Table Of ContentBe Like the Fox
Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom
ERICA BENNER
W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York • London
Contents
Dramatis Personae
Maps
Preface
1. The Importance of Good Faith
2. Take Nothing on Authority
3. Do Not Be Deceived by False Glory
4. Beware of Doctors
5. Have No Fear of Giants
6. How to Speak of Princes
7. Recover Your Freedom
8. The Way to Paradise
9. So Blinded Are You by Present Greed
10. Build Dykes and Dams
11. Fortune Loves Impetuous Young Men
12. How to Win
13. Measure Yourself and Limit Your Hopes
14. Be Like the Fox
15. Simulate Stupidity
16. Imagine a True Republic
17. Never Give Up
Aftermath
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Dramatis Personae
Machiavelli Household Niccolò Machiavelli, Second Chancellor of
the Florentine Republic from 1498 to 1512; also a poet, playwright,
historian and political writer Bernardo and Bartolommea
Machiavelli, his parents
Primavera, Margherita and Totto Machiavelli, Niccolò’s sisters and brother Marietta (Corsini)
Machiavelli, Niccolò’s wife
Bernardo, Ludovico, Piero, Guido, Baccina and Totto Machiavelli, their children Nencia, Bartolommea
Machiavelli’s servant girl
Nicolò di Alessandro Machiavelli, Bernardo Machiavelli’s younger cousin and neighbour Machiavelli’s
Friends
Biagio Buonaccorsi, Niccolò’s loyal coadjutor in the Chancery Agostino Vespucci, another office-mate, a
member of the patrician Vespucci family, connoisseur of fine art and publisher of Machiavelli’s first
published work Filippo Casavecchia, another colleague and close friend
Francesco Vettori, a leading patrician who holds many political posts in the republic and under Medici
rule, and one of Machiavelli’s most intimate correspondents The Orti Oricellari circle: Cosimo Rucellai
(grandson of Bernardo), Zanobi Buondelmonti, Luigi Alamanni, Battista della Palla
Francesco Guicciardini, a lawyer, historian, and leading political figure under the Medici government
after 1512
Jacopo Falconetti, a wealthy businessman of humble origins who hosts a spectacular production of
Machiavelli’s play Mandragola Barbera Salutati Raffacani, a young singer and musician with whom
Machiavelli is enamoured in his later years The House of Medici
Lorenzo, known as il Magnifico, Florence’s political leader from 1469 to 1492
Giuliano, Lorenzo’s younger brother, murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478
Lorenzo’s sons
Piero, Lorenzo’s eldest son and heir; Florence’s leader from 1492 to 1494
Giovanni, who became Pope Leo X in 1513
Giuliano, later Duke of Nemours
Piero’s children
Lorenzo di Piero, later Duke of Urbino and leader of Florence Clarice, who marries Filippo Strozzi
Others
Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici, Piero’s Naples-born wife and Regent of Florence from 1515 to 1519
Giulio de’ Medici, son of the murdered Giuliano, who became Pope Clement VII in 1523
Alessandro and Ippolito de’ Medici, sons, respectively, of Lorenzo di Piero and Giuliano di Piero
Other Protagonists in Florence
The family Pazzi, leaders of a conspiracy against the Medici in 1478
Bartolomeo Scala, Florentine Chancellor under the Medici and Bernardo Machiavelli’s close friend
Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar from Ferrara whose popular sermons and prophecies give him
great authority in Florence Bernardo Rucellai, a patrician opponent of popular government and founder
of the Orti Oricellari gardens, where Machiavelli would take part in discussions that inspired his
Discourses and Art of War Messer Guidantonio Vespucci, a famous patrician lawyer and Rucellai’s
political ally Tommaso Soderini, a patrician elder statesman in the early years of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s
government Soderini’s sons
Paoloantonio Soderini, a supporter of popular government and of Savonarola Piero Soderini, elected
Florence’s first Gonfalonier (Standard-bearer) for Life in 1502
Francesco Soderini, Bishop of Volterra and later Cardinal, one of Machiavelli’s early political mentors
Others
Paolo Vitelli, a renowned Italian mercenary, captain of Florence’s military forces from 1498 to 1499
Filippo Strozzi (‘the younger’), scion of the wealthy Strozzi family, married to Clarice de’ Medici
Outside Florence
The Italians
Caterina Sforza Riario, ruler of Forlì and Imola in the Romagna, Florence’s closest Italian ally The Pisan
people, who rebel against Florentine rule in 1494 and engage Florence in a draining war Vitellozzo
Vitelli, Paolo Vitelli’s brother and second-in-command, later allied with Cesare Borgia The French
King Charles VIII, whose armies pass through Italy and linger in Florence in 1494
King Louis XII, Charles’s successor, the Florentine republic’s most important foreign defender Cardinal
Georges d’Amboise, King Louis’s chief counsellor Florimond Robertet, another of King Louis’s
advisers
King François I, Louis’s successor
Non-Florentine popes and their relatives
Pope Sixtus IV, born Francesco della Rovere, thought to have been behind the Pazzi conspiracy in
Florence Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia, the subject of much gossip concerning his nepotism
and other corruptions Cesare Borgia, his son, appointed captain of the papal troops by his father and
given the French title Duc de Valentinois Pope Julius II, born Giuliano della Rovere, popularly known
as il Papa terribile (the fearsome pope) for his impetuous and warlike disposition
Preface
1
In the winter of 1538, an Englishman living in Italy travelled to Florence.
Cardinal Reginald Pole was a devout adherent of the Church of Rome at a time
when the English Reformation threatened to tear the Church apart. He had fled
into self-imposed exile from his native shores after opposing King Henry VIII’s
divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and settled in Italy.
Along with his other business in Florence, Pole had a personal mission.
About a decade before this journey, he’d had a conversation with Thomas
Cromwell, a man of low origins who now served as the king’s most intimate
counsellor. Cromwell had stopped at nothing – or so it seemed to Pole – to
indulge Henry’s lusts and blasphemies. It was this ambitious adviser who, Pole
believed, had masterminded the monarch’s divorce, put England in a state of war
with the Church, had priests and noblemen murdered – and had always found
some righteous pretext to colour these deeds. Contemplating the evils that had
driven him from his homeland, Pole longed to get his hands on a book about
statecraft that Cromwell had praised when they’d met. The book’s author was a
citizen of Florence. He had died over ten years previously, so Pole could not
meet him in person. But if the cardinal could read that book, it might help him
better understand Cromwell’s mind and Henry’s actions, and thereby make sense
of what was happening to his poor England.
On acquiring a copy, Pole began to read with fascination, then with growing
horror. ‘I had scarcely begun to read the book,’ he later wrote, ‘when I
recognized the finger of Satan, though it bore the name of a human author and
was written in a discernibly human style.’ The Florentine’s text laid bare all the
doctrines that seemed to guide Cromwell’s policies. Princes, it said, should build
their states on fear rather than love. Since they live in a world teeming with lies
and violence, they have no choice but to practise duplicity. Indeed, the prince
who best knows how to deceive will be the most successful. In short, Pole
declared, the book Cromwell so admired is full of ‘things that stink of Satan’s
every wickedness’. Its author is clearly ‘an enemy of the human race’. The book
that so appalled Cardinal Pole was the Prince, and the name of its author
Niccolò Machiavelli.
Aghast and intrigued, Pole was determined to find out more about the man
who could write such things. Machiavelli, it transpired, had at one time caused a
good deal of trouble for Florence’s own princely family, the Medici. In 1512, a
year before Machiavelli wrote his most notorious work, the new Medici
government had ejected him from the civil-service posts he’d held for nearly
fifteen years, then imprisoned and tortured him on suspicion of plotting to
overthrow the principality. These fragments of biography must have come up
when Pole asked his Florentine hosts about their compatriot. For, he wrote, when
he told them his thoughts about the book, they excused the author, ‘answering
the charge with the same argument that Machiavelli himself had offered when
they had confronted him’.
Machiavelli’s reply, the Florentines said, had been that not everything in the
Prince expressed his own opinions. Rather, he’d written what he thought would
please a prince, particularly the Medici prince to whom he dedicated the slender
volume: Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, a young man with tyrannical leanings.
But, Pole’s unnamed hosts continued, Machiavelli’s aim wasn’t just to flatter his
way into favour: he had a more sinister purpose. This wiliest of writers had no
illusions about the utility of his cynical teachings. In fact, he was sure that any
prince who put them into practice would soon arouse popular hatred and self-
destruct. And this, said Pole’s Florentine friends, was precisely what Machiavelli
wanted. His design ‘was to write for a tyrant those things that are pleasing to
tyrants, bringing about in this way, if he could, the tyrant’s self-willed and swift
downfall’. In other words, the book’s most shocking advice was ironic. Its
author wore the mask of a helpful adviser, all the while knowing the folly of his
own advice, hoping to ensnare rulers and drag them to their ruin.
This explanation made sense of something that had bothered Pole while
reading the Prince. Though Machiavelli was clearly a man of uncommon
intelligence, some of his maxims seemed to show, as the cardinal put it, a ‘crass
stupidity’. It seemed obvious to Pole that a prince who wins power through fear
won’t achieve security for himself or his state. The Prince claimed to put hard
political facts ahead of moral ideals. But as a handbook on how to secure power,
its advice was flagrantly unrealistic. Machiavelli’s self-proclaimed realism, his
book’s main selling point, was a fraud. And Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and
England were among its first victims. Cromwell had taken the Prince at face
value, Pole insisted, imbibing its devilish doctrines in the belief they were
highest prudence – and in doing so had walked straight into Machiavelli’s trap.
If the writer were alive, he’d be laughing at his handiwork. The results, though,
were no laughing matter. England in 1539 was far along the road to perdition,
and other Christian monarchs might soon go the way of Henry, should they or
their counsellors fall under Machiavelli’s spell. ‘Mark this well, rulers,’ Pole
warned; beware of this two-faced writer. ‘For it is the aim of his doctrine to act
like a drug that causes princes to go mad,’ making them attack their own people
with ‘the savagery of the lion and the wiles of the fox’.
Pole was the first of many readers to demonize Niccolò Machiavelli and
associate his name with the unscrupulous practices of men like Thomas
Cromwell. The Prince as political poison, its author as a cunning fox, Old Nick,
Satan’s emissary, cold-blooded destroyer of kingdoms and of true religion: these
images of Machiavelli and his writings soon came to play a big role in the
propaganda wars stirred up by the Reformation. The conjurors of this demonic
Machiavelli were mostly men of religion, both Catholic and Protestant. The
enemies they branded as Machiavelli’s disciples challenged traditional relations
between Church and state. Some were devout Christians like Cromwell who
sought to weaken political ties with the Church of Rome. Others called for a
new, more secular kind of politics.
Some of these sixteenth-and seventeenth-century challengers fought back by
defending the Florentine against their opponents’ smear campaign. And in this
way a very different Machiavelli – this one altogether human, and humane –
joined his evil double on the political stage. His champions found their
undevilish Machiavelli mainly in his Discourses and Florentine Histories, much
2
longer books than the fast-paced Prince. This Machiavelli was a thoroughgoing
3
republican, a ‘eulogist of democracy’. His aim was to defend the rule of law
against corrupt popes and tyrants. And he sought to uphold high moral standards,
not lower them to fit the gritty realities of political life. True, his morality came
from ancient writers such as Livy, Plutarch and Xenophon rather than Christian
Scriptures, and he loved to ridicule the empty moral platitudes of his day. But he
never wanted to sever politics from morality. He simply wanted to put morality
on firmer, purely human foundations.
But how could this image of a virtuous Machiavelli be squared with
everything he says in the Prince ? His defenders’ answer was that the
Machiavelli of the Prince is a master ironist, a dissimulator who offers advice
that he knows to be imprudent. On this point, though in nothing else, they agreed
with Cardinal Pole. But while Pole thought that Machiavelli dissimulated so that
he could poison princes’ minds and drive them mad, his admirers believed he did
4
so only to unmask their deceits and their secret lusts for power. When he writes
that Pope Alexander VI never did anything, or ever thought of anything, but how
