Niccolò Machiavelli
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469 and died there in 1527. He was not a philosopher by trade. He was a working civil servant, second chancellor of the Florentine Republic for fourteen years, and a diplomat who spent those years on the road watching powerful men up close: Cesare Borgia, Louis XII of France, the Emperor Maximilian, Pope Julius II.
Florence was a republic in a peninsula of rival city-states, any of which could be invaded by France or Spain in a season. Machiavelli's job was to keep a small state alive among much larger ones. He also raised and trained a citizen militia, against the fashion of the day for hired mercenaries, because he had seen what mercenaries do when the fighting starts.
Why he wrote it
In 1512 the republic fell and the Medici family returned. Machiavelli was dismissed, accused of conspiracy, imprisoned, tortured on the rope, and sent to a small farm outside the city. He was forty-three and finished.
He wrote The Prince in the second half of 1513, in the evenings, after days spent among farm laborers. He dedicated it to the same Medici family that had just destroyed him. It was his application for a job, and it did not work.
That is the circumstance the book comes from, and it explains its tone. It is not a court flatterer's book about how power ought to look. It is written by a man who had been on the receiving end and had stopped pretending.
The book we publish, and why
We publish The Prince because it is the clearest description ever written of how people actually behave when something is at stake, and because that is useful to an ordinary reader in an ordinary job.
The boss who smiles while cutting your shifts. The colleague who is pleasant to your face and angling for your position. The promise made warmly and broken the moment your back is turned. Machiavelli is not recommending any of it. He is showing you the mechanism, so you recognize the move while it is being made instead of a year afterwards.
Read that way it is not a cynical book, it is a protective one. Most readers finish it less naive and considerably harder to manage.
His works, in the order he wrote them
Dates of writing and dates of publication rarely match here. Nearly everything of consequence appeared after his death.
- Discourse on Pisa, 1499. An early official paper.
- The Description of the Methods Adopted by the Duke Valentino, composition disputed, probably after 1503. An eyewitness account of Cesare Borgia disposing of his own commanders at Senigallia. Machiavelli was there.
- The Decennali, 1504 and 1509. Two poems in terza rima on recent Florentine history.
- The Prince, written 1513, published 1532.
- Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, begun around 1514 and finished by about 1519, published 1531. His republican book, and longer and more considered than The Prince.
- Mandragola (The Mandrake), written somewhere between 1512 and 1520, published 1524, staged 1526. A comedy, and still performed.
- Andria, around 1517 to 1520. His translation of the Roman playwright Terence.
- The Art of War, written 1519 to 1520, published 1521. The only major prose work he saw in print.
- The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca, 1520. Part biography, part invention.
- Clizia, staged 1525, published 1532. A second comedy.
- Florentine Histories, completed around 1525, published 1532. Commissioned work, and the nearest he came to official rehabilitation.
- The Legations, 1498 to 1512. His diplomatic dispatches, written on the job. Not literature, and the raw material for everything above.
General reference on Machiavelli's life and works. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
We publish The Prince in hardcover. This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by Machiavelli