the wrists, tied behind his back, and dropped. From the cell he wrote comic sonnets to Giuliano de' Medici about the irons on his leg, the lice, and six drops of the rope. He was freed in the amnesty when a Medici became pope.
Four hours with the dead
That winter, on his farm outside Florence, he wrote the most famous letter of the Renaissance. He catches thrushes at dawn, quarrels with woodcutters, plays cards at the inn with a butcher and a miller. At nightfall he takes off his muddy clothes, puts on courtly ones, and goes in among the ancients to ask them why they did what they did.
What came out of those evenings was The Prince: a short book no government had asked for, written by a man who wanted his job back. It was dedicated to a Medici. There is no record that he read it.
What he actually found
He did not invent political science; Aristotle had compared constitutions eighteen centuries earlier. He did not invent the modern state. What he did was smaller and harder to argue with. Before him, books of advice told rulers what they ought to be. He wrote about what rulers actually do, in a living language, from evidence, about named men of his own day, and said when the ugly thing worked.
Set what he wrote on the day beside what he wrote years later, and the story changes in four ways. Reasons come afterwards. Verdicts harden. Evidence drops out. And the man who was there goes missing.
How his name became an insult
He died in Florence on 21 June 1527 and was buried in Santa Croce. His books were printed with a papal privilege in 1531 and 1532. In 1559 the Church put everything he had written on the Index.
In 1576, after the St Bartholomew's Day massacre, a Huguenot lawyer named Innocent Gentillet blamed French policy on his book and boiled it down to fifty maxims, each with its conditions removed. About thirteen years later Marlowe put a villain called Machevil on the London stage. By the time The Prince was first printed in English, in 1640, his name had been a term of abuse for half a century, in the mouths of people who had never read him.
Everything on this page comes from Niccolò Machiavelli: How Power Works, which is built from the letters and the printed texts, and says in its notes where each fact comes from.
