Lehal Library

xxix Introduction published in Machiavelli’s lifetime. After circulating for years in manuscript form, then in a printed Latin edition (still entitled On Principalities), it finally appeared in Italian in 1532, only to be put on Pope Paul IV’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1559, this partly in response to the prompting of the English cardinal Reginald Pole, who maintained that, written as it was by ‘Satan’s finger’, The Prince was largely responsible for Henry VIII’s decision to take the English Church away from Rome. Meantime, in France, the conflict between the Protest- ant Huguenots and the Catholics was intensifying and would reach a head under the reign of the sickly young Charles IX, who for the most part was controlled by his mother, the Italian, indeed Florentine, Catherine de’ Med- ici, daughter of the same Lorenzo de’ Medici to whom Machiavelli had dedicated The Prince. Catherine had brought a great many Italian favourites into the French court, a move guaranteed to arouse ­anti-­Italian feeling. In general, she sought to dampen down the religious conflict which threatened to tear France apart, but nevertheless she would be held responsible for the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 when thousands of Huguenots were murdered. One potential victim, Innocent Gentillet, escaped to Protestant Geneva and wrote a Discours contre Machiavel that was to set the tone for ­anti-­Machiavellian criticism for decades to come. Intended as an attack on Catherine de’ Medici and mili- tant French Catholicism, and hence a defence of the xxx