As a diplomat, he matched wits with the corrupt Pope Alexander VI and his son, the infamous Cesare Borgia, whose violent career served as a model for The Prince. He was on intimate terms with Leonardo and Michelangelo. His first political mission was to spy on the fire-and-brimstone preacher Savonarola. Machiavelli’s philosophy was shaped by the tumultuous age in which he lived, an age of towering geniuses and brutal tyrants. His name has become synonymous with cynical scheming and the selfish pursuit of power, but the real Machiavelli, says Miles Unger, was a deeply humane and perceptive writer whose controversial theories were a response to the violence and corruption he saw around him. Niccolò Machiavelli is the most influential political writer of all time. Feeling forced to choose between Florence’s twin freedoms-the rudimentary rights a republic offered its citizens, and the city’s own liberty from foreign control-Machiavelli opted for Florence above the Florentines.A “captivating biography of Italian philosopher and playwright”*-Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince-whose writings have outraged and inspired generations of readers. In the end his patriotism outweighed his republican sympathies. Machiavelli soon developed a preference for order over anarchy, however it was achieved. The republic of Florence, on the other hand, often seemed to its exasperated servant to specialize in half-measures, harsh and, worse, unpredictable enough to enrage subjects and allies, but not harsh enough to keep them in line. In an era of constant war and failed states, the Borgia territories were spared the random killings, rapes and pillage that racked so many other Italian regions.

“This Lord is of such splendid and magnificent bearing…he never rests, nor does he know weariness or fear.”īorgia conquered and ruled cruelly, but effectively. When, as an envoy from the republic, Machiavelli met the great man in 1502, his admiration for Borgia came through in his dispatches home. As a senior civil servant for the Florentine republic between 14, he went on high-level diplomatic missions, oversaw the city’s militia, and watched with fascination the rise and fall of empire-building Cesare Borgia. He only partially succeeds-Niccolò Machiavelli did possess the intellectual’s fatal attraction to men of action-but the attempt still offers an intriguing portrait of a man marked more by his fervent love for his artistically dazzling city-state than by his political cynicism.īorn in 1469, Machiavelli learned by doing. That’s a reputation Unger sets out to demolish in his lively recap of the Florentine thinker and his tumultuous times. Mostly the former, of course: as an adjective, “Machiavellian” is always a pejorative.

The man whose 1513 work The Prince stands as the foundational document of Western political science has ever since been excoriated for his worship of raw power or praised for his grasp of realpolitik.

Machiavelli by Miles J. Unger