Though a prince need not possess all the virtues, to seem to have them is useful; as, for example, to seem merciful, loyal, humane, religious, and sincere; it is also useful to be so, but with a mind so flexible that if the need arise he can be the contrary…. He should be careful to let nothing fall from his lips that is not instinct with the five qualities mentioned, and must appear to those who see and hear him all compassion, all faith, all humanity, all religion, all integrity…. One must color his conduct, and be a great dissembler; and men are so simple, so absorbed in present necessities, that they are easily deceived…. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few know what you are; and those few dare not oppose the opinion of the many.115
To these precepts Machiavelli adds examples. He notes the success of Alexander VI, and thinks it entirely due to marvelous lying. He admires Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain for always putting a religious front on his military enterprises. He praises the means—warlike courage and strategic skill mingled with diplomatic craft—by which Francesco Sforza rose to the throne of Milan. But above all he holds up as his supreme and almost perfect exemplar Caesar Borgia:
When all the actions of the Duke are recalled, I do not know how to blame him; but rather it appears to me that I ought to offer him for imitation to all those who are… raised to government…. He was considered cruel; nevertheless his cruelty reconciled all the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty…. Having a lofty spirit and far-reaching aims, he could not have regulated his conduct otherwise; and only the shortening of the life of Alexander, and his own sickness, frustrated his designs. Therefore he who considers it necessary to secure himself in his new principality, to gain friends, to overcome enemies by force or fraud, to make himself at once feared and loved by the people, to be followed and revered by the soldiers, to exterminate those who have power or reason to hurt him, to change the old order of things for new, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to destroy a disloyal soldiery and create new, to maintain friendship with kings and princes in such a way that they must help him with zeal and offend him with caution, cannot find a more lively example than the actions of this man.116
Machiavelli admired Borgia because he felt that his methods and character, had it not been for the simultaneous illness of Pope and son, would have gone far to unite Italy. Now, in concluding The Prince, he appeals to the young Duke Lorenzo, and through him to Leo and the Medici, to organize the union of the peninsula. He describes his countrymen as “more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, pillaged, and torn, and overrun by foreign powers.” “Italy, left as without life, waits for him who shall heal her wounds…. She entreats God to send some one who shall deliver her from these wrong and alien insolencies.”117 The situation is critical, but the opportunity is ripe. “Italy is ready and willing to follow a banner if only some one will raise it.” And who better than the Medici, the most famous family in Italy, and now heading the Church?
Who could express the love with which Italy would hail her liberator, with what thirst for revenge, what stubborn faith, what devotion, what tears? What door would be closed to him?—who would refuse him obedience? To all of us this barbarous dominion is a stench in the nostrils. Let therefore your illustrious house take up this charge, with that courage and hope with which all just enterprises are undertaken, so that under its standard our native country may be ennobled, and under its auspices may be verified those words of Petrarch:
Virtù contr’ al furore
Prendera l’arme e sia il combatter corto,
Che l’antico valore
Negl’ Italici cuor non è ancor morto—
“Manhood will take up arms against madness, and brief may the combat be, for the ancient valor is not yet dead in the veins of Italy.”
4. Considerations
So the cry that Dante and Petrarch had sent up to alien emperors was here raised to the Medici; and indeed, had Leo lived longer and played less, Machiavelli might have seen the liberation begin. But young Lorenzo died in 1519, Leo in 1521; and in 1527, the year of Machiavelli’s death, Italy’s subjection to a foreign power was complete. Liberation would have to wait 343 years until Cavour would effect it by Machiavellian statesmanship.
Philosophers have been well nigh unanimous in condemning The Prince, and statesmen in practising its precepts. A thousand books began to appear against it on the morrow of its publication (1532). But Charles V studied it carefully, Catherine de’ Medici brought it to France, Henry III and Henry IV of France had it with them at their death, Richelieu admired it, William of Orange kept it under his pillow as if to memorize it by osmosis.118 Frederick the Great of Prussia wrote an Anti-Machiavel as a prelude to outprincing The Prince. To most rulers, of course, these precepts were no revelation, except as revealing injudiciously the secrets of their guild. Dreamers who thought to turn Machiavelli into a Jacobin fancied that he had written The Prince not to express his own philosophy but, by sarcastic indirection, to expose the ways and wiles of rulers; however, the Discourses expound at greater length the same views. Francis Bacon ventured a condoning word: “Our thanks are due to Machiavelli and similar writers, who have openly and without dissimulation shown us what men are accustomed to do, not what they ought to do.”119 Hegel’s judgment was intelligent and generous:
The Prince has often been cast aside with horror as containing maxims of the most revolting tyranny; yet it was Machiavelli’s high sense of the necessity of constituting a state which caused him to lay down the principles on which alone states could be formed under the circumstances. The isolated lords and lordships had to be entirely suppressed; and though our idea of Freedom is incompatible with the means which he proposes… including, as these do, the most reckless violence, all kinds of deception, murder, and the like—yet we must confess that the despots who had to be subdued were assailable in no other way.120
And Macaulay, in a famous essay, pictured the philosophy of Machiavelli as a natural reflex of an Italy brilliant and de-moral-ized, and long since accustomed, by her despots, to the principles of The Prince.
Machiavelli represents the ultimate challenge of a revived paganism to a weakened Christianity. In his philosophy religion becomes again, as in ancient Rome, the humble servant of a state which in effect is god. The only virtues honored are pagan Roman virtues—courage, endurance, self-reliance, intelligence; the only immortality is a fading fame. Perhaps Machiavelli exaggerated the enfeebling influence of Christianity; had he forgotten the lusty wars of medieval history, the campaigns of Constantine, Belisarius, Charlemagne, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, and Julius II of recent memory? The Christian morality emphasized the feminine virtues because men had the opposite qualities in ruinous abundance; some antidote and counterideal had to be preached to the sadistic Romans of the amphitheater, to the rough barbarians entering Italy, to lawless peoples striving to subside into civilization. The virtues that Machiavelli scorned made for orderly and peaceful societies; those that he admired (and, like Nietzsche, because he lacked them) made for strong and warlike states, and for dictators capable of murdering by the million to enforce conformity, and of incarnadining a planet to extend their rule. He confused the good of the ruler with the good of the nation; he thought too much of the preservation, seldom of the obligations, never of the corruption, of power. He ignored the stimulating rivalry and cultural fertility of the Italian citystates; he cared little for the magnificent art of his time, or even for that of ancient Rome. He was lost in idolatry of the state. He helped to free the state from the Church, but he shared in setting up for worship an atomistic nationalism not visibly superior to the medieval notion of states subject to an international morality represented by the pope. Each ideal has broken down under the natural selfishness of men; and a candid Christian must admit that in preaching and practising the principle that no faith need be kept with a heretic (as in violating the safe-conduct of Huss at Constance and of Alfonso of Ferrara in Rome), the Church herself was playing a Machiavellian game fatal to her mission as a moral power.