The Prince (Historical Context)

Historical Context

The Medici Family

Lorenzo di Medici was a member of a family who ruled Florence for almost three centuries (1434 – 1737). They lost control of Florence for only a brief time (1494 to 1512) when a reform government was established to run Florence. Machiavelli was a member of the reform government, and he lost his government post when the Medici family regained power in 1512. The Prince was written as Machiavelli's way of gaining the Medici family's favor by offering advice based on his experience in government.

The first Medici came to Florence from the surrounding farmlands around the year 1200. At that time Italy was not a unified country, but a land scattered with separate, powerful, feudal cities. Florence was one of the most prominent of these city-states.

It is believed that the family prospered in Florence. The social class system was strict: the wealthy merchant class, known as the popolo grasso ("the fat people"), suppressed the lower class, known as the popolo minuto ("the lean people").

The Ordinances of Justice (1293) established the city as a republic to be ruled under democratic principles. Although true democracy was never achieved — political rights were reserved for members of higher political standing — it did much to change the political landscape. Florence was looked on by other Italian city-states as a model of progressive thinking.

Giovanni di Bicci de Medici (1360 – 1429) was the first real politician of the family. He was a banker and a powerful member of the popular political party. Though he considered himself a businessman only dabbling in politics, Giovanni was elected prior of Florence three times.

It was his son Cosimo (1389 – 1464) who first established the family's control of the city, ruling Florence for thirty years. He was a brutal, aggressive leader. Yet he is also remembered as a financial supporter of some of the Renaissance's leading artists, including Donatello and Brunelleschi.

Cosimo's son, Piero (1414 – 1469), was a quiet, contemplative man. Yet Cosimo's grandson was one of the most powerful in Italian history: Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449 – 1492), who took control in 1469, the year of Machiavelli's birth.

Lorenzo was a strong-willed ruler and an outstanding patron of the arts. Among the great thinkers who stayed at his house were Leonardo di Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli. Yet he was tyrannical and ruthless in his reign.

When he brought a Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola (1452 – 1498) to Florence in 1485, Savonarola quickly became a popular spiritual leader who raised public sentiment against the Medici family.

After Lorenzo's death, his son Piero (1471 – 1503) assumed leadership. Considered weak and foolish, Piero was very unpopular with his subjects. Savonarola and his supporters drove Piero from power in 1494. The Florentine Republic proved unstable, though, and the Medici family returned to power in 1512. They ruled the city until 1737.

Renaissance

The Renaissance began in Italy in the fourteenth century and spread to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the Renaissance, the agricultural-based economy and religious domination of the Middle Ages virtually disappeared and was replaced by a society gov-erned by centralized political institutions and urban-centered, commercial economies.

The Renaissance is also characterized by great strides in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and astronomy. Yet the greatest legacy of the Renaissance period is found in the field of art — and the greatest Renaissance artists lived in Florence.

Artistic advances were numerous and significant during this period. Linear perspective — the mathematical ordering of the scene portrayed on a painter's canvas so that things are proportional to their distance from the viewer — was developed by Filippo Brunelleschi. Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, which remains the most recognized painting in the world. The sculptor Donatello as well as the painter Botticelli lived and worked in Florence. Even those artists who did not live there at least passed through Florence, eager to gain inspiration from the terrific artistic revolution that occurred during the period.