Lehal Library

xxi Introduction a nicer place, Machiavelli does not do this. It wasn’t his project. Rather he takes it for granted that we already know that life, particularly political life, is routinely, and some- times unspeakably, cruel, and that once established in a position of power a ruler may have no choice but to kill or be killed. This is where the words ‘of necessity’, ‘must’ and ‘have to’ become so ominous. For The Prince is most convincing and most scandalous not in its famous general statements – ​ that the end justifies the means, that men must be pampered or crushed, that the only sure way of keeping a conquered territory is to devastate it utterly, and so on – ​but in the many historical examples of barbarous behaviour that Machiavelli puts before us, without any h ­ and-­wringing, as things that were bound to happen: the Venetians find that their mercenary leader Carmagnola is not putting much effort into his fighting any more, but they are afraid that if they dismiss him he will walk off with the territory he previously captured for them: ‘at which point the only safe thing to do was to kill him.’ Hiero of Syracuse, when given command of his country’s army, finds that they are all mercenaries and ‘realizing that they could neither make use of them, nor let them go, he had them all cut to pieces.’ The climax of this approach comes with Machiavelli’s presentation of the ruthless Cesare Borgia as a model for any man determined to win a state for himself (as if such a project were not essentially dissimilar from building a house or starting a business). Having tamed and unified xxii