Machiavelli's Exile and Literary Output

The Fall

In September 1512, a Spanish army defeated the Florentine militia at Prato and restored the Medici to power. Machiavelli, who had been the republic's most prominent civil servant for fourteen years, was immediately dismissed. In February 1513, he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in an anti-Medici conspiracy. He was imprisoned and tortured — subjected to the strappado, in which the victim is hoisted by ropes tied to his wrists behind his back, dislocating the shoulders.

Machiavelli was released after several weeks, probably because the newly elected Pope Leo X — a Medici — declared a general amnesty. But he was banned from political life and confined to his small farm at Sant'Andrea in Percussina, about seven miles south of Florence. At the age of forty-three, the man who had spent his career at the center of European power was reduced to farming, hunting birds, and playing cards with locals at the village inn.

The Letter to Vettori

On December 10, 1513, Machiavelli wrote a letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, the Florentine ambassador in Rome, that has become one of the most famous documents in literary history. In it, he described his daily routine in exile: spending the morning checking bird traps, arguing at the inn, eating simple meals with his family.

Then, in a passage that captures one of the great transformations in intellectual history, he described his evenings: 'When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and I put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing, and was born to savor. I am not ashamed to talk to them and ask them to explain their actions, and they, out of kindness, answer me.'

It was during these evening sessions — this dialogue with the ancients — that Machiavelli composed The Prince, which he described to Vettori as 'a little work' he had been writing 'De principatibus.' He completed it in a matter of months, writing with an urgency born of desperation and intellectual passion.

Writing as a Political Act

Machiavelli never fully accepted his exclusion from political life. The Prince was partly a job application — he dedicated it to Lorenzo de' Medici in the hope of winning a governmental position. The dedication's language is almost painfully eager: Machiavelli offered his 'knowledge of the actions of great men, learned through long experience of modern affairs and constant reading of ancient ones.'

The position never came. Machiavelli was given minor commissions — the Florentine Histories, a mission to organize Florence's fortifications in 1526 — but never regained the political influence he craved. He died on June 21, 1527, just weeks after the republic was briefly restored following the Sack of Rome. The republic he had served all his life returned too late for him to serve it again.

The tragedy of Machiavelli's exile is also its gift to posterity. Had the republic survived in 1512, Machiavelli would have remained a busy diplomat who never found time to write. His enforced leisure produced works that changed the course of Western political thought. Fortune, which Machiavelli wrote about so brilliantly, was cruel to the man but generous to the world.