Machiavelli › A game
Play the Prince
In the autumn of 1502 Florence sent its chancery secretary to follow a man nobody could read. Machiavelli watched Cesare Borgia hold a state together, and watched him lose it. Now you are Borgia. Can you keep it?
Five decisions, each one a real moment from October 1502 to November 1503. After each, you see what Borgia actually did, what Machiavelli wrote home on the day, and what he made of it years later in The Prince.
The gold squares are your towns.
What happened to the Duke
Borgia never got his state back. Released the next spring, he went to Naples, where the Spanish arrested him and shipped him to Spain. He escaped, and was killed in a skirmish in Navarre in 1507.
Ten years later, in The Prince, Machiavelli reviewed all the Duke’s actions and could find nothing to blame, with one exception: the election of Julius II.
For whoever thinks that amongst great personages recent benefits will cause old injuries to be forgotten, deceives himself greatly.
— The Prince, chapter seven
And the man taking notes
Machiavelli never held a state. He was a salaried clerk, sent to listen and write home. In 1512 the army at Prato, much of it the militia he had raised himself, ran, the republic fell, and he was dismissed, then tortured with the rope. The Prince was written by a man who wanted his job back, out of what he had watched men like Borgia do.
The situations, Borgia’s choices and every quotation are from the book. What happens on the roads Borgia did not take is illustration, not history.
More about Machiavelli
The trial file
A short piece, free: what the documents in Galileo’s own trial file actually say, including the two pages that decided it. It isn’t sold anywhere, and it’s the fastest way to see how these books are built.
One email when there’s a new book. Nothing else, and you can leave any time.