It is in the light of these frustrations that we have to understand Machiavelli’s growing obsession, very much in evidence in The Prince, with the formation of a citizen army. Florence was weak partly because of its size but mostly because it had no military forces of its own. It relied on mercenary armies which were notorious for evaporating when things got tough, before the gates of Pisa for example. A power-base built on an efficient and patriotic civilian army would give a diplomat like Machiavelli a little more clout and respect when he negotiated. Or so he hoped.
In June of 1502, four years into the job, Machiavelli met Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI. With his father’s support, Borgia was carving out a new state for himself on the northern borders of the Papal States and had just captured the city of Urbino to the east of Florence. Sent on a mission to dissuade Borgia from advancing into Florentine territory, Machiavelli was deeply impressed by the man. Seductive, determined, cunning and ruthless, Borgia was a leader in the epic mode. Certainly he could hardly have been more different from the diplomat’s dithering boss, Soderini.
Machiavelli was on another mission to Borgia in January 1503 when the adventurer invited a group of rebels to negotiations in the coastal town of Senigallia, then had them seized and murdered as soon as they were inside the town walls. Here was a man, Machiavelli realized, determined to take circumstance by the scruff of the neck. It was not so much Borgia’s willingness to ignore Christian principles that fascinated him, as his ability to assess a situation rapidly, make his calculations, then act decisively in whatever way would bring the desired result. This modern, positivist attitude, where thought and analysis serve in so far as they produce decisive action, rather than abstract concepts, lies at the heart of The Prince.
Meanwhile Florence continued to drift. Machiavelli was once again on the scene in 1503, this time in Rome, when Borgia’s empire collapsed after both he and his father fell seriously ill; legend has it that Alexander had accidentally poisoned them both. The pope died and the son lost his power-base. Three years later Machiavelli was travelling with the later Pope Julius at the head of the papal army when Julius demanded admission to the town of Perugia, walked in with only a small bodyguard and told the local tyrant, Giampaolo Baglioni, to get out or face certain defeat. Sure that Baglioni would simply kill Julius, Machiavelli was amazed when the man caved in and fled. Such were the pope’s coercive powers as he then marched north to lay siege to Bologna that Florence was once again forced to enter an alliance and a war in which it had no desire to be involved.
As Secretary of the Ten of War, Machiavelli enjoyed just one moment of personal glory, in 1509, when the citizen army that he had finally been allowed to form overcame Pisan resistance and took the town after a long siege. Given the many failed attempts to capture Pisa using mercenary armies, this victory was a powerful vindication of Machiavelli’s conviction that citizen armies were superior. It was also the only occasion in his fourteen years of service when Soderini took the initiative with success.
But in every other respect things went from bad to worse. Florence was living on borrowed time, its freedom dependent on the whims of others. Three years after the capture of Pisa, when Pope Julius, now in alliance with the Spanish, defeated the French at Ravenna, he immediately sent an army to Florence to impose a return of the Medici and transform the city into a puppet state dependent on Rome. After brief resistance, the Florentine army was crushed at Prato a few miles to the north of the city. Soderini escaped and the Medici returned. Machiavelli was unemployed and unemployable.
The scandalous nature of The Prince was largely determined by its structure rather than any conscious desire to shock. Originally entitled On Principalities, the book opens with an attempt to categorize different kinds of states and governments at different moments of their development, then, moving back and forth between ancient and modern history, to establish some universal principles relative to the business of taking and holding power in each kind of state. Given Machiavelli’s experience, wide reading and determined intellectual honesty, the project obliged him to explain that there were many occasions when winning and holding political power was possible only if a leader was ready to act outside the moral codes that applied to ordinary individuals. Public opinion was such, he explained, that, once victory was achieved, nobody was going to put the winner on trial. Political leaders were above the law.
Had Machiavelli insisted on deploring this unhappy state of affairs, had he dwelt on other criteria for judging a leader, aside from his mere ability to stay in power and build a strong state, had he told us with appropriate piety that power was hardly worth having if you had to sell your soul to get it, he could have headed off a great deal of criticism while still delivering the same information. But aside from one or two token regrets that the world is not a nicer place, Machiavelli does not do this. It wasn’t his project. Rather he takes it for granted that we already know that life, particularly political life, is routinely, and sometimes unspeakably, cruel, and that once established in a position of power a ruler may have no choice but to kill or be killed.
This is where the words ‘of necessity’, ‘must’ and ‘have to’ become so ominous. For The Prince is most convincing and most scandalous not in its famous general statements - that the end justifies the means, that men must be pampered or crushed, that the only sure way of keeping a conquered territory is to devastate it utterly, and so on - but in the many historical examples of barbarous behaviour that Machiavelli puts before us, without any hand-wringing, as things that were bound to happen: the Venetians find that their mercenary leader Carmagnola is not putting much effort into his fighting any more, but they are afraid that if they dismiss him he will walk off with the territory he previously captured for them: ‘at which point the only safe thing to do was to kill him.’ Hiero of Syracuse, when given command of his country’s army, finds that they are all mercenaries and ‘realiz ing that they could neither make use of them, nor let them go, he had them all cut to pieces.’
The climax of this approach comes with Machiavelli’s presentation of the ruthless Cesare Borgia as a model for any man determined to win a state for himself (as if such a project were not essentially dissimilar from building a house or starting a business). Having tamed and unified the Romagna with the help of his cruel minister Remirro de Orco, Machiavelli tells us, Borgia decided to deflect people’s hatred away from himself by putting the blame for all atrocities on his minister and then doing away with him: so ‘he had de Orco beheaded and his corpse put on display one morning in the piazza in Cesena with a wooden block and a bloody knife beside. The ferocity of the spectacle left people both gratified and shocked.’
It’s hard not to feel, as we read the chapters on Borgia, that this is the point where Machiavelli’s book ceases to be the learned, but fairly tame, On Principalities and is transformed into the extraordinary and disturbing work that would eventually be called The Prince. In short, Machiavelli’s attention has shifted from a methodical analysis of different political systems to a gripping and personally engaged account of the psychology of the leader who has placed himself beyond the constrictions of Christian ethics and lives in a delirium of pure power. For a diplomat like Machiavelli, who had spent his life among the powerful but never really held the knife by the handle, a state employee so scrupulously honest that when investigated for embezzlement he ended up being reimbursed monies that were due to him, it was all too easy to fall into a state of envy and almost longing when contemplating the awesome Borgia who had no qualms about taking anything that came his way and never dreamed of being honest to anyone.
At a deep level, then, the scandal of The Prince is intimately tied up with the scandal of all writers of fiction and history who in the quiet of their studies take vicarious enjoyment in the ruthlessness of the characters they describe - but with this difference: Machiavelli systematizes such behaviour and appears to recommend it, if only to those few who are committed to winning and holding political po
wer. The author’s description, in a letter to a friend, of his state of mind when writing the book makes it clear what a relief it was, during these months immediately following his dismissal, imprisonment and torture, to imagine himself back in the world of politics and, if only on paper, on a par with history’s great heroes.
Come evening, I walk home and go into my study. In the passage I take off my ordinary clothes, caked with mud and slime, and put on my formal palace gowns. Then when I’m properly dressed I take my place in the courts of the past where the ancients welcome me kindly and I eat my fill of the only food that is really mine and that I was born for. I’m quite at ease talking to them and asking them why they did the things they did, and they are generous with their answers. So for four hours at a time I feel no pain, I forget all my worries, I’m not afraid of poverty and death doesn’t frighten me. I put myself entirely in their minds.
In so far as The Prince remains a persuasive account of how political power is won and lost it is so because it eventually focuses on the mind, or, to be more precise, on the interaction of individual and collective psychologies, the latter fairly predictable, the former infinitely varied, the two together dangerously volatile. The book is not a careful elaboration of a rigid, predetermined vision. More and more, as Machiavelli rapidly assesses different kinds of states and forms of government, different contexts, different men and their successes and failures, he runs up against two factors that defy codification: the role of luck and the mystery of personality. By the end of the book he is beyond the stage of offering heroes and success stories as models, aware that if there is one circumstance that a man cannot easily change it is his own character: even had he wanted to, Soderini could not have modelled himself on Borgia, nor vice versa.
In particular Machiavelli is fascinated by the way certain personality traits can mesh positively or negatively with certain sets of historical circumstances. A man can be successful in one situation then fail miserably in another; a policy that works well in one moment is a disaster the next. Rather than one ideal ruler, then, different men are required for different situations. The only key to permanent political success would be always to adapt one’s deepest instincts to new events, but, as Machiavelli ruefully observes, that would effectively mean the end of ‘luck’ and the end of history.
Machiavelli’s own mind was deeply divided during the writing of The Prince and it is the resulting tension that accounts for much of the book’s fascination and ambiguity. On the one hand, as a form of private therapy, he was disinterestedly pursuing the truth about power and politics: to establish how states really were won and lost would give him an illusion of control and bolster his self-esteem. At the same time, and perhaps less consciously, he was vicariously enjoying, in the stories of Borgia and others, the sort of dramatic political achievements that had always been denied to him. In this regard it’s interesting to see how rapidly he glosses over Borgia’s abject fall from power, his arrest, imprisonment and death, almost as if the author were in denial about his hero’s ultimate fallibility.
Therapeutic as this might have been, however, at another level The Prince was clearly written for publication and meant as a public performance. Machiavelli loves to show off his intelligence, his range of reference, his clever reasoning. Even here, though, his intentions were divided and perhaps contradictory. At his most passionate and focused he was involved in a debate with all the great historians and philosophers of the past and determined to show his contemporaries that his own mind was as sharp as the best. But in a more practical mood Machiavelli was planning to use the book as a passport to get himself back into a job: so evident and compelling, he hoped, would his analytical skills appear, that the ruler to whom he formally gave and dedicated the book would necessarily want to employ him; hence the flattering tone of the opening dedication and the addition of The Prince’s final patriotic pages proposing that the ruler in question should be the man to rid Italy of foreign oppression.
Who was this ruler? Shortly before Machiavelli had been released from prison, Pope Julius had died and been replaced by Giovanni de’ Medici, il Magnifico’s son, the man who had become a cardinal at thirteen. This was March 1513. When he started work on The Prince some months later, Machiavelli had intended to dedicate the book to Giovanni’s brother, Giuliano, who had been put in charge of Florence after the Medicis’ return. However, when the effeminate Giuliano began to move away from politics and was replaced in Florence by his aggressive, warlike nephew Lorenzo, Machiavelli decided to switch the dedication to the younger man.
Thus far the writer showed himself flexible in the face of changing events. Yet there is something ingenuous and almost endearing in the clever diplomat’s miscalculation here. The brilliant reasoning required to convince yourself that you had got a grip on politics and history, the profound analysis that would demonstrate to your fellow intellectuals that you were as clear-headed as Livy, Tacitus and Thucydides put together, were not the qualities that a young and hardly well-read Medici prince was likely to comprehend, never mind enjoy.
Given the book in 1515, Lorenzo probably never opened it and certainly didn’t take time to study Machiavelli’s carefully crafted reflections. Then, even if he had read it, would Lorenzo, or indeed any other ruler, have wanted to employ a diplomat who had gone on record as saying that trickery was largely the name of the game and that though it wasn’t important to have a religious faith it was absolutely essential to appear to have one? Machiavelli should have been the first to understand that as an instrument for furthering his diplomatic career, rather than a literary and philosophical achievement in its own right, the book’s honesty would be self-defeating: the two goals were never compatible.
Surprised and disappointed by The Prince’s failure, Machiavelli went back to womanizing. Aside from routine whoring, he fell in and out of love easily, pursuing passion without discretion or restraint. And just as he had more luck with romance than diplomacy, he had more success when he wrote ironic, sex-centred comedies rather than candid but dangerous political analyses. In 1518 the first performance of his play The Mandragola, in which a young man invents the most absurd subterfuges to get a married woman into bed, won Machiavelli immediate celebrity; some years later Clizia, which this time has an older man hell-bent on having his way with a very young woman, confirmed his talent.
But literary success was not enough for Machiavelli. It was active politics that interested him, and, though he laboured for ten years or so on his Discourses on Livy, then on a long history of Florence and finally on a short work entitled The Art of War, it was his old job as the city’s principal ambassador that he always yearned for. Finally, in 1525, Pope Clement VII, alias Giulio de’ Medici (Giovanni’s cousin), drew the ex-diplomat back into politics, asking him for advice on how to deal with the growing antagonism between the French and the Spanish. As an eventual clash between the two great powers inside Italy loomed ever closer, Machiavelli was given the task of overseeing Florence’s defensive walls. When the crunch came, however, and the armies of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, now united under the same crown, marched south into Italy, they simply bypassed Florence, went straight to Rome and sacked it. It was an occasion of the most disgraceful savagery on a scale Italy had not witnessed for centuries. In the aftermath, the Medici regime in Florence collapsed and once again Machiavelli was out of favour. Overwhelmed with disappointment and in the habit of taking medicines that weren’t good for him, he died in June 1527, aged fifty-eight, having accepted, no doubt after careful calculation, extreme unction.
That there are many different roads to notoriety and that a man’s achievements may combine with historical events in unexpected ways, are truths Machiavelli was well aware of. So he would have appreciated the irony that it was largely due to Luther’s Protestant reform and the ensuing wars of religion that his name became the object of the most implacable vilification and, as a consequence, universally famous.
The turning point came in 1572. The Pr
ince had not been published in Machiavelli’s lifetime. After circulating for years in manuscript form, then in a printed Latin edition (still entitled On Principalities), it finally appeared in Italian in 1532, only to be put on Pope Paul IV’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1559, this partly in response to the prompting of the English cardinal Reginald Pole, who maintained that, written as it was by ‘Satan’s finger’, The Prince was largely responsible for Henry VIII’s decision to take the English Church away from Rome.
Meantime, in France, the conflict between the Protestant Huguenots and the Catholics was intensifying and would reach a head under the reign of the sickly young Charles IX, who for the most part was controlled by his mother, the Italian, indeed Florentine, Catherine de’ Medici, daughter of the same Lorenzo de’ Medici to whom Machiavelli had dedicated The Prince. Catherine had brought a great many Italian favourites into the French court, a move guaranteed to arouse anti-Italian feeling. In general, she sought to dampen down the religious conflict which threatened to tear France apart, but nevertheless she would be held responsible for the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 when thousands of Huguenots were murdered. One potential victim, Innocent Gentillet, escaped to Protestant Geneva and wrote a Discours contre Machiavel that was to set the tone for anti-Machiavellian criticism for decades to come.
Intended as an attack on Catherine de’ Medici and militant French Catholicism, and hence a defence of the Huguenots, the book described Catherine as a compulsive reader of Machiavelli and, playing on anti-Italian feeling, claimed that both queen and writer were representative of a callous and villainous trait in Italian national character. Listed out of context, the ideas developed in The Prince were schematized and simplified, allowing readers to imagine they had read Machiavelli himself when what they were actually getting was a travesty that legitimized any form of brutality and rejoiced in amoral calculation.