Much like Orwell, Dickens and Kafka, poor Niccolò shares the distinction of being the second oldest author I know of, whose surname became an adjective everybody thinks they know the definition of…yet, the real person was nothing like it.
Most of this entry is based upon the great podcast Writ Large‘s episode covering The Prince. The host interviewed James Hankins, a History professor at Harvard who specializes in the Renaissance. According to Hankins and other experts, The Prince is an instructional manual Machiavelli wrote exclusively for Lorenzo and Giulian Medici when their family returned to power in Florence. It was a new take on past guidebooks which often promoted the naive and stupid litany that virtue and morality were connected to the natural world. Machiavelli changed the message to, “don’t be a sucker.”
In his own life, Niccolò was a pretty upstanding person given Italy’s situation in the 15th and 16th Centuries. He was born into a family with some clout, his father was a lawyer and his mother came from affluent Tuscans. This afforded him a good Humanist education: fluency in Latin, maybe Greek, taught all the key Greco-Roman texts Renaissance people were rediscovering plus some Math and business. Before getting involved with politics, he lived in Rome and worked as a banker.
What sucked was his hometown’s situation. For almost three centuries, Florence was an independent republic until the Medicis took over before he was born. They may have sponsored great art by Michelangelo, Da Vinci and all the heavy hitters we see in Art History classes but so have the Sacklers, Kochs and Rockefellers; in short they were rich, evil and not terribly bright.
The state we know as Italy since 1861, was just the name of a peninsula broken up into numerous city-states (usually the north), kingdoms (usually the south) with the Pope’s little fiefdom centered in Rome. Now Spain, France and the Holy Roman Empire chose to invade to show who had the biggest cock. Florence, Venice, Genoa and the other city-states scrambled to survive by either allying with an outside faction, the Pope, a fellow city or duked it out on their own. Venice was the most successful and cunning. I think being an island and having strong commercial ties to the Ottoman Turks were a big factor, primarily being the hub for selling other Europeans into slavery for the Turkish Empire.
Florence had the worst person possible at the helm when the invasions arrived, Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici aka, Piero the Unfortunate. Today we’d call him Piero the Dumbass or a former advisor to Donald Trump, for in 1494, Charles VIII and a frighteningly huge French army was “passing through” to go seize Naples. Armies in those days took everything in their path so Charles demanded Florence’s support and Piero stalled for a few days until he stated Florence’s neutrality. This pissed the French off so they massacred everyone in nearby Fivizzano. Piero then tried to mount a defense yet it was too late, the Florentine elite whose support was required and two of his cousins were siding with Charles. So Piero went to the French camp and conceded practically everything. Upon returning, those same elites openly turned on him. The Medicis were driven out of Florence, their homes looted and replaced with a weird theocracy led by a Dominican priest named Girolamo Savonarola.
Three years later, Savonarola was overthrown and executed and the Florentine Republic was restored. Machiavelli landed a spot as Il segretario dei Dieci della Libertà e della Pace. The contemporary English translation would be Undersecretary of State (America) or Deputy Foreign Minister (Europe). His superior couldn’t travel so he got all the great opportunities to visit the courts of the other powers: Rome, Madrid and Paris. He witnessed the brutality the Borgias in Rome and noted, “Well, they get results while we’d debate to death in Florence.” His experiences were noted in reports to the republic back home and became the foundation of his infamous book. Machiavelli also led the effort to build a resident-based militia to cut Florence’s dependence on mercenaries like the other city-states. He was right. Mercenaries in the 15th and 16th Century were often from Switzerland, England, Bohemia and German-speaking polities so their loyalty was always unreliable, especially when the enemy could poach your forces in the middle of a battle with promises of more money.
Sadly, the Medicis were reinstalled with the help of Pope Julius II and Spanish troops. The “president” wisely fled but Machiavelli stuck around. He was dismissed immediately as the Medicis dissolved the republic and banished him outside the city for a year. He didn’t have to move very far, his family owned a nice place outside the “city limits.” Then it got worse. The Medicis accused him of plotting against them (not true) and had him imprisoned and tortured with an ugly practice still used today called strappado; it’s a fave with the CIA, Israel, Turkey and Vietnam. After several weeks without a confession for the trumped up charges, they released him but never let him work in politics/government again, this left him broken.
Machiavelli then wrote The Prince for the two Medicis I mentioned early, hoping to get back into their administrations. They never bothered to read it and the manuscript was never published until his death. His life afterwards wasn’t miserable, he spent the last 14 years of his life traveling, writing popular plays (throughout Europe, not solely in Italian circles), composing poetry and participating in local intellectual round tables.
But it’s The Prince everyone knows. When the Reformation Wars later engulfed Europe, Protestant and Catholic sides accused each other of being fans even though they both did things Machiavelli described in detail. It was said to have influenced Henry VIII on his decision to establish the Church of England and Henry III of France to order the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Many intellectuals of numerous disciplines tip their hat to Machiavelli: Francis Bacon, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Baruch de Spinoza, David Hume, Adam Smith, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Rather disappointing you can’t easily find many German-speaking thinkers, just English and French.
Even though the book’s advice appears to be for a “prince,” America’s Founding Fathers were fans and interpreted its guidance as a manual for republicanism to fend off centralized rule from within as well as from external threats, John Adams especially. The Prince continues to be found within the libraries of modern-day tyrants, “statesmen” and defenders of big D Democracy. I’m positive Otto von Bismarck swore by it, the great unifier of Italy Giuseppe Garibaldi followed it and Abraham Lincoln read it at least once while trying to win the (American) Civil War. Hell, I bet the leaders behind the Meiji Restoration got a copy in Dutch or translated to Japanese. Lastly, Stalin’s copy was annotated which shouldn’t shock anyone. And don’t be surprised if it’s in the personal libraries of Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Javier Bolsonaro alongside their ideological “enemies” Luis Lula da Silva, Bernie Sanders, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel and Joe Biden. I wouldn’t put it past Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney of having well-worn copies. Boris Johnson and George W. Bush are too ignorant, incompetent and racist to bother. Trump and Reagan? They hated reading and only like books requiring crayons.
Niccolò was loved, respected and even a bit famous at the end. His tomb’s epitaph says…
TANTO NOMINI NULLUM PAR ELOGIUM
“So great a name (has) no adequate praise”
But America, The Book: A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction by the Daily Show Staff also has it right unfortunately…
“Call me a dreamer, but one day, my name will become an adjective for everything cynical and untrustworthy in human nature.”