History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 803 passages
Cite this work
- APAMachiavelli. (n.d.). History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/machiavelli/history-of-florence-and-of-the-affairs-of-italy
- MLAMachiavelli. "History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/machiavelli/history-of-florence-and-of-the-affairs-of-italy.
- ChicagoMachiavelli. History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/machiavelli/history-of-florence-and-of-the-affairs-of-italy.
What it is about
The history of Florence that Machiavelli wrote between 1520 and 1525, from the origins to the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Context and history
The circumstances of its writing are what make it singular: it was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the future Pope Clement VII — that is, by the family that seven years earlier had had him arrested and tortured when they returned to power. Machiavelli needed the work. The result is a book that does not lie but chooses very carefully what to underline, and reading it while knowing who was paying is part of reading it well. The underlying thesis is that Florence's internal divisions were not an accident but its mechanism.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE DEATH OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT By Niccolo Machiavelli With an Introduction by HUGO ALBERT RENNERT, Ph.D. Professor of Romanic Languages and Literature, University of Pennsylvania. PREPARER'S NOTE This text was typed up from a Universal Classics Library edition, published in 1901 by W. Walter Dunne, New York and London. The translator was not named. The book contains a "photogravure" of Niccolo Machiavelli from an engraving. INTRODUCTION Niccolo Machiavelli, the first great Italian historian, and one of the most eminent political writers of any age or country, was born at Florence, May 3, 1469. He was of an old though not wealthy Tuscan family, his father, who was a jurist, dying when Niccolo was sixteen years old. We know nothing of Machiavelli's youth and little about his studies. He does not seem to have received the usual humanistic education of his time, as he knew no Greek.[*] The first notice of Machiavelli is in 1498 when we find him holding the office of Secretary in the second Chancery of the Signoria, which office he retained till the downfall of the Florentine Republic in 1512. His unusual ability was soon recognized, and in 1500 he was sent on a mission to Louis XII. of France, and afterward on an embassy to Cæsar Borgia, the lord of Romagna, at Urbino. Machiavelli's report and description of this and subsequent embassies to this prince, shows his undisguised admiration for the courage and cunning of Cæsar, who was a master in the application of the principles afterwards exposed in such a skillful and uncompromising manner by Machiavelli in his _Prince_. The limits of this introduction will not permit us to follow with any detail the many important duties with which he was charged by his native state, all of which he fulfilled with the utmost fidelity and with consummate skill. When, after the battle of Ravenna in 1512