Machiavelli › On the day, and years later
On the day, and years later
For fourteen years he wrote dispatches on the day, for a government that needed them accurate. Then he wrote the books. Here are the same events, both times.
Cesena, 1502
Messer Ramiro was found to-day cut into two pieces in the public square, and his body still remains there.
Why: not precisely known, beyond the duke's pleasure and what the man deserved.
The Prince, 1513: Borgia used a cruel governor to pacify the province, then wanted it known if any cruelties had been practised, they had not originated with him. The people were left satisfied and stunned.
Reasons come afterwards. A design in three moves, supplied as fact, eleven years on.
Perugia, 1506
The tyrant Gianpaolo Baglioni let the unarmed pope ride into his city. If he did him no harm, it was to be put down to his good nature and humanity.
Discourses: Gianpaolo's own account of why he gave in is dropped, and he is called a coward. No piety, now, could enter so vile a heart.
Verdicts harden. And the account the man gave of himself disappears.
Prato, 1512
A private letter: the Gonfalonier postponing at the table, and the cowardice shown at Prato by our soldiers, the militia Machiavelli had raised.
Discourses: Prato is named, and the obstinacy at the table is kept. The soldiers who ran are never mentioned again.
Evidence drops out. The soldiers who ran were his own militia.
With the pope, 1506
He was there, travelling with the pope.
Discourses: sagacious men who were with the Pope saw the tyrant's cowardice.
The self goes missing. He was one of the men with the pope, and does not say so.
Borgia's fortune, 1502
From Imola, in his third week: Borgia's state is kept up by nothing but his good fortune.
The Prince: Borgia won his state by his father's fortune and lost it when the fortune failed.
Some things did not move. Germany and the friar Savonarola also went into the books as they came out of the file.
What it means
This is what one man's memory did to his own file between the job and the books. It is not a law, and it is not a charge of lying. He may have learned some of what he later supplied; the record does not say. But it is the same operation later readers performed on his sentences, keeping the conclusion and dropping the conditions, and he had done it first to his own dispatches.
Read them yourself
The dispatches are in Christian Detmold's English of 1882, free at the Online Library of Liberty, and The Prince and the Discourses are at Project Gutenberg.
More about Machiavelli
- Did Machiavelli say “the ends justify the means”?
- Did Machiavelli say it is better to be feared than loved?
- Was Machiavelli tortured?
- What did Machiavelli see Cesare Borgia do?
- What was Machiavelli’s job?
- Did Machiavelli invent political science?
- Was The Prince meant as satire?
- The timeline
- The reading room: original sources online
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