The Prince

The Prince: Summary

A man who came home in muddy clothes every evening

In the winter of 1513, a forty-four-year-old man did the same thing every single evening. He spent the whole day working his own small estate, chopping wood, arguing with the woodcutters, and in the afternoon he walked down to the village tavern and played cards with a miller, a butcher, and two bakers. He bickered, he shouted, he won or lost a few coins. An outsider would have said: here is a man who slid down in the world, a man who amounted to nothing.

But when evening came, something changed. He went home, took off his muddy, dirty peasant clothes, and put on his finest attire. The kind of clothes you would wear to a royal court. Dressed like that, he stepped into his study, and there he spent four hours in conversation with the dead. With the great men of antiquity, the old kings and generals. He asked them questions, and they, as he wrote, kindly answered. "For four hours I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not fear poverty, and death does not frighten me." This man's name was Niccolò Machiavelli, and out of that four-hour evening ritual was born what may be the most notorious book in the world.

A few months earlier he had been one of the most influential men in Florence. For fourteen years he ran the republic's foreign affairs, negotiating in person with French kings, popes, and generals. Then his luck turned. The Medici returned to power, he was fired, thrown in prison, and tortured on a charge of conspiracy he had nothing to do with. By the time they let him out, everything he owned was gone except his knowledge. And it was that knowledge he now set down in a slim book, hoping the new masters would employ him again. The book never won his job back. But we are still reading it five hundred years later.