Minor Political Writings

What Machiavelli wrote down, as a Florentine envoy, about Cesare Borgia, the German emperor and the French crown.

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Scritti politici minori
First published: 1503(aged 34)
Original language: Italian

Overview

For fourteen years Machiavelli served Florence as an envoy, and an envoy's job was to write down what he saw. These seven short pieces come out of that work: reports, sketches and a single letter of advice, grouped together by his editors rather than by him. What they share is a habit of sizing up a power — its money, its soldiers, and whether its people will obey. The best known is his account of Cesare Borgia, the pope's son, seizing four of his mutinous captains at Senigallia at the end of 1502 and having them strangled, two that night and two the following month. Machiavelli was at Borgia's court at the time, and scholars disagree whether he wrote this version soon afterwards or a decade later. Three pieces on Germany grew from his mission to Emperor Maximilian I in 1507 and 1508, alongside Francesco Vettori, the Florentine envoy there: a report dated 17 June 1508, a discourse of 1509, and a portrait finished around 1512. He admired the German free cities, which kept a year's grain, drink and fuel in public stores. He judged the emperor wasteful and changeable, a ruler who asked no one's advice yet believed everyone. The Prince reuses both the Borgia story and the German cities' stores as examples. Two pieces on France drew on his missions to Louis XII. One lists French habits: keener on money than on bloodshed, quick to forget both injuries and favours. The other, written around 1510–12 and left unfinished, explains why the French crown had never been stronger: estates without heirs fell to it, and barons who once rebelled now submitted. The last piece dates from October 1522, ten years after he lost his post. It tells Raffaello Girolami, a Florentine about to leave on his first embassy — to Charles V in Spain — what to watch at a foreign court and how often to write it up for the government at home.

Key concepts

What does Machiavelli mean by an envoy's conjecture?

Judging well what is going to happen, and making the government at home understand it. He calls it an ambassador's most important duty, and the hardest: facts already done are easy to learn, but where things are still in motion one has only judgment and surmise. His rule for weighing a coming war is to measure the number and quality of the troops, the money, the conduct and the fortune; the side with most of these is likely to win.

What does it mean that a ruler would succeed if only he changed his nature?

It is the verdict on Maximilian I in the report of 1508: everyone Machiavelli heard agreed the emperor would have succeeded in Italy had he changed his nature or had Germany backed him in earnest. His revenues were ample; his liberality and easiness, the very qualities praised in him, ruined him. He never had money, and everyone around him deceived him. Character, on this account, can cancel resources entirely.

How does inheritance law shape a state's strength in these reports?

Decisively. In Germany princely estates are divided among heirs, which has left the temporal princes weak and useless as friends. In France the barons' estates pass whole to the eldest son; the younger brothers take up arms to win a state of their own, which is why the French men-at-arms are the best. And because estates without heirs revert to the crown, and the great barons hope to inherit it, the crown grows richer and rebellion rarer.

How should an envoy offer his own judgment without seeming presumptuous?

By attributing it to others. After setting out the intrigues and the men behind them, Machiavelli advises Girolami to write something like 'the shrewd men here judge that it will produce such or such an effect.' The same care runs through his own German report, where he passes on what he heard rather than claiming it as certain, holding it a servant's duty to set before his master everything that may be of use.

Why are the best troops in the open field poor at sieges?

Because their strength is their order. The German and Swiss infantry, he reports, have no equal in a pitched battle, where their ranks cannot be broken, but give a poor account of themselves attacking or defending a town, where they cannot keep the discipline of the camp. The French show the opposite weakness: fierce in the first onset, then discouraged and careless, so that whoever withstands the first charge and waits them out defeats them.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Sizing up a power: money, arms, obedience

What actually makes a state formidable, and what only makes it look so? Machiavelli answers from the German free cities, the emperor and the French crown, and finds the answer less in size than in money, arms and whether a people will obey.

Germany, he reports, abounds in men and money, yet its strength cannot be used. The free cities keep a year's grain, drink and fuel in public stores and arm their own citizens, but they want to keep their liberty rather than enlarge it, and will not spend equally on a conquest whose profit would go to the princes. France is the reverse: estates without heirs have fallen to the crown, barons who once rebelled now submit, and a people that venerates its king costs little to guard. The cities' power is great, he concludes, but no one can avail himself of it.

political power
public finance
monarchy
military organization
hereditary succession
political fragmentation
collective action
liberty
discipline
war

Enter a dialogue

Reading rulers, and being believed

How does someone sent among dissemblers see what is really happening, and still keep a name for honesty? Machiavelli recorded how Cesare Borgia talked his captains into a trap, and twenty years later told a young envoy to be known as sincere.

At Senigallia he shows Borgia, thoroughly skilled in the art of dissembling, assuring his mutinous captains that mistrust could not make their agreement more sincere, then seizing them. Yet in 1522 he tells Raffaello Girolami that dissemblers lose a prince's confidence for good; a fact hidden with words must be hidden so that it does not show. The envoy's real work is conjecture: to learn from courtiers by telling them things in return, to judge whether a ruler governs himself or is governed, and to report what the shrewd men expect.

diplomacy
political judgment
political intelligence
deception
trust
political counsel
political leadership
prudence
reciprocity
statecraft

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 73
distinct concepts: 129
by passages held, corpus-wide: #573

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “diplomacy” and “political judgment”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 47 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
diplomacy	political judgment	4
military strategy	political power	4
political leadership	public finance	4
military strategy	political leadership	3
monarchy	political power	3
diplomacy	military strategy	2
diplomacy	political power	2
military strategy	political judgment	2
monarchy	public finance	2
diplomacy	political leadership	1
military organization	monarchy	1
military organization	political judgment	1
military organization	political power	1
military strategy	monarchy	1
military strategy	public finance	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1503 Minor Political Writings (Scritti politici minori) you are here EN
1521 The Art of War (Dell'arte della guerra)
A companion, in dialogue form, to the Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli had dedicated that book to Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti, and both reappear here as listeners while a soldier turns ancient military practice into a programme for a modern state.
EN
1531 Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius
Longer, later and far less read than The Prince, this republican commentary on Livy is the work that makes Machiavelli's real politics a genuine question. Published, like The Prince, only after he died.
EN
1532 History of Florence (Istorie fiorentine)
His last large work turns the questions of the Discourses on Livy on the past of his own city. Like The Prince and the Discourses, it reached print only after his death.
EN
1532 The Prince
Machiavelli's most famous and shortest book, written in 1513 and published in 1532. Read for centuries as a tyrant's manual — a reading its republican companion, the Discourses on Livy, complicates.
DEEN

— or open another of their works