Niccolò Machiavelli: the “bad guy” of modern political thought, was he really Machiavellian?

When June 18, 1815 Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated at Waterloo, the victorious troops discovered in their tank which left abandoned on the battlefield a complete version, in French of The prince, the most famous work of Nicolas Machiavelli.

What is precious about this copy is that it contained an incredible number of marginal annotations of Napoleon himself which he had been making for some time, even when confined to the Isle of Elbe. Machiavelli, which has been defined in several ways: from a symbol of the Renaissance, an impious, immoral author, a reference to the modern conception of the State, patriot and republican, Was he really Machiavellian?

Son of a family of some renown in Florence, he was born on May 3, 1469. His father Bernardo was a lawyer who had no fortune, but his family, in the past, had held important positions Florence. Nicolas He was a young man of medium height, slender, with sharp eyes, black hair, who had his mouth still tight. Early in his training he was nourished by reading ancient thinkers, such as Cicero, Thucydides, Tito Livio, Polibio and Plutarco.

His first post was administrative in the government of Florence. He had his ideas that would support them, throughout his life, based on knowing the individual and studying history. In 1506, he organized a military reform, arming a national militia and dispensing with mercenaries, who handed over command to the highest bidder. His work Dialogues on the Art of War it is a theoretical anticipation of modern national armies.

When in 1512 the Florentine troops were defeated in Prato by the Spanish army in the service of Pope Julius II, his name appeared on a list of conspirators. Without being engaged, yes his friends Piero Boscoli Yes Agostino Capponi– was arrested and tortured. “I was very close to death, I endured all the pain, and God and my conscience saved me.”

When he assumed Lion x to the papacy, he was freed thanks to a general amnesty, but the Medici -the powerful Florentine family of bankers who managed Florence in the Renaissance accusing him of having conspired against them. He would be arrested again and confined to the family farm in San’t Andrea and Percussina, in the town of San Casciano to Val di Pesa, about fifteen kilometers south of the city of Florence. His wife accompanied him Weather in Marietta Corsini, their four children and their extra-marital affairs.

At this time he began to write About principalities, which would go down in history as The prince. He was inspired by watching the people who went to the hostel “L ‘Albergaccio” (The bad hostel) next to his house, where he went every night after dinner, dressed in ordinary clothes. He sat down at a table at the back, near the fireplace. “In the usual company of the innkeeper, a butcher, a mill server and two quarry workers, I get involved all day with them by playing cricca or backgammon” (a game dice). It was made to prepare meat cooked in wine, black cabbage and wild fennel.

It was also at this time that he wrote Speech on the first decades of Tito Livio, some comedies like Clizia Yes The Mandrake, stories that revolve around conflicts between a young man and an old man for the favors of a girl. The prince It would not be published until five years after his death.

Throughout history, Machiavelli’s work has not received good press. He was reported to be the precursor of political and moral perversion, so much so that in Britain the Prince of Darkness was called “Old Nick” (old Nicholas) after him. His status as a humanist and a Renaissance man, formed on the basis of the conscientious reading of classical authors, has been ignored. It is from these that Machiavelli argued that they should be taken as a starting point for teaching and explaining politics.

With a realistic vision, he separates morality from politics and asserts that the latter travels in its own ways, independent of economy and society.. He found that the exercise of power deviated from the paths of loyalty and ethics.

He admitted that politics had rules that could be amoral. “I saw fit to represent things as they really are in reality, rather than as they are imagined,” he explained..

The most famous phrase that “the end justifies the means” was not written by him, and results from an interpretation which was made on an annotation made by Napoleon Bonaparte. Others attribute it to a German Jesuit theologian Hermann Busenbaum: “When the end is lawful, the means are also lawful”, as read his manual of moral theology of 1650. On the contrary Machiavelli He argued that men in power should be judged on results achieved, and if these are not achieved, the means used to achieve them should be forgiven.

A great observer of the individual wrote what the exercise of power really looked like, not how it should be. Because The prince It is a kind of instruction manual on how to exercise power effectively.

He planned for Italy to make it a unitary stateBut in its day it was a country still closely associated with the medieval and none of the Italian states of the time had enough power to undertake such an enterprise. This dream of Machiavelli they would just fill it Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini Yes Giuseppe Garibaldi 300 years later.

Machiavelli scholars claim that for the writing of The prince was inspired by the figure of the able Caesar Borgia, natural son of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. His gifts as a soldier and his constant and disproportionate search for power made him admire and detest him with the same intensity. In order to MachiavelliHe was a kind of role model for the prince to rule.

“The fear of the prince is fueled by a fear of punishment which never leaves us”, wrote. However, he dedicated the book to Medici, in an attempt to have fun with them, which he has achieved since the cardinal Giulio de Medici, once he became the pope Clement VII, used it for various diplomatic missions. When he succeeded in his efforts, he gave him more work and asked him to write two works. They were The art of War (the only one published during Machiavelli’s lifetime, in 1521) and Florentine stories, which ended in 1525.

He won the antipathy of the Church by pointing out its decline and the need for reform. “Being religious was one of the qualities that the prince had to have,” he remarked and insisted that he was not anticlerical. His ideas were close to that Jesus Christ and not the Pope was the real head of the church. The prince it would be part of the index of books banned by the church. “This book was written by the devil’s finger himself”, condemned the cardinal Reginald Pole, Archbishop of Canterbury.

The thesis repeated for years that Machiavelli was a supporter of the dictatorship collapses just by reading his work, which reflects him as a republican. He had the courage to speak out, in his time, on issues such as virtue, fortune, the common good and war.

When the armies of Carlos v, in their confrontation with the Pope, the French and the Turks sacked Rome in 1527 and besieged Clement VII, a new popular movement reversed the situation in favor of the republic by Florence and old friends and allies of Machiavelli they moved away from him and turned their backs on him.

Surprisingly, he fell ill and died on June 21, 1527. His remains remained unknown for two and a half centuries until, thanks to a popular subscription at the end of the 18th century, a magnificent mausoleum was built in the church of the holy cross. Stay close to other famous Italians, such as Galileo Yes Miguel Angel Buonarotti.

His epitaph says it all: “No praise could express the greatness of this name: Nicholas Machiavelli. He died in 1527 “. And on the fourth centenary of his birth, a plaque was placed in front of the house he lived in: “To Nicholas Machiavelli. The one who inspired and advocated the liberation of Italy by writing his immortal works on the art of maintaining and defending the motherland with the national troops ”.

Meanwhile, the house San’t Andrea and Percussina is a tourist attraction that brings the spirit of Nicolas, the great misunderstood of political history, and the one who wrote that the “The real way to get to heaven is to learn the way of hell to avoid it.”

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