As noted in the previous chapter, Machiavelli first refers to the writing of The Prince in a famous letter he wrote to his friend Francesco Vettori dated December 10, 1513. After describing how he enters his study at night, dressed in his “regal and courtly garments,” and spends the next four hours conversing with the ancient authors, Machiavelli tells Vettori: “And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De Principatibus, in which I delve as deeply as I can into the ideas concerning this topic, discussing the definition of a principality, of what kinds they are, how they are acquired, how they are retained, and why they are lost.”1 Also as noted above, Machiavelli goes on to tell Vettori that he intends to address it to the new ruler of Florence, Giuliano de’ Medici. Machiavelli’s book will exhibit the understanding he has gained of through his long experience of politics and his nighttime conversations with the ancients. The letter to Vettori reveals important information about when

Machiavelli composed The Prince and something of his intentions

in doing so. First, as for the composition, he must have begun writing the book sometime after his release from prison in March 1513. How far along he was in writing it by the time he wrote Vettori in December is not clear. He states in the letter that he has already shown a draft to a mutual friend and that he is still “fattening and currying it.”2 This characterization of the draft, along with the fact that he had already turned his mind to presenting it to Giuliano de’ Medici, suggests that The Prince was drawing toward completion in December 1513. On the other hand, the letter from Vettori of January 1514 cited in the previous chapter thanking Machiavelli for the “chapters” he has sent suggests that the work was not fully complete at that point. Even if the book was nearly complete in terms of the work he

set out to write, how “complete” was it relative to the work we now know as The Prince? Two further considerations indicate that Machiavelli continued to revise the work after late 1513 and early 1514 when he was corresponding with Vettori about it, the question being how much. The first consideration derives from his summary of its contents in the letter to Vettori. Namely, as suggested by the title De Principatibus, what Machiavelli had drafted up to the point he wrote Vettori concerned principalities: what they are and how they are acquired, maintained, and lost. Some scholars have inferred from this summary that Machiavelli may have composed only the first eleven chapters of the work, which they argue fits this description of its contents, but not the remainder of the full work we now have, in which he takes up additional subjects. These scholars have therefore hypothesized that the original version of the work to which Machiavelli refers as De Principatibus in the letter to Vettori was a much shorter work than we now possess.3

Other scholars counter that Machiavelli’s description of the contents of the work could easily refer to the entire work as we now have it, and not just the first eleven chapters, and therefore suggest that the work may have reached more or less the full version not long after he wrote Vettori. Finally, a third group of scholars, generally holding that the original version of the work contained the first twenty-five chapters, argue that Machiavelli added the Dedicatory Letter to Lorenzo de’Medici and, more importantly, the concluding chapter, chapter 26, exhorting the Medici to free Italy from

external powers, at a later date when he decided to present the work to the Medici in hopes of regaining a government position, perhaps between 1515 and 1517. Many of these scholars rely for this hypothesis on their view that the rhetorically heated tone of chapter 26 does not match the cold analysis throughout the rest of the work.4 Since there is no further manuscript or other documentary evidence, these conjectures about the state of the composition of the work when he wrote the ambassador necessarily remain irresolvable on this evidence. The second set of considerations for dating the composition of

the work is more concrete since the reasons are derived from the text of The Prince itself. First, within The Prince Machiavelli makes mention of a number of political events that occurred after his letter to Vettori of December 1513, the last of which seems to be from early 1515. Machiavelli therefore obviously made at least some changes to the text sometime after the beginning of 1515 and probably not much later. Second, and most obviously, although he informed Vettori that he intended to dedicate the book to Giuliano de’ Medici, the final version of the work as we now have it is dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici. We do not know for certain whether The Prince, in some version, was presented to Giuliano, although it seems unlikely since we have a letter from January 1515 conveying instructions from the head of the Medici family, Cardinal Giulio, to his brother Giuliano warning him not to employ Machiavelli in any way. Machiavelli may have therefore turned his hopes at that point to Giuliano’s nephew, Lorenzo, who returned to Florence in May 1515 with the mission of organizing the Florentine militia, a mission for which Machiavelli would have considered himself particularly qualified to advise upon, and who then assumed leadership in Florence in March 1516 when Giuliano died. From this evidence, we can fairly confidently narrow the window for the final form of The Prince, including the Dedicatory Letter, to May 1515 to March 1516, with the fact that the last events mentioned in the work occurred in early 1515 suggesting probable completion on the earlier side. Finally, we can further narrow this window by supplementing this information by the findings of ingenious detective work by a scholar with regard to Machiavelli’s own personal affairs during this period, and

particularly his dramatically declining financial position and need for employment. This evidence, in combination with the other facts discussed, persuasively suggests that Machiavelli took up writing again April or May of 1515, and completed his book at that time in order to present it to Lorenzo de’ Medici soon after.5 In short, The Prince seems to have been completed by May or June 1515. Finally, we know that a number of manuscript copies of The

Prince were circulating among Machiavelli’s friends, and beyond, by 1516-17, and circumstantial evidence suggests that these manuscripts contained something like the entirety of Machiavelli’s work as we now have it.6 Interestingly, a work that borrowed heavily from The Prince appeared in 1523 by Agostino Niso, an important philosopher of the time, suggesting that The Prince was fairly widely circulated by that time.7