Yet, his message was so strange and ahead of his time that he was accursed by baffled contemporaries and generations of commentators alike, including, e.g. Friedrich II. If I understand this message correctly, it is two-fold. First, the medieval European order will collapse and feudal kingdoms, "Christian Republic" of the Empire and Universal, i.e. Catholic Church, will be replaced by a new type of social organization. For the lack of term, I’ll call it anachronistically (with respect to Machiavelli) as "National Monarchy": a sovereign state based on the standing army, common language of the people and religion of its subjects, which are embodied in the figure of the ruler, the Prince.
Second, because of marked superiority of this beast to the contemporary patchwork of vassilages, communes and dioceses, Italy must be the first in embracing this new type of organization or else it becomes plaything of these new leviathans. He was, of course, correct on both instances. If one would look at the world 150 years after his death, one would find most of Europe divided between national monarchies of England, France, Spain, Russia and Sweden, and three antiquated medieval-style commonwealths of Austria-Germany (Holy Roman Empire), Turkey and Poland. National monarchies were not yet nation-states in a modern sense, but to achieve that, all they needed were citizenship, borders and identity separate from that of a ruling dynasty. To get these, European monarchies needed to pass through the furnace? of the Napoleonic Wars.
Italy, and Germany, were late in developing institutions of a unified nation and Machiavelli’s patriotic dream (cynics do not have patriotic dreams) was realized only in the second half of XIX century. Hence, the bold predictions of the “Prince” all turned true, but they are now behind us.
Since mid-XIX century, we live in the modern world. We hold passports; switching allegiance between states must be accompanied by an official act of some sort, or else it is punished as "treason", crossing imaginary boundaries on land, sea or in the air requires documents called visas, and these "nations" negotiate between themselves binding contracts, the treaties, and form families, alliances, as if they were individuals. Peacetime armies are not much smaller than wartime, and, at least in the developed states, internal repression is performed by a strictly separate institution, the police. Shrewd 15th century Italian, if he were to believe in the afterlife, would smile on us. He did not.
The book "From Poliziano to Machiavelli by Peter Godman shares mistaken and simplistic view of Machiavelli’s political philosophy. Yet, it provides a rich glimpse of the intellectual environment of Niccolo the Magnificent. As a politician, he was modestly successful directing for approximately five years the foreign affairs of the Florentine Republic. It was not surprising that he was finally unseated by the shrewder, more emotionally intelligent operators—despite his professed cynicism, as any passionate intellectual he could be quite defenseless—it is quite remarkable that his career took him that far.
What is really interesting about the book is that it shows how the ideas of the “Prince” germinated in the contemporary Italian literary milieu. As I already mentioned, the book might have been so modernistic and far-fetched for his contemporaries that its intellectual roots seemed obscure. Not so—-according to Peter Godman--Machiavelli’s views were firmly rooted in contemporary political thinking and he had many predecessors and competitors. What is really fascinating, is that, among his contemporaries he, as an intellectual councilor to the princes and political theorist, was hardly considered a top class in his time, being overshadowed by some florentine professor, now nearly forgotten. Even I forgot his name. That’s why history is wonderful: you never know how it will turn out.
