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Introduction

A recognizably modern history begins with the Italian Renaissance’s rediscovery of Greek and Roman literature. The focal points for renaissance culture and its slow spread throughout Europe were the city-states of Florence and Venice, states that grew into power not through the traditional medieval mechanisms of conquest and inheritance, but through the trade that flowed through the Mediterranean basin. The spread of luxury trade acted as a solvent in a medieval economy whose foundation was a subsistence economy dominated by a feudal warrior class. Medieval culture was grounded in the teachings and symbols of the Roman Catholic Church, which made a sharp distinction between this inferior earthly existence ( a vale of tears) and a heavenly salvation for those who performed their duty within their designated station in life. Church teaching and the feudal system reinforced and guided a community that, while not without a rich inner dynamism, was guided by tradition and fulfilled God’s plan for man.

While history remained a religious or traditional agenda, it was difficult for societies to see events in the here and now of temporal existence. The unique development of the Italian City States as dynamic and powerful republics, but whose independent existence was short lived, allowed observers to develop alternate perspectives and a more recognizably human history. In particular, Nicolo Machiavelli sent shock waves through the mentality of the late medieval world by giving advice to princes that allowed them, rather than religion or custom, to shape their own fates. The Prince remains one of the most powerful works ever written because of its ruthless efficiency, its sweeping boldness and its psychological insights. For the intellectual and cultural historian, it is the first work in the late medieval and early modern period that is based on an analysis of historical facts rather than ideal considerations.

We should beware, however, of transforming The Prince into a modern historical tract or the foundation of a new science of politics. The Prince does mark a new stage in the development of these disciplines, but it was also a tract for the times. Machiavelli’s advice was directed at princes living in a particular region at a particular difficult period. It was specifically directed at the Medici family who Machiavelli hoped could bring some semblance of order to the Italian principalities. It provided Lorenzo DeMedici with a guide to living in a world characterized by political chaos. And it was written by a man who knew whereof he spoke. Machiavelli closed the introduction to his famous work with the following words:

If, from your lofty peak, Your magnificence will sometimes glance down to these low-lying regions, you will realize the extent to which, undeservedly, I have to endure the great and unremitting malice of fortune.

More than anything else, The Prince is advice on how to “endure the great and unremitting malice of fortune.” It is guide for living through difficult times.

The Feudal Inheritance

Medieval or feudal society was inherently resistant to change, particularly on the part of individuals. It relied heavily on custom, tradition and a social structure that was fixed to a large extent at birth. Ironically, the institution that allowed for the greatest degree of individual development and social mobility was the Church, which from the local parish to the papacy, exerted sufficient control to be able at least to claim that it stood at the apex of the Holy Roman Empire. Nor was this an idle boast. Latin was the universal language in medieval Christian society, the pope was the recognized spiritual leader, and his base in Vatican City wielded an enormous amount of power disproportionate to the size of this patrimony. When the pope called on feudal society to fight the Turks and Arabs in the Crusades, many responded with the desire to demonstrate their warrior skills and to collect valuable booty, but the interesting point is that they responded.

In the medieval world, society was divided into three fundamental orders: those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked. Notably missing from this schemata were those who traded, those who made and lent money, and those who invested in enterprises for profit. Not until the Italian Renaissance did men of trade and commerce enter into the literary canon, and even then, it was usually as villains. In the medieval order, such a group had no status. They made no recognizable contribution to the wealth of the nation except in the form of luxury goods. They encouraged soft values that enervated the strength of warriors and that had led to the decline of the great civilizations in the past. They encouraged greed and an attachment to the things of this world that led to social dissatisfaction and that made it difficult to maintain order. More than this, however, they were irrelevant to most of medieval life, which was overwhelmingly rural in nature and agricultural in focus. Land, not capital, was the lifeblood of this society.

Trade and commerce were submerged in the values of a pre-capitalist rural society. Fairs took place in the towns but usually only once a year. The only merchants that most people saw were traveling tinkers who sold bits of ribbon and who mended pots – jacks of all trades, who were always outsiders and who were suspected of thievery whenever they passed. The entrepots of foreign commerce, the ports, were not connected to the primary rhythms of medieval life, and they were often condemned as centers for vices of all kinds.

Medieval socio-cultural values could be complex, as the code and ceremonies of chivalry attest. But the critical point here is that wealth and power followed status. Status and power did not follow wealth. And wealth was a totally different animal than it is today. In modern society, a primary reason for chasing wealth is to make oneself more comfortable and happy. In medieval society, one used wealth to demonstrate one’s power. The castles and homes of the aristocracy were cold and drafty, as their present occupiers have discovered. Clothing was uncomfortable and designed to display one’s prestige. To be sure, the medieval cathedrals were beautiful edifices, but these were public buildings rather than private edifices.

The idea of gaining wealth for its own sake was anathema to the medieval mind and to traditional aristocratic society. The Roman Catholic Church preached charity on the part of the rich, whose souls were very likely to burn in hell if they did nothing to relieve the pain of the poor and unfortunate. After death, personal wealth often flowed into the Church in the form of an annuity for those who prayed to release one’s soul from Purgatory (that painful period of penance for those who were neither evil enough to go to Hell nor good enough to go to heaven). Of course it also went into the construction of churches, shrines, crypts and other religious symbols that would represent the dead and encourage others to pray for them.

The poor – those who worked in a subsistence economy — had less need of prayer. Like the poor biblical character Lazarus who ate the crumbs from the tables of the rich and who knew his station in life, the poor had an excellent chance of obtaining heavenly salvation. After all, they were rarely tempted by luxury into greed and avarice, because they were too poor to contemplate the riches of others. Poor Piers Ploughman had every reason to trust that he and his wife and children would obtain their reward in heaven for a rather miserable life on earth.

Anything to do with money for its own sake was a taboo for the medieval mind. That is precisely why Christians were strictly warned against money lending and the rate of interest was usually fixed between 2 and 3 per cent. So disgusting was the thought of money lending in medieval society that the function of money lending devolved to the Jews, who were thought to have no Christian scruples and who were presumably damned anyway for their role in the death of Christ. So powerful was this stereotype of the Jewish community that it has persisted up to the present, and has played itself out in a particularly vicious and repugnant fashion in the history of the West.

The Leaven That Was Humanism

Humanism blew a wind of historical change and contingency, first through southern Europe and slowly to the northern nations where it slowly transformed the medieval mind. Humanism was a complex intellectual and cultural movement that originated in the Italian City states. It revitalized Greek and Roman literature; created the West’s first vernacular literature; led to a flowering of art and culture; refocused attention on the things of this life; focused on human beings and their needs, desires and ideals (hence the term humanism); reintegrated heaven and earth; created the first universities (and their humanist curriculum); gave an enormous boost to scientific discovery; and produced the first great works in the Western canon. To put it simply, the Renaissance was a tough act to follow and nothing so revolutionary would occur again until the 1740s, when the first lights of the European Enlightenment appeared on the intellectual firmament.

When you read medieval texts, you know straight away that you are in a different intellectual university. Renaissance works, especially in translation, seem modern in comparison. Particularly when you read a work like Machiavelli’s Il Principe its possible to think that it was written yesterday, because it speaks to us in what appears to be our own language. The arguments are delivered with a rhetorical force that is unmatched by anything written in our own time. It is no wonder that humanism soon became the training ground for diplomats and that the humanities played such a large part in creating the highly literate, not to mention imperialistic, British civil service who saw it as the mission of pax Britannica to spread civilization to the rest of the world. Indeed, the British were one of the first of the northern nations in Europe to appreciate the power of humanist training. Henry VII invited humanist scholars to his court in order to make his fragile reign seem much more elegant and powerful than it really was. His son, Henry VIII was a humanist trained poet and scholar who used his training to win over his lady friends before he deprived them of their lovely heads. Sir and Saint Thomas More, one of his chief ministers, became one of Europe’s leading humanist scholars before he too lost his head. His famous work, of course, was Utopia, which every educated university student is supposed to have read and which is even said to have influenced the theories of Karl Marx.

There’s a problem, however, in reading humanist scholars like Machiavelli, through modern eyes. Not only should be beware of anachronism, but also we need to appreciate that the renaissance mind was its own paradigm. When the uninformed look at Michelangelo’s statue of David, they are inclined to focus on just how real it is. They assume that Michelangelo thinks like us. However, if we look at the total output of Michelangelo, we spot things that are less familiar. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for example, presents an entire cosmology that links God to man, but whose focus is as much on the power of the creator as the nature of the created. In another piece of art, Michelangelo presents recognizably human but as yet imperfect beings trying to emerge from a crude block of stone.

The renaissance mentality refocused attention to the things of this earth, thereby legitimizing new forms of art and encouraging a newfound appreciation for earthly pleasures. Ultimately, however, the focus was on the ideal rather than the real. Earthly blessings, rational thought and sexual love were created by God not merely to make our lives meaningful, but to lead us to higher forms of worship and love. To focus unduly on the things of this life was to miss the entire point of humanist thought, which was to lead us to god.

Neo-Platonists, Humanists and Secular Rulers

Neo-Platonism was one of the most influential schools of thought in the Renaissance. Taking their cue from Plato’s belief that we should be guided by ideal forms, types, or concepts, but that we could use information obtained from real life as stepping-stones to the ideal, renaissance thinkers affirmed the validity of our earthly experience. However, this experience ultimately was only useful to the extent that it led us to a purer form of spiritual knowledge. The wisdom of God, however, was not something that could be defined by the fiat of the ruler or the dogmatic papal Bulls; it needed to conform to the logic and reason given to us by God. Mankind resembled God in nothing more than his/her ability to think.

This emphasis on human reason and logic encouraged many, but certainly not all, humanist scholars to affirm the rationality and educability of both women and men. Sir Thomas More was considered unusual in his belief that his daughters should be educated in the use of their reason as much as any man. This focus on equality, however, was only extended with reservation to those below the warrior or clerical caste. Poor people were generally thought to be too conservative, superstitious, traditional and fanatical to benefit from a humanist education. One of the self-assigned tasks of the clerical elite was to watch for and select those who might benefit from a humanist education for future positions in the Church.

For several centuries, therefore, humanist education remained the preserve of the Church and was the primary avenue for social mobility in an otherwise caste-like society. Most of the higher English clerisy, for example, consisted of the younger sons of the aristocracy, who were unable to become aristocrats themselves because of the law of primogeniture. But there were also many examples of individuals from lower status rising through the ranks.

Secular rulers, depending on the nature and extent of their power, generally chose their advisors and diplomats either from within the aristocratic or the clerical community. Those clerics who were originally of lower status, if capable and careful, could rise to high positions in the circle of counselors or the court. One of their advantages was their loyalty to the ruler. Since their status among potential rebels in the aristocracy or opponents in the church hierarchy was relatively low, they were more inclined to attach themselves to the ruler and to associate their own success with a particular king or queen.

An example in point is Thomas Cromwell, not to be confused with Oliver Cromwell the English Civil War figure. Thomas was the man who signed Thomas More’s sentence of execution for Henry VIII and who engineered the English Reformation that made most of Great Britain protestant. Thomas was an individual who rose to considerable bureaucratic power through the traditional route from Church to State, but who helped to engineer the separation of Church and State that would transform society after the 1500s.

The Wheel of History

From the perspective of the neo-Platonist, at least two distinctive but related histories now ran in tandem. Religious history and earthly history were no longer considered to be identical except, perhaps, in the case of nations who believed that they had a special covenant with God that guided all of their actions. In the more cosmopolitan regions of the Holy Roman Empire, it was difficult to act with such hubris. But the Protestant Reformation, kick-started by Martin Luther but finely tuned by the legal mind of John Calvin, did allow some nations and principalities to play this religious role at least for a time. In Scotland, Calvin’s disciple John Knox wielded enormous political power and made certain that Scotland and England would not unite in any shape or form for another two centuries. The Scotland that existed prior to the Union of Great Britain in 1707 is perhaps the prime example of the covenanted nation that viewed itself in the tradition of biblical Israel. The only modern example of this kind of thinking that I know of in the modern world is the belief on the part of the Jamaican Rastafarians that Ethiopia is the new Israel and that Heille Selassie is God’s chosen representative on earth.

In the late-medieval and early renaissance period, this kind of thinking was in decline but not yet dead. The Protestant Reformation gave it new life, at least until it became clear that most rulers were only interested in affirming the religious polity to the extent that it increased or consolidated their rule, particularly by allowing the new Protestant governments to confiscate the wealth of the cathedrals and monasteries in order to subsidize their increasingly ambitious military and administrative agendas. The concept of the covenanted nation was also subjoined to that of the ancient constitution – the juridical elevation of tradition.

Together, the covenanted nation and the ancient constitution shaped a view of history clearly privileged the past but blurred its relation to the present. The nature of the covenanted nation was buried in religious prescriptions that were potent but ambiguous. God’s plan or punishment for the nation is difficult to forecast and is usually only apparent in hindsight, a realization that played a central role in the idealistic philosophy of Hegel several centuries later. The ancient constitution was even more illusive and usually depended on legalistic definitions of the common or customary law, a legal hodge-podge that was often encrusted with the various statutes, precedents and interpretations of the past.

Renaissance writers invented a much more recognizably modern form of history by suggesting that it made better sense to explore history as a concatenation of events that were contingent upon one another. This inclined scholars, for the first time, to interpret the historical record on its own terms rather than as a plan determined by God, covenant or constitution. This was a courageous and paradigmatic leap into the world of the four c’s: change, chance and contingency and concrete circumstance. It can also be said to have invented political science by suggesting that human beings could use their reason to determine their past and plan for the future.

Despite their significant and enduring contributions to fields like history, political science and philosophy, however, the primary interest of humanist scholars lay in the development of a desirable type of human being. And their fundamental focus, therefore, was on ethics. If you compare the enormous output of humanist scholars by field, the overwhelming majority of their letters, histories, speeches, translations, poems etc were aimed at improving ethics. History was a much more useful teaching tool than either philosophy or political science because it provided opportunities for discovering examples of ethical character, ethical missteps, and ethical commentary. If it were a choice of academic model or ethical moral, a true humanist would have invariably opted for the latter.

Virtue and Corruption

The main ethical lesson that Machiavelli and many others after him gleaned from the study of Greek and Roman History is not something that you can easily discover by reading The Prince alone. Parts of this ethical lesson may be more familiar than others. It goes something like this. The history of the rise and fall of the great civilizations shows us that civilizations achieve greatness through the virtue of their citizens. While there may be many virtues for us to discover in the history of the past, the main virtues that propel civilizations onto the world map and leave us with great literature are the result of something called civic virtue. Civic virtue in the Greek and Roman Republics was different from the virtues of kindness and humanity, and even from the Christian emphasis on loving one’s neighbour and doing charitable acts. The civic virtue that made the ancient civilizations last was an amalgam of independence, courage, patriotism, and a strict and selfless sense of duty. This virtue was also characterized by simple habits and desires.

The serpent in this republican garden of Eden was luxury, something that Machiavelli knew rather a lot about since he lived most of his life (1469-1527) in the Italian City State of Florence, the same place that gave birth to Dante and Boccaccio. Machiavelli was a patriotic Florentine and proud of the fact that this little city-state had achieved independence. But Florence was highly vulnerable to attack because it was a rich trading centre. Its citizens were traders rather than soldiers and so it didn’t even have its own army, but was forced to hire mercenaries to defend it or to do what came naturally to states at the time, to try to extend its power and boundaries. This little City-State, however, was a blip on the radar for the big nations like France and Spain that were always trying to add it to their list of conquests or at least dependencies. In France, where Machiavelli was for a time a diplomat, the French referred to Florence as Ser Nihilo or Mr. Nothing.

Them’s not only fighting words, but they reflected the danger of a state like Florence that often needed to cut a deal with the surrounding Princes in order to protect them. If only Florence could be like Rome, pined Machiavelli, then it would be able to rely on the virtue of its citizens and a citizen army to defend it. Unfortunately, Florence lived in the very precarious world of fifteenth-century power politics and had to practice something that Bismarck later called realpolitik in order to survive. Machiavelli was a diplomat and a negotiator – he knew whereof he wrote. And he knew there were certain situations in which classical ideals of virtue simply did not work. To put it in modern terminology, if you don’t have the protection of a good Vice-Principal, you’d better figure out a strategy for handling the schoolyard bully.

Before we talk about Machiavelli’s marvelous discussion of realpolitik, lets devote a little bit of time to his account of a more ideal scenario. This will allow us to explore his ideas of the ethical uses of history more fully and put Il Principe in a better context. The force that destroyed Greece and Rome did not come from without, but from within. When they became too wealthy, and were exposed to the luxurious values of what Machiavelli and his peers loosely called the Orient, the virtue of the leading citizens was corrupted. For a time, the powerful and ultimately destructive effects of wealth were postponed by adding new territories to the Empire whose citizens reinvigorated the polity. By adopting republican constitutions, the ancient empires were able to check the vices attendant to luxury, by strictly limiting the power and the term of office of those in government. These constitutions, argued Machiavelli, were testaments to the dignity and reason of the legislators, who created man made barriers to stem the cycle of fortuna or fortune.

Fortuna

According to the renaissance mentality, fortuna or what we call fortune is the fate of all earthly kingdoms. History is a cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations; they rise through their civic virtue and they fall through the corruption of luxury. The decline and fall of civilizations is implied in their rise to prominence. Earth is not heaven and progress is not continuous. Wise legislators and brave patriots can protect a civilization for a time, but human progress is limited. Sooner or later, tide and time will bring a reversal of fortune.

Civilization is in a constant struggle against this fortuna. Once the cycle is complete and fortune rules, the virtu (the term Machiavelli uses to denote civic virtue) that once maintained a civilization and allowed it to shine is at an end. The end of a civilization has a parallel with the end of the world. All the old rules change. Individual can be as patriotic and noble as they like, but they cannot resurrect a fallen civilization. Civilization will have to be created anew, over many generations, only to go through the same cyclical wheel as every society that preceded it.

For the religious purist, in Machiavelli’s time the Aristotelian theologian, the fate of man is in the hands of God, and mankind is connected by a great chain of being to the spiritual realm. Our fate is dictated in advance. For many humanists, and Machiavelli is one of them, fortuna does not allow us the passive luxury of accepting our fate. We need to act rationally and to express our dignity as human beings. Sayings like “fortune favours the brave” and “God only helps those who help themselves” are closer to the kind of air that Machiavelli and other republican writers breathed. To accept one’s fate implied accepting the death of the wonder that was Florence, and Machiavelli wasn’t prepared to do that without a fight.

He therefore redefined virtu as it needed to operate in a world governed by fortuna. For us moderns, these writing are highly relevant because Machiavelli describes a contingent world of power politics with which we are somewhat familiar. But an understanding of the concept of fortuna allows us to suggest some important ways that Machiavelli differs from the political scientists who often cite his work as a treatise on politics. The world he is describing is chaotic. It is a beleaguered principality – hence the term prince rather than king – in a beleaguered region. What he describes is neither an ancient nor a modern state. A state can rely on all sorts of institutions — including tradition, laws, a settled administration, or even a standing army — to maintain itself. Its largely agricultural citizenry experience rarely experience invasion and live according to custom. Life goes on in a straightforward manner from generation to generation. To be sure, large established nations like France and Spain will experience the rise and fall of their power and significance. But this gradual cycle is totally different from a society governed by fortuna.

We should take Machiavelli seriously when he says “You should understand, therefore, that there are two ways of fighting; by law or by force:

The first way is natural to men, and the second to beasts. But as the first way often proves inadequate one must needs have recourse to the second. So a prince must understand how to make a nice use of the beast and the man. The ancient writers taught princes about this by an allegory, when they described how Achilles and many other princes of the ancient world were sent to be brought up by Chiron, the centaur, so that he might train them this way. All the allegory means, in making the teacher half best and half man, is that a prince must know how to act according the nature of both, and that he cannot survive otherwise.

Not only is Machiavelli talking about a time before Greek civilization was established by the lawgiver Solon, but he is describing a situation in which there is a struggle for survival, rather than a settled situation.

Some political scientists suggest that Machiavelli is describing a society in which Church and State are separating and in which the state has a morality all its own. The political scientists have got it wrong. In the first place, Machiavelli is not describing a settled state but fragile principalities in central Italy. In the second place, Machiavelli is not describing a state governed by laws, but a society in which law is breaking down or ineffective. Some political scientists suggest that Machiavelli is the defender of tyranny or absolute rule. No one could seriously advocate absolute rule in societies that were governed as much by environment and tradition as they were by constitution and where the apparatus of central government was totally absent. We shouldn’t confuse giving advice for taking strong action with advocacy of tyranny either; Machiavelli’s other writings show that he detested those tyrants who brought down the Roman republic before its time.

I’m focusing on the misinterpretations of political science here, not to undermine that fine discipline, but to show how different the world becomes when we look at it through fresh humanist renaissance eyes. Political scientists are obviously obsessed with the rise of the modern state, but Machiavelli is not a good source for discovering these origins. Not only would Machiavelli be confused by modern analyses of the state but he would have thought that the very concept of the state was a myth. A strong belief in the existence of the state overwhelms the dignity of human action espoused by humanists like Machiavelli. Moreover, it obscures the fact that eventually all humans and all civilizations must confront fortuna.

An ancient republic, it should be noted, was something very different from a modern state. It was an intensely human creation, populated by people who exercised their virtu. It lacked a belief in equal citizenry; it epitomized the distrust of power; it was populated by vigilant and engaged actors who were constantly taking precautions. Even so, it was not something that one could hope to see in the Italian city-states, which lacked much protection of any kind.

The Prince was written for the powerful men who contested for control in these petty principalities. It was a blueprint for an individual to take whatever measures were necessary to establish order in this volatile region of Europe. It was the brave statement of a writer who wanted to take fortuna by the throat and throttle it into submission. The analogy that Machiavelli uses is an unfortunate one; he compares fortune to a woman who needs to be coerced into submission. This sexist analogy is highly revealing, however, because Machiavelli implies that the coercion is done out of affection when he condemns those men who “act coldly” towards their wives.

Ultimately, that prince practices a kind of virtue who understands that it’s futile to talk about republican freedom in places and times when fortuna is on the rampage. What makes The Prince such an astonishing text is its ability to picture the human predicament in a situation where neither Christian nor classical values can save us. As far as I know, this is the first book that recognizes that predicament and that has the courage to meet it head on. In that sense, it is a very modern and a relevant text for any of us who have had to confront fortuna in our lives.

Text and Context: Something to Consider

Just how different we moderns are from the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth century can be seen in the way that ethics has been pushed to the background of university education. We rarely read the ethical writings of the humanist scholars, but we force our students to read works like Il Principe or Utopia that reflect more modern preoccupations. Would it make a difference to you to know that Machiavelli’s The Prince was only a very small part of this author’s literary output, and that he wrote a lengthy commentary on the history of Rome entitled Discourses on Livy? What would you say if you knew that these Discourses were much longer had a much greater readership than The Prince until comparatively recently, and that they were all about ways to preserve the virtue of the republic and its citizens? What would you think if you knew that Machiavelli makes favourable references to this earlier and more complex work in The Prince? Would any of this contextual information change the way that you read Il Principe? If not, why not?

The job of the intellectual historian is to put writings like The Prince in their historical context – to show us what they reveal about the past. There are other legitimate ways to read a text but, if we want to communicate with the author, we need to address his/her writings contextually. While I can assure you that what we learn in the process can be very significant, even mind-blowing, it is neither predictable nor unambiguous.

In the evening, Machiavelli would often dress up in a toga before he went into his library to read the writings of the Greeks and Romans that he so admired. He referred to this exercise as getting ready to converse with the virtuous dead. Getting dressed up can be compared to putting yourself in the frame of mind to listen to and engage the writers of the past.