The Prince

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4 Conquered by Alexander the Great, the Kingdom of Darius did not rebel against his successors after his death. Why not?

Introduction

Necessity. Must. Have to. Inevitably. Bound to. These are the words that recur insistently throughout The Prince. And then again: success, victory, prestige, achievement, and, on the other hand: loss, failure, defeat, death. These opposites are linked together by an almost obsessive use of because, so that, hence, therefore, as a result, as a consequence. From start to finish we have a vision of man manoeuvring precariously in a suffocating net of cause and effect. What is at stake is survival. Anything extra is luxury.

The Prince was written by a forty-four-year-old diplomat facing ruin. After fourteen years of influence and prestige, a change of regime had led to his dismissal. Suspected of conspiring against the new government, he was imprisoned and tortured. The rapid reversal of fortunes could not have been more devastating. Found innocent and released, he left town to live with his wife and family on a small farm. For a worldly man and compulsive womanizer, used to being at the frenetic heart of public life, this too felt like punishment. Idle and bitter, he tramped the hills by day and, in the long, empty evenings, began to write down some considerations on how to win power and, above all, how to hold on to it, how not to be a victim of circumstance. The result was a slim volume that would be a scandal for centuries.

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, the same year Lorenzo de’ Medici (il Magnifico) came to power. First male child after two daughters, Niccolò would grow up very close to his father, Bernardo, an ex-lawyer, mostly unemployed, with good contacts but no significant wealth or influence. If the son was to rise in the world, and he was determined to do so, he would have to count on his own wits and charm. Niccolò’s younger brother, Totto, chose not to compete and went into the priesthood. The boys’ mother, it should be said, was an extremely devout woman, a writer of religious poems and hymns. Their father on the other hand was sceptical, more at home with the sober works of Latin antiquity than the Bible. Niccolò may have taken his writing skills from his mother, but over divisions on religion he stood with his father and the Roman historians.

One says of Lorenzo il Magnifico that he ‘came to power’, but officially Florence was a republic and since Lorenzo was only twenty years old in 1469 he was far too young to hold elected office; an explanation is required. When, in the thirteenth century, the Florentines had thrown out the noble families who used to run the town, they introduced a republican constitution of exemplary idealism. A government of eight priori led by one gonfaloniere, or prime minister, would be elected every two months by drawing tags from a series of bags containing the names of well-to-do men from different guilds and different areas of town. This lottery would allow each major profession and each geographical area to be adequately and constantly represented. Every individual (of a certain social standing) could expect a brief share of power in order that no one could ever seize it permanently.

The system was unworkable. Every two months a new government might take a different position on key issues. The potential for instability more or less obliged whichever family was in the ascendant to step in and impose continuity. From 1434 on, the Medicis – first Cosimo, then Piero, then Lorenzo – had been manipulating the electoral process to make sure that most of the names in the bags were friendly to themselves and that all of those actually selected for government would toe the Medici line. Hence, although the Florentines still liked to boast that they were free citizens who bowed the knee to no man, by the mid-fifteenth century they were in fact living in something very close to a dictatorship. When the rival Pazzi family tried to assassinate Lorenzo in the Duomo in April 1478, it was because they saw no legitimate way of putting him in his place as an ordinary citizen. Machiavelli thus grew up in a society where the distance between how things were actually run and how they were described as being run could not have been greater. He was close to his ninth birthday when the captured Pazzi conspirators, one an archbishop, were hung upside down from the high windows of the city’s main government building and left there for weeks to rot. He would have understood very young the price of getting it wrong in politics.

The young Machiavelli might also have had reason to doubt that there was any meaningful difference between matters of religion and matters of state. The pope had backed the Pazzi conspiracy, priests had been involved in the assassination attempt and Lorenzo was excommunicated after it failed; the religious edict was a political tool. A war between Florence and Rome ensued and the hostility only ended in 1480 when Turkish raids on the southern Italian coast prompted a rare moment of unity in the peninsula. Years later, Lorenzo would so ingratiate himself with a new pope as to get his son Giovanni made a cardinal at age thirteen. From excommunication to pope’s favourite was quite a change of fortune and once again it was more a matter of politics than of faith. Nothing, it appeared, was beyond the reach of wealth and astute negotiation.

At this point Machiavelli was twenty-one. We know very little of his early adult life, but one thing he definitely did at least once was to listen to the fiery preacher Girolamo Savonarola, head of the influential monastery of San Marco. Savonarola’s was a different kind of Christianity: rather than the corrupt, pleasure-conscious world of the papacy, whose decadence had offered no resistance to the rise of Humanism, this austere monk represented an early manifestation of what we have come to call fundamentalism, a return to the biblical text as the sole authority on earth and a vision of the Church as embattled and defensive in a world increasingly interested in values that had little to do with the gospel story. With great conviction, Savonarola preached the virtues of poverty, advocated the burning of any book or work of art that was impure and prophesied doom for the sinful Florentines in the form of a foreign invasion. In 1494 his prophesy came true.

To get any grasp of Machiavelli’s diplomatic career and the range of reference he draws on in The Prince, one must have some sense of the complicated political geography of Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and of the profound change that occurred in the 1490s, a change that would determine Italy’s fate for the next 350 years.

For most of the fifteenth century there had been five major players in the peninsula: the Kingdom of Naples, the Papal States, Florence, Venice and Milan. Extending from just south of Rome to the southernmost tip of Calabria, the Kingdom of Naples was by far the largest. Wedged in the centre, with only precarious access to the sea, Florence was the smallest and weakest.

All five powers were in fierce competition for whatever territory they could take. Having lost much of their overseas empire to the Turks, the Venetians were eager to expand inside the northern Italian plain (Ferrara, Verona, Brescia) and down the Adriatic coast (Forlì, Rimini). Conscious of the size and power of a now unified France to the north, Milan hoped for gains to the south and west (Genoa) as a counterweight. Florence simply tried to get bigger in any way that was convenient. Over the previous century the Florentines had captured Arezzo, Pisa and Cortona and wasted huge energies in a series of failed attempts to conquer Lucca.

Rome’s aim under any pope was always to expand north and east into Romagna and Emilia, with a view to swallowing up Perugia, Bologna, Rimini and Forlì, a project that would bring it into conflict with both Venice and Florence. In the far south, Naples was governed by a branch of the house of Aragon, but the crown was contested by the Angevin kings of France and by the Spanish royal family (also Aragons) which already ruled Sicily.

So the scenario was complicated. Scattered between the large states were at least a score of smaller ones, some no bigger than a town and the surrounding fields, and all constantly under threat of invasion from one enemy or another. However, if the situation was rarely static, it is also true that there were few major changes. As soon as one power achieved some significant military victory, the others immediately formed an alliance against it to halt its progress. Florence, in particular, owed its continuing independence largely to the fact that if Venice, Milan or Rome tried to take it, the other two would at once intervene to prevent this happening. So for more than a hundred years a certain balance of power had been kept. All this ended with the French invasion of 1494.

The invasion was, as Machiavelli himself explains in The Prince, largely the Italians’ own fault. For some time the five states had been in the habit of frightening each other with the threat of foreign intervention. During the war against Rome and Naples in 1480, Florence had invited the French king to pursue his claim to the throne of Naples more actively. In 1482, during a Venetian assault on Ferrara, Florence and Milan had encouraged the Turks to step up their attacks on Venice’s maritime possessions. Venice had replied by inviting the Duke of Orleans to pursue his claim to Milan. In a war against Naples in 1483, Pope Innocent VIII had reminded the Duke of Lorraine that he too had a claim to the southern kingdom and invited him to send troops.

There was an element of bluff and brinkmanship in these threats, but in 1494 when King Charles VIII of France accepted Milan’s invitation to make good his claim to the crown of Naples, the bluff was called. Charles marched south with an army far larger than any Italians had seen in living memory. From that moment on, the peninsula would not be free from foreign intervention until the completion of the Risorgimento in 1870. Struggling to hold Naples, the French would invite in the Spanish from Sicily to split the kingdom with them, and the Spanish, after Charles I of Spain inherited the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, would eventually push France back north of the Alps, put Rome to the sack and dominate Italy for 150 years.

But that is to leap ahead. In 1494, when the French first marched through Lombardy heading for Naples, Florence was directly in their path and, what’s more, an ally of Naples. At this point Lorenzo il Magnifico had been dead for two years and the Medici regime was led by his incompetent son, Piero. So abject was Piero’s capitulation to Charles, so spineless his decision simply to surrender the city’s dependent territories, that the Florentines rebelled against him. The Medici regime collapsed and very soon the preacher who had been prophesying this disaster was made gonfaloniere, first minister, this time on a yearly, rather than a two-monthly, basis.

Girolamo Savonarola ruled Florence from 1494 to 1498, during which time the city passed from being one of the centres of Renaissance Humanism to a book-burning, fundamentalist theocracy. Realizing that Savonarola’s claim to be God’s prophet was a far greater threat to its authority than any Humanism, scepticism or eclecticism, the Church in Rome did everything possible to bring about his downfall and in 1498, having lost much of his support in Florence, the preacher was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. It was shortly after these dramatic events that Niccolò Machiavelli succeeded in getting himself elected to the important positions of Secretary of the Second Chancery (one of two key state departments in Florence) and, soon afterwards, Secretary of the Ten of War, a committee that dealt with foreign relations and war preparations.

Machiavelli was twenty-eight. We have no idea how he arrived at such appointments at this early age. There is no record of any special experience that would warrant such confidence in his abilities. But within months he was travelling to neighbouring states to represent Florence’s interests, and over the next fourteen years he would be involved in important, often long-drawn-out missions to the King of France, the pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, Cesare Borgia, Caterina Sforza and many others. In between these missions he was frequently and very actively engaged in Florence’s ongoing military campaign to re-take Pisa, which had regained its independence during the French invasion. Pisa was crucial to Florentine commerce in that it gave the town an outlet to the sea.

Introductions to The Prince generally play down Machiavelli’s abilities as a diplomat, presenting these years as useful only in so far as they offered him the material he would draw on for his writing after he had lost his position. Machiavelli would not have seen things that way. For more than a decade he was Florence’s top diplomat and proud to be so, and if the missions he undertook did not produce spectacular results this was largely because he was representing the weakest of the main states in Italy in a period of particular confusion and vulnerability that would eventually see four foreign powers militarily involved in the peninsula: France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland.

Savonarola had taken Florence towards an alliance with France; the priest’s successors followed the same policy, but without any clear vision of how the city might achieve stability and security in the long term. To make matters worse, having decided in 1502. that their gonfaloniere, or first minister, should be elected for life, the Florentines gave the job to Piero Soderini, an honourable man but chronically incapable of making any kind of bold decision. Machiavelli’s diplomatic career was thus mostly taken up in attempts to persuade surrounding and threatening states to leave Florence alone and not to expect financial or military help from her for their wars elsewhere; that is, as far as there was a discernible, long-term policy it was one of prevarication. Far from home, Machiavelli would frequently receive contradictory orders after he had already started negotiating. Arriving in foreign towns, he would find that his expense allowance wasn’t sufficient to pay couriers to take his messages back to Florence. Sometimes he could barely afford to feed and clothe himself. Such was the contempt of the more powerful monarchs that he was often obliged to wait days or even weeks before being granted an audience.

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 ‘realizing 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 power. 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.

Contents

Introduction