The Torture of Machiavelli

What actually happened

When the Medici retook Florence in 1512, Machiavelli, fourteen years the republic's diplomat and militia organizer, was sacked, then implicated by a list found on two conspirators. He was given the strappado: hoisted by wrists tied behind the back and dropped. He confessed nothing and was released in a general amnesty when Giovanni de' Medici became Pope Leo X.

Exiled to his farm, he wrote by day and by candlelight 'entered the ancient courts of ancient men,' his phrase, from the most famous letter in Italian literature, composing The Prince as both distilled experience and a plea for employment from the very family that had tortured him.

The Medici never gave him the job he wanted. The book outlived every prince in it.

The longer arc

The years before his fall gave Machiavelli the raw material for The Prince as much as the torture did. As Florence's second chancellor from 1498, he ran diplomatic missions across Italy and observed Cesare Borgia up close, consolidating and then losing a small state through exactly the mix of calculation and ruthlessness the book would later analyze. That firsthand access to power ended abruptly when the Medici, backed by Spanish troops, retook Florence in 1512 and dissolved the republic he had served.

He never got the job he wrote The Prince to win. Confined mostly to his farm for over a decade, he wrote the Discourses, the comedy Mandragola, and the Art of War, and only late in life secured a minor commission from the Medici pope Clement VII to write a history of Florence, work cut short when the Medici were expelled from the city yet again in 1527, the same year he died. The Prince itself was not published until 1532, five years after his death, and in 1559 the Catholic Church placed it and his other works on the Index of Prohibited Books, judging its politics too dangerous for the faithful to read.