Project Gutenberg Etext History of Florence and>, by Machiavelli
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HISTORY OF FLORENCE
AND OF THE AFFAIRS OF ITALY
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE
DEATH OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT
by Niccolo Machiavelli
January, 2001 [Etext #2464]
Project Gutenberg Etext History of Florence and>, by Machiavelli
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Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@ihug.co.nz
and Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
HISTORY OF FLORENCE
AND OF THE AFFAIRS OF ITALY
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE
by NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
With an Introduction by
HUGO ALBERT RENNERT, Ph.D.
Professor of Romanic Languages and Literature,
University of Pennsylvania.
PREPARER'S NOTE
This text was typed up from a Universal Classics Library edition,
published in 1901 by W. Walter Dunne, New York and London. The
translator was not named. The book contains a "photogravure" of
Niccolo Machiavelli from an engraving.
INTRODUCTION
Niccolo Machiavelli, the first great Italian historian, and one of the
most eminent political writers of any age or country, was born at
Florence, May 3, 1469. He was of an old though not wealthy Tuscan
family, his father, who was a jurist, dying when Niccolo was sixteen
years old. We know nothing of Machiavelli'
s youth and little about his
studies. He does not seem to have received the usual humanistic
education of his time, as he knew no Greek.[*] The first notice of
Machiavelli is in 1498 when we find him holding the office of
Secretary in the second Chancery of the Signoria, which office he
retained till the downfall of the Florentine Republic in 1512. His
unusual ability was soon recognized, and in 1500 he was sent on a
mission to Louis XII. of France, and afterward on an embassy to C�sar
Borgia, the lord of Romagna, at Urbino. Machiavelli's report and
description of this and subsequent embassies to this prince, shows his
undisguised admiration for the courage and cunning of C�sar, who was a
master in the application of the principles afterwards exposed in such
a skillful and uncompromising manner by Machiavelli in his /Prince/.
The limits of this introduction will not permit us to follow with any
detail the many important duties with which he was charged by his
native state, all of which he fulfilled with the utmost fidelity and
with consummate skill. When, after the battle of Ravenna in 1512 the
holy league determined upon the downfall of Pier Soderini,
Gonfaloniere of the Florentine Republic, and the restoration of the
Medici, the efforts of Machiavelli, who was an ardent republican, were
in vain; the troops he had helped to organize fled before the
Spaniards and the Medici were returned to power. Machiavelli attempted
to conciliate his new masters, but he was deprived of his office, and
being accused in the following year of participation in the conspiracy
of Boccoli and Capponi, he was imprisoned and tortured, though
afterward set at liberty by Pope Leo X. He now retired to a small
estate near San Casciano, seven miles from Florence. Here he devoted
himself to political and historical studies, and though apparently
retired from public life, his letters show the deep and passionate
interest he took in the political vicissitudes through which Italy was
then passing, and in all of which the singleness of purpose with which
he continued to advance his native Florence, is clearly manifested. It
was during his retirement upon his little estate at San Casciano that
Machiavelli wrote /The Prince/, the most famous of all his writings,
and here also he had begun a much more extensive work, his /Discourses
on the Decades of Livy/, which continued to occupy him for several
years. These /Discourses/, which do not form a continuous commentary
on Livy, give Machiavelli an opportunity to express his own views on
the government of the state, a task for which his long and varied
political experience, and an assiduous study of the ancients rendered
him eminently qualified. The /Discourses/ and /The Prince/, written at
the same time, supplement each other and are really one work. Indeed,
the treatise, /The Art of War/, though not written till 1520 should be
mentioned here because of its intimate connection with these two
treatises, it being, in fact, a further development of some of the
thoughts expressed in the /Discorsi/. /The Prince/, a short work,
divided into twenty-six books, is the best known of all Machiavelli's
writings. Herein he expresses in his own masterly way his views on the
founding of a new state, taking for his type and model C�sar Borgia,
although the latter had failed in his schemes for the consolidation of
his power in the Romagna. The principles here laid down were the
natural outgrowth of the confused political conditions of his time.
And as in the /Principe/, as its name indicates, Machiavelli is
concerned chiefly with the government of a Prince, so the /Discorsi/
treat principally of the Republic, and here Machiavelli's model
republic was the Roman commonwealth, the most successful and most
enduring example of popular government. Free Rome is the embodiment of