The education of a christian prince pdf

“Having wiped out these leaders, then, and changed their partisans into his friends, the Duke had laid very good foundations for his power, holding all the Romagna along with the dukedom of Urbino, especially since he believed he had made the Romagna his friend and gained the support of all those people, through their getting a taste of well-being” (Norton 1631)

� � Author � Time/Date of Composition � Contextual Information � Form � Major Themes

Preview

� � Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) à born to a notable,

but powerless family � Lived and worked in Florence, Italy

�  Except for when he served as a diplomat � Heavily involved in the political scene � Remembered and “known” for writing The Prince,

but wrote other fiction and non-fiction texts too

Author

� Author

� Some major works �  Discourses on the First

Ten Books of Livy (1513-21)

�  The Prince (1513) �  La mandragola (1520) �  The Art of War (1521) �  The Florentine Histories

(1532)

(The Prince (1921) book cover via Open Library)

� � Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513

�  Was unfairly accused of conspiracy by the Medici Family, and then imprisoned and tortured (Norton 1626)

�  Left city for the countryside for several years, which is when he wrote The Prince

� The Prince was part of an attempt to regain public office (Norton 1626) à that’s why it’s dedicated to Lorenzo of the Medici Family

Time/Date of Composition

� �  The Prince belongs to a genre of handbooks, or advice-

writing, for leaders. It is contextualized by other political writings, such as �  The Education of a Christian Prince (1516) by Erasmus

�  Traditional Renaissance handbooks “couched their advice in the language of Christian morality” (think: Augustine’s Confessions for reference) & “their point was to remind the ruler to remain virtuous” (Norton 1626)

�  The Prince CLASHED with these texts because it argues that maintaining political stability sometimes means the ruler must be deceptive and violent (Norton 1626)

Contextual Information

� �  Written in the form of a non-fiction book à a kind of

“handbook” for learning how to rule and keep power �  Consists of 26 chapters

�  “The first eleven deal with different types of dominions and how they are acquired and preserved” (Norton 1626)

�  Chapters 12 – 14 “focus on problems of military power” (Norton 1626)

�  Chapters 15 – 26 are the most famous parts of The Prince; they deal with “the attributes and ‘virtues’ of the prince himself” (Norton 1626)

Form

� Being realistic about the world.

For there is such a difference between the way men live and the way they ought to live, that anybody who abandons what is for what ought to be will learn something that will ruin rather than preserve him, because anyone who determines to act in all circumstances the part of a good man must come to ruin among so many who are not good. Hence, if a prince wishes to maintain himself, he must learn how to be not good, and to use that ability or not as is required. (Norton 1632)

Major Themes

� Major Themes

(Machiavelli Meme)

� “The ends justifies the means.” The Duke has Messer Remirro de Orco establish order in Romagna (a region in modern-day northern Italy), and then…

because he knew that past severities had made some men hate him, he determined to purge such men’s minds and win them over entirely by showing that any cruelty which had gone on did not originate with himself but with the harsh nature of his agent. So getting an opportunity for it, one morning at Cesena he had Messer Remirro laid in two pieces in the public square with a block of wood and a bloody sword near him. (Norton 1631)

Major Themes

� Fortune/luck.

That is, if a prince bases himself entirely on Fortune, he will fall when she varies. I also believe that a ruler will be successful who adapts his mode of procedure to the quality of the times, and likewise that he will be unsuccessful if the times are out of accord with his procedure. (Norton 1633)

Major Themes

� Free will.

Nevertheless, because the freedom of the will should not be wholly annulled, I think it may be true that Fortune is arbiter of half of our actions, but that she still leaves the control of the other half, or about that, to us. (Norton 1633)