Niccolò Machiavelli

Tortured, Then Dedicated a Book to Them

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469 and spent fourteen years as its Second Chancellor, running diplomacy and raising a citizen militia to replace the mercenaries he thought worthless. He was sent as Florence's envoy to watch Cesare Borgia, a young warlord carving out a state in central Italy, at close range, and on similar missions to the courts of France and the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1512 the Medici, who had been driven out of Florence in 1494, came back, the republic fell, and he lost all of it. The following year his name turned up on a conspirator's list; the Medici had him imprisoned and given six drops of the strappado, and let him go still denying it. Exiled to his farm, he wrote The Prince — a short handbook on how power is really taken and held — and dedicated it to the family that had tortured him, hoping for work. He also wrote the Discourses on Livy, a commentary on the Roman historian's own history, arguing at far greater length that a free republic is the best of all governments — a conviction The Prince, written to win back a job, never mentions. The first is the one the world read.

Passed Over by Both Sides

He died in Florence on 21 June 1527, aged fifty-eight, after taking a medicine for a stomach complaint. Weeks earlier the republic had been restored — the thing he had wanted for fifteen years — and the new republicans passed him over for having courted the Medici. The Medici had never trusted him for being a republican. The Prince was printed five years after he was dead.