In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
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Niccolò
Machiavelli

1469  —  1527
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florence, 1469  ·  Florence, 1527

The republican civil servant, tortured and exiled, who wrote the handbook for princes.

For fourteen years he served the Florentine republic — on embassies to the King of France, the Emperor, and Cesare Borgia — and raised its citizen militia himself. When the Medici returned he was dismissed, arrested, and given six drops of the strappado. In exile on his farm he wrote The Prince to win back employment, and the Discourses on Livy to argue for free republics.

When the republic returned in 1527, it remembered only that he had courted the Medici. He died that June.

Consultation

The effectual truth
of the thing.

Machiavelli speaks from 1,661 chunks across four works — The Prince, the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, the History of Florence, and The Art of War with his shorter political writings.

His discourse holds Pasquale Villari's great Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli, the nineteenth-century biography that recovered the republican patriot behind the legend.

Ask him whether it is better to be feared than loved. Ask him which of today's leaders has virtù. Ask him why the man who loved republics wrote a manual for princes — and why he still wanted to work for the men who had him tortured.

Virtù and FortunaThe PrinceRepublicsStatecraftCesare BorgiaArms and LawsFlorence
Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.
The Prince  ·  Chapter XVII  ·  1513 (Marriott tr.)

Drawn From the Corpus