Biography: In the annals of received ideas, the name of Niccolò Machiavelli holds a prominent position.
Although his most famous work, The Prince, was not published in his own lifetime, he had within a few years of his death acquired a reputation as one of the most wicked thinkers ever to put pen to parchment, and even yet he is considered by many, especially those who have not read him, as the epitome of political cynicism and public and private immorality. A contemporary of Machiavelli, the historian Benedetto Varchi, spoke of his bad name being due to the licentious life he led and to "a little book called The Prince", while his first biographer, Pasquale Villari, disliked and disapproved of his subject. Later, after the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, in which more than 50,000 French Protestants were killed, Protestant leaders believed that the Catholics who instigated the slaughter, including Catherine de' Medici, had taken their inspiration from Machiavelli, forgetting, perhaps, that the Vatican had placed The Prince on the Index of banned works 13 years before the massacre took place.
Nowhere, it seems, was Machiavelli more reviled than in England. The word "Machiavellian" first appeared in an English dictionary as early as 1569. Christopher Marlowe made him a character in The Jew of Malta (1590), while Shakespeare has numerous mentions of "the murderous Machiavel", and, as Michael White suggests in his lively and perceptive new biography, based several of his villains directly on him, including Richard III, Iago, and even Lady Macbeth. Yet White is correct when he observes that "Machiavelli did not invent Machiavellianism, he observed it . . ."
White's case for this "man misunderstood" is summed up in the epigraph to his book, taken from Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning: "We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, not what they ought to do." That was written in 1605, but it was not until 35 years later that The Prince was translated into English, by which time, however, in England "Old Nick" had become one of the most popular nicknames (!) for the Devil. It is a sobriquet that still survives - odd to think that when our mothers warned us of the wiles of Old Nick they were unknowingly paying a backhanded compliment to the enduring reputation of one of the great figures of the Italian Renaissance.
Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469 into a patrician family, a branch of the Guelphs, which by Niccolò's time had lost the greater part of its wealth and power. His father, Bernardo, had trained as a lawyer but did not earn his living from the law, and the family seems to have relied solely on scant incomes from the family farm at Sant'Andrea, a little way outside Florence. It is known that Bernardo was a specchio, or tax debtor, which normally would have precluded his children from serving in public office, and the fact that his son later held high positions in the government of the city state of Florence is an indication that by then his debts had been settled - or that the wily and resourceful Niccolò was not prepared to let such a barrier stand in the way of a glittering career.
Niccolò grew up in a cultured household. His mother, Bartolomea, had a love for poetry and music, and composed religious verse. His father too had intellectual interests, and despite his modest means was a dedicated bibliophile; in later years his son told of how he had been sent to collect from the printer a splendid copy of Livy bound in calfskin and printed on the best paper. The book was to become the prize of Bernardo's collection and almost a family icon, and it is no accident that the Discorsi, which Machiavelli considered his most important writings, took their inspiration from the works of Livy.
Few details survive of Machiavelli's life up to 1498, when he secured the influential position of Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Florentine Republic. Florence had become one of the leading cities in Italy - indeed, in Europe - under the guidance of the Medici family, in particular Cosimo de' Medici, a brilliant banker who made the city rich, and his grandson Lorenzo, deservedly known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, who assumed his place as the head of the family in the year of Machiavelli's birth. Lorenzo inherited his grandfather's skill as a banker, and like Cosimo was a patron of the arts and of scholarship. The translations of ancient classics that Cosimo commissioned from such savants as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola brought the wisdom of Greece and Rome and Constantinople to the Italian city state.
There was more to Florence than learning, however, and among the arts that it practised the most important were those of warfare and intrigue. Lorenzo soon found himself the victim of an assassination attempt by members of the rival Pazzi family, in which he was seriously wounded and in which his brother Giuliano died. The attack took place in the Duomo at the end of Mass; Lorenzo was stabbed in the neck, and his friend Antonio Ridolfi, fearing the dagger might have been tipped with poison, sucked the wound clean, after which the two escaped through a secret passageway, hauling Giuliano's body with them. The incident smacks of a scene out of Shakespeare, and indeed, reading White's racy and vigorous biography, one cannot but regret the Machiavel that Shakespeare never wrote.
Lorenzo's son and successor, "the hapless Piero", as White calls him, was no chip off the old block, but a vacillator and political amateur: within a couple of years of taking over from his father he virtually handed over the city to the invading forces of the French King Charles VIII, and had to be hurried away into exile to escape the fury of the Florentine citizenry. Florence from its earliest days had no written constitution, but its system of government, if complicated, was, White writes, "compared with any other state in Europe except for Venice, the most liberal and sophisticated of the Renaissance". After Lorenzo's death and the debâcle of Piero's rule, however, the governance of the city was in disarray.
Comes the hour, comes the man. The Dominican monk Savonarola was a sort of Ian Paisley of his day, though less shrewd and even more intemperate than the Reverend Doctor. Having served on a five-man commission that negotiated a peace settlement with the invading French, Savonarola became the new head of state. He immediately set about establishing a Florentine theocracy which was to last for four turbulent years, before the city, backed by the Pope, whom Savonarola had been foolish enough to excoriate from the pulpit, turned on him and caused him to be burnt at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria on May 23rd, 1498. With the mad monk and his autos-da-fé gone, Florence went back to its old pursuits of making money and having a good time. Among the bright new men was the 29-year-old Niccolò Machiavelli.
He was to prove a loyal son of Florence, a brilliant diplomat who in the 14 years before his downfall travelled the length and breadth of Europe, encountering political and religious leaders such as Louis XII of France, the corrupt and ruthless Pope Julius II, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, and the artists Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. His most significant encounter, however, was with Cardinal Cesare Borgia, also known as Duke Valentino, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, and Machiavelli's very model of a model prince. Cesare was a soldier, a despot, and a suspected fratricide, who murdered two of his sister's husbands and a number of her lovers, probably out of jealousy, since he harboured an incestuous passion for Lucrezia who, by all accounts, many of them unfair, was no laggard herself in the wickedness stakes.
Machiavelli was fascinated by Cesare, this warrior prince who won his way to power by a consummate blend of ruthlessness and charm, and seemingly miraculous good luck. The crafty secretary had time to study the iron duke when he was sent by his government on a three-month mission to Cesare's court at Imola, with the twin task of negotiating an alliance between the city and the Borgias, and to spy on Cesare and report back on his intentions and his doings.
It was Machiavelli's great strength that, although he was a poet and a romantic, he had no illusions whatever about the nature of human nature. He recognised Cesare as the personification of the will to power, a superb strategist and fearless soldier, a man who would readily execute a loyal henchman if the sacrifice should suit his purpose, as Machiavelli himself could attest: in December 1502, on a campaign in the Romagna, Cesare had his closest associate, Remirro de Orco, who was feared and loathed by the citizenry, cut in two and dumped along with a bloodied knife and a chopping block in the town square of Cesena, a deed which, Machiavelli observed mildly, "kept the people of the Romagna for a long time appeased and stupefied".
Even a prince can come to grief, however. At a dinner in Rome in August of 1503, the Pope, Cesare's father, made a botched attempt to poison one of his enemies and succeeded instead in killing himself and poisoning his son. Cesare lived, but something in him died, the Lady Fortuna deserted him, and a swift decline set in, so that within months he was imprisoned by his father's successor to the papacy, and four years later died a squalid death at the hands of brigands on a road in Navarre, where he had been sent into exile by the Pope. Machiavelli was disgusted that such a hero should come to such an ignominious end.
It was not many more years before Machiavelli himself was in jail, put there by a new breed of Medici rulers, in a plot against whom Machiavelli had been named as a conspirator, unjustly, as it happened. In February, 1513, he was flung into a cell in the Bargello prison, where he was tortured by strappado - hands tied behind his back, the victim was winched to the ceiling, then released and brought up short at the end of the rope - in an attempt to force him to incriminate himself in the plot. He suffered this treatment six times, but continued to assert his innocence. Old Nick was no weakling.
Released from prison but now a ruined man, he retired with his family to the farm at Sant'Angelo, where he sought to heal his spirit by living the life of a minor country squire, and by writing a masterpiece of world literature. The Prince is a short book, of some 30,000 words, but its effect over the half millennium since it was written has been vast. Traces of the insights and instructions offered by The Prince can be detected in documents as disparate as the American Constitution and Marx's Capital. White, in a brilliant precis, reduces Machiavelli's thought to seven essential rules, among them that history is written by the winners, that people can never be trusted, and that a successful leader must be both a lion and a fox - as examples of such leaders he offers Hitler and, surely with a touch of mischievousness, Margaret Thatcher.
For Machiavelli there was a life after political death. Showing an iron will of his own, he turned himself into a popular writer, with hugely successful plays such as Mandragola and Clizia, outrageous and indecent comedies which even the Pope enjoyed; he also found his way into an exclusive circle of literary men who used to meet in the Rucellai Gardens on the outskirts of Florence for discussion and enjoyment. He got some way back into public favour, too, and in the final two years of his life was taken on as a papal diplomat, exercising his old skills at intrigue and persuasion. After witnessing the sack of Rome by the German forces of Emperor Charles V - eight days of rapine and slaughter in which citizens were forced to eat their own ears, noses or roasted testicles - Machiavelli returned home to Florence, where he died on June 21st, 1527, surrounded by his family and his few remaining friends.
Machiavelli, as White amply demonstrates, does not deserve his reputation. He was tough, clear-eyed, unsentimental, yet of a poetical nature, a lover of women, wine and good talk. He was a man's man through and through - his friends' name for him was "Il Machia", the man - and not very nice, but then, the age in which he lived was not nice either. He liked to drink in taverns and sport with prostitutes; he fell in love at the drop of a farthingale, and wrote obscene comic letters to his mates. The Man, in short, was quite a boy.
Despite the hell-raising, however, he was a great thinker and a greater artist, and Michael White has done as much as anyone could to convince us of his genius.
John Banville's new novel, The Sea, will be published in June
Machiavelli: A Man Misunderstood by Michael White Little, Brown, 304pp. £16.99