207 - Miccolò Machiavelli

Episode Show Notes

Love poems that sound like a lovestruck teenager wrote them, but whose author has become a byword for scheming? In this episode we meet the real Niccolò Machiavelli, the Renaissance Florentine whose name became the adjective "Machiavellian." His reputation rests on one part of his most famous work, The Prince (De Principatibus), a treatise on gaining and keeping power that many see as the foundation of modern political science. But was Machiavelli really the ruthless opportunist we imagine, or something more complex?

We follow his life from his birth in Florence in 1469, through his years as Secretary of the Florentine Republic, his imprisonment and exile under the Medici, and his late success as a playwright. Along the way we find a loving son, a humorous friend, a rather unsuccessful politician and one of the most influential thinkers in Italian Renaissance history.

In this episode:

• Machiavelli's reputation: why chapter 15 of The Prince and its advice to lie, cheat and break oaths for the good of the state shaped how history remembers him, and how writers from the Enlightenment onward offered a less damning picture.
• Childhood in Santa Croce: legends about his birth, the possible origin of the family name ("bad nails"), and a neighbourhood brawl that taught him to watch conflict from a safe window.
• His parents, Bernardo and Bartolomea: a mother who wrote religious odes, and a father who loved books, embraced the new printing press and introduced him to Titus Livius (Livy).
• Secretary of the Republic of Florence: his appointment in 1498 after the fall of Girolamo Savonarola, and his close partnership with Gonfaloniere Pier Soderini.
• Diplomatic missions: meetings with Caterina Sforza, trips to France and Germany, his time with Pope Julius II, and his famous encounters with Cesare Borgia, who would become a protagonist of The Prince.
• The siege of Pisa: including his consultation with Leonardo da Vinci about diverting the Arno river.
• Mercenaries vs. a citizen army: why Machiavelli blamed the condottieri and the Papal States for Italy's divisions, and his plan for a Florentine militia.
• The Art of War, and the day Giovanni dalle Bande Nere put his theory to the test.
• The return of the Medici in 1512: his fall from office, arrest, torture and release after the Boscoli conspiracy.
• Exile and writing: how The Prince was dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, who was more impressed by a gift of hunting dogs.
• Machiavelli the playwright: the plot of his comedy La Mandragola (The Mandrake), a sharp satire of Florentine society, and his later play Clizia.
• His final years: brief favour with Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII, the Sack of Rome in 1527, and the ironic twist that left him out of favour with everyone before his death on 21 June 1527.

Fun facts from the episode:

• He was supposedly born with his eyes open and a full head of black hair.
• Historian Luigi Russo argued that blaming Machiavelli for the leaders who admired him is like blaming Newtonfor gravity.
• When a friar complained about strangers buried near his father's tomb in Santa Croce, Niccolò told him to leave them, since his father loved good company.
• One performance of La Mandragola drew such a big, unruly crowd that it had to be stopped between the fourth and fifth acts.

Visit his tomb

Machiavelli is buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. Nearby, in the Medici Chapels at San Lorenzo, you can see the Michelangelo-designed tomb of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the man who preferred the dogs.