Title: The Prince Author: Niccolò Machiavelli Creation Date: 1532 Location: Florence, Italy Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
Il Principe was written in 1513, when Niccolò Machiavelli was living in exile at his small farm in Sant'Andrea in Percussina outside Florence, having been removed from his post as Second Chancellor of the Florentine Republic after the Medici returned to power and arrested and briefly tortured him on suspicion of conspiracy. He completed the text in a matter of months — it is short, perhaps thirty thousand words — and presented a copy to Lorenzo de' Medici, grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in the hope of regaining employment in the new government. The hope was disappointed. The Prince was not published in Machiavelli's lifetime; it appeared in print five years after his death, in 1532, and was placed on the Papal Index of Forbidden Books in 1559.
The text is organised in twenty-six chapters, moving from a typology of principalities and methods of acquisition to analyses of military organisation, the nature of Fortune and virtù, and specific advice about courts, counsellors, and the avoidance of flattery. The Italian is compressed, elegant, and deliberately paradoxical; the sixteenth-century Elizabethan translations made Machiavelli sound more sinister than he perhaps intended, and Machiavellian entered English as a term of abuse before most readers had encountered the actual text.
The Prince matters not because it is a manual for tyrants — it is too short, too abstract, and too specific to Renaissance Italy to serve that purpose — but because it is the founding document of modern political thought: the moment at which politics is separated from Christian ethics and treated as a domain with its own logic, its own virtues, and its own necessities. Machiavelli was the first writer to ask what politics actually requires of those who practise it, rather than what Christian morality would ideally prescribe.
The Banning
Il Principe was placed on the Roman Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559, during the first systematic compilation under Pope Paul IV. The Pauline Index banned Machiavelli's complete works, not merely The Prince. The prohibition remained in effect for over four centuries until 1966, when Pope Paul VI abolished the Index following the Second Vatican Council. The printed edition of 1532, published by Antonio Blado in Rome with the permission of Pope Clement VII — a Medici, inclined to permit a work dedicated to his family — had been received with a mixture of fascination and alarm. By mid-century, the Counter-Reformation had hardened the Church's position on any text that separated political ethics from Christian morality.
The grounds were theological and moral. Machiavelli treated deception, cruelty, and the strategic deployment of fear as legitimate instruments of governance rather than as sins requiring repentance. The instruction that a prince must learn "how not to be good" explicitly contradicted Christian teaching on mercy, truth-telling, and humility. The ban extended through the Inquisition's apparatus across southern Europe, including Spain and the Italian states. In Protestant England, the book was widely read among political elites but vilified in popular culture — Marlowe's Jew of Malta opens with a prologue spoken by "Machevill" — and Machiavellian entered English as a synonym for amoral cunning before most readers had encountered the actual text. In France, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 was attributed to Machiavellian counsel, and Gentillet's Discours contre Machiavel was more widely read than The Prince itself, shaping popular understanding of Machiavelli as a teacher of tyrants more effectively than the original text had done.
The Fallout
The ban's practical effect was to ensure that Machiavelli was read clandestinely by everyone who mattered and openly by everyone outside papal jurisdiction. The Index designation functioned as advertisement: a book forbidden by the most powerful institution in Europe was one that every ambitious prince and counsellor needed to read. Copies circulated throughout Catholic Europe despite the prohibition. The book was translated into French, English, Latin, and Spanish within decades of its publication; each translation carried the frisson of the forbidden. By the seventeenth century, the text was available in every European language and was being studied at every European court, the Index notwithstanding.
The concept of "Machiavellianism" became a standard accusation in European political discourse, deployed against Catherine de' Medici, Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Richelieu, and virtually every figure who combined intelligence with ruthlessness. The word acquired a life independent of the text, and most people who used it had not read The Prince but had absorbed a caricature of its arguments through the cultural tradition the ban had helped create. The Enlightenment reassessment, beginning in the eighteenth century, treated Machiavelli not as a teacher of tyrants but as the founder of modern political science. Rousseau argued that The Prince was actually a republican text, written to expose tyranny rather than instruct it. Spinoza, Hume, and later Gramsci engaged with the work as serious political philosophy rather than moral outrage. The rehabilitation was never complete — Machiavellian retains its pejorative force to this day — but it transformed the book's reputation from dangerous heresy to foundational political text. The abolition of the Index in 1966 was less a vindication of The Prince specifically than a recognition that the entire project of prohibiting books had become incompatible with the modern relationship between the Church and intellectual freedom.
Why It Was Feared
The danger of The Prince was its method: Machiavelli separated political analysis from moral judgement. He asked not "what should a prince do?" but "what must a prince do to maintain his state?" — and the substitution of must for should was the revolution. The question assumed that politics had its own logic, its own necessities, its own criteria for success and failure, and that these were not reducible to Christian morality. A prince who was always truthful, merciful, and faithful to his word would be destroyed by those who were not. The choice was not between virtue and vice but between the survival of the state and the comfort of the ruler's conscience.
The Church could not tolerate this separation because its entire political theology depended on the unity of moral and political authority. The Pope was both spiritual head of Christendom and temporal ruler; the claim to temporal authority rested on the premise that political governance was a moral enterprise answerable to divine authority. If the prince's duty to maintain his state could override his duty to obey Christian precepts, the Church's claim to direct political action was undermined at its foundation. The instruction that a prince must learn "how not to be good" was the precise point of offence: not that evil sometimes happens, but that the capacity for what morality forbids must be cultivated as a trained skill, deployed when circumstances require it. The Church's moral theology held that virtue was a habit, cultivated through practice. Machiavelli proposed the opposite: the effective prince trains himself to do the wrong thing when necessary, judging the necessity by political criteria rather than moral ones. The inversion was complete, and the Church understood it as such.
The Reading
Let us be clear from the start about what kind of book this is and what it is not. This is not a mirror for princes in the tradition of Erasmus and Isocrates — it does not hold up an ideal image of the virtuous ruler and urge you to imitate it. That tradition is useless. It tells you how you ought to act, not how you must act if you want to maintain your state. And maintaining your state is the only problem that matters, because without the state, nothing else is possible — not justice, not commerce, not religion, not art. Every other good depends on the existence of political order, and political order depends on the capacity of the man who holds it to keep holding it.
All principalities, Machiavelli begins, are either hereditary or new. The hereditary prince who has not done something extraordinary to alienate his subjects will keep his state without difficulty: the natural prince, as Machiavelli calls him, has tradition and inertia on his side. His subjects are accustomed to the ruling family. Their habits of obedience are established. He need only refrain from gross incompetence and the ordinary course of things will preserve his position. It is the new prince whose situation is difficult, and it is the new prince for whom this book is written — because the new prince has none of these advantages. He must create from nothing the loyalty, the fear, the institutional habits that the hereditary prince has inherited.
New principalities are acquired either by one's own arms and virtù, or by fortune and the arms of others, or by crime, or with the favour of the citizens. Each requires a different analysis, and the analysis in each case leads to the same fundamental question: does the prince's position rest on his own foundations or on someone else's? If on his own, it may endure. If on someone else's, it will collapse when that support is withdrawn.
Those who acquire a state by their own arms and virtù — Romulus, Cyrus, Moses, Theseus — are the most secure and the most glorious. The key is that they do not depend on fortune: they may have been fortunate in the circumstances that gave them the opportunity, but once opportunity appeared, they supplied the substance from their own capacity. Moses found the Israelites enslaved in Egypt — that was his opportunity. But it was his own virtù that organised them, gave them laws, made them a people capable of surviving the desert and conquering Canaan. Romulus was exposed at birth and raised among shepherds — that was mere fortune. But the founding of Rome was his own work, the product of his capacity to see what was needed and to do it. The lesson from this type is the most disturbing: Moses, Cyrus, and all the rest either killed large numbers of their own people or destroyed entire populations of others. The armed prophet succeeds; the unarmed prophet fails. Savonarola, who tried to reform Florence by persuasion alone, was burned. Those who depend entirely on fortune for their elevation are lost when fortune turns against them, because they have no roots in their own capacity, no foundation in military strength, no relationship with their subjects built through their own exertions. They are birds on a branch, and the branch belongs to someone else.
The analysis of Cesare Borgia is the most extended case study in the book, and the most instructive. Cesare had everything that fortune could give: a powerful father in Pope Alexander VI, the resources of the papacy, political opportunity in the fragmented Italian political landscape. And he used those gifts with remarkable intelligence. He knew that he could not rely on the fortune that had given him his position — that when his father died, the foundation would shift beneath him. So he worked, systematically and with great foresight, to build foundations that were his own. He secured his hold on Romagna by sending Remirro de Orco, a cruel and efficient man, to pacify the region. When de Orco had done his work and made himself hated for the cruelties that pacification required, Cesare had him cut in two and displayed in the town square of Cesena with a bloody knife beside him — thus both removing an inconvenient instrument and displacing the blame for the cruelties of pacification onto one man, while the prince appeared as the agent of justice. The people were satisfied and stupefied at the same time. This is administration of genius: the use of another man's cruelty to do the necessary work, followed by the theatrical destruction of that man to absorb the resentment his work created.
Cesare then moved to consolidate his position against the threats that his father's death would create. He eliminated the rival families that might challenge him. He cultivated allies in the College of Cardinals to ensure that the next pope, whoever he was, would not be his active enemy. He built his own military forces rather than relying on mercenaries, whose loyalty was always for sale to the highest bidder. He did everything that a prudent and capable man could do to secure his state against the inevitable reversal of the fortune that had raised him.
He failed in the end because he could not prevent the election of Julius II as pope, a man who was his implacable enemy, and because he was himself gravely ill with fever at the critical moment when decisive action was required. He made an error he should not have made — he trusted Julius's promises — and it cost him everything. But the error was a single error of judgement in a career of otherwise excellent management. Machiavelli's conclusion is precise: Cesare Borgia deserves to be set up as a model for all those who rise by fortune and the arms of others, because given his circumstances, there was no other way he could have proceeded. His failure was not a failure of method but a failure of luck — he was ill when he needed to be well, and the timing destroyed him.
On cruelty and mercy, Machiavelli is without sentimentality. It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. Love is held by a bond of obligation which, since men are bad, is broken at every opportunity for personal advantage; fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails. Men love at their own convenience but fear at the prince's convenience, and a wise prince should found himself on what is in his own power, not on what is in the power of others. But the prince must be careful not to be hated, which is a different and more dangerous condition than being merely feared. A man who is feared but not hated can govern; a man who is hated will be conspired against until he falls. The prince may seize property and kill — these are sometimes necessary — but he should take the property and kill the persons of as few people as possible, and above all he should keep his hands off the women and the property of the mass of citizens. For men forget more quickly the death of a father than the loss of a patrimony — a sentence that has shocked readers for five centuries but that describes, with unembarrassed precision, the hierarchy of resentments that actually governs political behaviour.
It is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself to learn how not to be good, and to make use of this knowledge or not according to necessity. This single sentence is the book's hinge and its scandal. Not: it is sometimes necessary to do evil. But: it is necessary to learn how not to be good — to make the capacity for what morality forbids into a trained skill, available when the situation demands it and held in reserve when it does not. The prince who acts always according to the precepts of Christianity will be destroyed, because those he deals with will not act according to those precepts. To be good in all things is to offer oneself as prey to those who are not good. The world is not arranged for the virtuous; it is arranged for those who understand that virtue and effectiveness are not the same thing and that the prince's primary obligation is not to his own moral comfort but to the survival of the state he governs and the people whose lives depend on the existence of that state.
The analysis of liberality versus parsimony makes the same point with the precision of an accountant. The prince who wants a reputation for generosity will spend lavishly, will exhaust his treasury, and will then be forced to impose new taxes to compensate, which will make him hated by the very people he was trying to impress. The prince who is parsimonious — who carefully husbands his resources and does not spend ostentatiously — will eventually have enough to defend himself without taxing his people heavily, and in time they will see him as sufficiently liberal because he is not burdening them. Julius II was elected pope by promising generosity to the cardinals and then immediately became parsimonious because he needed his resources for his wars against the Italian city-states. This served him well: the parsimony funded the campaigns that expanded his power. The reputation for virtue is useful; virtue itself may or may not be, depending on the circumstances. What matters is not what you are but what you appear to be — and even this must be managed carefully, because appearances that are not supported by at least some underlying reality will eventually be exposed.
On the question of whether it is better to be loved or feared, to be generous or parsimonious, to be merciful or cruel, Machiavelli's answer is always the same: it depends on circumstances, and the prince who has fixed himself permanently in one mode of behaviour will fail when the times change and his mode is no longer suited to them. The world changes; the prince must change with it, or at least must have the flexibility to change his methods while maintaining his ends. The man whose temperament is impetuous will succeed when the times favour boldness and fail when they favour caution; the cautious man will succeed when the times favour prudence and fail when they favour audacity. Neither is universally right. The prince who could change his nature according to the times would always succeed, but men cannot change their natures, and this is the source of the fundamental instability of all political power.
The famous chapter on fortune compares her to a river in flood: when she is calm, you can build embankments and channels to contain her; when she rages, your preparations may not hold, but they are far better than having made no preparations at all. Fortune governs half of human actions, Machiavelli says, but she leaves the other half to be governed by us. This is the precise measure of human agency in the political world: not complete control, not complete helplessness, but a constant negotiation between what we can influence and what we cannot. Fortune is a woman, and she favours the bold: she is more easily governed by those who attack her than by those who proceed cautiously, because she loves young men who are less circumspect, more fierce, and more audacious in commanding her. This is not merely a metaphor for courage; it is a statement about the relationship between character and circumstance, and about the inherent instability of any success built on fortune alone.
The final chapter is a direct address to Lorenzo de' Medici, urging him to take up the redemption of Italy — to expel the barbarian French, Spanish, and Swiss who have overrun the peninsula, to unify the Italian states under a single capable ruler, to take back what has been taken from an Italy that "has suffered every kind of desolation." This is where the cold analysis of the preceding chapters suddenly opens into something like passion, something that the controlled analytical voice of the earlier chapters has been deliberately suppressing. Italy is ready to be redeemed; she only needs a leader with sufficient virtù. She has waited long enough. The opportunity is present. The matter is ready, and it only lacks the form that a great prince could impose upon it.
The chapter is also the key to understanding the book's deepest register. Machiavelli is not simply giving advice to a tyrant; he is writing, in exile, about the catastrophic failure of the republican Florence he had served for fourteen years as Second Chancellor, about the weakness and division that had allowed foreign powers to treat Italy as their battlefield, about what it would actually take — not what it ought ideally to take, not what a virtuous ruler might accomplish in a better world, but what it would actually take in this one — to build a political order capable of enduring. The cool analysis of the earlier chapters is in service of this final concern: what must a new prince do to found something that lasts? The answer is not comfortable. It involves cruelty employed well — cruelty that is done once, for the sake of security, and then not persisted in. It involves deception practised when treaties and promises would otherwise constrain necessary action. It involves the strategic deployment of fear, calibrated precisely to maintain obedience without provoking the hatred that leads to conspiracy and overthrow. And it involves the subordination of private morality to the necessities of political survival — the willingness to do what conscience forbids because the alternative is worse.
The alternative — the political failure that Machiavelli had watched at close range, the collapse of Florence, the sack of Italian cities by foreign armies, the enslavement of a civilisation that had produced Dante and Petrarch and Giotto — is worse than any cruelty a capable prince might commit. The failure of an entire civilisation is worse than the cruelties of a Cesare Borgia. This is the bet that The Prince asks you to accept. You do not have to accept it. But you must take it seriously, because the man who wrote it had seen what happens when it is refused — had seen, with his own eyes, what happens to a republic that cannot defend itself, to a civilisation that cannot produce the leaders its survival requires. The book is a manual for the possible, written by a man who had spent his career watching the ideal fail. Its compression, its directness, its refusal to comfort — these are the marks of a mind that has no time for illusions, because illusions are what destroyed the republic he loved.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the books that power tried to silence. See the full collection →
The Penguin Classics edition, translated by Tim Parks, is the most readable modern English version — supple, exact, and faithful to Machiavelli's compression. The Oxford World's Classics edition, translated by Peter Bondanella with an introduction by Maurizio Viroli, is the best annotated scholarly text for readers wanting fuller historical context.
The Penguin Classics edition translated by Tim Parks — the most fluent and readable modern English version of the most-banned political treatise in history.
The Oxford World's Classics edition translated by Peter Bondanella with an introduction by Maurizio Viroli — the best annotated scholarly text for full historical context.
Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.