2. The title-page of one of the numerous early Venetian editions of The Prince.
As Machiavelli complains in the same letter, he is reduced to living ‘in a poor house on a tiny patrimony’. But he is making life bearable by retreating to his study every evening and reading about classical history, ‘entering the ancient courts of ancient men’ in order ‘to speak with them and ask them the reasons for their actions’. He has also been pondering the insights he acquired ‘in the course of the fifteen years’ when he ‘was involved in studying the art of government’. The outcome, he says, is that ‘I have composed a little book On Principalities, in which I delve as deeply as I can into discussions about this subject’. This ‘little book’ was Machiavelli’s masterpiece, The Prince, which was drafted — as this letter indicates — in the second half of 1513, and completed by Christmas of that year (C 303–5).
Machiavelli’s highest hope, as he confided to Vettori, was that his treatise might serve to bring him to the notice of ‘our Medici lords’ (C 305). One reason for wishing to draw attention to himself in this way — as his dedication to The Prince makes clear — was a desire to offer the Medici ‘some token of my devotion’ as a loyal subject (3). His worries on this score even seem to have impaired his normally objective standards of argument, for in chapter 20 of The Prince he maintains with great feeling that new rulers can expect to find ‘that men whom they had regarded with suspicion in the early stages of their rule prove more reliable and useful than those whom they had trusted at first’ (74). Since this contention is later flatly contradicted in the Discourses (236), it is hard not to feel that an element of special pleading has entered Machiavelli’s analysis at this point, especially as he anxiously repeats that ‘I must not fail to remind any ruler’ that men who were ‘content under the previous regime’ will always prove ‘more useful’ than anyone else (74–5).
Machiavelli’s main concern, however, was of course to make it clear to the Medici that he was a man worth employing, an expert whom it would be foolish to overlook. He insists in his Dedication that ‘to understand properly the character of rulers’ it is essential to be ‘a man of the people’ (4). With his usual confidence, he adds that his own reflections are likely, for two reasons, to be of exceptional value. He stresses the ‘long experience of modern affairs’ he has gained over ‘many years’ and with ‘much difficulty and danger’. And he points with pride to the theoretical mastery of statecraft he has acquired at the same time through his ‘continual study of ancient history’ — an indispensable source of wisdom on which he has reflected ‘with great care’ (3).
What, then, does Machiavelli think he can teach princes in general, and the Medici in particular, as a result of his reading and experience? To anyone beginning The Prince at the beginning, he might appear to have little more to offer than a dry and over-schematized analysis of types of principality and the means ‘to acquire them and to hold them’ (42). In the opening chapter he starts by isolating the idea of ‘dominion’ and lays it down that all dominions are ‘either republics or principalities’. He immediately casts off the first term, observing that for the moment he will omit any discussion of republics and concern himself exclusively with principalities. Next he offers the unremarkable observation that all princedoms are either hereditary or new ones. Again he discards the first term, arguing that hereditary rulers encounter fewer difficulties and correspondingly stand in less need of his advice. Focusing on new princedoms, he goes on to distinguish the ‘completely new’ from those which ‘are like limbs joined to the hereditary state of the ruler who annexes them’ (5–6). Here he is less interested in the latter class, and after three chapters on ‘mixed principalities’ he moves on, in chapter 6, to the topic that clearly fascinates him most of alclass="underline" that of ‘completely new principalities’ (19). At this point he makes one further subdivision of his material, and at the same time introduces perhaps the most important antithesis in the whole of his political theory, the antithesis around which the argument of The Prince revolves. New princedoms, he declares, are either acquired and held ‘by one’s own arms and virtus’, or else ‘through the power of others and fortuna’ (19, 22).
Turning to this final dichotomy, Machiavelli again exhibits less interest in the first possibility. He agrees that those who have risen to power through ‘their own virtú and not through Fortune’ have been ‘the most outstanding’ leaders, and he instances ‘Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus and others of that stamp’. But he is unable to think of any modern Italian examples (with the possible exception of Francesco Sforza) and the implication of his discussion is that such outstanding virtú is scarcely to be expected amid the corruption of the modern world (20). He accordingly concentrates on the case of princedoms acquired by Fortune and the aid of foreign arms. Here, by contrast, he finds modern Italy full of examples, the most instructive being that of Cesare Borgia, who ‘gained his position through his father’s Fortune’, and whose career is ‘worthy to be held up as a model’ to all those ‘who have risen to power through fortuna and through the arms of others’ (28).
This contention marks the end of Machiavelli’s divisions and subdivisions, and brings us to the class of principalities with which he is pre-eminently concerned. By this stage it also becomes clear that, although he has taken care to present his argument as a sequence of neutral typologies, he has cunningly organized the discussion in such a way as to highlight one particular type of case, and has done so because of its local and personal significance. The situation in which the need for expert advice is said to be especially urgent is where a ruler has come to power by Fortune and foreign arms. No contemporary reader of The Prince could have failed to reflect that, at the point when Machiavelli was advancing this claim, the Medici had just regained their former ascendancy in Florence as the result of an astonishing stroke of good Fortune, combined with the unstoppable force of the foreign arms supplied by Ferdinand of Spain. This does not imply, of course, that Machiavelli’s argument can be dismissed as having no more than parochial relevance. But it does appear that he intended his original readers to focus their attention on one particular time and place. The place was Florence; the time was the moment at which The Prince was being composed.