Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 2 The Adviser to Princes

Early in 1513 the Medici family scored its most brilliant triumph of all. On 22 February Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici set out for Rome after learning of Julius II’s death, and on 11 March he emerged from the conclave of cardinals as Pope Leo X. In one way this represented a further blow to Machiavelli’s hopes, for it brought the new regime in Florence an unprecedented popularity. Giovanni was the first Florentine ever to become pope, and according to Luca Landucci, the contemporary diarist, the city celebrated with bonfires and ordnance for nearly a week. But in another way the development was an unexpected stroke of good fortune, for it prompted the government to declare an amnesty as part of the general rejoicing, and Machiavelli was freed.

As soon as he came out of prison Machiavelli began scheming to recommend himself to the city’s new authorities. His former colleague, Francesco Vettori, had been made ambassador to Rome, and Machiavelli repeatedly wrote urging him to use his influence ‘so that I may begin to receive some employment from our lord the pope’ (C 244). However, it soon became clear that Vettori was unable or perhaps unwilling to help. Greatly discouraged, Machiavelli withdrew to his little farm at Sant’Andrea, in order (as he wrote to Vettori) ‘to be at a distance from every human face’ (C 516). From there he began for the first time to contemplate the political scene less as a participant than as an analyst. First he sent long and powerfully argued letters to Vettori about the implications of the renewed French and Spanish interventions in Italy. And then — as he explained in a letter of 10 December — he started to beguile his enforced leisure by reflecting more systematically on his diplomatic experience, on the lessons of history, and hence on the rules of statecraft.

_{2. The title-page of one of the numerous early Venetian editions of The Prince.}

As Machiavelli complains in the same letter, he is reduced to living ‘in a poor house on a tiny patrimony’. But he is making life bearable by retreating to his study every evening and reading about classical history, ‘entering the ancient courts of ancient men’ in order ‘to speak with them and ask them the reasons for their actions’. He has also been pondering the insights he acquired ‘in the course of the fifteen years’ when he ‘was involved in studying the art of government’. The outcome, he says, is that ‘I have composed a little book On Principalities, in which I delve as deeply as I can into discussions about this subject’. This ‘little book’ was Machiavelli’s masterpiece, The Prince, which was drafted — as this letter indicates — in the second half of 1513, and completed by Christmas of that year (C 303–5).

Machiavelli’s highest hope, as he confided to Vettori, was that his treatise might serve to bring him to the notice of ‘our Medici lords’ (C 305). One reason for wishing to draw attention to himself in this way — as his dedication to The Prince makes clear — was a desire to offer the Medici ‘some token of my devotion’ as a loyal subject (3). His worries on this score even seem to have impaired his normally objective standards of argument, for in chapter 20 of The Prince he maintains with great feeling that new rulers can expect to find ‘that men whom they had regarded with suspicion in the early stages of their rule prove more reliable and useful than those whom they had trusted at first’ (74). Since this contention is later flatly contradicted in the Discourses (236), it is hard not to feel that an element of special pleading has entered Machiavelli’s analysis at this point, especially as he anxiously repeats that ‘I must not fail to remind any ruler’ that men who were ‘content under the previous regime’ will always prove ‘more useful’ than anyone else (74–5).

Machiavelli’s main concern, however, was of course to make it clear to the Medici that he was a man worth employing, an expert whom it would be foolish to overlook. He insists in his Dedication that ‘to understand properly the character of rulers’ it is essential to be ‘a man of the people’ (4). With his usual confidence, he adds that his own reflections are likely, for two reasons, to be of exceptional value. He stresses the ‘long experience of modern affairs’ he has gained over ‘many years’ and with ‘much difficulty and danger’. And he points with pride to the theoretical mastery of statecraft he has acquired at the same time through his ‘continual study of ancient history’ — an indispensable source of wisdom on which he has reflected ‘with great care’ (3).

What, then, does Machiavelli think he can teach princes in general, and the Medici in particular, as a result of his reading and experience? To anyone beginning The Prince at the beginning, he might appear to have little more to offer than a dry and over-schematized analysis of types of principality and the means ‘to acquire them and to hold them’ (42). In the opening chapter he starts by isolating the idea of ‘dominion’ and lays it down that all dominions are ‘either republics or principalities’. He immediately casts off the first term, observing that for the moment he will omit any discussion of republics and concern himself exclusively with principalities. Next he offers the unremarkable observation that all princedoms are either hereditary or new ones. Again he discards the first term, arguing that hereditary rulers encounter fewer difficulties and correspondingly stand in less need of his advice. Focusing on new princedoms, he goes on to distinguish the ‘completely new’ from those which ‘are like limbs joined to the hereditary state of the ruler who annexes them’ (5–6). Here he is less interested in the latter class, and after three chapters on ‘mixed principalities’ he moves on, in chapter 6, to the topic that clearly fascinates him most of all: that of ‘completely new principalities’ (19). At this point he makes one further subdivision of his material, and at the same time introduces perhaps the most important antithesis in the whole of his political theory, the antithesis around which the argument of The Prince revolves. New princedoms, he declares, are either acquired and held ‘by one’s own arms and virtus’, or else ‘through the power of others and fortuna’ (19, 22).

Turning to this final dichotomy, Machiavelli again exhibits less interest in the first possibility. He agrees that those who have risen to power through ‘their own virtú and not through Fortune’ have been ‘the most outstanding’ leaders, and he instances ‘Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus and others of that stamp’. But he is unable to think of any modern Italian examples (with the possible exception of Francesco Sforza) and the implication of his discussion is that such outstanding virtú is scarcely to be expected amid the corruption of the modern world (20). He accordingly concentrates on the case of princedoms acquired by Fortune and the aid of foreign arms. Here, by contrast, he finds modern Italy full of examples, the most instructive being that of Cesare Borgia, who ‘gained his position through his father’s Fortune’, and whose career is ‘worthy to be held up as a model’ to all those ‘who have risen to power through fortuna and through the arms of others’ (28).

This contention marks the end of Machiavelli’s divisions and subdivisions, and brings us to the class of principalities with which he is pre-eminently concerned. By this stage it also becomes clear that, although he has taken care to present his argument as a sequence of neutral typologies, he has cunningly organized the discussion in such a way as to highlight one particular type of case, and has done so because of its local and personal significance. The situation in which the need for expert advice is said to be especially urgent is where a ruler has come to power by Fortune and foreign arms. No contemporary reader of The Prince could have failed to reflect that, at the point when Machiavelli was advancing this claim, the Medici had just regained their former ascendancy in Florence as the result of an astonishing stroke of good Fortune, combined with the unstoppable force of the foreign arms supplied by Ferdinand of Spain. This does not imply, of course, that Machiavelli’s argument can be dismissed as having no more than parochial relevance. But it does appear that he intended his original readers to focus their attention on one particular time and place. The place was Florence; the time was the moment at which The Prince was being composed.

When Machiavelli and his contemporaries felt impelled — as in 1512 — to reflect on the immense power of Fortune in human affairs, they generally turned to the Roman historians and moralists to supply them with an authoritative analysis of the goddess’s character. These writers had laid it down that, if a ruler owes his position to the intervention of Fortune, the first lesson he must learn is to fear the goddess, even when she comes bearing gifts. Livy had furnished a particularly influential statement of this claim in Book XXX of his History, in the course of describing the dramatic moment when Hannibal finally capitulates to the young Scipio. Hannibal begins his speech of surrender by remarking admiringly that his conqueror has so far been ‘a man whom Fortune has never deceived’. But this merely prompts him to issue a grave warning about the place of Fortune in human affairs. Not only is ‘the might of Fortune immense’, but ‘the greatest good Fortune is always least to be trusted’. If we depend on Fortune to raise us up, we are liable to fall ‘the more terribly’ when she turns against us, as she is almost certain to do in the end (XXX.30.12–23).

However, the Roman moralists never thought of Fortune as an inexorably malign force. On the contrary, they saw her as a good goddess, bona dea, and a potential ally whose attention it is well worth trying to attract. The reason for seeking her friendship is of course that she disposes of the goods of Fortune, which all men are assumed to desire. These goods themselves are variously described: Seneca emphasizes honours and riches; Sallust prefers to single out glory and power. But it was generally agreed that, of all the gifts of Fortune, the greatest is honour and the glory that comes with it. As Cicero repeatedly stresses in De Officiis, man’s highest good is ‘the attainment of glory’, ‘the enhancement of personal honour and glory’, the acquisition of the ‘truest glory’ that can be won (II.9.31; II.12.42; II.14.48.).

How, then, can we persuade Fortune to look in our direction, to pour out the gifts from her cornucopia on us rather than on others? The answer is that, although Fortune is a goddess, she is still a woman; and since she is a woman, she is most of all attracted by the vir, the man of true manliness. One quality she especially likes to reward is thus held to be manly courage. Livy, for example, several times cites the adage that ‘Fortune favours the brave.’ But the quality she admires most of all is virtus, the eponymous attribute of the truly manly man. The idea underlying this belief is most clearly set out in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, in which he lays it down that the criterion for being a real man, a vir, is the possession of virtus in the highest degree. The implications of the argument are extensively explored in Livy’s History, in which the successes won by the Romans are almost always explained in terms of the fact that Fortune likes to follow and even wait upon virtus, and generally smiles on those who exhibit it.

With the triumph of Christianity, this classical analysis of Fortune was entirely overthrown. The Christian view, most compellingly stated by Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, is based on denying the key assumption that Fortune is open to being influenced. The goddess is now depicted as ‘a blind power’, and hence as completely careless and indiscriminate in the bestowal of her gifts. She is no longer seen as a potential friend, but simply as a pitiless force; her symbol is no longer the cornucopia, but rather the wheel of change which turns inexorably ‘like the ebb and flow of the tide’ (177–9).

This new view of Fortune’s nature went with a new sense of her significance. By her very carelessness and lack of concern for human merit in the disposition of her rewards, she is said to remind us that the goods of Fortune are completely unworthy of our pursuit, that the desire for worldly honour and glory is, as Boethius puts it, ‘really nothing at all’ (221). She serves in consequence to direct our footsteps away from the paths of glory, encouraging us to look beyond our earthly prison in order to seek our heavenly home. But this means that, in spite of her capricious tyranny, Fortune is genuinely an ancilla dei, an agent of God’s benevolent providence. For it is part of God’s design to show us that ‘happiness cannot consist in the fortuitous things of this mortal life’, and thus to make us ‘despise all earthly affairs, and in the joy of heaven rejoice to be freed from earthly things’ (197, 221). It is for this reason, Boethius concludes, that God has placed the control of the world’s goods in Fortune’s feckless hands. His aim is to teach us ‘that sufficiency cannot be obtained through wealth, nor power through kingship, nor respect through office, nor fame through glory’ (263).

Boethius’s reconciliation of Fortune with providence had an enduring influence on Italian literature: it underlies Dante’s discussion of Fortune in canto VII of The Inferno and furnishes the theme of Petrarch’s Remedy of the Two Kinds of Fortune. However, with the recovery of classical values in the Renaissance, this analysis of Fortune as an ancilla dei was in turn challenged by a return to the earlier suggestion that a distinction must be drawn between Fortune and fate.

This development originated in a changing view about the nature of man’s peculiar ‘excellence and dignity’. Traditionally this had been held to lie in his possession of an immortal soul, but in the work of Petrarch’s successors we find a growing tendency to shift the emphasis in such a way as to highlight the freedom of the will. Man’s freedom was felt to be threatened, however, by the concept of Fortune as an inexorable force. So we find a corresponding tendency to repudiate any suggestion that Fortune is merely an agent of providence. A striking example is provided by Pico della Mirandola’s attack on the alleged science of astrology, a science he denounces for embodying the false assumption that our Fortunes are ineluctably assigned to us by the stars at the moment of our birth. A little later, we begin to encounter a widespread appeal to the far more optimistic view that — as Shakespeare makes Cassius say to Brutus — if we fail in our efforts to attain greatness, the fault must lie ‘not in our stars but in our selves’.

By building on this new attitude to freedom, the humanists of fifteenth-century Italy were able to reconstruct the full classical image of Fortune’s role in human affairs. We find it in Leon Battista Alberti’s Della famiglia, in Giovanni Pontano’s treatise On Fortune, and most remarkably in Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s tract of 1444 entitled A Dream of Fortune. The writer dreams that he is being guided through Fortune’s kingdom, and that he encounters the goddess herself, who agrees to answer his questions. She admits to being wilful in the exercise of her powers, for when he inquires, ‘How long do you remain kindly to men?’ she replies, ‘To none for very long.’ But she is far from heedless of human merit, and does not deny the suggestion that ‘there are arts by which it is possible for your favour to be gained’. Finally, when she is asked what qualities she particularly likes and dislikes, she responds with an allusion to the idea that Fortune favours the brave, declaring that ‘those who lack courage are more hateful than anyone else’.[2]

When Machiavelli comes to discuss ‘Fortune’s power in human affairs’ in the penultimate chapter of The Prince, his handling of this crucial theme reveals him to be a typical representative of humanist attitudes. He opens his chapter by invoking the familiar belief that men are ‘ruled by Fortune and by God’, and by noting the apparent implication that ‘we have no remedy at all’ against the world’s variations, since everything is providentially foreordained (84). In contrast to these Christian assumptions, he immediately offers a classical analysis of liberty. He concedes, of course, that human freedom is far from complete, since Fortune is immensely powerful, and ‘may be the arbiter of half our actions’. But he insists that to suppose our fate to be entirely in her hands would be ‘to eliminate human freedom’. And since he holds firmly to the humanist view that ‘God does not want to do everything, in order not to deprive us of our freedom and the glory that belongs to us’, he concludes that roughly half our actions must be genuinely under our control rather than under Fortune’s sway (84–5, 89).

Machiavelli’s most graphic image for this sense of man as the master of his fate is again classical in inspiration. He stresses that ‘Fortune is a woman’ and is in consequence readily allured by manly qualities (87). So he sees a genuine possibility of making oneself the ally of Fortune, of learning to act in harmony with her powers, neutralizing her varying nature and thus remaining successful in all one’s affairs.

This brings Machiavelli to the key question the Roman moralists had originally posed. How can we hope to forge an alliance with Fortune, how can we induce her to smile on us? He answers in precisely the terms they had already used. He stresses that she is the friend of the brave, of those who are ‘less cautious and more aggressive’. And he develops the idea that she is chiefly excited by, and responsive to, the virtus of the true vir. First he makes the negative point that she is most of all driven to rage and hatred by lack of virtú. Just as the presence of virtú acts as an embankment against her onrush, so she always directs her fury where she knows ‘that no dykes or dams have been built’. He even goes so far as to suggest that she only shows her power when men of virtú fail to stand up to her — the implication being that she so greatly admires the quality that she never vents her most lethal spite on those who exhibit it (85, 87).

As well as reiterating these classical arguments, Machiavelli gives them an unusual erotic twist. He implies that Fortune may actually take a perverse pleasure in being violently handled. He not only claims that ‘fortune is a woman, and if you want to control her, it is necessary to treat her roughly’. He adds that she is actually ‘more inclined to yield to men’ who ‘treat her more boldly’ (87).

The suggestion that men may be able to take advantage of Fortune in this way has sometimes been presented as a peculiarly Machiavellian insight. But even here Machiavelli is drawing on a stock of familiar imagery. The idea that Fortune must be opposed with violence had been emphasized by Seneca, while Piccolomini in his Dream of Fortune had even gone on to explore the erotic overtones of the belief. When he asks Fortune ‘Who is able to hold on to you more than others?’, she confesses that she is most of all attracted by men ‘who keep my power in check with the greatest spirit’. And when he finally dares to ask ‘Who is most acceptable to you among the living?’, she tells him that, while she views with contempt ‘those who run away from me’, she is most aroused ‘by those who put me to flight’.[3]

If men are capable of curbing Fortune and thus of attaining their highest goals, the next question to ask must be what goals a new prince should set himself. Machiavelli begins by stating a minimum condition, using a phrase that echoes throughout The Prince. The basic aim must be mantenere lo stato, by which he means that a new ruler must preserve the existing state of affairs, and especially keep control of the prevailing system of government. As well as sheer survival, however, there are far greater ends to be pursued; and in specifying what these are, Machiavelli again reveals himself to be a true heir of the Roman historians and moralists. He assumes that all men want above all to acquire the goods of Fortune. So he totally ignores the orthodox Christian injunction (emphasized, for example, by St Thomas Aquinas in The Government of Princes) that a good ruler ought to avoid the temptations of worldly glory and wealth in order to be sure of attaining his heavenly rewards. On the contrary, it seems obvious to Machiavelli that the highest prizes for which men are bound to compete are ‘glory and riches’ — the two finest gifts that Fortune has it in her power to bestow (85).

Like the Roman moralists, however, Machiavelli sets aside the acquisition of riches as a base pursuit, and argues that the noblest aim for ‘a far-seeing and virtuoso’ prince must be to introduce a form of government ‘that will bring honour to him’ and make him glorious (87). For new rulers, he adds, there is even the possibility of winning a ‘double glory’: they not only have the chance to inaugurate a new princedom, but also to strengthen it ‘with good laws, strong arms, reliable allies and exemplary conduct’ (83). The attainment of worldly honour and glory is thus the highest goal for Machiavelli no less than for Livy or Cicero. When he asks himself in the final chapter of The Prince whether the condition of Italy is conducive to the success of a new ruler, he treats this as equivalent to asking whether a man of virtú can hope to ‘mould it into a form that will bring honour to him’ (87). And when he expresses his admiration for Ferdinand of Spain — whom he respects most of all among contemporary statesmen — the reason he gives is that Ferdinand has done ‘great things’ that have made him ‘the most famous and glorious king in Christendom’ (76).

These goals, Machiavelli thinks, are not especially difficult to attain — at least in their minimum form — where a prince has inherited a dominion ‘accustomed to the rule of those belonging to the present ruler’s family’ (6). But they are very hard for a new prince to achieve, particularly if he owes his position to a stroke of good Fortune. Such regimes ‘cannot sufficiently develop their roots’ and are liable to be blown away by the first unfavourable weather that Fortune chooses to send them (23). And they cannot — or rather, they emphatically must not — place any trust in Fortune’s continuing benevolence, for this is to rely on the most unreliable force in human affairs. For Machiavelli, the next — and the most crucial — question is accordingly this: what maxims, what precepts, can be offered to a new ruler such that, if they are ‘put into practice skilfully’, they will make him ‘seem very well established’ (83)? It is with the answer to this question that the rest of The Prince is chiefly concerned.

Machiavelli’s advice to new princes comes in two principal parts. His first and fundamental point is that ‘the main foundations of all states’ are ‘good laws and good armies’. Moreover, good armies are even more important than good laws, because ‘it is impossible to have good laws if good arms are lacking’, whereas ‘if there are good arms there must also be good laws’ (42–3). The moral — put with a typical touch of exaggeration — is that a wise prince ‘should have no other objective and no other concern’ than ‘war and its methods and practices’ (51–2).

Machiavelli goes on to specify that armies are basically of two types: hired mercenaries and citizen militias. In Italy the mercenary system was almost universally employed, but Machiavelli proceeds in chapter 12 to launch an all-out attack on it. ‘For many years’ the Italians have been ‘controlled by mercenary armies’ and the results have been appalling: the entire peninsula ‘has been overrun by Charles, plundered by Louis, ravaged by Ferdinand and treated with contempt by the Swiss’ (47). Nor could anything better have been expected, for all mercenaries ‘are useless and dangerous’. They are ‘disunited, ambitious, undisciplined and treacherous’ and their capacity to ruin you ‘is only postponed until the time comes when they are required to fight’ (43). To Machiavelli the implications are obvious, and he states them with great force in chapter 13. Wise princes will always ‘avoid using these troops and form armies composed of their own men’. So strongly does he feel this that he even adds the almost absurd claim that they will ‘prefer to lose using their own troops rather than to conquer through using foreign troops’ (49).

Such an intense vehemence of tone stands in need of some explanation, especially in view of the fact that most historians have concluded that the mercenary system usually worked quite effectively. One possibility is that Machiavelli was simply following a literary tradition at this point. The contention that true citizenship involves the bearing of arms had been emphasized by Livy and Polybius as well as Aristotle, and taken over by several generations of Florentine humanists after Leonardo Bruni and his disciples had revived the argument. It would be very unusual, however, for Machiavelli to follow even his most cherished authorities in such a slavish way. It seems more likely that, although he mounts a general attack on hired soldiers, he may have been thinking in particular about the misfortunes of his native city, which undoubtedly suffered a series of humiliations at the hands of its mercenary commanders in the course of the protracted war against Pisa. Not only was the campaign of 1500 a complete disaster, but a similar fiasco resulted when Florence launched a fresh offensive in 1505: the captains of ten mercenary companies mutinied as soon as the assault began, and within a week it had to be abandoned.

As we have seen, Machiavelli had been shocked to discover, at the time of the 1500 débâcle, that the French regarded the Florentines with derision because of their military incompetence, and especially because of their inability to reduce Pisa to obedience. After the renewed failure of 1505, he took the matter into his own hands and drew up a detailed plan for the replacement of Florence’s hired troops with a citizen militia. The great council provisionally accepted the idea in December 1505, and Machiavelli was authorized to begin recruiting. By the following February he was ready to hold his first parade in the city, an occasion watched with great admiration by the diarist Luca Landucci, who recorded that ‘this was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence’.[4] During the summer of 1506 Machiavelli wrote A Provision for Infantry, emphasizing ‘how little hope it is possible to place in foreign and hired arms’, and arguing that the city ought instead to be ‘armed with her own weapons and with her own men’ (3). By the end of the year, the great council was finally convinced. A new government committee — the Nine of the Militia — was set up, Machiavelli was elected its secretary, and one of the most cherished ideals of Florentine humanism became a reality.

One might have supposed that Machiavelli’s ardour for his militia-men would have cooled as a result of their disastrous showing in 1512, when they were sent to defend Prato and were effortlessly brushed aside by the advancing Spanish infantry. But in fact his enthusiasm remained undimmed. A year later, we find him assuring the Medici at the end of The Prince that what they must be sure to do ‘above all else’ is to equip Florence with her own armies (90). When he published his Art of War in 1521 — his only treatise on statecraft to be printed during his lifetime — he continued to reiterate the same arguments. The whole of Book I is given over to vindicating ‘the method of the citizen army’ against those who have doubted its usefulness (580). Machiavelli allows, of course, that such troops are far from invincible, but he still insists on their superiority over any other type of force (585). He concludes with the extravagant assertion that to speak of a wise man finding fault with the idea of a citizen army is simply to utter a contradiction (583).

We can now understand why Machiavelli felt so impressed by Cesare Borgia as a military commander, and asserted in The Prince that no better precepts could be offered to a new ruler than the example of the duke’s conduct (23). For Machiavelli had been present, as we have seen, when the duke made the ruthless decision to eliminate his mercenary lieutenants and replace them with his own troops. This daring strategy appears to have had a decisive impact on the formation of Machiavelli’s ideas. He reverts to it as soon as he raises the question of military policy in chapter 13 of The Prince, treating it as an exemplary illustration of the measures that any new ruler ought to adopt. Borgia is first of all praised for having recognized without hesitation that mercenary leaders are dangerously disloyal and deserve to be mercilessly destroyed. And he is even more fulsomely commended for having grasped the basic lesson that any new prince needs to learn if he wishes to maintain his state: he must stop relying on Fortune and foreign arms, raise soldiers of his own, and make himself ‘complete master of his own forces’ (25–6, 49).

Arms and the man: these are Machiavelli’s two great themes in The Prince. The other lesson he accordingly wishes to bring home to the rulers of his age is that, in addition to having a sound army, a prince who aims to scale the heights of glory must cultivate the right qualities of princely leadership. The nature of these qualities had already been influentially analysed by the Roman moralists. They had argued in the first place that all great leaders need to some extent to be fortunate. For unless Fortune happens to smile, no amount of unaided human effort can hope to bring us to our highest goals. As we have seen, however, they also maintained that a special range of characteristics — those of the vir — tend to attract the favourable attentions of Fortune, and in this way almost guarantee us the attainment of honour, glory and fame. The assumptions underlying this belief are best summarized by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations. He declares that, if we act from a thirst for virtus without any thought of winning glory as a result, this will give us the best chance of winning glory as well, provided that Fortune smiles; for glory is virtus rewarded (I.38.91).

This analysis was taken over without alteration by the humanists of Renaissance Italy. By the end of the fifteenth century, an extensive genre of humanist advice books for princes had grown up, and had begun to reach an unprecedentedly wide audience through the new medium of print. Such distinguished writers as Bartolomeo Sacchi, Giovanni Pontano, and Francesco Patrizi all wrote treatises for the guidance of new rulers, all of which were founded on the same basic principle: that the possession of virtus is the key to princely success. As Pontano rather grandly proclaims in his tract on The Prince, any ruler who wishes to attain his noblest ends ‘must rouse himself to follow the dictates of virtus’ in all his public acts. Virtus is ‘the most splendid thing in the world’, more magnificent even than the sun, for ‘the blind cannot see the sun’ whereas ‘even they can see virtus as plainly as possible’.[5]

Machiavelli reiterates precisely the same beliefs about the relations between virtú, Fortune, and the achievement of princely goals. He first makes these humanist allegiances clear in chapter 6 of The Prince, in which he argues that ‘in a completely new principality, where there is a new ruler, the difficulty he will have in maintaining it’ will depend basically on whether he is ‘more or less virtuoso’ (19). This is later corroborated in chapter 24, the aim of which is to explain ‘Why the rulers of Italy have lost their states’ (83). Machiavelli insists that they should not blame Fortune for their disgrace, because ‘she only shows her power’ when men of virtú are not prepared to resist her (84, 85). Their losses are simply due to their failure to recognize that the only ‘effective, certain and lasting’ defences are those based on your own virtú (84). The role of virtú is again underlined in chapter 26, the impassioned ‘Exhortation’ to liberate Italy that brings The Prince to an end. At this point Machiavelli reverts to the incomparable leaders praised in chapter 6 for their ‘outstanding virtú’ — Moses, Cyrus, and Theseus (20). He implies that nothing less than a union of their astonishing abilities with the greatest good Fortune will enable Italy to be saved. And he adds — in an uncharacteristic moment of flattery — that the glorious family of the Medici luckily possess all the requisite qualities: they have tremendous virtú; they are immensely favoured by Fortune; and they are no less ‘favoured by God and by the Church’ (88).

It is often complained that Machiavelli fails to provide any definition of virtú, and even that he is innocent of any systematic use of the word. But it will now be evident that he uses the term with complete consistency. Following his classical and humanist authorities, he treats it as that quality which enables a prince to withstand the blows of Fortune, to attract the goddess’s favour, and to rise in consequence to the heights of princely fame, winning honour and glory for himself and security for his government.

It still remains, however, to consider what particular characteristics are to be expected in a man of virtuoso capacities. The Roman moralists had bequeathed a complex analysis of the concept of virtus, generally picturing the true vir as the possessor of three distinct yet affiliated sets of qualities. They took him to be endowed in the first place with the four ‘cardinal’ virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and temperance — the virtues that Cicero (following Plato) had begun by singling out in the opening book of De Officiis. But they also credited him with an additional range of qualities that later came to be regarded as peculiarly ‘princely’ in nature. The chief of these — the pivotal virtue of Cicero’s De Officiis — was what Cicero called ‘honesty’, meaning a willingness to keep faith and deal honourably with all men at all times. This was felt to need supplementing by two further attributes, both of which were described in De Officiis, but were more extensively analysed by Seneca, who devoted special treatises to each of them. One was princely magnanimity, the theme of Seneca’s On Clemency; the other was liberality, one of the major topics discussed in Seneca’s On Benefits. Finally, the true vir was said to be characterized by his steady recognition of the fact that, if we wish to reach the goals of honour and glory, we must always be sure to behave as virtuously as possible. This contention — that it is always rational to be moral — lies at the heart of Cicero’s De Officiis. He observes in Book II that many men believe ‘that a thing may be morally right without being expedient, and expedient without being morally right’. But this is an illusion, for it is only by moral methods that we can hope to attain the objects of our desires. Any appearances to the contrary are wholly deceptive, for expediency can never conflict with moral rectitude (II.3.9–10).

This analysis was again adopted in its entirety by the writers of advice books for Renaissance princes. They made it their governing assumption that the general concept of virtus must refer to the complete list of cardinal and princely virtues, a list they proceeded to amplify and subdivide with so much attention to nuance that, in a treatise such as Patrizi’s on The Education of the King, we find the overarching idea of virtus separated out into a series of no less than forty moral virtues which the ruler is expected to acquire. Next, they unhesitatingly endorsed the contention that the rational course of action for the prince to follow will always be the moral one, arguing the point with so much force that they eventually made it proverbial to say that ‘honesty is the best policy’. And finally, they contributed a specifically Christian objection to any divorce between expediency and the moral realm. They insisted that, even if we succeed in advancing our interests by perpetrating injustices in this present life, we can still expect to find these apparent advantages cancelled out when we are justly visited with divine retribution in the life to come.

If we examine the moral treatises of Machiavelli’s contemporaries we find these arguments tirelessly reiterated. But when we turn to The Prince we find this aspect of humanist morality suddenly and violently overturned. The upheaval begins in chapter 15, when Machiavelli starts to discuss the princely virtues and vices, and quietly warns us that ‘I am well aware that many people have written about this subject’, but that ‘what I have to say differs from the precepts offered by others’ (54). He begins by alluding to the familiar humanist commonplaces: that there is a special group of princely virtues; that these include the need to be liberal, merciful, and truthful; and that all rulers have a duty to cultivate these qualities. Next he concedes — still in orthodox humanist vein — that ‘it would be most praiseworthy’ for a prince to be able at all times to act in such ways. But then he totally rejects the fundamental humanist assumption that these are the virtues a ruler needs to acquire if he wishes to achieve his highest ends. This belief — the nerve and heart of humanist advice books for princes — he regards as an obvious and disastrous mistake. He agrees of course about the nature of the ends to be pursued: every prince must seek to maintain his state and obtain glory for himself. But he objects that, if these goals are to be attained, no ruler can possibly possess or fully practise all the qualities usually ‘held to be good’. The position in which any prince finds himself is that of trying to protect his interests in a dark world filled with unscrupulous men. If in these circumstances he ‘does not do what is generally done, but persists in doing what ought to be done’ he will simply ‘undermine his power rather than maintain it’ (54).

Machiavelli’s criticism of classical and contemporary humanism is thus a simple but devastating one. He argues that, if a ruler wishes to reach his highest goals, he will not always find it rational to be moral; on the contrary, he will find that any consistent attempt to cultivate the princely virtues will prove to be a ruinously irrational policy (62). But what of the Christian objection that this is a foolish as well as a wicked position to adopt, since it forgets the day of judgement on which all injustices will finally be punished? About this Machiavelli says nothing at all. His silence is eloquent, indeed epoch making; it echoed around Christian Europe, at first eliciting a stunned silence in return, and then a howl of execration that has never finally died away.

If princes ought not to conduct themselves according to the dictates of conventional morality, how ought they to conduct themselves? Machiavelli’s response — the core of his positive advice to new rulers — is given at the beginning of chapter 15. A wise prince will be guided above all by the dictates of necessity: if he ‘wishes to maintain his power’ he must always ‘be prepared to act immorally when this becomes necessary’ (55). Three chapters later, this basic doctrine is repeated. A wise prince does good when he can, but ‘if it becomes necessary to refrain’ he ‘must be prepared to act in the opposite way and be capable of doing it’. Moreover, he must reconcile himself to the fact that, ‘in order to maintain his power’, he will often be forced by necessity ‘to act treacherously, ruthlessly or inhumanely’ (62).

As we have seen, the crucial importance of this insight was first put to Machiavelli at an early stage in his diplomatic career. It was after conversing with the cardinal of Volterra in 1503, and with Pandolfo Petrucci some two years later, that he originally felt impelled to record what was later to become his central political belief: that the clue to successful statecraft lies in recognizing the force of circumstances, accepting what necessity dictates, and harmonizing one’s behaviour with the times. A year after Pandolfo gave him this recipe for princely success, we find Machiavelli putting forward a similar set of observations as his own ideas for the first time. While stationed at Perugia in September 1506, watching the hectic progress of Julius II’s campaign, he fell to musing in a letter to his friend Giovan Soderini about the reasons for triumph and disaster in civil and military affairs. ‘Nature’, he declares, ‘has given every man a particular talent and inspiration’ which ‘controls each one of us’. But ‘the times are varied’ and ‘subject to frequent change’, so that ‘those who fail to alter their ways of proceeding’ are bound to encounter ‘good Fortune at one time and bad at another’. The moral is obvious: if a man wishes ‘always to enjoy good Fortune’, he must ‘be wise enough to accommodate himself to the times’. Indeed, if everyone were ‘to command his nature’ in this way, and ‘match his way of proceeding with his age’, then ‘it would genuinely come true that the wise man would be the ruler of the stars and of the fates’ (73).

Writing The Prince seven years later, Machiavelli virtually copied out these ‘Caprices’, as he deprecatingly called them, in his chapter on the role of Fortune in human affairs. Everyone, he says, likes to follow their own particular bent: one man proceeds cautiously, another impetuously; one forcefully, another cunningly. But in the meantime, ‘times and circumstances change’, so that a ruler who ‘does not change his methods’ will eventually ‘come to grief’. However, Fortune would not change if one learned ‘to change one’s character to suit the times and circumstances’. So the successful prince will always be the one who moves with the times (85–6).

By now it will be evident that the revolution Machiavelli engineered in the genre of advice books for princes was based in effect on redefining the pivotal concept of virtú. He endorses the conventional assumption that virtú is the name of that congeries of qualities which enables a prince to ally with Fortune and obtain honour, glory, and fame. But he divorces the meaning of the term from any necessary connection with the cardinal and princely virtues. He argues instead that the defining characteristic of a truly virtuoso prince will be a willingness to do whatever is dictated by necessity — whether the action happens to be wicked or virtuous — in order to attain his highest ends. So virtú comes to denote precisely the requisite quality of moral flexibility in a prince: ‘He must be prepared to vary his conduct as the winds of fortune and changing circumstance constrain him’ (62).

Machiavelli takes some pains to point out that this conclusion opens up an unbridgeable gulf between himself and the whole tradition of humanist political thought, and does so in his most savagely ironic style. To the classical moralists and their innumerable followers, moral virtue had been the defining characteristic of the vir, the man of true manliness. Hence to abandon virtue was not merely to act irrationally; it was also to abandon one’s status as a man and descend to the level of the beasts. As Cicero had put it in Book I of De Officiis, there are two ways in which wrong may be done, either by force or by fraud. Both, he declares, ‘are bestial’ and ‘wholly unworthy of man’ — force because it typifies the lion and fraud because it ‘seems to belong to the cunning fox’ (I.13.41).

To Machiavelli, by contrast, it seemed obvious that manliness is not enough. There are indeed two ways of acting, he agrees at the start of chapter 18, of which ‘the first is appropriate for men, the second for animals’. But ‘because the former is often ineffective, one must have recourse to the latter’ (61). One of the things a prince therefore needs to know is which animals to imitate. Machiavelli’s celebrated advice is that he will come off best if he learns to imitate ‘both the fox and the lion’, supplementing the ideals of manly decency with the beastly arts of force and fraud (61). This conception is underlined in the next chapter, in which Machiavelli discusses one of his favourite historical characters, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus. First he assures us that the emperor was a man of very great virtú (68). And then, explaining the judgement, he adds that Septimius’s great qualities were those of ‘a very fierce lion and a very cunning fox’, as a result of which he was ‘feared and respected by everyone’ (69).

Machiavelli rounds off his analysis by indicating the lines of conduct to be expected from a truly virtuoso prince. In chapter 19 he puts the point negatively, stressing that such a ruler will never do anything worthy of contempt, and will always take the greatest care to avoid becoming an object of hatred (63). In chapter 21 the positive implications are then spelled out. Such a prince will always stand boldly forth, either as ‘a true ally or an outright enemy’. At the same time he will ensure, like Ferdinand of Spain, that he presents himself to his subjects as majestically as possible, doing ‘great things’ and keeping his subjects ‘in a state of suspense and amazement as they await their outcome’ (77).

In the light of this account, it is again easy to understand why Machiavelli felt such admiration for Cesare Borgia, and wished to hold him up — despite his obvious limitations — as a pattern of virtú for other new princes. For Borgia had demonstrated, on one terrifying occasion, that he understood perfectly the paramount importance of avoiding the hatred of the people while at the same time keeping them in awe. The occasion was when he realized that his government of the Romagna, in the capable but tyrannical hands of Rimirro de Orco, was falling into the most serious danger of all, that of becoming hated by those living under it. As we have seen, Machiavelli was an eyewitness of Borgia’s cold-blooded solution to the dilemma: the summary murder of Rimirro and the exhibition of his body in the public square as a sacrifice to the people’s rage.

Machiavelli’s belief in the imperative need to avoid popular hatred and contempt should perhaps be dated from this moment. But even if the duke’s action merely served to corroborate his own sense of political realities, there is no doubt that the episode left him deeply impressed. When he came to discuss the issues of hatred and contempt in The Prince, this was precisely the incident he recalled in order to illustrate his point. He makes it clear that Borgia’s action had struck him on reflection as being profoundly right. It was resolute; it took courage; and it brought about exactly the desired effect, since it ‘left the people both satisfied and amazed’ while at the same time removing the cause of their hatred. Summing up in his iciest tones, Machiavelli remarks that the policy not only deserves to be ‘known about’ but also to be ‘imitated by others’ (26).

Machiavelli is fully aware that his new analysis of princely virtú raises some new difficulties. He states the main dilemma in the course of chapter 15: on the one hand ‘a ruler who wishes to maintain his power must be prepared to act immorally when this becomes necessary’; but on the other hand he must be careful not to acquire the reputation of being a wicked man, because this will destroy his power instead of securing it (55). The problem is how to avoid appearing wicked when you cannot avoid behaving wickedly.

Moreover, the dilemma is even sharper than this implies, for the true aim of the prince is not merely to secure his position, but is of course to win honour and glory as well. As Machiavelli indicates in recounting the story of Agathocles of Sicily in chapter 8, this greatly intensifies the predicament in which any new ruler finds himself. Agathocles, we are told, ‘always lived a very dissolute life’ and was known for ‘appallingly cruel and inhumane conduct’. These attributes brought him immense success, enabling him to rise from ‘the lowest and most abject origins’ to become king of Syracuse and hold on to his principality ‘without any civil strife’ (30–1). But as Machiavelli warns us, in a deeply revealing phrase, such unashamed cruelties may win us power ‘but not glory’. Although Agathocles was able to maintain his state by means of these qualities, they ‘cannot be called virtú’ and they ‘preclude his being numbered among the finest men’ (31).

Machiavelli refuses to admit that the dilemma can be resolved by setting stringent limits to princely wickedness, and in general behaving honourably towards one’s subjects and allies. This is exactly what one cannot hope to do, because all men at all times ‘are ungrateful, fickle, feigners and dissemblers, avoiders of danger, eager for gain’, so that any ruler ‘who has relied completely on their promises, and has neglected to prepare other defences, will be ruined’ (59). The implication is that a prince, and above all a new prince, will often — not just occasionally — find himself forced by necessity to act contrary to humanity if he wishes to keep his position and avoid being deceived (62).

These are acute difficulties, but they can nevertheless be overcome. The prince need only remember that, although it is not necessary to have all the qualities usually considered good, it is indispensable to appear to have them (66). It is desirable to be considered liberal; it is sensible to seem merciful and not cruel; it is essential in general to appear meritorious (56, 58, 64). The solution is thus to become a great simulator and dissimulator, learning the skill of ‘cunningly confusing men’ and making them believe in your pretence (61).

Machiavelli had received an early lesson in the value of cunningly confusing men. As we have seen, he had been present when the struggle developed between Cesare Borgia and Julius II in the closing months of 1503, and it is evident that the impressions he carried away from that occasion were still uppermost in his mind when he came to write about the question of dissimulation in The Prince. He immediately refers back to the episode he had witnessed, using it as his main example of the need to remain constantly on one’s guard against princely duplicity. Julius, he recalls, managed to conceal his hatred of Borgia so cleverly that he caused the duke to fall into the egregious error of believing ‘that new benefits make important men forget old injuries’ (29). He was then able to put his powers of dissimulation to decisive use. Having won the papal election with Borgia’s full support, he suddenly revealed his true feelings, turned against the duke, and brought about his final downfall. Borgia certainly blundered at this point, and Machiavelli feels that he deserves to be blamed severely for his mistake. He ought to have known that a talent for spreading confusion is part of the armoury of any successful prince (34).

Machiavelli cannot have been unaware, however, that in recommending the arts of deceit as the key to success he was in danger of sounding too glib. More orthodox moralists had always been prepared to consider the suggestion that hypocrisy might be used as a short cut to glory, but had always gone on to rule out any such possibility. Cicero, for example, had explicitly canvassed the idea in Book II of De Officiis, only to dismiss it as a manifest absurdity. Anyone, he declares, who ‘thinks that he can win lasting glory by pretence’ is ‘very much mistaken’. The reason is that ‘true glory strikes deep roots and spreads its branches wide’, whereas ‘all pretences soon fall to the ground like fragile flowers’ (II.12.43).

Machiavelli responds, as before, by rejecting such earnest sentiments in his most ironic style. He insists in chapter 18 that the practice of hypocrisy is not merely indispensable to princely government, but is capable of being sustained without much difficulty for as long as may be required. Two distinct reasons are offered for this deliberately provocative conclusion. One is that most men are so simple-minded, and above all so prone to self-deception, that they usually take things at face value in a wholly uncritical way (62). The other is that, when it comes to assessing the behaviour of princes, even the shrewdest observers are largely condemned to judge by appearances. Isolated from the populace, sustained by the majesty of his role, the prince’s position is such that ‘everyone can see what you appear to be’ but ‘few have direct experience of what you really are’ (63). So there is no reason to suppose that your sins will find you out; on the contrary, ‘a skilful deceiver always finds plenty of people who will let themselves be deceived’ (62).

A further issue Machiavelli discusses is what attitude we should take towards the new rules he has sought to inculcate. At first sight he appears to adopt a relatively conventional moral stance. He agrees in chapter 15 that ‘it would be most praiseworthy’ for new princes to exhibit those qualities which are normally considered good, and he equates the abandonment of the princely virtues with the process of learning ‘to act immorally’ (55). The same scale of values recurs even in the notorious chapter on ‘How rulers should keep their promises’. Machiavelli begins by affirming that everybody realizes how praiseworthy it is when a ruler ‘lives uprightly and not by trickery’ (61). He goes on to insist that a prince ought not merely to seem conventionally virtuous, but ought ‘actually to be so’ as far as circumstances permit. He should ‘not deviate from right conduct if possible, but be capable of entering upon the path of wrongdoing when this becomes necessary’ (62).

However, two very different arguments are introduced in the course of chapter 15, each of which is subsequently developed. First of all, Machiavelli is somewhat quizzical about whether we can properly say that those qualities which are considered good, but are nevertheless ruinous, really deserve the name of virtues. Since they are prone to bring destruction, he prefers to say that they ‘seem virtuous’; and since their opposites are more likely to strengthen one’s position, he prefers to say that they only look like vices (55).

This suggestion is pursued in both the succeeding chapters. Chapter 16, entitled ‘Generosity and Meanness’, picks up a theme handled by all the classical moralists and turns it on its head. When Cicero discusses the virtue of generosity in De Officiis (II.17.58 and II.22.77), he defines it as a desire to ‘avoid any suspicion of penuriousness’, together with an awareness that no vice is more offensive in a political leader than parsimony and avarice. Machiavelli replies that, if this is what we mean by generosity, it is the name not of a virtue but a vice. He argues that a ruler who wishes to avoid a reputation for parsimony will find that he ‘needs to spend lavishly and ostentatiously’. As a result, he will find himself having ‘to tax the people very heavily’ to pay for his liberality, a policy which will soon make him ‘hated by his subjects’. Conversely, if he begins by abandoning any desire to act with such munificence, he may well be called miserly at the outset, but ‘eventually he will be come to be considered more generous’, and will in fact be practising the true virtue of generosity (59).

A similar paradox appears in the following chapter, entitled ‘Cruelty and Mercifulness’. This too had been a favourite topic among the Roman moralists, Seneca’s essay On Clemency being the most celebrated treatment of the theme. According to Seneca, a prince who is merciful will always show ‘how loath he is to turn his hand’ to punishment; he will resort to it only ‘when great and repeated wrongdoing has overcome his patience’; and he will inflict it only ‘after great reluctance’ and ‘much procrastination’ as well as with the greatest possible clemency (I.13.4, I.14.1, II.2.3). Faced with this orthodoxy, Machiavelli insists once more that it represents a complete misunderstanding of the virtue involved. If you begin by trying to be merciful, so that you ‘overindulgently permit disorders to develop’ and only turn to punishment once ‘killings and plunderings’ have begun, your conduct will be far less clement than that of a ruler who possesses the courage to start by making an example of the ringleaders involved. Machiavelli gives the example of his fellow Florentines, who wanted to avoid seeming cruel in the face of an uprising and in consequence acted in such a way that the destruction of an entire city resulted — an outcome hideously more cruel than any cruelty they could have devised. This is contrasted with the behaviour of Cesare Borgia, who ‘was considered cruel’, but whose harsh measures ‘restored order to the Romagna, unifying it and rendering it peaceful and loyal’ by means of his alleged viciousness (58).

This leads Machiavelli to a closely connected question which he puts forward — with a similar air of self-conscious paradox — later in the same chapter: ‘whether it is better to be loved than feared, or vice versa’ (59). Again the classic answer had been furnished by Cicero in De Officiis. ‘Fear is but a poor safeguard of lasting power’, whereas love ‘may be trusted to keep it safe for ever’ (II.7.23). Again Machiavelli registers his total dissent. ‘It is much safer’, he retorts, for a prince ‘to be feared than loved’. The reason is that many of the qualities that make a prince loved also tend to bring him into contempt. If your subjects have no ‘dread of punishment’, they will take every chance to deceive you for their own profit. But if you make yourself feared, they will hesitate to offend or injure you, as a result of which you will find it much easier to maintain your state (59).

The other line of argument in these chapters reflects an even more scornful rejection of conventional humanist morality. Machiavelli suggests that, even if the qualities usually considered good are indeed virtues — such that a ruler who flouts them will undoubtedly be falling into vice — he ought not to worry about such vices if he thinks them either useful or irrelevant to the conduct of his government.

_{3. The title-page of Edward Dacres’s translation of The Prince, the earliest English version to be printed.}

Machiavelli’s main concern at this point is to remind new rulers of their most basic duty of all. A wise prince ‘should not be troubled about becoming notorious for those vices without which it is difficult to preserve his power’; he will see that such criticisms are merely an unavoidable cost he has to bear in the course of discharging his fundamental obligation, which is of course to maintain his state (55). The implications are first spelled out in relation to the supposed vice of parsimony. Once a wise prince perceives that miserliness is ‘one of those vices that enable him to rule’, he will cease to worry about being thought a miserly man (57). The same applies in the case of cruelty. A willingness to act on occasion with exemplary severity is crucial to the preservation of good order in civil as in military affairs. This means that a wise prince ‘should not worry about incurring a reputation for cruelty’, and that it is essential not to worry about being called cruel if you are an army commander, for without such a reputation you can never hope to keep your troops ‘united and prepared for military action’ (60).

Lastly, Machiavelli considers whether it is important for a ruler to eschew the lesser vices and sins of the flesh if he wishes to maintain his state. The writers of advice books for princes generally dealt with this issue in a sternly moralistic vein, echoing Cicero’s insistence in Book I of De Officiis that propriety is ‘essential to moral rectitude’, and thus that all persons in positions of authority must avoid all lapses of conduct in their personal lives (I.28.98). By contrast, Machiavelli answers with a shrug. A wise prince ‘will seek to avoid those vices’ if he can; but if he finds he cannot, then he certainly will not trouble himself unduly about such ordinary moral susceptibilities (55).