Lehal Library

xi Introduction would have understood very young the price of getting it wrong in politics. The young Machiavelli might also have had reason to doubt that there was any meaningful difference between matters of religion and matters of state. The pope had backed the Pazzi conspiracy, priests had been involved in the assassination attempt and Lorenzo was excommuni- cated after it failed; the religious edict was a political tool. A war between Florence and Rome ensued and the hostility only ended in 1480 when Turkish raids on the southern Italian coast prompted a rare moment of unity in the pen- insula. Years later, Lorenzo would so ingratiate himself with a new pope as to get his son Giovanni made a cardinal at age thirteen. From excommunication to pope’s favourite was quite a change of fortune and once again it was more a matter of politics than of faith. Nothing, it appeared, was beyond the reach of wealth and astute negotiation. At this point Machiavelli was t­ wenty-­one. We know very little of his early adult life, but one thing he definitely did at least once was to listen to the fiery preacher Girolamo Savonarola, head of the influential monastery of San Marco. Savonarola’s was a different kind of Christianity: rather than the corrupt, p­ leasure-­conscious world of the papacy, whose decadence had offered no resistance to the rise of Humanism, this austere monk represented an early manifestation of what we have come to call fundamental- ism, a return to the biblical text as the sole authority on earth and a vision of the Church as embattled and xii ingratiate: bring oneself into favor with someone by flattering or trying to please them decadence: moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury