Niccolo Machiavelli, by Corrado Vivanti; The Garments of Court and Palace, by Philip Bobbitt

One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced his notorious work, The Prince. He wrote it after a significant career blip in 1512, when the Florentine Republic fell and the Medici regained power. Machiavelli was not merely sacked from his job — secretary to the Republic — but also accused of conspiracy, imprisoned and horribly tortured. In 1513, he was released into exile, and went to live on his family farm, south of Florence. There he walked, consorted with ‘vulgarity’ (the locals) and read classical writers, including Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, Plutarch, Suetonius and Procopius. By December 1513, Machiavelli had finished The Prince, a book of advice to new princes, explaining how they might establish themselves in their territories and win glory. Though such books were common at the time, Machiavelli’s unconventional remarks about politics earned him an abiding reputation as a Renaissance Mephistopheles, whispering depravities into the ears of princes.

In this way, Machiavelli entered an exclusive group — including Freud and Darwin — of writers whose names are used adjectivally even by those who have never read a word they wrote. In Niccolo Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography, the late Corrado Vivanti explains:

In the entire history of political thought we cannot find another example of a flow of ideas so defined by hostility towards the author as is anti-Machiavellianism… nor can we find an example of an author whose work was adulterated to the point of becoming a system of principles at odds, in many aspects, with his true intentions.

In The Garments of Court and Palace, Philip Bobbitt (recently interviewed in these pages) agrees:

The Prince is often described as a great book that changed the world, yet… it has been so variously and contradictorily interpreted that any change in the world it may have brought about is likely to have been through a kind of horrible inadvertence that would have amused, though perhaps not surprised, Machiavelli.