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Machiavelli ought to have known better than to tempt Fortune with such overconfident sentiments. For in May 1527 the unthinkable happened. During the previous year, Francis I had treacherously entered a League to recover the possessions in Italy which he had been forced to cede after his crushing defeat at the hands of the imperial forces in 1525. Responding to this renewed challenge, Charles V ordered his armies back into Italy in the spring of 1527. But the troops were unpaid and badly disciplined, and instead of attacking any military targets they advanced directly on Rome. Entering the undefended city on 6 May, they put it to the sack in a four-day massacre that astounded and horrified the entire Christian world.

With the fall of Rome, Clement VII had to flee for his life. And with the loss of papal backing, the increasingly unpopular government of the Medici in Florence immediately collapsed. On 16 May the city council met to proclaim the restoration of the republic, and on the following morning the young Medicean princes rode out of the city and into exile.

For Machiavelli, with his staunchly republican sympathies, the restoration of free government in Florence ought to have been a moment of triumph. But in view of his connections with the Medici, who had been paying his salary for the past six years, he must have appeared to the younger generation of republicans as little more than an ageing and insignificant client of the discredited tyranny. Although he seems to have nurtured some hopes of regaining his old position in the second chancery, there was no question of any job being found for him in the new anti-Medicean government.

The irony of it all seems to have broken Machiavelli’s spirit, and soon afterwards he contracted an illness from which he never recovered. The story that he summoned a priest to his deathbed to hear a final confession is one that most biographers have repeated, but it is undoubtedly a pious invention of a later date. Machiavelli had viewed the Church’s ministrations with disdain throughout his life, and there is no evidence that he changed his mind at the moment of death. He died on 21 June, in the midst of his family and friends, and was buried in the church of Santa Croce on the following day.

With Machiavelli, more than with any other political theorist, the temptation to pursue him beyond the grave, to end by summarizing and sitting in judgement on his philosophy, is one that has generally proved irresistible. The process began immediately after his death, and it continues to this day. Some of Machiavelli’s earliest critics, such as Francis Bacon, felt able to concede that ‘we are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do’. But the majority of Machiavelli’s original readers were so shocked by his outlook that they simply denounced him as an invention of the devil, or even as Old Nick, the devil himself. By contrast, the bulk of Machiavelli’s modern commentators have confronted even his most outrageous doctrines with an air of conscious worldliness. But some of them, especially Leo Strauss and his disciples, have unrepentantly continued to uphold the traditional view that (as Strauss expresses it) Machiavelli can only be characterized as ‘a teacher of evil’.

The business of the historian, however, is surely to serve as a recording angel, not a hanging judge. All I have accordingly sought to do in the preceding pages is to recover the past and place it before the present, without trying to employ the local and defeasible standards of the present as a way of praising or blaming the past. As the inscription on Machiavelli’s tomb proudly reminds us, ‘no epitaph can match so great a name’.

Works by Machiavelli Quoted in the Text

The Art of War, in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. A. Gilbert, 3 vols (Durham, NC, 1965), 561–726.

Caprices [Ghiribizzi], in R. Ridolfi and P. Ghiglieri, ‘I Ghiribizzi al Soderini’, La Bibliofilia, 72 (1970), 71–4.

Correspondence [Lettere], ed. F. Gaeta (Milan, 1961).

Discourses on the first Decade of Titus Livius, in Machiavelli, trans. Gilbert, 175–529.

The History of Florence, in Machiavelli, trans. Gilbert, 1025–1435.

The Legations [Legazioni e commissarie], ed. S. Bertelli, 3 vols (Milan, 1964).

The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca, in Machiavelli, trans. Gilbert, 533–59.

The Prince, ed. Q. Skinner and R. Price (Cambridge, 1988).

A Provision for Infantry, in Machiavelli, trans. Gilbert, 3.

Further Reading

Bibliography

Silvia Ruffo Fiore, Niccolò Machiavelli: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism and Scholarship (New York, 1990) covers the previous half-century of studies. For an analysis of my own approach see Roberta Talamo, ‘Quentin Skinner interprete di Machiavelli’, Croce Via 3 (1997), pp. 80–101.

Biography

The standard work remains Roberto Ridolfi, The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. Cecil Grayson (1963). Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton, 1989) is an unusual intellectual biography. John M. Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton, 1993) concentrates on the period in which The Prince was written. For the most up-to-date account see Maurizio Viroli, Il sorriso de Niccolò: Storia di Machiavelli (Rome, 1998).

The Political Context

For the period of Machiavelli’s youth see Nicolai Rubinstein, The Government of Florence under the Medici 1434–1494 (Oxford, 1966). On the 1490s see Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence (Princeton, 1963). On Machiavelli’s political and diplomatic career see the section ‘Machiavelli and the Republican Experience’ — essays by Nicolai Rubinstein, Elena Fasano Guarini, Giovanni Silvano, Robert Black, and John M. Najemy — in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1–117. On the vicissitudes of the Florentine republic during Machiavelli’s adult life see Rudolf von Albertini, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato (Turin, 1970), H. C. Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence, 1502–1519 (Oxford, 1985), and J. N. Stephens, The Fall of the Florentine Republic, 1512–1530 (Oxford, 1983).

The Intellectual Context

The essays collected in P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 2 vols (New York, 1961–65) remain indispensable. For the fullest survey of the intellectual life of the period see The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles Schmitt, Eckhard Kessler, Quentin Skinner, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge, 1988). For the classic account of ‘civic humanism’ see Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (revised edn, Princeton, 1966). See also Donald J. Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1969) and Peter Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton, 1998). For surveys of the political theory of the period see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1978) and The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1991).