How Machiavelli's Florence bargained with Cesare Borgia for survival – Ada Palmer

Historical Context of The Prince00:00

Machiavelli dedicates The Prince to Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici in 1513. In the final chapter, he states that Lorenzo is the only person who can bring Italy out of its current state of ruin and ravage. Two major factors explain the instability: the city-state structure of Italy and the role of the papacy.

City-State Instability and Legitimacy00:35

A core political principle holds that long continuity of government creates legitimacy because people are accustomed to its institutions. When that continuity breaks through overthrow or regime change, the new government lacks staying power. One regime change frequently triggers multiple rapid successive changes. This pattern appears in the multiple iterations of the French Republic and in England's Wars of the Roses. When a long stable dynasty ends, repeated overthrows follow because the thread of continuity has been severed.

In Machiavelli's lifetime, that thread of continuity was cut for the majority of Italian cities. When he was born, six or seven city-states had recently had their governments uprooted. By the time he writes The Prince, dozens of places, in fact the majority, had experienced this disruption. Almost no government possessed staying power; every government remained ripe for replacement.

The Papacy's Expanding Executive Power02:35

The papacy stands as one of the oldest institutions in the world. Consecutive popes expanded executive power, especially on the military side, and launched more wars while carrying out arbitrary overthrows of governments. City-states directly ruled by the papacy could theoretically have any ruler appointed by the pope. A pope with an illegitimate son could overthrow a city's government to install his son. Successive popes repeated this pattern until the norm emerged that every new pope possessed authority to knock down any pawn on the chessboard.