Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, born 3 May 1469 and dead 21 June 1527, was a Florentine who worked as a diplomat, wrote books, thought about philosophy, and recorded history during the Italian Renaissance. His most famous work is a political book called *The Prince*, which he wrote around 1513 but which only came out in print in 1532, five years after he died. People often call him the founder of modern political philosophy and political science.

For a long stretch, he held a senior post in the Florentine Republic, handling diplomacy and military matters. From 1498 to 1512, while the Medici family was out of power, he served as secretary to the republic’s second chancery. When the Medici took back control of Florence in 1512, he lost his diplomatic job. Soon after, he was wrongly suspected of treason and sent into exile. A year later, he started working as a political writer.

After his death, Machiavelli’s name became linked to the kind of ruthless actions he described in *The Prince*. In that book, he said rulers sometimes have to adopt unpleasant policies for the good of their political community, which went against older classical political ideas. He told rulers to do evil when political necessity demanded it—for instance, he argued that successful founders and reformers of governments should be forgiven for killing their political enemies. *The Prince* has stirred up controversy ever since it was published. Many readers see it as a manual for would-be tyrants on how to grab power and set up an absolute regime. Even in recent times, scholars like Leo Strauss have repeated the old view that Machiavelli was a “teacher of evil.”

Although Machiavelli is most famous for his work on principalities, scholars also pay attention to the republican ideas in his other political writings. His *Discourses on Livy* is said to have paved the way for modern republicanism. His works strongly influenced later Enlightenment thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James Harrington. Machiavelli’s philosophical ideas have shaped generations of philosophers, academics, and politicians, who have argued for centuries about what his ideas really mean.

Machiavelli was born in Florence, the third child and first son of a lawyer named Bernardo di Niccolò Machiavelli and his wife Bartolomea di Stefano Nelli. His family had been a second-tier elite Florentine clan in the late 1200s and 1300s, probably coming from south of Florence near Giogoli. They later became big landowners around Sant’Andrea in Percussina, possibly descending from minor feudal nobility in the Val di Pesa. Because his father Bernardo was born illegitimate, he could not become a full citizen of Florence or take part in politics. This also affected Niccolò, who likewise could not get full citizenship rights. Not much is known about Machiavelli’s early life. One main source historians rely on is his father’s diary, called the *Libro di Ricordi*, which was discovered in the 1900s. His family had a huge impact on him, and it is said that his father influenced Machiavelli’s later preference for a republican form of government. Little is known about his mother; historians have found only a few facts about her life, and no letters or written accounts survive to describe her.

Machiavelli grew up in a turbulent time. He was eight when the Pazzi family plotted to assassinate both Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, Florence’s de facto rulers, inside a church. Only Giuliano died, and the plot’s leaders were arrested and hanged. Machiavelli saw the violence that followed the failed conspiracy. As a young man, he listened to the long sermons of Girolamo Savonarola but was not swayed by them. Machiavelli said Savonarola colored his “untruths” to fit the situation. Machiavelli’s civil service began shortly after Savonarola was burned at the stake for heresy.

He was taught grammar, rhetoric, and Latin by a teacher named Paolo da Ronciglione. It is not known if Machiavelli knew Greek, though Florence was then a center of Greek scholarship in Europe. In 1494, Florence restored its republic and expelled the Medici family, who had ruled for about sixty years.

Right after Savonarola’s execution, Machiavelli got a job in the second chancery, a medieval writing office where he was put in charge of producing official Florentine government documents. Soon after, he was also made secretary of the *Dieci di Libertà e Pace*, the Florentine council that handled diplomacy and war. Why he was appointed remains a mystery to scholars: he was only 29, with no experience in law or public office.

Machiavelli started as a mid-level civil servant after Savonarola’s death, but his duties and position rose during Piero Soderini’s time as gonfaloniere of the republic. He became crucial to Soderini’s government, essentially acting as his right-hand man. This led many of his contemporaries to see him as just an extension of Soderini’s orders, which caused jealousy among various factions in the republic. Machiavelli was often the subject of gossip from some colleagues. Because he headed the Chancery of the Ten, this gave him a lot of influence.