Machiavelli, the Sack of Rome, and Philosophical Rupture

In May 1527, as Imperial armies approached Rome, Niccolo Machiavelli, who had been assisting attempts to divert the enemy, managed to escape from the city and return home to Florence, only to die the following month. During the same months Machiavelli appears also to have been arranging his writings for publication. The Sack of Rome, because it brutally demystified the world in which early modern Europeans lived, functioned as a caesura separating times ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the European consciousness. Machiavelli’s writings, too, contributed to a major break in the European approach to the world. After Machiavelli’s major works, The Prince, Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories, were published posthumously in 1531-1532, they became for the next several centuries the fundamental texts explaining to Europe how it had become what it was a continent torn by warring states and religious strife. The Prince illustrated the often atrocious behavior of monarchs; the Discourses described the moving parts and undercarriage of a virtuous republican Rome that was lost; the Florentine Histories recounted how the corrupt present came into being. But Machiavelli’s work was not merely descriptive. Although a friend of his once praised the Florentine’s “philosophy,” which he sais “would never be understood by fools, and which not enough wise men would understand,” modern writers have tended too hastily to deny Machiavelli a philosopher’s status. Yet they have overlooked the manner in which Machiavelli’s new approach to causation opened a path from Aristotelian to early modern empiricism. And his novel understanding of original sin anticipated the moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. The Sack could be said by some to have “changed everything”. The same is true of Machiavelli.