A short life of the author
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was born in Florence into a family of minor Tuscan gentry. He became the most influential political thinker in Western history — a man whose slim treatise The Prince has shaped how rulers, revolutionaries, and political theorists have thought about power for five hundred years. His surname entered every European language as a synonym for cunning, but his actual thought is far more subtle, more republican, and more humane than the caricature suggests.
Life and Career
Machiavelli entered Florentine government in 1498, at twenty-nine, as Second Chancellor of the Republic — a position that made him responsible for diplomatic correspondence and military affairs. For fourteen years he was at the centre of Florentine politics, conducting missions to the courts of France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Papal States, and observing at close quarters the ruthless statecraft of Cesare Borgia, Pope Julius II, and the great powers of the Italian Wars.
His direct experience of power — not as a philosopher contemplating abstractions but as a working diplomat watching decisions being made under pressure — is what distinguishes his political thought from all previous political philosophy. He saw Borgia’s methods in the Romagna firsthand; he watched Louis XII’s strategic blunders in Italy; he observed how the Swiss infantry destroyed the armoured cavalry of Milan and France.
The Medici’s return to Florence in 1512 ended Machiavelli’s career. He was dismissed from office, briefly imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy (he was given the strappado — hung by his bound wrists from a rope), and retired to his small farm at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, seven miles south of Florence.
In exile, he wrote The Prince (1513, published posthumously in 1532), the Discourses on Livy (c. 1517), and the comedy La Mandragola (c. 1518, the finest Italian comedy of the Renaissance). He wrote The Prince in a few months of intense composition — in a famous letter to Francesco Vettori, he describes changing into formal clothes each evening to enter his study and converse with the ancients: “I feed on that food which alone is mine and which I was born for.”
He never regained significant political office. He died on 21 June 1527, a month after the final expulsion of the Medici — an irony he might have appreciated.
Major Works and Themes
The Prince is a handbook of twenty-six chapters addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, advising a ruler on how to acquire and maintain political power. Its revolutionary claim is that politics must be understood on its own terms — that the effective ruler must learn “how not to be good,” that fortune favours the bold, that it is better to be feared than loved (“if you cannot be both”), and that appearances matter more than realities.
The Discourses on Livy is a far longer and more substantial work — a commentary on the first ten books of Livy’s Roman history that amounts to a treatise on republican government. Machiavelli’s true political preference was for the republic, not the principality; he saw Rome’s republican institutions as the model for political liberty. The Discourses is the foundational text of modern republican theory.
La Mandragola is a brilliantly cynical comedy of seduction and clerical corruption that is still performed.
Critical Reception and Legacy
The Prince was condemned by the Church (placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559), attacked by moralists for five centuries, and misread as a manual of tyranny. In reality, Machiavelli inaugurated the modern understanding of politics as a sphere of human activity governed by its own logic — distinct from morality, theology, and philosophy. His influence runs through Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, the American Founders (particularly Hamilton and Adams), Marx, Gramsci, and every serious student of political power.
Key Works
- The Prince (written 1513, published 1532)
- Discourses on Livy (c. 1517, published 1531)
- La Mandragola (c. 1518)
- The Art of War (1521)
- Florentine Histories (1532)
Collecting Machiavelli
Collecting Machiavelli means collecting some of the most important books in the history of Western thought.
The first edition of Il Principe (1532, Antonio Blado, Rome) is one of the rarest and most desirable of all Renaissance printed books. It was published posthumously along with the Discourses. Copies are almost entirely institutional; the handful that have appeared at auction have brought $100,000–$500,000.
The Giunta edition of the Discorsi (1531, Florence) preceded the Blado Principe by a year and is the true first publication of Machiavelli’s political thought. First editions bring $20,000–$80,000.
Sixteenth-century editions of Il Principe from Venetian and Florentine printers are the practical targets for collectors, typically bringing $5,000–$30,000 depending on the edition, condition, and binding. The Testina collected editions (so called for the small portrait on the title page) are among the most attractive.
Later important editions include the Elzevier (Leiden, 1640s) and the major eighteenth-century scholarly editions. English translations — particularly Edward Dacres’s 1640 translation, the first in English — are collected as Anglo-American milestones.