The Prince

Summary

The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones. The book opens with a taxonomy. States are republics or principalities; principalities are hereditary or new; new ones are won by one's own arms or another's, by ability (virtù) or by fortune. Chapters I to XI work through these cases: the ease of holding an inherited state, the troubles of annexing a province with a different language and customs, the reason Alexander's successors kept Darius's empire, the danger of conquering cities used to liberty. The heroes of self-made founding are Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus, who succeeded because they were armed, while the unarmed prophet Savonarola failed. Cesare Borgia is the model of a man raised by his father's fortune who used ability to keep what he was given, until illness and the election of Julius II undid him. Agathocles of Syracuse shows that power can be won by crime, though not glory. Chapters XII to XIV turn to arms. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; a prince must have his own troops and think of nothing but war. Chapters XV to XXIII form the notorious core. Machiavelli announces that he will follow the effectual truth of things rather than imagined republics, because a man who professes goodness in every respect will be ruined among so many who are not good. He weighs liberality against meanness, cruelty against clemency, and concludes that it is safer to be feared than loved, provided the prince avoids hatred by keeping his hands off his subjects' property and women. Faith should be kept only while it serves; the prince must be both fox and lion, and must appear merciful, faithful, humane, upright and religious even when he is not. He must avoid being despised, distrust fortresses, choose capable ministers and shun flatterers. The last three chapters explain why the Italian princes lost their states, assess fortune, which governs perhaps half of human affairs and can be dammed like a flooding river, and close with an exhortation to the Medici to free Italy from the barbarians, ending with lines from Petrarch. The book circulated in manuscript and was printed only in 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death.

Plot or Argument

• Dedication to Lorenzo de' Medici

  Machiavelli presents the treatise as a gift drawn from experience and reading, and defends a low-born man's right to advise rulers: one must stand in the valley to see the shape of mountains.

• Kinds of principality and how they are won (Ch. I–XI)

  A classification of hereditary, mixed, new and ecclesiastical states. Annexed provinces are best held by living there or planting colonies; founders who rely on their own arms (Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus) endure; Cesare Borgia shows how a state given by fortune must be secured by ability; Agathocles and Oliverotto show power taken by crime; civil principalities depend on the people's favour.

• Soldiers of one's own (Ch. XII–XIV)

  Mercenaries are disunited, ambitious and cowardly, and Italy's ruin is blamed on them; auxiliaries are worse because they are united under someone else. A prince's only proper art is war, practised in peace through hunting, knowledge of terrain and the study of history.

• The effectual truth about virtue (Ch. XV–XIX)

  The break with mirror-for-princes tradition. Liberality ruins, meanness preserves; well-used cruelty is merciful compared with disorder; fear is safer than love but hatred must be avoided; faith is kept only when useful, by a ruler who is both fox and lion; appearances govern a public that judges by the eye. Long excursus on the Roman emperors from Marcus Aurelius to Maximinus.

• Practical counsel (Ch. XX–XXIII)

  Whether to arm or disarm subjects, build or raze fortresses; how Ferdinand of Aragon won renown by great enterprises; how to judge a ruler by his ministers; how to take counsel without being besieged by flatterers.

• Fortune and the call to Italy (Ch. XXIV–XXVI)

  The Italian princes lost their states through idleness, not bad luck. Fortune is a flooding river that foresight can channel, and favours the impetuous. The final chapter calls on the Medici to redeem a beaten, wounded Italy and closes with Petrarch's verses on ancient valour.

Characters

• Cesare Borgia (Duke Valentino), central exemplar

  Son of Pope Alexander VI whom Machiavelli observed in 1502; praised for the Romagna campaign and the massacre at Senigallia, undone by his father's death and his own illness.

• Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, dedicatee

  Grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent to whom the finished work was addressed; the original intended dedicatee was Giuliano de' Medici.

• Agathocles of Syracuse, exemplar of crime

  Potter's son who seized Syracuse by murdering its senators; shows that wickedness can win power but not glory.

• Pope Alexander VI, exemplar of deceit

  Borgia pope who 'did nothing else but deceive men' and always found people willing to be deceived.

• Pope Julius II, exemplar of impetuosity

  Warrior pope whose boldness happened to suit his times; used to show that fortune favours the impetuous.

• Ramiro d'Orco, Borgia's minister

  Cruel governor who pacified the Romagna and was then executed and displayed in the piazza at Cesena so that the duke could disown his severity.

• Girolamo Savonarola, unarmed prophet

  Dominican friar who ruled Florence by preaching and fell when the people stopped believing; Machiavelli's warning against authority without force.

• Ferdinand of Aragon, contemporary exemplar

  King of Spain who won renown through great enterprises under the cloak of religion.

• Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus, founders

  Armed prophets who owed fortune nothing but the opportunity, and whose ability turned it to account.

Lessons

• The gap between how we live and how we ought to live

  Chapter XV announces a method: describe politics as it actually works, not as moralists imagine it. Machiavelli argues that a ruler who acts on private virtue in a world of bad actors destroys himself and the people who depend on him. The lesson is severe because it does not deny morality; it insists that good intentions are not a policy.

  • Is Machiavelli rejecting morality or redefining what political goodness is?
  • Where in modern institutions do people quietly follow the 'effectual truth' while publicly professing ideals?
  • Does describing how power works amount to recommending it?

• Severity concentrated, kindness spread out

  Machiavelli distinguishes cruelty 'well used', done at one stroke and then stopped, from cruelty that grows over time. Injuries should be done all at once and benefits given little by little. Whatever one thinks of the ethics, it is a sharp piece of behavioural observation about how people experience loss and gain.

  • Why does the order and timing of harms and benefits change how they are felt?
  • Is the execution of Ramiro d'Orco an example of cruelty well used or of pure manipulation?

• Fortune can be channelled but not abolished

  Chapter XXV pictures fortune as a river in flood that cannot be stopped once it rises but can be contained by dykes built in calm weather. Human ability governs perhaps half of events. The practical counsel is preparation and adaptability, together with the bleak admission that temperament rarely changes as fast as the times.

  • Why does Machiavelli think people cannot change their methods when circumstances change?
  • How does the flood image differ from the image of fortune as a woman to be beaten, and what does the second image reveal about the book's assumptions?

• Appearance is a political resource

  Because most people judge by the eye and few by the hand, the prince must seem merciful, faithful and religious. Machiavelli treats reputation as something to be managed like an army. The book anticipates modern ideas about image, public relations and the distance between public persona and private conduct.

  • Can a leader maintain a false public image indefinitely, or does Chapter XIX's warning about contempt set limits?
  • How should citizens respond to a theory that tells rulers to deceive them?

Context

The Prince was written amid the Italian Wars that began with Charles VIII's invasion in 1494, when French, Spanish, imperial and papal armies fought over a peninsula of small, rival states. Florence expelled the Medici in 1494, lived through Savonarola's rule and his execution in 1498, and then maintained a republic under Piero Soderini, which Machiavelli served. Spanish troops sacked Prato in 1512, the republic collapsed and the Medici returned. Machiavelli's first-hand diplomacy, especially his mission to Cesare Borgia in 1502–03, supplies many of the book's examples.

Composition

In a letter of 10 December 1513 to Francesco Vettori, Machiavelli describes spending his evenings in his study conversing with the ancients and composing a little work, De principatibus, on what a principality is and how it is won and lost. He hoped it would win him Medici employment. It circulated in manuscript and was printed in Rome and Florence in 1532 with papal permission. The Marriott translation of 1908 is the public-domain English text used here.

Reception

The book was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559, and in Elizabethan England 'Machiavel' became a stage villain. Readers have argued ever since about its intent: a handbook for tyrants, a republican satire exposing princes (Spinoza and Rousseau suggested this), a patriotic call for Italian unity, or a founding work of political science. Frederick the Great wrote an Anti-Machiavel in 1740. Modern interpreters such as Isaiah Berlin, Leo Strauss and Quentin Skinner have read it as, respectively, a clash of incompatible values, a teaching of evil, and a response to humanist advice books.

Comparisons

• the-art-of-war-machiavelli

  The Prince's chapters on citizen soldiers versus mercenaries are compressed in a few pages; The Art of War develops the same conviction into a dialogue on drill, formation and a citizen militia modelled on Rome.

• leviathan

  Hobbes shares Machiavelli's low view of human nature and fear as the cement of order, but turns it into a theory of sovereignty by covenant, whereas Machiavelli offers advice for winning and keeping a particular state without any account of legitimacy.

• the-arthashastra

  Kautilya's Indian manual of statecraft anticipates Machiavelli's spies, alliances and calculated ruthlessness by nearly two millennia, but embeds them in a far more detailed administrative system and an explicit duty to the welfare of subjects.

• the-social-contract

  Rousseau called The Prince 'the book of republicans', reading it as a warning to peoples about what princes do; setting his general will beside Machiavelli's fear-based rule sharpens the question of who the book is really written for.

• the-twelve-caesars

  Chapter XIX's survey of emperors from Marcus Aurelius to Maximinus draws on the same Roman history of murdered rulers that Suetonius tells as biography; Machiavelli converts the anecdotes into rules about avoiding hatred and contempt.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The dedication's image of the painter who stands in the valley to see the shape of mountains. Ask what this claims about who is qualified to advise a prince.
• The taxonomy of Chapters I-XI, which sorts states into hereditary, mixed, and new, and new ones into those won by one's own arms or another's, by virtù or by fortune. Notice how each example is chosen to fit a box.
• Chapter VII on Cesare Borgia, especially Ramiro d'Orco's body left in the piazza at Cesena. Watch how Machiavelli narrates cruelty with admiration for its timing.
• The announcement at the opening of Chapter XV that Machiavelli will follow the effectual truth of things rather than imagined republics. Everything in Chapters XV-XIX depends on this turn.
• The image of fortune as a flooding river in Chapter XXV, and the sudden change of tone in Chapter XXVI, where the cool analyst becomes a patriot calling on the Medici to free Italy.

Key terms and names

Virtù

Machiavelli's word for the ability, energy, and boldness that let a man win and hold a state. It is not moral virtue; Agathocles shows plenty of virtù in Chapter VIII, though his crimes deny him glory.

Fortuna

Fortune, the force of circumstance that Machiavelli in Chapter XXV says governs about half of human affairs. Virtù can prepare against her as dikes prepare against a flood.

Effectual truth

The phrase in Chapter XV for how things actually are, as opposed to how writers imagine they ought to be. It marks Machiavelli's break with the older mirror-for-princes books.

Cesare Borgia (Duke Valentino)

Son of Pope Alexander VI and Machiavelli's chief modern model in Chapter VII. He secured the Romagna by cruelty well used and lost his state through his father's death and the election of Julius II.

Mercenaries and auxiliaries

Hired troops and troops borrowed from another ruler, which Chapters XII-XIII condemn as useless and dangerous. Machiavelli blames Italy's ruin on mercenaries and urges a prince to rely on arms of his own.

The unarmed prophet

Machiavelli's term in Chapter VI for a leader who rules by persuasion without force, with Savonarola as the example. Armed prophets like Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus succeeded; unarmed ones were ruined.

The fox and the lion

The two animals of Chapter XVIII that a prince must imitate: the fox to recognize traps and the lion to frighten wolves. A ruler who is only a lion cannot see snares, and one who is only a fox cannot defend himself.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What does Chapter VII say Cesare Borgia did to pacify the Romagna, and how did he deal with Ramiro d'Orco afterward?
2. Comprehension Why does Machiavelli say in Chapter XVII that it is safer to be feared than loved, and what must a prince avoid so that fear does not become hatred?
3. Comprehension According to Chapter XXV, how much of human affairs does fortune govern, and how can a prince prepare against her?
4. Interpretation Agathocles and Cesare Borgia both used cruelty, yet Machiavelli praises one and denies the other glory. What distinction is he drawing, and does it hold?
5. Interpretation In Chapter XVIII Machiavelli says a prince need not have the virtues of mercy, faith, and religion but must seem to have them. Why does he think appearance matters more than reality to the people?
6. Interpretation Machiavelli compares disorders in a state to a hectic fever in Chapter III. What does the medical comparison teach about when a ruler should act?
7. Interpretation Chapter XXVI ends with a passionate appeal to free Italy. Does this final chapter change how we should read the cold advice that comes before it?
8. Big Question Can a ruler be both a good man and a successful prince, or does political responsibility sometimes require doing what is morally wrong?

Faith Connections

• Matthew 10:16 (Scripture)

  Christ sends his disciples out as sheep among wolves and tells them to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. Machiavelli's fox and lion in Chapter XVIII also prepare a man to live among wolves, but they join cunning to force rather than to innocence, and the contrast clarifies both teachings.

• Romans 3:8 (Scripture)

  Paul rejects the slander that Christians say, let us do evil that good may come, and declares that the condemnation of those who say it is just. Chapter XV's teaching that a prince must learn how not to be good, and use it according to necessity, is the very principle Paul refuses.

• Proverbs 20:28 (Scripture)

  Solomon says mercy and truth preserve the king, and his throne is upheld by mercy. Chapter XVII argues nearly the reverse, that a prince too eager to be thought merciful invites disorder, so the proverb and the chapter make a sharp pair for debating what actually keeps a ruler secure.

• Augustine, City of God V.24 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine describes the Christian emperors he calls happy: rulers who govern justly, are slow to punish and ready to pardon, and use power to serve God rather than their own glory. It is the kind of mirror-for-princes portrait that Machiavelli in Chapter XV sets aside as imagined rather than real.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Men in general are ungrateful, fickle, and self-interested, and a ruler who professes goodness in every respect will be ruined among so many who are not good. A prince's first duty is to keep his state, since without it he can do no good at all. Keeping it requires sometimes acting against faith, mercy, and religion while appearing to honor them, and relying on fear and one's own arms rather than on love or hired soldiers. Therefore a prince must learn to do wrong when necessity demands it, and must be judged by whether he preserves the state.

Rhetorical device: extended medical simile. In Chapter III Machiavelli compares political disorders to hectic fever, which the physicians say is easy to cure but hard to detect at first and easy to detect but hard to cure later. The image turns the Romans' foresight in distant provinces into a lesson in early intervention, giving statecraft the authority of medicine.

Debate: Resolved: It is better for a ruler to be feared than loved.

Memory Work

it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves

how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation

Writing Prompts

Essay: Machiavelli praises Cesare Borgia in Chapter VII but denies Agathocles glory in Chapter VIII, though both rose by cruelty. Using these chapters and Chapter XV, argue whether The Prince contains a hidden moral standard of its own or reduces every virtue to success.

Comparison with De Regno: Aquinas's On Kingship teaches that the king rules for the common good and must be guided toward the people's final end in God, while Machiavelli teaches that the prince must keep his state by whatever means necessity requires. Compare how the two works treat the tyrant and the means a ruler may use, and argue which gives the better account of what a ruler owes his people.

Medical Lens

The Prince is not a medical text, but it thinks in medical metaphors drawn from Renaissance practice. The state is a body that sickens; the ruler is a physician who must diagnose early, as with hectic (consumptive) fever, which is hard to detect at first and hard to cure later. Italy at the end is a wounded body with festering sores. For psychiatry readers the book is a sharp phenomenology of fear, hatred, contempt and trust in groups, and a classic case study in how threat shapes leadership behaviour. Machiavelli wrote it months after being tortured with the strappado, a biographical fact sometimes read into its unsentimental view of cruelty, though that remains interpretation. Cesare Borgia's collapse is attributed to a near-fatal illness in August 1503, when he and Alexander VI fell sick at the same moment, traditionally ascribed to malaria or to poison.

• Chapter III

  The extended analogy between foreseeing political trouble and the physicians' maxim about hectic fever: easy to cure but hard to detect early, easy to detect but hard to cure late.

  Fever InfectionTuberculosis ConsumptionPhysicians Doctors
• Chapter VII

  Borgia explains that he had planned for everything at his father's death except being himself at the point of death at the same time; illness, not lack of ability, ruins him.

  Fever InfectionDeath Dying
• Chapter XIII

  Machiavelli recalls the hectic-fever analogy: the scanty wisdom of man cannot discern the poison hidden in a policy that looks good at first.

  Fever Infection
• Chapters XVII and XIX

  Analysis of fear, love, hatred and contempt as the emotional forces that hold or dissolve a state; a ruler should be feared without being hated.

  Neurosis Anxiety
• Chapter XXVI

  Italy pictured as beaten, despoiled and lacerated, waiting for someone to heal her wounds and cleanse her long-festering sores.

  WAR WoundsPain

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the night of 10 December 1513 at Sant'Andrea in Percussina from Machiavelli's point of view: the tavern games of the afternoon, the change into court robes, and the first draft of the chapter on cruelty, with the strappado still in his shoulders.

• Dialogue

  Stage a debate between Machiavelli and Savonarola, the armed and the unarmed prophet, on whether a city can be ruled by persuasion alone.

• Essay

  Apply Chapter III's hectic-fever analogy to a modern public-health crisis: what does it mean for a government to act when a problem is 'easy to cure but difficult to detect'?

• Classroom

  Divide a class into readers who treat The Prince as a tyrant's handbook, as republican satire, and as patriotic exhortation; each group must defend its reading using Chapters XV, XVIII and XXVI.

Further Reading

• Discourses on Livy, Niccolò Machiavelli

  The republican companion work, written in the same years.

• Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction, Quentin Skinner

• Thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss

• Niccolò's Smile, Maurizio Viroli

• Against the Current, Isaiah Berlin

  Contains the essay 'The Originality of Machiavelli'.