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  HISTORY OF FLORENCE

  AND OF THE AFFAIRS OF ITALY

  FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE

  DEATH OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT

  by Niccolo Machiavelli

  January, 2001 [Etext #2464]

  Project Gutenberg Etext History of Florence and>, by Machiavelli

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  Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected]

  and Dagny, [email protected]

  HISTORY OF FLORENCE

  AND OF THE AFFAIRS OF ITALY

  FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE

  DEATH OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT

  by NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

  With an Introduction by

  HUGO ALBERT RENNERT, Ph.D.

  Professor of Romanic Languages and Literature,

  University of Pennsylvania.

  PREPARER'S NOTE

  This text was typed up from a Universal Classics Library edition,

  published in 1901 by W. Walter Dunne, New York and London. The

  translator was not named. The book contains a "photogravure" of

  Niccolo Machiavelli from an engraving.

  INTRODUCTION

  Niccolo Machiavelli, the first great Italian historian, and one of the

  most eminent political writers of any age or country, was born at

  Florence, May 3, 1469. He was of an old though not wealthy Tuscan

  family, his father, who was a jurist, dying when Niccolo was sixteen

  years old. We know nothing of Machiavelli's
youth and little about his

  studies. He does not seem to have received the usual humanistic

  education of his time, as he knew no Greek.[*] The first notice of

  Machiavelli is in 1498 when we find him holding the office of

  Secretary in the second Chancery of the Signoria, which office he

  retained till the downfall of the Florentine Republic in 1512. His

  unusual ability was soon recognized, and in 1500 he was sent on a

  mission to Louis XII. of France, and afterward on an embassy to C?sar

  Borgia, the lord of Romagna, at Urbino. Machiavelli's report and

  description of this and subsequent embassies to this prince, shows his

  undisguised admiration for the courage and cunning of C?sar, who was a

  master in the application of the principles afterwards exposed in such

  a skillful and uncompromising manner by Machiavelli in his /Prince/.

  The limits of this introduction will not permit us to follow with any

  detail the many important duties with which he was charged by his

  native state, all of which he fulfilled with the utmost fidelity and

  with consummate skill. When, after the battle of Ravenna in 1512 the

  holy league determined upon the downfall of Pier Soderini,

  Gonfaloniere of the Florentine Republic, and the restoration of the

  Medici, the efforts of Machiavelli, who was an ardent republican, were

  in vain; the troops he had helped to organize fled before the

  Spaniards and the Medici were returned to power. Machiavelli attempted

  to conciliate his new masters, but he was deprived of his office, and

  being accused in the following year of participation in the conspiracy

  of Boccoli and Capponi, he was imprisoned and tortured, though

  afterward set at liberty by Pope Leo X. He now retired to a small

  estate near San Casciano, seven miles from Florence. Here he devoted

  himself to political and historical studies, and though apparently

  retired from public life, his letters show the deep and passionate

  interest he took in the political vicissitudes through which Italy was

  then passing, and in all of which the singleness of purpose with which

  he continued to advance his native Florence, is clearly manifested. It

  was during his retirement upon his little estate at San Casciano that

  Machiavelli wrote /The Prince/, the most famous of all his writings,

  and here also he had begun a much more extensive work, his /Discourses

  on the Decades of Livy/, which continued to occupy him for several

  years. These /Discourses/, which do not form a continuous commentary

  on Livy, give Machiavelli an opportunity to express his own views on

  the government of the state, a task for which his long and varied

  political experience, and an assiduous study of the ancients rendered

  him eminently qualified. The /Discourses/ and /The Prince/, written at

  the same time, supplement each other and are really one work. Indeed,

  the treatise, /The Art of War/, though not written till 1520 should be

  mentioned here because of its intimate connection with these two

  treatises, it being, in fact, a further development of some of the

  thoughts expressed in the /Discorsi/. /The Prince/, a short work,

  divided into twenty-six books, is the best known of all Machiavelli's

  writings. Herein he expresses in his own masterly way his views on the

  founding of a new state, taking for his type and model C?sar Borgia,

  although the latter had failed in his schemes for the consolidation of

  his power in the Romagna. The principles here laid down were the

  natural outgrowth of the confused political conditions of his time.

  And as in the /Principe/, as its name indicates, Machiavelli is

  concerned chiefly with the government of a Prince, so the /Discorsi/

  treat principally of the Republic, and here Machiavelli's model

  republic was the Roman commonwealth, the most successful and most

  enduring example of popular government. Free Rome is the embodiment of