Niccolò Machiavelli, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The question has a simple answer and a complicated one, and both are true. The simple answer: I wrote it in the autumn of 1513 at Sant'Andrea in Percussina, dismissed from the chancery, fined, imprisoned, tortured in the Boscoli investigation, and released under the papal amnesty with nothing to show for fifteen years of service to Florence.
I needed employment. The Medici had the power to give it or withhold it. The Prince was my argument to them — a demonstration that I understood the art of rule well enough to be useful to those who practiced it. The complicated answer: the book is also what I actually thought. A prince who rises from private status, who owes his position to no inherited advantage, who relies on fortuna for nothing more than the initial opportunity — such a prince faces a specific and demanding set of problems that no moralist had addressed honestly.1
Fortune supplies the occasion; virtù must do everything else. Those who arrive at power through fortune alone, through money or another's favor, find themselves in place with no roots, no foundations, no forces loyal to them — and the first adverse weather eliminates them, because states that arise suddenly cannot have the deep roots that make them durable.2
That is the diagnosis. The Prince is the prescription. There is a third thing, harder to separate from the other two. The Discourses on Livy — a general theory of republics, written in the same years for my republican friends at the Orti Oricellari — argues consistently that the republic is the superior form. The Prince is the specialized case of new principalities in a specific historical moment when the republic was not recoverable and the Medici held Florence.
I wrote the Discourses for Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai; I wrote the Prince for Lorenzo. Both books are mine. Neither cancels the other. The tension between them is a feature of the political circumstances in which I wrote, not a puzzle to be dissolved by deciding one of them was ironic. What I can say plainly: the Italy I watched being overrun by French and Spanish armies while her princes quarreled and her cities changed hands like market goods needed someone to describe the political world as it actually was rather than as the humanist moralists wished it to be.
The Florentine histories from 1434 to 1494 showed what happened when principalities conducted themselves with weak and badly directed armies, with deceits and guile substituted for genuine virtù — the way was opened for the barbarians, and Italy put itself again into slavery to them.3 If that record cannot excite admiration for virtue and greatness, it can at least excite wise men to avoid and eliminate such failures.4
The Prince was written in that spirit: not flattery, but diagnosis, and the hope that someone with the capacity to act might read it.
Fortune supplies the prince with nothing more than opportunity, as when Moses found the people of Israel enslaved by the Egyptians, Romulus found himself exposed at birth, Cyrus found the Persians discontented with the empire of the Medes, and Theseus found the Athenians dispersed.The Prince, pp. 15–16
states that come to be suddenly, like all other things in nature that are born and grow quickly, cannot have roots and branches, so that the first adverse weather eliminates them.The Prince, pp. 57–58
there it will be seen how in the end the way was opened anew for the barbarians and how Italy put itself again in slavery to them.Florentine Histories, p. 202
if the latter excite liberal spirits to follow them, the former will excite such spirits to avoid and eliminate them.Florentine Histories, p. 202