After almost 500 years, Machiavelli, one of the Italian Renaissance's most original and brilliant thinkers, is still able to intrigue and amaze. The American historian William J. Connell of Seton Hall University has now announced the discovery of missing correspondence which was a prelude to one of the most famous private letters in history. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote on December 10, 1513 to his friend Francesco Vettori, announcing that he was writing a work "On Principalities." This book, known to the world as The Prince, is a classic in the history of political thought and considered a founding document of Enlightenment secularism and thus of the modern era. Connell's discovery of a coded postscript in a letter to Vettori has a great impact on our understanding the genesis of this great work.
Professor Connell will be making the first public presentation of his find in a lecture on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at 4:00 p.m. at the Fondazione Luigi Firpo, located in Palazzo d'Azeglio, via Principe Amedeo 34, in Turin, (Italy). The completion of this important puzzle, together with the related documents, will also be published in the journal Il Pensiero Politico.
Connell's intriguing theory was the result of a discovery made several years ago in an Italian private archive, where he was studying a puzzling letter from a Florentine magistracy, the Ten of Balia addressed to Machiavelli's friend, Francesco Vettori, in Rome. The letter, dated November 12, 1513, bears, in a format typically used to indicate which chancery official dictated a letter to a scribe, an abbreviated form of Machiavelli's name: "N. Mach." and an inexplicable "L".
What was especially bewildering was that "N(iccolò) Mach(iave)l(li)," as previous scholars read the abbreviation, was in official disgrace and no longer working in the Florentine chancery in 1513. Machiavelli's service to the Florentine government ended in November 1512, when, after the fall of Pier Soderini's republic and the return of the exiled Medici family to Florence, he was summarily fired and forbidden to leave the Florentine dominion for a year. Two months later he was implicated in a plot against the Medici, resulting in his arrest and torture. It would have been impossible for him to dictate the letter on that date. Some scholars believed that the year was simply mistaken by the scribe. Now the historian Connell, by comparing the letter with others written to and from Vettori in 1513, has proven that both the date and the document itself are genuine. The abbreviation at the bottom, which used to be taken as a kind of chancery signature, was really a hidden message to Vettori meaning "N(iccolò) Mach(iavelli) L(ibero)," or "Niccolò Machiavelli is free."
Machiavelli maintained his innocence under torture and was released from prison as part of a general amnesty when Giovanni de' Medici was elected as Pope Leo X in March 1513. Soon after his release, an intense correspondence began with his lifelong friend, Francesco Vettori, who was then serving as Florentine ambassador in Rome. The men discussed the political affairs of Europe, the goings-on in Rome and Florence, and the business of their family and friends. The two men exchanged letters frequently until the end of August, when Vettori suddenly halted the correspondence. Possibly he sensed danger in corresponding with someone who only recently had been charged with conspiring against the ruling family… The secretive post scriptum of November 12, 1513, according to Professor Connell's reading, is a clever message from a friend in the chancery announcing the end of the official prohibition on Machiavelli's travel.
Only after receiving the hidden chancery message of November 12 did Vettori break his silence by writing an elegant letter to Machiavelli dated November 23, 1513, inviting him to be his guest in Rome now that the travel ban had been lifted. Machiavelli's response to Vettori's invitation was in fact the famous letter of December 10, which begins, fittingly: " `Divine favors were never late' [Petrarch. I say this because it seemed to me that I had lost--no rather strayed from -- your favor. It has been a long time since you wrote me, and I was unclear about what the reason might be ...." Connell's new discovery explains the recommencement of the correspondence after its abrupt suspension, leading directly to the letter announcing Machiavelli's writing of The Prince.
William J. Connell, Professor of History, holds the Joseph M. and Geraldine C. La Motta Chair in Italian Studies at Seton Hall University (South Orange, New Jersey). He received his BA summa cum laude from Yale University in 1980 and his Ph.D. in from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. He has been honored with a Fulbright Scholarship, a Giannini Italian-American Travel Scholarship, and a Fellowship at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence/Villa I Tatti. In 2002-2003 he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. From 2002 to 2005 he served on the New Jersey Italian American Heritage Commission. His books include La città dei crucci: fazioni e clientele in uno stato territoriale del Rinascimento (Florence, 2000); Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power (Cambridge, 2000, ed. with A. Zorzi); Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, 2002, ed.); a new English translation of Machiavelli's Prince (Boston, 2005); and Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence (Toronto, 2005, written with G. Constable).
This event is organized in conjunction with the international project "Machiavellism and Machiavellisms in the Western Political Tradition", with additional assistance from the Centro di Studi sul Pensiero Politico (Univ. of Turin), the Charles and Joan Alberto Italian Studies Institute (Seton Hall Univ.), and the Valente Italian Library (Seton Hall Univ.).