Machiavelli Wasn’t Writing From the Center of Power: How the Medici destroyed his political career and became his best hope of rebuilding it

Santi di Tito, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Niccolò Machiavelli is often remembered as a powerful political strategist, a man calmly explaining how rulers could gain and keep control. Yet The Prince was not written by someone securely positioned inside government. It emerged after Machiavelli had lost the political career that had shaped nearly fourteen years of his life.

When the Medici returned to power in Florence in 1512, the republican government Machiavelli had served collapsed. He was removed from his position in the Second Chancery that November. A few months later, he was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured after being suspected of involvement in a conspiracy against the new Medici government (Najemy, 1982).

Machiavelli’s relationship with the Medici was therefore far more complicated than simple loyalty or opposition. Historian John M. Najemy describes the family as both the cause of Machiavelli’s downfall and the people he imagined might rescue him from political obscurity. The Medici had ended his career, but they also controlled the government he desperately hoped to rejoin.

Throughout 1513 and 1514, Machiavelli repeatedly expressed his desire to find some form of employment under the Medici. He originally planned to dedicate The Prince to Giuliano de’ Medici before ultimately addressing it to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the book’s final chapter, Machiavelli presented the Medici family as Italy’s potential deliverers, capable of leading a campaign to free the peninsula from foreign domination (Najemy, 1982).

The dedication was not the end of Machiavelli’s efforts to return to public life. In 1520, he prepared a proposal for reforming the Florentine government under Medici leadership. He also sought and accepted a commission from Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici to write the Florentine Histories. When Giulio later became Pope Clement VII, Machiavelli dedicated the completed work to him.

This does not mean that Machiavelli had forgotten what the Medici restoration had cost him. Najemy argues that Machiavelli continued wrestling with the contradiction throughout his later writings. The family represented both personal tragedy and possible renewal. They had destroyed the republican world he had served, yet they also controlled his only realistic path back into political life.

That contradiction gives The Prince a very different context. Machiavelli was not dispensing advice from a position of effortless influence. He was writing after imprisonment, torture, dismissal, and forced retirement, offering his political experience to the same family that had pushed him out of power.

Further Reading

Najemy, J. M. (1982). Machiavelli and the Medici: The lessons of Florentine history. Renaissance Quarterly, 35(4), 551–576. https://doi.org/10.2307/2861371