The Block and the Knife
26 December 1502 · Machiavelli, Florence's envoy, sent to report on Cesare Borgia's conduct
He is Florence's envoy, sent to watch a young warlord at close range and report what he is really like.
The warlord took a province that had been ungovernable for a generation, and handed it to a hard man with instructions to pacify it. The hard man did — with a cruelty that made the whole region hate the new regime instead of the old bandits.
This morning the hard man is in two pieces in the square, with a block of wood and a bloody knife laid beside him. The people have come to look. They are horrified, and they are also, unmistakably, satisfied — the man who did those things has been punished by the man who sent him, and the province is quiet, and everyone now knows who is actually in charge.
The envoy has to write the dispatch tonight. He can describe a murder committed by a tyrant to cover his own orders. Or he can describe what he actually thinks he just watched, which is a piece of statecraft so effective it frightens him.
Report it as the crime it was
Report what he actually sawOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Machiavelli reported what he saw, and eleven years later he put it in The Prince as a model — Cesare Borgia, the enforcer Remirro de Orco, the block and the knife, and the crowd left, in his words, satisfied and stunned. It is the passage that has damned his name for five centuries. He also wrote the Discourses on Livy, a much longer argument that a free republic is the best of all governments, and he served the Florentine republic for fourteen years. The Medici never trusted him for being a republican, and when the republic came back in 1527 the republicans passed him over for having courted the Medici. He died weeks later.
The philosophers weigh in
Call it murder"Harm you foresee is not harm you intend. But this man was not foreseen — he was used, as the instrument, and then used again as the apology. There is no reading in which that is not murder."
Report it plain"I wrote down what the Athenians said to the Melians without softening it, and men have called me cold for it ever since. Somebody has to record how this is actually done."