MACHIAVELLI
Niccolò Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, to the notary Bernardo Machiavelli and his wife, Bartolomea de’ Nelli. The father’s meager salary was supplemented by income from renting out his land near San Casciano, a small village south of Florence. (Machiavelli was to write his major political and literary works there while in exile.) Machiavelli grew up in Florence’s Santo Spirito district, where in his short story “Belfagor” the archdevil took residence. Machiavelli’s father kept a diary for fourteen years, from 1474, when Niccolò turned five, which provides us with the only information about Machiavelli’s early years. The diary underlines the straitened circumstances of the family, but also provides an interesting insight into Machiavelli’s literary education. We learn that he studied Latin and that the family had an unusually large selection of books for the time: among them volumes by Livy Cicero, Aristotle, Julian—books that Machiavelli would analyze and comment on in his later works.
Machiavelli emerges from obscurity in 1498, when he was nominated Secretary of the Second Chancery, an office that handled matters relating to Florence’s territories and external affairs. His fortunes rose over the next decade, when he acted as diplomat, ambassador, and negotiator for Florence’s high-level relations with other Italian states and foreign powers. His analytical reports and discourses from these diplomatic missions give testimony to his political acumen and the extent of his experience.
At what seemed the height of his political career—he had become the foremost adviser to Piero Soderini, Gonfalonier of Florence—Machiavelli’s fortunes changed. In 1512 Soderini was ousted from office, the Medici returned to power in Florence, and Machiavelli’s illustrious political career came to an abrupt end. He came under suspicion of conspiracy against the Medici, and was imprisoned and tortured. He was subsequently exiled from Florence and sought refuge on the farm near San Casciano that he had inherited from his father.
As Machiavelli’s letters from this period attest, he lived in misery. But these years of exile were to be a period of incredible productivity. This period—1512–20—produced the works for which he is remembered today: The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War, and his plays The Woman of Andros and The Mandrake.
In 1520 Machiavelli grasped at the first real opportunity to reinstate himself as a central figure in Florentine politics. Lorenzo de’ Medici had just died, and his cousin Giulio de’ Medici (who was to become Pope Clement VII in 1523) became virtual ruler of Florence. Giulio de’ Medici, aware of Machiavelli’s expertise, sent him on a minor diplomatic mission to the city of Lucca. There Machiavelli wrote an astute analysis of Lucca’s political system and also the famous Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca. Giulio de’ Medici was impressed and offered Machiavelli a position at the University of Florence as the city’s official historiographer. The product of this appointment was Machiavelli’s last great work, Florentine Histories.
His career was showing every sign of reaching its former glory when the Medici government fell, and Machiavelli, in the final months of his life, found himself again out of favor. He died on June 21, 1527.