Birth in Florence
He was born on 3 May into an old Florentine family of modest means; his father was a jurist with humanist interests.
Florentine republicanism · political realism · 1469–1527
Niccolò Machiavelli
See politics as it is, not as it is imagined.
Florence · Sant’Andrea in Percussina
Biography
The thread of a life.
Niccolò Machiavelli was a Florentine secretary, diplomat and writer who served the republic from 1498 to 1512 and, after his dismissal, wrote The Prince, the Discourses on Livy and the Florentine Histories. He examined politics through how people actually behave, weighing force, fortune, institutions and civic conflict; his name became a byword for ruthless calculation, an image his works complicate.
Second Chancery
Weeks after Savonarola’s execution, he was elected secretary of the Second Chancery and soon also served the Ten, the magistracy for war and diplomacy.
Missions to Cesare Borgia
His dispatches from the Romagna follow Borgia’s methods closely; the duke later becomes a central example in The Prince.
Florentine militia
He organized a militia recruited from the Florentine countryside, which took part in the recovery of Pisa in 1509.
Dismissal and The Prince
The return of the Medici cost him his post; after prison and torture he withdrew to his farm and drafted The Prince.
Death in Florence
He died in June, weeks after the Sack of Rome; The Prince and the Discourses were printed only in 1531–1532.
Understanding a life in depth
01Florence and a humanist education
Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence on 3 May 1469 into an old but impoverished family. His father Bernardo, a doctor of law with a modest library, obtained a printed Livy in exchange for compiling its index of place names, an early link to the historian his son would later comment on. Niccolò learned Latin and read the Roman historians and poets; he even copied Lucretius’s poem by hand. When the Medici were expelled in 1494 and Savonarola’s preaching dominated the city, he watched a republic being rebuilt amid factions and foreign armies.
02Secretary and envoy of the republic
In June 1498, weeks after Savonarola’s execution, he was elected head of the Second Chancery and soon served the Ten responsible for war and foreign affairs. For fourteen years he wrote dispatches and travelled on missions to Caterina Sforza, to the French court, to Cesare Borgia in the Romagna, to Rome and to the Emperor Maximilian. Close to the gonfaloniere Piero Soderini, he persuaded the city to raise a militia from its own territory, which helped recover Pisa in 1509. These years gave him the cases and comparisons that fill his later works.
03Fall, exile and the great treatises
In 1512 a Spanish army restored the Medici, Soderini fled and Machiavelli lost his offices. Early in 1513 he was suspected of joining a conspiracy, imprisoned and tortured, then freed in the amnesty that followed the election of Pope Leo X. Withdrawn to his farm at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, he described in a letter of 10 December 1513 how, each evening, he put on courtly clothes to converse with the ancients and had composed a little work on principalities. The Discourses on Livy, the comedy Mandragola and conversations with young republicans in the Orti Oricellari followed.
04Late commissions and a contested legacy
From 1520 he slowly regained the favour of the Medici: he wrote a Life of Castruccio Castracani, drafted for them a proposal to reform Florence’s constitution and was commissioned to write the Florentine Histories, which he presented to Pope Clement VII in 1525. The Art of War appeared in 1521. He died in Florence on 21 June 1527, just after the Sack of Rome and the restoration of the republic. The Prince and the Discourses were printed in 1531–1532, and in 1559 all his works were placed on the Index. Since then he has been read as a teacher of tyranny, as a covert republican, as Spinoza and Rousseau suggested, and as the founder of a political science detached from theology.
His works opened an enduring debate on the relation between ethics and politics, nourished republican thought from Harrington to the American founders and remain contested: some read in them a teacher of evil, others a theorist of liberty, conflict and institutions. Reading him means distinguishing the texts from the legend of “Machiavellianism”.
Sources & reference points