He was put in charge of military arrangements for Clement in Florence. However, Clement foolishly fell for a ploy by his Roman enemies that resulted in his humiliation and the sacking of the papal palace and church of St. Soon after, Rome fell, and the great Catholic city was terrorized and looted by mostly German Protestant armies. This debacle, and the threat posed to Florence by the advancing forces of Clement's enemies, led the Florentines to depose the Medici family in Machiavelli, a staunch supporter and lifelong defender of the Florentine republic, was on the losing side once again, now suspected by the republicans for having been in league with the Medici.
However, he did not have long to dwell on the irony of his position. He died after an illness in June Machiavelli's most famous work was not formally published during his lifetime, although it probably circulated in manuscript copies. As evidence of its popularity, it went through seven Italian editions in the next twenty years. In , all of Machiavelli's works were put on the "Index of Prohibited Books," a list of books banned by the Catholic church for heresy or immorality.
This did nothing to dampen his popularity, and The Prince was soon translated into all the major European languages. Today, Machiavelli continues to be recognized as one of the first modern political thinkers and as a shrewd commentator on the psychology of leadership. Decennali , a long poem in two parts on the contemporary history of Florence. First Decennale , ; Second Decennale , or The Prince Il principe , treatise on leadership and political power, The Mandrake Root Mandragola , comic play, circa Mandrogola tells the story of young and beautiful Lucrezia, who is married to old and foolish Nicia.
Callimaco falls in love with Lucrezia and manages to trick Nicia into giving his full approval for their love affair. It is considered one of the best Italian comedies of this period. Discourses on Livy Discorsi sopra la prima deca ldi Tito Livio , analysis of the Roman republic, to Andria , comic play, circa Hostile English interpreters so effectively typified Machiavelli as an amalgam of various evils, which they described with the still-used term " Machiavellian," that fact and fabrication still coexist today.
Rarely, until the nineteenth century, did mention of The Prince elicit other than unfounded and largely unexamined repugnance, much less encourage objective scrutiny of its actual issues. As Fredi Chiappelli has aptly summarized: "Centuries had to elapse before the distinction between moral moment and political moment, between technical approach and moralistic generalities, and even between the subject matter of the book and the author's person were finally achieved.
Modern critics, noting these crucial distinctions, have engaged in a prolonged and animated discussion concerning Machiavelli's true intent in The Prince. An anomalous seventeenth-century commentator, philosopher Pierre Bayle, found it "strange" that "there are so many people, who believe, that Machiavel teaches princes dangerous politics; for on the contrary princes have taught Machiavel what he has written. Was the treatise, as Bayle suggested, a faithful representation of princely conduct which might justifiably incriminate its subjects but not its chronicler?
Or had Machiavelli, in his manner of presentation, devised the volume as a vehicle for his own commentary? Still more calculatedly, had the author superseded description in ably providing a legacy for despots?
A single conclusion concerning the author's motive has not been drawn, though patterns of conjecture have certainly appeared within Machiavelli's critical heritage. Lord Macaulay, in emphasizing the writer's republican zeal and those privations he suffered in its behalf, has contended that it is "inconceivable that the martyr of freedom should have designedly acted as the apostle of tyranny," and that "the peculiar immorality which has rendered The Prince unpopular According to Harold J.
Laski, The Prince "is a text-book for the house of Medici set out in the terms their own history would make them appreciate and, so set out, that its author might hope for their realization of his insight into the business of government. Macaulay has affirmed that the "judicious and candid mind of Machiavelli shows itself in his luminous, manly, and polished language.
Without looking for Italian prose he found it. For sheer volume and intensity, studies of The Prince have far exceeded those directed at Machiavelli's Discourses, though the latter work has been acknowledged an essential companion piece to the former.
All of the author's subsequent studies treating history, political science, and military theory stem from this voluminous dissertation containing the most original thought of Machiavelli. Less flamboyant than The Prince and narrower in its margin for interpretation, the Discourses contains Machiavelli's undisguised admiration for ancient governmental forms, and his most eloquent, thoroughly explicated republicanism. Commentators have noted the presence of a gravity and skillful rhetoric that at times punctuate The Prince but are in full evidence only in that work's final chapter, a memorable exhortation to the Medicis to resist foreign tyranny.
The Discourses also presents that methodical extrapolation of political theory from historical documentation which is intermittent in The Prince. Max Lerner has observed that "if The Prince is great because it gives us the grammar of power for a government, The Discourses are great because they give us the philosophy of organic unity not in a government but in a state, and the conditions under which alone a culture can survive.
For Machiavelli regarded comedy exactly as he conceived history: an interplay of forces leading unavoidably to a given result. Machiavelli's Mandragola, his only work in the comedic genre, clearly reflected this parallel. De Sanctis has remarked that "under the frivolous surface [of Mandragola ] are hidden the profoundest complexities of the inner life, and the action is propelled by spiritual forces as inevitable as fate. Milner discovered unpublished archival documents that shed new light on the moment which initiated the chain of events that led to the writing of The Prince.
Whilst working on the figure of the Florentine Town-Crier in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Prof.
The text of the proclamation, seeking information on Machiavelli's whereabouts and who might be holding him, had been known for some time.
However, using the information gathered from examining hundreds of similar proclamations made between and , Prof. The great republic of his own era had failed because the men entrusted with its liberties did not know how to fight for them.
He had seen his friend Soderini forfeit Florence by refusing to limit the freedoms ultimately employed against him by his enemies; that is, by trusting that goodness and decency could triumph over the implacable vices and envious designs of men. Yet he was not a monster, if one considered the question of morals honestly, in terms of the good actually accomplished rather than the reputation created for oneself.
Machiavelli asserts that Borgia had thus proved more genuinely merciful than the Florentines, who, guarding their reputation, had allowed the town of Pistoia to be destroyed by factional fighting rather than intervene with their own arms. So is he in fact a moralist? Or, heaven forbid, a saint? Machiavelli was a very precise writer, continually reworking his manuscripts to achieve a style that is as clear as daylight.
But the choice even of a word can amplify a thought in a significant way. Constantine is right to underscore it. But if they are his enemies and hate him, he must fear everything and everybody. In any case, neither prince saw fit to offer the author a job. Within the plan of the book itself, the final chapter envisions an end so important—the unification of the Italian states—that it justifies not only whatever means must be used to attain it but whatever language must be used to describe it.
The prose suddenly becomes effusive, lyrical, and determinedly rousing: the verbal equivalent of pennants flying, trumpets sounding. For Machiavelli is no longer justifying or advising but actively urging the prince toward a goal, and it is a goal much larger than personal power.
All doors will be flung open. What populace would not embrace such a leader? Still, he understood that many of his ideas, being so radically new, would meet resistance. To the culture at large, the danger was real. Although his ideas have drawn sporadic support throughout history—among seventeenth-century English anti-monarchists, among nineteenth-century German nationalists—it was not until the present age that scholars began to separate the man from his cursed reputation.
Leo Strauss, a few years later, claimed that Machiavelli intended his most outrageous statements merely to startle and amuse. There is today an entire school of political philosophers who see Machiavelli as an intellectual freedom fighter, a transmitter of models of liberty from the ancient to the modern world. Machiavelli may not have been, in fact, a Machiavellian.
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