Lehal Library

travelling to neighbouring states to represent Florence’s interests, and over the next fourteen years he would be involved in important, often ­long-­drawn-­out missions to the King of France, the pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, Cesare Borgia, Caterina Sforza and many others. In between these missions he was frequently and very actively engaged in Florence’s ongoing military campaign to ­re‑­take Pisa, which had regained its independence during the French invasion. Pisa was crucial to Florentine commerce in that it gave the town an outlet to the sea. Introductions to The Prince generally play down Machi- avelli’s abilities as a diplomat, presenting these years as useful only in so far as they offered him the material he would draw on for his writing after he had lost his position. Machiavelli would not have seen things that way. For more than a decade he was Florence’s top diplomat and proud to be so, and if the missions he undertook did not produce spectacular results this was largely because he was repre- senting the weakest of the main states in Italy in a period of particular confusion and vulnerability that would even- tually see four foreign powers militarily involved in the peninsula: France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland. Savonarola had taken Florence towards an alliance with France; the priest’s successors followed the same policy, but without any clear vision of how the city might achieve stability and security in the long term. To make matters worse, having decided in 1502 that their gonfaloniere, or first