Machiavelli: The Prince of Darkness

[The following is Episode 10 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

            For more than four hundred years, his name has been synonymous with cold, cunning, calculating evil.  He has been a dark inspiration to the theater’s cleverest and most dangerous villains, and he even had a special place of dishonor in Shakespeare’s plays.  The Church branded him an enemy, and declared that all of his writings should be destroyed.  But no witch, no heretic, no prophet of darkness has ever written so boldly against goodness, decency, and piety, and has had such an enduring influence as he.  He is remembered as a schemer, a manipulator, a man who did whatever was necessary to obtain power, and who did it well.  By the end of his lifetime, a special brand of evildoing was given a human name, Machiavelli.

            Who was this man, Machiavelli?  Many people know that he wrote a book called The Prince.  And many are aware that there was something about his writings that was, to put it mildly, cynical, and yes, maybe even a little evil.  The Prince does contain some rather blunt and irreverent axioms for rising to power, and it’s still not uncommon to find a young executive or M.B.A. student boast to his friends and co-workers that he’s read it, so that he might leave them in awe of his special and potentially dangerous knowledge, like a wizard who’s discovered some secret book on the black arts.  And The Prince has certainly attracted a dark and infamous following.  The Italian dictator Mussolini chose it as a topic for his doctoral dissertation, and it was studied by the Russian dictators Lenin and Stalin as well.  It was bedside reading for Adolph Hitler.  If a book can be judged by its more prominent readers, then this one has a very shady pedigree. 

            But what about its contents?  It has always been a simple matter to find quotations peppered throughout the book that seem to justify its bad reputation, as well as the infamy of its author.  In one passage, Machiavelli recommends that: “Men must either be caressed or annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones, the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance.”  And speaking on love and fear, he says, “One ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”   He also observes that “He who has good weapons will always have good friends.”

The Prince (Title Page of 1550 Edition)

            Now these are proverbs that one would never find in the Bible, or just about any other book, for that matter.  Just what kind of a person would write them, and what would compel him to do so?  It might surprise some to know that Machiavelli was not a prince – he wasn’t even a powerful nobleman.  Rather, he spent most of his career as a minor diplomat, working for the city-state of Florence where he lived, during the height of the Renaissance.  And to understand his writing, we have to understand the times, and the environment in which he worked and wrote.

            Late in the fifteenth century, when Machiavelli was born, Europe was emerging from the Middle Ages.  After many turbulent centuries of plague, war, and famine, civilization was regaining its footing, and even advancing.  The German principalities that had arisen on the old ruins of the Roman Empire had become, or were becoming, clearly defined nation-states, and two of these, England and France, were rising as particularly powerful and influential countries.  Portugal and Spain expanded the vistas of the known world, with their exploration and colonization of North America.  In Germany, the introduction of the mechanical printing press with a movable metal type would make possible a much wider availability of books that were affordable to a larger audience.  Now, at last, it seemed assured that the new civilization of Europe would not only rival, but surpass, the great civilizations of Greece and Rome that had preceded it.  Ironically, it seemed that Italy, where Roman civilization had arisen, was being left behind by the new one taking its place.  Rome had maintained a tenuous hold over the life, politics, and culture of Europe through the Church, but by the fifteenth century, popular dissatisfaction with corruption among the priests, bishops, and even the popes had become widespread, and the widening availability of the printed Bible led to interpretations of scripture that differed with official Catholic dogma.  Dissatisfaction and disagreement with the Church turned into open revolt during the next century, that was led by, among others, Martin Luther in Germany, King Henry VIII in England, and John Calvin in Switzerland.  Rome was losing its hold over the mind, heart, and soul of Europe, and with it, the one enduring link to its glorious past, when it was the center of power of the civilized world.  With the Reformation, the Germanic heirs to the new civilization were breaking this remaining chain to the Roman Empire that had once ruled them.

            Italy itself was militarily weak and politically divided.  Far from being the seat of an empire, it was just a collection of principalities: disunited, and occasionally warring amongst themselves, like the primitive cities of ancient Sumer.  Principal among these were Rome, the Kingdom of Naples, Venice, Florence, and Milan.  To the often hostile world that surrounded them, they could offer little resistance, and could only appeal to tradition, their link to a dimly remembered past, in order to obtain whatever respect and mercies that their external neighbors would grant them.  But along with this fading pedigree, the Italians had one other asset that would secure for them a new and respectable position in the new civilization that was growing up around them.  This was money.  For Italy was at the crossroads of west and east, and northern Italy in particular became a center of trade, and of diverse cultural exchange as well.  And here, in northern Italy, Florence would light the way that would lead to that great age called the Renaissance.

            With eighty banking houses, Florence was the financial capital of Europe.  One-fourth of its people worked in industry, and it was only the artisans, the skilled laborers and professionals, who were allowed to participate in its government.  But the real power lay in the hands of the most wealthy, and in the fifteenth century, the wealthiest citizen of Florence was Cosimo de’ Medici.  He was a tireless man, and while he could be ruthless to his enemies, it seemed that his greatest ambition in life was to put his immense wealth to good use.  In 1439, he sponsored the council of Florence, a meeting dedicated to the aim of reuniting the western Catholic and eastern Orthodox churches.  When Constantinople, the seat of the Eastern Church, fell to the Turks in 1453, many Greek refugees fled to Florence, remembering the hospitality that it had offered to their people fourteen years earlier.  And in their exodus to Florence, they brought with them manuscripts of ancients texts: writings of the classical age that had been unknown to or forgotten by the peoples of western Europe.  Cosimo de’ Medici became an ardent collector of these texts, and when his hunger for the printed page and the writings of ancient sages could not be satisfied, he spent part of his fortune in sponsoring living ones: philosophers, scholars, and poets, as well as artists.  One of these artists was Donatello, who was so well supported by Cosimo that it is said he kept his money in a hanging basket in his studio, and invited his friends to take whatever they needed from it and not to trouble him with their requests.

Some Sketches of Leonardo Da Vinci

            During the reign of Cosimo de’ Medici, in 1452, in a village sixty miles outside of Florence, the most famous son of the Renaissance was born, Leonardo da Vinci.  He was the illegitimate child of a peasant woman and a prominent Florentine attorney, but from his humble beginnings he would rise to leave an indelible mark on the new civilization, becoming, literally, that civilization’s first “Renaissance Man”.  He is best remembered as the artist, the painter of the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, but his talents spanned many fields.  His writings exceed five thousand pages, but he never finished a single book.  And the sketches of his inventions are still a marvel to behold, for here, centuries before they made their actual appearance in the world, are plans for a machine gun, a steam engine, a submarine, and a parachute.  He was fascinated with flight, and sketched out designs of mechanisms that might make artificial flight possible.  In a way, there is no better living symbol of the Renaissance, for here is a man who exhibited at least a superficial reverence and piety for the religious tradition of Christian Rome, while embracing a wider world of new ideas and innovations, a world that valued science and invention at least as much as it revered the past.

Raphael's The School of Athens

            As the Renaissance came into full bloom, Rome, too, would become a patron of the arts.  It was Pope Julius II who pressed the painter Raphael into service at the Vatican, in 1508, inducing him to adorn its walls with immortal masterpieces, such as The School of Athens, and, in the same year, Pope Julius bribed a reluctant Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo's "Creation of Man" (Sistine Chapel Painting)

But amidst these artistic glories and intellectual achievements, the city-states of Italy suffered a series of indignities at the hands of their neighbors.  In a sense, they brought these misfortunes on themselves, for after a century of squabbling with each other for dominance of Italy, they finally turned to outside powers for assistance.  It was a deal with the devil, or rather many deals with many devils, signed in pacts of blood, and the collective soul of the Italian Renaissance became the ultimate price.  Milan was conquered by France in 1500, Naples by Spain in 1502-1503, and Venice by the combined armies of the pope, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and Spain in 1508.  Florence had thrived under the benign dictatorship of Cosimo de Medici and later his grandson Lorenzo, “the Magnificent”, who had continued his grandfather’s policy of enriching the cultural life of his people, while squelching their political liberties.  Shortly after Lorenzo’s death, the leadership of Florence passed to his confessor, the Dominican monk Savonarola, an ardent republican and critic of the Medici overlords.  Savonarola’s great ambition was to turn Florence into a Christian commonwealth, where the most extreme powers of government would only be used to repress vice.  But in this high-minded quest, he gained more enemies than allies.  After all, in a land that reveled in its art, music, poetry and lusty romances, it seemed to many that a plan to exterminate sin was a cure that was worse than the disease.  Lacking popular support, formidable allies, or personal power, his project was doomed to failure.  As Machiavelli later explained, “Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus would not have been able to keep their constitutions observed for so long had they been disarmed, as happened in our own time with . . . Savonarola, who failed entirely in his new rules when the multitude began to disbelieve in him, and he had no means of holding fast those who had believed nor of compelling the unbelievers to believe.”  Savonarola’s final undoing came when he turned his moral indignation against Italy’s most hallowed sinner, Pope Alexander VI.  Savonarola was excommunicated in 1497, declared a heretic in 1498, seized by a mob later that same year, hanged, and burned.  Never again would moral reform find a prominent advocate in Florence.  But the dream of a republic lived on, and in the wake of Savonarola’s downfall another attempt followed.  It was during this time that a young Niccolo Machiavelli would find a career as a diplomat, in the service of the new government.  Over the next thirteen years, his missions would send him to the courts of the French King, the pope, and the German emperor.  He even tried his hand at organizing a citizen’s militia to defend Florence against foreign enemies: a bold attempt to break with the established practice of relying on paid mercenaries for protection.  But in 1511, Florence fell to French invaders, who abolished the republic and restored the Medici clan to power. 

Savonarola

When two republican conspirators were arrested by the new regime, a list was discovered that identified Machiavelli as a man who might be relied upon for assistance.  He was arrested, and interrogated under torture, but eventually cleared of all serious charges.  Nevertheless, he was removed from office and exiled from Florence, forced to abandon the career to which he had been so passionately devoted.  Ironically, it was at this point, when his professional life seemed finished, that he would embark upon a new career that would make him immortal.  In a letter to a friend, he described a typical day in his life as an exile, living on a small farm.  He would wake up at dawn, and go to the little wood to see what his woodcutters had done.  After some polite conversation with them, he would retire to a secluded spot to read the classics: Dante, Petrarch, Tibullus, or Ovid.  The reading would be followed by a short visit to the local inn after which he would return home for, as he put it, “a mediocre dinner with my brood”, that is, his wife and six children.  A second visit to the local inn followed, where he would spend the afternoon, in his words, “with these boors playing cards or dice.  We argue over farthings.”  But then, he added, “When evening comes I return to the house and go into my study.  Before I enter I take off my mud-stained country dress.  I put on my royal and curial robes and thus fittingly attired I enter into the assembly of men of old times.  Welcomed by them I feed upon that food which is my true nourishment, and which has made me what I am.  I dare to talk with them, and ask them the reason for their actions.  Of their kindness they answer me, and for two hours I forget all my cares; I no longer fear poverty or death: I am utterly translated in their company . . . From these notes I have composed a little work, The Prince, in which I probe as deeply as I can the consideration of this subject, discussing what a principality is, the variety of such states, how they are won, how they are held, how they are lost . . .”

            The Prince was intended to be a manual of leadership – a guide for taking, controlling, and maintaining a state, against any challenge from without or from within.  It contains practical military advice - like the warning against relying upon paid mercenaries for defense, and it has those generally cynical aphorisms that have made Machiavelli so famous, or rather, so infamous.  He says, for example, that a ruler risks personal ruin if he is too generous among his subjects, unless he can practice generosity with money that he’s taken from somebody else.  “Princes,” he advises, “should let the carrying out of unpopular duties devolve on others, and bestow favors themselves.”  He probably summed up the philosophy of this book best when he said, “A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good.  Therefore, it is necessary . . . to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not to use it, according to the necessity of the case.”  This was a radical approach to a very serious subject, and it was quite out of character with everything written before it.  After all, the exalted writings of earlier ages, whether philosophical, political, or even ecclesiastical, always discussed, in high-minded tones, the way that things should be, in an ideal republic, an ideal society, or an ideal church.  But in sixteenth-century Italy, the contrast between the writings and speeches of priests, nobles, and scholars, and their actual corrupt, lusty, and recklessly ambitious behavior must have been painfully obvious.  And now here was an author who had the audacity to write of things as they really were.  Machiavelli defended his actions this way:

But my intention being to write something of use to those who understand, it appears to me more proper to go to the real truth of the matter than to its imagination; and many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation. 

Cesare Borgia

Still, it is a little shocking to see him set up, as a sort of “role model” for success, the ruthless and illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia, a man who had no scruples to check his ambitions.  Machiavelli describes how Borgia, with the help of his father the pope, conquered the Romagna region in Italy, and then appointed a cruel administrator to keep it in check.  After this administrator had brought the region into orderly submission, and made himself sufficiently unpopular, Cesare had him cut into two pieces and left his dismembered body in a public square, to win the favor of the oppressed people.   Cesare relied upon either bribery, or assassination, or both, to keep his rivals in check, and may have even had a role in assassinating his own brother.  And, according to Machiavelli, he had developed a coldly methodical plan for continuing his rise to power in Italy, which consisted of four phases: 1) destroy the relatives of the ruling families which he had already despoiled, 2) gain the friendship of key Roman nobles, to keep whatever pope succeeded his father in check, 3) obtain as great a hold on the College of Cardinals as possible, and 4) gain as much power as he could before his father’s death so as to resist the first onslaught of a reaction.  Machiavelli tells us that Borgia was nearly successful in all of these designs, but was stopped by his own mortality, succumbing to a terminal illness shortly after his father died.  How could anyone admire such a man, let alone hold him up as an example?  Part of the explanation lies in the fact that Machiavelli was writing The Prince for one man in particular: Lorenzo de Medici, grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, nephew of Pope Leo X, and the new ruler of Florence.  In a sense, the book was an extended resume, intended to demonstrate its author’s wealth of practical knowledge in matters of politics, written by an unemployed diplomat who hoped to find a new position with the current head of state.  But it can also be read as an extended, impassioned appeal for some great man, perhaps this new de Medici ruler, to act boldly and unify Italy – through conquest, if necessary – in order to help her recover a political glory just like that artistic and literary glory that had been recovered in the Renaissance.  Because for Machiavelli, the artistic and literary genius that was being rediscovered and reborn in his day just made all the more plain the real tragedy of Italy in the dawn of the modern age.  Here were a great people, the heirs to one of the most glorious civilizations in history, forced to live at the mercy of foreign powers that were either unwilling or incapable of understanding their past and present greatness.  The Renaissance had brought Italy recognition, but it had not brought it respect, or independence.  Machiavelli had lived to see the rise and fall of republicanism in Florence as well as other Italian city-states.  To him, the conclusion was clear: freedom, prosperity, genius, cultural advancement, and liberality could not guarantee security, but a secure state could preserve its institutions, and if these institutions were liberal, as they had been during the glory days of the Roman Republic, so much the better, because such institutions tend to foster continued stability and prosperity.  This pervading idea underlying Machiavelli’s writing, to be strong first, and then liberal, is not really such an alien or shocking one.  To anyone living in the United States during the past century, it should sound very familiar.

            Lorenzo de Medici probably never read The Prince – he died shortly after it was sent to him.  And the final irony is that when a republican government was briefly restored, after his death, in Florence in 1527, it wanted nothing to do with Machiavelli.  It suspected that he had pro-Medici leanings, and rejected his application for employment.  He died later that same year.

            Of course, his legacy has survived, in his writings, although not always in ways that he might have wished.  In the years after his death, the name “Old Nick” was applied to both Machiavelli and the devil, and it was unclear to many which of the two had been named after the other.  His books were banned by the Catholic Church, but also condemned by Protestants as a probable inspiration for Catholic intolerance after the Reformation.  His name became permanently linked with a certain brand of unseemly behavior.  In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, written less than a century after his death, one of the characters asks, “Am I subtle?  Am I a Machiavel?”  And in any modern dictionary, one can find the word Machiavellian typically defined, as it is in Webster’s, as “of, like, or characterized by the political principles and methods of expediency, craftiness, and duplicity”.

Excerpt from a Modern Study Guide for Shakespeare's Play Othello

            But he had a much more tangible legacy in shaping the behavior of diplomats, statesmen, and even social reformers of later centuries.  One of history’s best examples of the successful Machiavellian appeared in France, in the person of Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII, whose policy secured absolute power for his monarch within the country, and made France in turn the supreme power of Europe.  When he came into office in 1624, a violent struggle was under way in Germany between Catholics and Protestants, and the conflict was expanding, drawing in neighboring nations sympathetic to the Protestant rebels.  For Ferdinand II, who headed the so-called Holy Roman Empire, which controlled most of the German-speaking lands of Central Europe, the conflict was a challenge to the supremacy of Catholicism, but also an opportunity – for with a complete victory over the rebels he might stamp out Protestantism and restore complete control over the princes within his dominion.  On the surface, it might seem that Richelieu, a Catholic Cardinal, would have been one of Ferdinand’s most ardent supporters.  But Richelieu was not just a Catholic, he was a Frenchman, and France was surrounded by powerful Catholic countries either directly under the control of Ferdinand II, or ruled by other members of the Hapsburg dynasty, the German royal family to which Ferdinand belonged.  A restored and strengthened Holy Roman Empire would have left France relatively weak in the midst of united and powerful neighbors. 

Cardinal Richelieu: Failed Catholic or Successful Strategist?

The war had been going badly for the Protestants, but it had taken a heavy toll on both sides, and had devastated Germany.  After seventeen years of conflict, the combatants were weary and ready for peace.  Here is where Richelieu found his opportunity.  France had been an idle spectator during the carnage of the war, and now, at the moment when it seemed that sheer exhaustion would bring about the war’s end, Richelieu offered to supply French armies to the Swedes, who had been supporting the Protestant cause.  Reinvigorated by French assistance, the Protestants were able to continue their struggle, prolonging the war for another thirteen years.  When it finally ended, in 1648, the balance of power in Europe had been radically overturned.  Germany, the arena of the conflict, had been its greatest victim.  At the beginning of the war, it had a population of 30 million persons, at war’s end, 12 million.  Two-thirds of personal property there was destroyed; art, architecture, and industry were swept away.  Educational institutions went into decline, as did public morality, and a land that had been one of the guiding lights of the emerging new civilization, and that had been on the verge of becoming a great nation-state in its own right, became instead a tombstone.  It would take more than a generation for the German people to recover, and it would take the rise of a diplomat as crafty as Richelieu - Otto von Bismarck - to bring about their unification into a state, over two hundred years later.  The Holy Roman Empire was another casualty of this “Thirty Years’ War”, emerging at the end of the conflict as little more than a loose confederation of independent states and cities.  France, on the other hand, had acquired new territory, and had become the dominant power of Europe.  It had done so through a brilliant, and yet truly Machiavellian, ploy – brought about by a Catholic Cardinal supporting Protestant forces at war with his nation’s Catholic rivals.  Richelieu’s accomplishments are probably best summarized in an epitaph allegedly uttered by Pope Urban VIII.  “If there is a God,” the pope said, “then Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for.  If not . . . well, he had a successful life.”  The Cardinal had no illusions about his own posterity.  He once wrote, “In matters of state, he who has the power often has the right, and he who is weak can only with difficulty keep from being wrong in the opinion of the majority of the world.”  It is a line that could have been taken right out of The Prince.

But decades before France’s ascendancy under the guidance of Richelieu, England laid its own course toward becoming a dominant power in Europe, under the leadership of Queen Elizabeth.  Elizabeth intuitively understood the principles of statecraft embodied in Machiavelli’s writings, cultivating favor and personal popularity among her subjects, while exercising swift and decisive attacks against her domestic enemies.  England amassed a powerful navy under her rule, and used it to cripple the power of the Spaniards, first by harassing Spanish shipping in the New World, and then by defeating the Armada that had been sent to invade England in 1588.   Like Cosimo de Medici, Elizabeth supported the growth of industry and commerce in her country, and became a patron of the arts.  It was during her reign that Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Christopher Marlow wrote.  In a sense, Elizabeth was a modern Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of war and wisdom, and patron of one of the most enlightened city-states in human history.  For Elizabethan England became a modern Athens, a seat of culture and learning, home to eminent persons of both poetry and state, and a dominant sea power.  The American colony that was named in Elizabeth’s honor during her reign, Virginia, seemed destined to share in the gift that this remarkable woman conveyed to her people, eventually becoming the birthplace of more United States Presidents than any other state, among them George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

Queen Elizabeth I

What, then, was the real message of Machiavelli, this man who gave practical advice to princes and dictators on how to obtain and secure power over their subjects, rivals, and enemies, but who yearned for the golden age of the Roman republic, when the rule of law provided for the welfare, stability, and individual rights of its subjects?  In spite of the image that has been portrayed by his detractors, he never advocated evil for evil’s sake.  His advice could be summed up in a very banal but practical prescription: When the rules of the game are stacked against you, then it is time to act outside of the rules.  And while this advice has certainly been followed all too well by some of the darker figures of our history, it was also practiced by the great American capitalists of the nineteenth century, who often subverted laws and conventional rules of fair play as they created new industries,  and even by many of the social reformers and revolutionaries in different ages.  It is reflected in the words of Malcolm X, when he talks of gaining justice “by any means necessary”.  It was practiced by other American radicals in the later twentieth century, such as Saul Alinsky, as he fought to rein in the abuses of powerful corporations.  It could even be said that Jesus and St. Paul acted outside the laws and traditions of their people, in the service of a higher cause, although in place of these, they substituted a life guided and inspired by the spirit of God.  Nevertheless, they never resisted or tried to subvert the political systems that controlled their lives, and even submitted in the end to a justice that unfairly condemned them, as did the Christian martyrs who followed their teachings.  Champions of other causes, too, have sought reform while acting within the laws of their place and time, regardless of how oppressive they were, men such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Machiavelli’s greatest legacy, and his greatest contribution to the science of politics, is that he based his theories and principles on a world that actually exists, not some ideal utopia which could only come about if everyone acted perfectly.  His was not a quest for some lost Atlantis, or New Jerusalem, but for a world where practical people could bring about practical results.  In this sense, he was a true herald of the modern age.  And at the same time that he was bringing about this revolution in political thinking, men of science were on the verge of changing society’s perception of the physical world.  In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus made the radical suggestion that the motions of the planets could better be explained by putting the sun at their center rather than the earth, a view that would be confirmed and popularized by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo during the next century.  And in the 1600’s, the English writer Francis Bacon argued that a systematic approach to scientific inquiry was the proper means of arriving at a true knowledge of the world, and that only this could overturn false knowledge that was based on popular prejudices and unquestioned traditional beliefs about reality.  While the Renaissance had recovered for the world the great thoughts of ancient minds, in the decades that followed, contemporary thinkers were paving the way for a new science, and a new civilization that would overshadow the one that had been nearly lost to history.

The Copernican Revolution

The Prince ends with a personal appeal to Lorenzo de Medici to be the savior of Italy.  Machiavelli writes:

Having now considered all the things we have spoken of, and thought within myself whether at present the time was not propitious in Italy for a new prince, and if there was not a state of things which offered an opportunity to a prudent and capable man to introduce a new system that would do honor to himself and good to the mass of the people, it seems to me that so many things concur to favor a new ruler that I do not know of any time more fitting for such an enterprise.  And if, as I said, it was necessary in order that the power of Moses be displayed, that the people of Israel should be slaves in Egypt, and to give scope for the greatness and power of Cyrus that the Persians should be oppressed by the Medes, and to illustrate the pre-eminence of Theseus that the Athenians should be dispersed, so at the present time, in order that the might of an Italian genius might be recognized, it was necessary that Italy should be reduced to her present condition, and that she should be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, and more scattered than the Athenians; without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, lacerated, and overrun, and that she should have suffered ruin of every kind. . . .

Behold how she prays to God to send some one to redeem her from this barbarous cruelty and insolence.  There is nothing more that she can hope for but that your illustrious house may place itself at the head of this redemption, being by its power and fortune so exalted and being favored by God and the Church, of which it is now the ruler.  Nor will this be very difficult, if you call to mind the actions and lives of the men I have named.

But the Medici clan would never answer Machiavelli’s call.  His call would be answered nearly three centuries later, by a man of Italian descent whose actions would exemplify all of the lessons of The Prince.  In his rise to power, this man would subvert the laws and customs of his time, setting them aside as unnecessary obstacles to his advancement.  But at the pinnacle of his success, he would institute new laws, striving to restore unity and order, not just to Italy, but to most of Europe, under his personal direction.  He would become the living fulfillment of all of Machiavelli’s hopeful prophecies, and would exemplify, more than any conquerors or statesmen before his time or since, both the merits and shortcomings of Machiavellian philosophy.  His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.