In Our Time - Machiavelli and the Italian City States

Episode Date: December 9, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. In The Prince, Machiavelli's great manual of power, he wrote, "since men love as they themselves determine but fear as their ruler determines, a wise prince must rely upon what he and not others can control". He also advised, "One must be a fox in order to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves. Those who simply act like lions are stupid. So it follows that a prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word when it places him at a disadvantage".What times was Machiavelli living through to take such a brutal perspective on power? How did he gain the experience to provide this advice to rulers? And was he really the amoral, or even evil figure that so many have liked to paint him?With Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge; Evelyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London; Lisa Jardine, Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In the Prince, Machiavelli's Manual of Power and Politics, he wrote, Since men love as they themselves determine, but fear as their ruler determines,

a wise prince must rely upon what he and not others can control. He also advised, one must be a fox in order to recognise traps and a lion to frighten off wolves. Those who simply act like lions are stupid. So it follows that a prudent ruler cannot and must not honour his word when it places him at a disadvantage. What times was Machiavelli living through to take such a tough perspective on power? I did again the experience to provide this advice to rulers.

And was he really the amoral or even evil figure that so many have liked to paint him? With me to discuss Niccolo Machiavelli and the Italian city states is Evelyn Welsh, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Quentin Skinner, Regis Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, and Lisa Jardine, Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary University of London. Quentin Skinner, can we start with some political background and tell us about the era in which Niccolo Machia Valley was born? Yes, he's born in 1469 into the Florentine Republic,

but it's a republic in some difficulties by that time. That's to say, with the rise of the Medici to informal control under Cosimo, who effectively ruled the city from 1434 until his death in 1464, and then with the coming of Lorenzo to power in the year of Machiavelli's birth, the Republic was in effect to sham. It's controlled by the Medici, who abandoned the great council, which had been central to the old republic, first replacing it with a council of 100, which they were. They're able to manipulate. And then, under Lorenzo, by 1480, setting up a council of 70, which is not reappointed. It becomes a permanent council. And so, really, the creatures of the Medici. So he's born into a proud republic, which has nevertheless been suborned from within.

And so we have the idea of the republic very much around still, and we have corruption very much interfused, and we have this great princely, although the word is not like family at the time, the Medici's, for about a century, wealthy and so. in this very small, we must emphasize at the time, a very small city but full of genius and ambition. Absolutely. Yes, I mean to speak of the culture of the period, I mean, this is really Evelyn speciality,

but it is very important to remember that by the time of Machiavelli's birth, most of what we think of as the huge cultural achievement of Florence was in place. Jotto's Tower on the cathedral, Brunelleschi's design for the dome, Masaccio's decorations of the Carmenet. all of this is present by the time Machiavelli is born.

Of course, it's an interesting fact that Machiavelli seems completely indifferent to this. You will read the whole of his works and find no reference to the cultural glories of his city except one complaint at the beginning of the discourses that people like old statutes, statues, but they ought to be thinking about statecraft instead. In the Italian city-states, do we have here a difference of politics from anywhere else in Europe? Is there still a hangover from the great days, more than... a millennial of the Roman Republic, the idea that republicanism should be somewhere around? Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, I think that's exactly the point, that what's revived in the Comune in Italy in the 12th century,

and they're very widely revived in Lombardy, as well as in Tuscany, is the Roman idea of self-government, the idea of Libetasse, that's to say, the independence of the commune to govern itself. Florence is very unusual in having succeeded in fighting off the rise, which was very general in Italy in the 14th century, of signori, that's to say, the abandonment of self-government in favour of having a single ruler, as with the Visconti in Milan or the Carraese in Padua. Florence and Venice are the two survivors of the neo-Roman idea of self-government, which emerged in the 12th century in Italy. The very strongly anti-fudal idea, it's incredible under feudal monarchies throughout Europe,

to have the idea that governments have to be elected and there has to be a written constitution. And that's still very much around in Machiavelli's adolescence. How did he come into prominence as a figure on one of the layers of administration, Evelyn Welsh, in Florence? Well, as Quentin has pointed out, there's an enormous tension in Florence, certainly by the 1490s, between, if you like, this fiction, very important key fiction that Florence is self-governing a republic independent and the increasing aristocraticization of that community, particularly as the Medici's start allying themselves, not with Florentine families, but with aristocratic families from Rome, for example.

And the fiction that's very tensely maintained throughout the 70s and 80s blows apart in the 1490s. In 1494, when the King of France comes into Italy and destabilizes all the very delicate, balances that have been established up until that point. So, if you like, the Medici are expelled. Very suddenly, that whole party, which has seemed to be really immutable in Florence, is forced into exile.

And another group of Florentine patrician families takes power. It happens that Machiavelli's father has good contacts. All of these things inevitably are about good contacts. And his son, who is trained in the law, who has a good university background, is promoted into office. If you like, there is a power vacuum. And all of the old civil servants have to go. There is a need for new civil servants.

Machiavelli is untainted by the previous regime. He finds himself in a rather sort of middling position, it should be stressed. He's not chancellor. He's sort of head of the second chancery there. But this is at the end of the... 50 of him in the century. It's 1498 he gets this post and he's there for 14 or 15 years and that is the way he gathers

his material. A lot of his material in the prints and he comes from the actual letters he wrote then and although he is not an aristocrat therefore he can't become an ambassador he seems to be an extremely influential in many ways. He seems to have gone and visited people. Can you just give us some idea of enough of the experience that the man

built up while he was in this particular job? Yes, I mean he held a range of jobs in the Florentine in the Thorntine government his official job as Secretary of the Second Chancery, but also he was in charge of a lot of small committees. And it's in those small committees that he was able to really influence colleagues, a lot of behind the scenes, pulling of strings, talking to people,

finding out what was really going on. And then much of his diplomacy was face-to-paced diplomacy. So he was sent on missions to try to Rome, to the Imperial Court, several times to to papal consistories there to try and find out what was in Florence's best interest and try to convince others

that they should act in Florence's best interest. Very much behind the scenes. It's quite interesting that whenever he had a potentially public role, often the Florentine government said he wasn't sort of elite enough to be sent in that kind of public way.

He could only go as an assistant to somebody else. But he's getting this tremendous experience. Do we have evidence from any of his contemporaries as to how good they thought he was at this particular job? Yes, and he was regarded as one of the most effective communicators, somebody who could really listen and work out from a variety of different sources what was really going on

at a time of enormous turbulence when Florence's interests were in real danger. So he's in that post for about 14, 15 years, Liz Adjadine, and then he is propelled into a contemplative life. In fact, the militia comes out, he's kicked out. It says in one or two of the accounts I've read that he was tortured and imprisoned for a year. Was he the way of evidence of this torture? Well, he was.

I mean, he was implicated in an attempt to return to the status quo. And therefore, yes, he was. He was imprisoned and he was tortured. I don't know any details. I'm sure Quentin Skinner does. But it's always, it is part of the background. to what, I mean, it's very important that he himself was caught up in the world he thereafter describes. That is, torture isn't just something that he recommends or violence.

He doesn't just recommend it. He has been the victim of it. I think that's quite important. And he goes to his farm in Tuscany and immediately begins to write. Yes, which is interestingly quite characteristic of these figures who've left public life. It's also what Francis Bacon does when he loses power. He begins to write, not only does he begin to write, but he looks back to all the classical figures who have informed the political thought of those who have worked in the administration in Florence. We have to remember, it's a really crucial part of this story, that the whole Florentine Republic is founded, as Quentin said, on the Roman ideal.

And that involves reading back through the classical authorities, through Tacitus, through Livy, through, and that's what, what, what, When Machiavelli is projected into retirement, what he tells us he does, what he tells Vittori in a letter, is that in the evening he'll dress up and he will go and talk to the classical authorities, as it were, speaking to the dead, and then he will write. And so his writing comes out of this deep immersion in classical figures, but then this immediate experience, himself of torture, of the vagaries of politics, the expulsion of the Medici,

the return of the Michi. It's all part of this terrible tumbling wheel of fate. Did he have to make a decision to write this in Italian? I know that the Italian had been used before, but the idea of writing it in the vernacular wasn't entirely common, was it, at that time? And it proved to be, of course, very effective

by writing the prince in Italian. Of course it depends whether you're an Italian. Very interesting story of the history of the prince in England, for instance, because it's originally written in Italian. There is, of course, the great precedent of Dante and Italy is the Tuscan is the language, the great vernacular language before all other vernacular languages.

So I think the combination of humanism, that love of language, love of rhetoric, and love of the past, I think, and Italian go together. But printing was around, so I'm just trying to get a, we have some idea of this political past. Quentin gave us some idea of the state of politics in the states. Avelin told us about what he Machiavellian, what Machiavelli did as a working man in the same.

His library would be quite extensive, wouldn't he? He would be able to draw on a great number of classical. And classical authors were coming through then. But remember, the Medici Library was the great library. We can't disentangle the culture from the author. That's the lovely thing that you've asked us to look at in this programme. The library in which all the books will have been was the library of the Medici in Florence,

which was the first public library, the first library that you could go and borrow books from. Yes, indeed, he had his own private library of the classics. And yes, indeed, this is a, it's at one level a historically bookish enterprise, but absolutely of the moment because of the politics and what has happened to him in his life and is happening to Florence. And the classical authors are being retranslated and rediscovered. Quintan, can you introduce us then to Machiavelli's most famous book,

the prince which he started right about a year after who was expelled? Yes. Well, he goes into action at once. He's released from prison. He was indeed tortured, and it was called being put to the hoist. What's that? Your arms are bound behind you and you're dropped, so it breaks your shoulders. He speaks about this with great bitterness in his letters of the time. But he's released when the Medici becomes Pope, an amnesty is declared, and he's released from prison. But he goes into internal exile. about 10 miles south of Florence.

You can still see the city. But he is in exile on his farm, as you say, and he settles down at once. It's a very interesting point you make about the vernacular because when he writes to Vittori at Christmas in 1513, he says, I've finished a book called De Prynchi Partibus, as if he'd written it in Latin. There was a huge literature of books called De Principipe,

all in Latin. This is a breakthrough that he decides not to write it in Latin, although the chapter headings are all in Latin. The text is in this, as you say, very formative. called Neo-Ciceronian Italian that he wrote. The book is finished by Christmas of 1513, so it takes him only nine months to write perhaps the most famous of all texts on political power.

And was he aiming it at, was this revenge? Was it proving how good a thinker he was? Do we have evidence that this was being built up in his letters and in his communications in the last 15 years? So is this something he had been thinking on for a long time? He makes that very clear, yes. I mean, it's a jaw back application, as he says to Vittori in the famous letter of December 1513 that Lisa cited,

he says, what will bring me to the notice of these princes? And in the preface, he says, if you want the favour of a prince, you give him your most prize possession. And then he says, my most prize possession, and it's a rejection of the trope of modesty, which was usual in dedications, is the unique understanding of politics that I've gained from the experience that Evelyn taught us about.

This is my most prized possession, and I give it to you. And he's quite clearly hoping to be re-employed. I think he had very bad luck, and it was, as Lisa has said, because of his implication falsely in an anti-Medician plot immediately after the return of the Medici in 1512, that he's not able to serve the new regime. Many did make the transition from the Republic, but he did not. So as a result of that, of course, we have all his literary works,

otherwise we wouldn't have anything. Everything is written between 1513 and his death in 1527. So we around this table are glad he was expelled. We're very glad for this extreme caesura, yes. Because as you said, I mean, the active life is then turned into the contemplative life, which is a greater Renaissance trope, but he lives the two. Can I ask you, which is very unfair, but you are Regis Professor Appelope? They never know anything.

Is it possible to say what the basic argument is in this book? Is it possibly encapsulated? Or does it not lend itself to that? If it doesn't move on. I think it does. I think it does. But in order to see what the basic argument is, which I think is a negative argument,

you do have to recognize that in neoclassical vein, Macchi Velli has a view about what princes should be doing. And it is a totally classical idea. They should be seeking their own glory, their honour and glory through their great exploits. And those exploits also have to bring happiness to the people. But fundamentally in underlying that, there's a phrase which echoes all through the prince, which is that it's the obligation fundamentally of the prince, mantonello, to sustain his state,

his state as a prince, of course, his princely state. Okay, once you've understood that that's what it is to be a prince, that you must maintain your state and seek honor and glory, then you're up against this whole humanist tradition, which you yourself alluded to of books called de principi, which say, yes, that's right, and the way to do that is to pursue the virtue. The way to encapsulate Machiavelli's thinking in the Prince, it seems to me, is to say that he says that's an illusion. The great illusion of humanism is to suppose that glory is the reward of virtue, or to put it in an acrolyistic terms, that it's always rational to be moral. The fundamental contention of this book is that it is not always rational to be moral.

How revolutionary is that, Evelyn? extraordinarily revolutionary revolutionary at all in terms of political thinking, in terms of how diplomacy operated, and in terms of how, if you like, agents talked to each other. The extraordinary thing was that Machiavelli took something which was effectively understood amongst good men who looked each other in the eye and winked, but not put between covers and sold to the general public there. So if you like, what Machiavelli is taking his experience of the active life, as Quentin has said, and kind of opening it up for scrutiny. It needs to be stressed, of course.

It wasn't published in his lifetime there. And again, I think the context of the extraordinary turbulence of the time, that this is a period in which men seem to be making themselves as princes on an almost daily basis. Can you just, excuse me, can you ask you to develop what in that brilliant summary Quentin said at the end of it? that it's not always rational to be moral. Can you just develop that a little? Well, I think we need to step back a moment and recognise that in Anglo-Saxon culture,

sort of post-enlightenment Anglo-Saxon culture, the notion of the impersonal bureaucrat working for the abstract ideal is something that we hold quite dear. And it's very hard for us then to look back at Machiavelli's world without using words like amoral there. But in his community to, if you like, serve something without also serving your family, your friends, your neighbours, those you care about most, is in itself foolish, genuinely foolish because, as Quentin has said, you'll get nowhere. And you'll find yourself on the receiving end of other family's antagonisms there.

So you begin by protecting your amici there. and foremost, and then you can protect the state. You move from, if you like, the domestic to the political, as opposed to what we see is correct today, moving from the political to the domestic. But for many people, there will seem to be a clash because the word virtue comes up, the word serve, the word, and yet you're allowed to go about it in the most what we would say,

you're allowed to use deceit, you're allowed to use revenge, you're allowed to use, and that sort of thing. And lies, of course, it is good to lie, he says at certain times. What's beautifully coming out of this discourse from Quentin to Evelyn is there's a sort of pun and a sort of fulcrum at the centre of this, which is mantinar de la stato. So it's your state, but it's also the stability of the state and the people who make up the state. And we keep coming back to these terribly turbulent times. What you have happening is that some political thinkers, Machiavelli, is that some political thinkers, Machiavelli, one, think about the prince as maintaining stability, whatever it takes. Some like Erasmus

say the prince has got to be virtuous and it's the people who consent to what it takes to be virtuous. Both are talking about stability, about please get us out of these times where year on year the gates of the city are broken down and somebody else comes in and we're pillaged and there's a whole new administration. So Machiavelli's virtue is, in the interests of those of the public who make up the city, because, ironically, even if you have to turn a blind eye to vice, to torture, to duplicitous behavior, to killing off your enemies in order to serve your family interest, keep your family safe, even if you have to turn a blind eye to that,

what you get is stability. And at the core of the prince is the problem that if you have seized power, which is going on up and down Italy, you are inevitably in an instable position. There is no equilibrium. As he says over and over again, equilibrium comes only. If you are a great benevolent ruler

and you pass on your benevolent rule to your children and their children, you should be so lucky. Instead, you have the King of France invading or you have the Pope interfering. In unstable times, Machiavelli says, virtue can only be the kind of of strong arm behaviour

which stops the next guy tipping the balance and taking over power. He does say that his fine systems would work if all men were good but they are not. Isn't there in the work, Quentin Skinner, is it open to the interpretation of the search for stability two things, many things

I don't happen. First of all, it lends itself to authoritarianism. Stability at all costs, therefore. And secondly, that in this work the last vestiges of republicanism are seen off. Yes. Could you take those two on? Yes.

Well, of course, the quest for stability is the great quest, and everything has to be seen in relation to that. And it is true, as Lisa has already implied, that what this in effect brings about is a redefinition of this notion of political virtue, which had been central to the Republican tradition. I actually think, perhaps more than Evelyn does, that Machiavelli's take on political virtue would have been very shocking at the time, if only because, as I see it, it's a kind of satire on the values of classical and Renaissance humanism. The great text for these writers and the text that Macchiabelli certainly had in his study, along with his livy, was Cicero's de efficacy, the study of the offices, that's to say the duties of the public life.

And the central theme of that work, and thus of classical humanism, is that virtue, and here's another important pun, is the quality of the veer, that's to say the man, it's a manly quality. Veer is man, virile, the source of our word. And so it's the virile qualities that enable stability to be maintained. But for Cicero, it's crucial that these are manly qualities by contrast with beatings, beastly qualities. And you brought it out beautifully in the introductory quotation, because Cicero goes on to say, look, in politics, you must avoid beastliness because the two things to be avoided are pure force and pure fraud. Pure force is the lion, pure fraud, is the fox. These are beasts. We are men. This is to be avoided. Now think of chapter 18 of the prince. It's a satire on all these values.

And Machiavelli says, of course manly virtue is a good thing if you can manage it. But in our time and in the quest for stability, you will have to use beastly methods as well as manly methods. And so, as he says in the immortal phrase, you better know which beasts to imitate. And I say, he who comes off best, and I'm now quoting, is the man who has learnt to imitate the lion and the fox. What isn't usually seen is that that's a quotation from Cicero, an upending of all of the values, in the name of saying, look, this idea that the virtuous form of action is the one that brings stability, is the great illusion of the age.

But it does take us into dark areas of interpretation, doesn't it? Once you say that, people think, right, anything I do to secure what I can maintain is a virtuous stability. Yes. In the name of that, I can do anything I want, really. Yes, but he does block that off, and he blocks it off by the extent to which he is a classical moralist, and the key passage is Chapter 8, where he discusses Agathocles, the tyrant of Sicily, who is enormously successful, so off all his enemies, murdered the entire Senate, died in his bed.

So Machiavelli says, well, why is that not virtue? He maintained his state, he fought off all his enemies. And he has a very interesting remark there. He says, in the Italian, this will bring you imperio, man and glory. Power but not glory. And the goal of the true prince is power and glory. So his prince is distinguished from the thug. Macchi Valley is not saying be the thug.

He's saying be the thug if it's absolutely necessary. I think you're being an advocate, but I think we could have different views on that. We'd like to take that up. Although it wasn't published, would those ideas have been acceptable? Would they have seen themselves in the Prince at the time? The point that Lisa made is a very important one. He wants to get noticed. He's absolutely, I mean, he loved his job.

He's desperate to get back into that position of influence and authority. And the Marici, who are returning to Florence, So relatively young men. In fact, it's their mother, Alphonseena, who's really pulling all the strings. And that's causing enormous sort of anxiety amongst these Florentine virtuous men there. So he's constructing something that he feels will cause a stir. He's not planning to publish it, but he's certainly planning to circulate it. And so that initial dedicatory letter, I think, is quite important.

He certainly had several versions of it to several different people there, sort of trying to put himself forward. Was it circulated? And was he telling them what they want to hear, the people to whom he circulated the book? Well, what he's doing is he's taking what you said was state correspondence, things that are said in private, behind closed doors, in small, today we'd call them smoke-filled committee rooms there. Smoke-free zone. Oh, smoke-free zone. He's putting that together in a very structured way in Italian, and it's not being circulated to the general public, but it's going to cause us to know for precisely the reasons that Quentin has said.

People are going to read it because it's interesting. And of course, it also, I think we have, I mean, I'm, of course, the great advocate of realpolitik here and the fact that what we're dealing with is immediate history and writing down to circulate amongst employees, of the regime the stories from the generation before, the lessons you learn

from what has happened. Now, you know, if we look at Machiavelli's extolling of the virtue of Chesery Borgia, that's why I laughed at Quentin about, yes, there are, there are tyrants who die in their beds

and they have imperium but not Gloria. Chesery Borgia takes up a whole chapter. Machiavelli had worked in close proximity, in close proximity to Chesri Borgia in 1503. When Leonardo da Vinci was in the direct employ of Chesery, Borja,

they had worked together at trying to divert the course of the Arno River so that Pisa would get no water and they could conquer Pisa. Real Machiavellian politics, take the water flow away. Failed dismally, they couldn't do so. But here is the man writing about the virtue of Cheserie Borgia, the great tyrant who only came to power, because his father the Pope pushed him into prominence who retained that power by the most dastard he means

who became a household name for bad behaviour. Here is a man who worked with him, who saw him working, writing about how well you might see it that way, but on the other hand you might say he got that glory. He became that virtuous, virile man, Quentin's grimacing. Did Macchierevelli justify that. Did Machiavelli justify Borgia in that sense? I mean, Borgia is known to,

would be known to the listeners to this programme as an evil, vicious, lying dastately personally. Murder, basically. But is Machiavelli saying, but because he achieved what he achieved, he is to be admired and perhaps even imitated? Well, he does talk about Borgia, not just in Chapter 7 of the Prince,

as Lisa has spoken of, but also very interestingly in the discussion of cruelty. Clemency, of course, Seneca's de Clementia, was meant to be the virtue of the prince. And Machiavelli says of Borgia, well, he was cruel, but his cruelty reformed Romagna. So if you think of keeping your eye on the ball, which is what does, in fact, bring stability and what does bring the means to maintain the state, then you'll have to excuse his cruelty. It's interesting about Clemency the way he attacks Scipio, who was famous for clemency, says, but look, when he pardoned these people, they just, after a mutiny, they're just mutiny it again.

That wasn't clemency, this was weakness. Oh, now, that's really interesting. I think that is actually a deeper layer of the theory of morality in the prince than we've yet got to, because I do think it's true that although Macchiavali talks about the princely virtues, of which Seneca had written the two major treatises, the de Clementia on mercy, but also the de beneficies on gratitude and on the importance of giving benefits and thus of liberality. and generosity. One of the things which I think is very important about the prince is Macchiabelli is saying, yes, liberality is a great virtue, yes, clemency is a great

virtue, but we probably don't understand these virtues. And your example, I think, is one of the best. That's to say he says of Borgia, yes, he was cruel, but that brought good results. But if it brought good results, in what sense was that not the conduct of the true vir? And so there's a question against whether we rightly think of a cruelty in the way that we do think of it. And then Scipio is the example given. Of the famous pardoning of the mutiny, which led to a second mutiny, Machiavelli says this is tropopieta. This is laxity.

This is not what was claimed of it, generosity and liberality and decency and absence of cruelty. This is actually a vice. But we do stray there into the... the area and the tag that Machiavelli, perhaps by people who haven't read him, much, say, look, what he's saying really is the end justifies the means, and I can find justification post hoc. Evelyn, are we in that territory? Well, certainly in some of that territory.

I mean, he's very clear about what the means and what the ends are. And again, I'm not sure he intended this, and Quentin may have more views on it, to be his major defining work. I mean, he wrote it very well. rapidly, he wrote it in Italian, he's not planning to publish it. It seems to be, if you like, it's serving his own ends there. And the immediate, I keep coming back to this immediate context, which is Florence has lost all the territory. Florence is desperate to get Pisa back. Under these circumstances, the means justifies the ends. The end justifies the means. Whether

he really intended this to be taken as a sort of universal political point for all times, I think is the interesting question. But it was very rapidly. I think that's the, I mean, it's extraordinarily rapidly. I mean, it's printed in the 1530s. And by 1539, Thomas Cromwell is taking a copy, presenting a copy to Henry the 8th, and saying, this is awfully useful. Here is stuff about badly behaved popes behaving like Condottieri and invading territory and manipulating power and putting their sons Cesare Borgia into positions where they conduct brutal, brutal assaults on the states that they want to rule. And the prince is being translated bits of it into, in fact, the whole thing into English

and circulated in England. So Henry is using it as justification for the break with Rome, for the way in which he is taking power. That's 1530s just after it's published. So I think we need to balance the whatever it was Machiavelli wanted, this extraordinary relationship between the work and the situation in Florence and the way that it just took off as the manual for tyrants. Quentin's going to come back to the prince had not the effect on his career that he'd hoped for.

He dedicated to Lorenzo. No. It didn't work. And he went on to do a work that he might have thought of as grandeur to work on the discourses of the first ten books of Livy. She spent more time on this work. Why did you turn there and did that amplify what it said in the prince? Yes.

Well, you give exactly the right chronology of it. The prince is finished by 1513, although probably revised in 1516 when he rededicates it. But from 1514 until 1519 when he completes it, can work this out from internal evidence. He's writing the discorsi. He has his Livy. His father, by the way, Bernardo, had done the index for the first printing.

You spoke earlier of printing. It's very important that we're in the age of the printed book now. And Livy's history, the first 10 decades, is published in Florence in the 1480s, and Machiavelli's father makes the index, as a result of which he's given a free copy, which he leaves to his son, who then sitting in the farm, which he'd also inherited from his father,

writes the greatest treatise on Republican freedom in the Western tradition and probably a more influential book, fantastically influential in the English Revolution, in the forming of an English republic, as well as in republicanism in its revival all through Europe. So that I think he would have thought of as his major work, certainly. It's enormously longer, as you know, three large books of discourses on the first ten books of Livy,

And the first ten books of Livy are about how Rome, having started as a monarchy, overthrew its kings, set up a self-governing republic, and as a result of doing so, rose from the position of a small city-state to govern the whole world. So there's the theme. But it's interesting that it goes to a man who, he's talking about, after 500 years of sort of experiments to get a republic going in Rome, it's now doomed. Yes.

And Livy is looking back on this with enormous. powerful nostalgia of hope, and Machiavelli goes for him? Yes. Well, it's a very nostalgic book, Livy's history, as you rightly say, because it's written at the time of the collapse of the Republic. But it is a meditation on how the Republic succeeded. And for Machiavelli, I think what is crucial and what seems to contradict the Prince is that if you were to try to encapsulate what he's telling us about republics in the discourse, it would be that if you want true glory as a state,

you have to have what he calls libertas. No glory without freedom. And by freedom, he means freedom from any external interference with the running of your own affairs. He means self-government. So it's the great contention that there's no real interesting distinction between monarchy and tyranny. If you want greatness, you must avoid those forms of government.

You must govern yourselves. Evelyn, Liz took us forward to the time when Cromwell got the translation, got the copy of the printed copy of the book and gave it to Henry the 8th. Can we talk a little now about the political, and Quentin has referred to the discourse as influence on the English Civil War? Can you talk about the influence that Machiavelli began to have in Europe and beyond as the 16th century, 17th, 18th century developed? Well, I hope everyone will pitch in on this one. It's when it is a printed text and when it is translated into a range. I mean, Lisa alluded to the fact.

that by not writing it in Latin, oddly enough, limits its initial circulation because Latin is the common language of the elites of Europe. And certainly, writing in Latin would have meant a wider initial dissemination. It has to be translated and modified for particular audiences there. There is an interesting way in which, for instance, again, coming back to the British Isles, learning Italian at the end of the 16th century is quite closely associated with being able to read the prince. I mean, I have marginal annotations by Gabriel Harvey in his livy, in which he very proudly quotes bits of the prince in Italian in order to demonstrate.

By that time it was in Latin. But the Italianate interests by the mid-16th century makes you look a bit suspect, certainly in England, that you might have Machiavellian interests. of course in the drama of around 1600, Machiavelli becomes a stock figure and he will actually quote passages from the prince, say in Marlowe's The View of Malta, in order to demonstrate that this is going to be a play about dastardly use of power. And it's also important to note that it was put on the index of censored books in Italy. So although in northern Europe, if you like, it's circulating as an example of how terrible Catholic Italy,

is in Italy itself, you're not supposed to have it on your shelves. So at the same time as it's spreading out as a handbook, as we've seen of Henry of the Eighth. We have the increasing demonisation of Machiavelli. Yes. He appears in play as that dreadful Machiavel. The murderous Machiavell. Yes. So is this seized on because of religiousism or is it seized on because people take the worst of the

sentences as it were and think are what a doubt of the person, because the old morality won't have itself revealed and he's torn down the curtain and they don't like it? Well, I think that's right. I mean, I think it is important to remember that this was held to be an extraordinarily shocking book. And it's important that when it's translated into English, Edward Dacres translates the discosci into English in 1636 and the Principae in 1640. They come with very elaborate health warnings. It's an amusing book to read because

Lisa's already spoken of marginal annotations but in the printed text there are marginal annotations in every chapter saying well here is what Machiavelli says but this is absolutely dreadful and you shouldn't for a moment believe any of this and don't do it and don't try this at home and indeed in the title page

when the text is printed it's printed with a title page which says the Prince of Maccavalli but with corrections of the immorality of the doctrine. But it's interesting because four years before Luther, Machiavelli is saying the papacy is corrupt, it must be reformed, then Luther does it,

but the northern, let's broadly now, I've only got a couple of minutes, the northern Protestant movement is so by faith and by work, so when he comes up and says, it doesn't work like that, the Christian, going for the Christian goodness, shoving off your prospect of making things better to the next world, is disabling

and disabling, they won't have that. No, that's terribly shocking. That's absolutely right, and it's the beginning of the second of the discourse, this attack on Christianity for having failed us in virtue. As he says, Christianity makes glory about the next world, and so it has delivered this world over to the evil. There is Macchi, a very little former, insisting that what we're trying to get out of politics

is stability and something which will bring happiness to the people, and insisting that conventional morality will not do that. But of course, conventional morality hit back with great ferocity. Abilene? Well, I think it's, if we want to sort of round it, Macchiavelli the man off as opposed to his influence, I think it's important to sort of note that in his continued attempt to make an impact in Florentine politics while he's in relative exile,

he actually moves on to very different kinds of works. That Livy discourse just doesn't make, again, the impact that he wants. And the stuff that he turns to is kind of funny, witty, amusing plays there. The mandragula. where again deception, transvestitism, all of the sort of stuff that actually, again,

forms the basis for Shakespeare and other kinds of English, sort of bawdy, humorous, witty plays, that that Machiavelli, in that context, may have been the one who was best known to his contemporaries. Better known as a poet

and a pler than a political thinker. Well, yes. And historian. And he hated that. It would have been a... I mean, it was... it was the stronger messages that he would have liked to have got across, not just as negative models.

Well, thank you all very much. I really enjoyed that. I'm sure everybody else did. Thanks to Quentin Skinner, Ablin Walsh, and Lisa Jardin, and next week I'll be attempting to discuss the second law of thermodynamics. I will learn to pronounce it first. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy,

at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.