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host: why did you think there's a market for this at this stage in the world? guest: i think there's always a market for machiavelli. all the renaissance writers you can think of, he's the most quoted and there's more titles with machiavelli's name with unusual contexts, machiavelli for businessmen, how to manage like machiavelli, machiavelli for relationships. you name it, machiavelli's name comes up. he's one of the few men, one of few names that really comes down -- has come into the common language, and i think there's always a fascination with him. part of it based on a misunderstanding, part of it valid, but he's certainly one of the perennially fascinating characters in history. host: what's the misunderstanding? guest: machiavelli has become an adjective. i doubt there are very many people in this town who would like to be described as

machiavelli and i have a feeling many of them read the print secretly at the dark of night, next to their bedside but not too many people would call themselves machiavellians. they might call themselves pragmatists or realists but very few people want to be called machiavellian because he's been associated with a kind of underhanded, cynical, manipulative approach, not only to politics, but to life, as well, and i don't think this is really what he was about. but it's a natural misunderstanding and one that goes very early back to really the first years after his death where he was called an enemy of the human race, the finger of satan. so there's certainly always a fascination for people who have that kind of reputation. host: when did you get interested in him? guest: it's interesting you ask that. i thought back to this, i was

giving a talk shortly after i completed the book and it had come out, and i realized i had written a paper when i was in 10th or 11th grade on machiavelli and i was living in florence at the time and my fascination stems from that era but my fascination with him in particular, i was -- had this notion that he was not the man he was purported to be, he was not this villainous character, but rather somebody who was dealing with the sort of the realities as he found them and wanted to find a way to honestly look at human beings the way they were and in my naive way and i wish i had that paper somewhere that i had written, but it was sort of -- i have not really changed my ideas on him that much. i'm much more sophisticated, much more knowledgeable, but the idea that he was up to something other than the common perception of what he was up to is something that's always fascinated me. host: why were you living in time in yourhat

life? guest: my mother took us to florence. i went there when i was 11, and had most of my high school years there. my mother, i think she wanted to follow in the footsteps of henry james and the drownings and had a very romantic notion of florence and took her three kids after she got divorced and it was sort of a lark and for me, it was certainly a fascinating and i fell in love with the city, fell in love with the history, and i've, you know, gone back many times since then. it's just, to me, i mean, florence is such a wonderful place to be, and it's just a beautiful, fascinating city full of sort of both violence and the height of civilization and lowest lows of human depravity. it's a fascinating era and you can still see that in the streets of florence.

host: where was your home originally? guest: i moved around a lot. an off-and-on new yorker. my father was a college professor and we moved around. i was born in california. sort of parapatetic. i make my home in boston. host: how many books have you written and what were the others about? book, i gote this in the florentine venice vein and the last book was on lorenzo de'medici called "magnifico" and sort of the defining figure over the renaissance, the man who presided over florence in its golden age, known as lorenzo the magnificent and it captured the splendor and pageantry and artistic production of florence at that time and writing about lorenzo and the politics and machinations and violence

beneath the surface, it was a national -- machiavelli wrote extensively about lorenzo de'medici, lorenzo de'medici died when machiavelli was 23, so he knew him, probably knew him personally, knew his family, knew his sons, and certainly machiavelli seemed like a natural follow-on from that. host: what year was machiavelli born and where? guest: he was born in 1469 in the city of florence and florence was one of the five major states of renaissance italy. italy was a divided -- it was not even a country. it was divided among five major powers and a host of duchies and principalities and petty states. florence was the weakest of the five. it was the most centrally located and probably the weakest, weakest of the kingdom, the duchy of milan of venice.

you had naples to the south ruled by a spanish born family, then you had the papal states which surround florence on three sides and it was a precarious position for florence and during machiavelli's youth, lorenzo de'medici was a very adept politician, very adept diplomat, and he managed to keep all these balls in the air, managing to keep italy at peace and more importantly, the foreigners out, and with his death comes the kalamity when the foreigners sweep in and cause chaos and destruction. host: in your footnote, you say machiavelli lived to be 88. guest: he lived to be 58. host: maybe it's a misprint. guest: he died at 58. michelangelo lived to be 88. 58 for a man of that era is an average, perhaps above average lifespan.

lorenzo de'medici lived to be 43. host: go through those 58 years and where was he and you write about the time, 14 years he was a public servant and prisoner. guest: he spent the first 29 years, exactly half of his life, not much of anything. he was a son of an impoverished gentleman who didn't want to work, had a small estate outside florence and he managed his small pat rimony, manage to eke a small living, enough to allow him to lead a life of leisure and machiavelli originally followed very much in his father's footsteps, as a dilettante, he studied with a good humanist education which meant he learned latin, learned to memorize and read most of the great latin writers, cicero and virgil and seneca, and he had a good education but didn't accomplish much until he was 29 and it was only then, when the

fall of safinarolea, that he takes on a career in public service and does this for 14 years during a period in which florence had recovered its republican institutions. it had been dominated by the de'medici family for decades but in 1494, the medicky are exspelled and there's a four-year period where a great fire and brim stone preacher is running things in florence and with safinarolla's execution, right after that, machiavelli takes office, which suggests he belonged to the party opposed to safinarolla and for that 14 years he serves as what i like to think of -- trying to think of an equivalent in today's politics -- a kind of undersecretary of state, roving diplomat, not a top, top member

of the bureaucracy, but a fairly high official with fairly large responsibilities which continue to grow as he shows himself to be a capable, energetic and patriotic man. he does this for 14 years until de'medici return to florence on the backs of spanish lances. they've been trying for 14 years to get back into the city that expelled them and manage it after the flornetines backed the wrong army, the french army. one of the de'medicis, who's a cardinal, and his brother, get the support of mercenaries to get into the city and machiavelli is booted out of office. a couple of months later he is

imprisoned and tortured because his name crops up on a list of people in the pocket of somebody plotting to overthrow de'medici regime, a young man named boscoli, trying to gather fellow conspirators, and machiavelli's name is on the list. he was never approached by boscoli, and if he had been, machiavelli would have shut the door on his face because he's not big on conspiracies, he writes about them saying how often they fail and how dangerous they are. be a politicalld agitator but he was not somebody who believed in violent overthrow of legitimate government. he was very much a bureaucrat and i think one of the things about machiavelli, the first man who really speaks for the bureaucracy, the federal bureaucracy, the man who puts the values of the state of government over the people, and he is the first to articulate

that view, that the french, reason of state, and he is the proponent of that kind of system. host: when did he marry? guest: he married in 1501, a young woman from the neighboring quarter of florence named marietta corsini who was probably slightly above him socially. we don't know that much about her because women were not really considered worthy of -- machiavelli didn't consider her worthy of spending a lot of time and effort recording her sort of day-to-day life. marriage in florence was very much a business arrangement. she was from a suitable family, the corsini family, perhaps a little better established than the machiavelli family, perhaps less down at the heels so he was probably moving up a bit when he

married her. host: children? guest: he had six children, four boys, two girls. he was a good family man to that extent. and their marriage was, i don't think, by our standards, not a conventional marriage. he was quite a philanderer. he liked visiting the whore houses. he was serially unfaithful. his wife seemed to put up with this, partly because that was expected of a good wife. she was almost certainly a decade or so younger than he was. men married in their late 20's and women in their late teens, so the difference in age meant that he was probably much more worldly and sophisticated man and she was -- one of the interesting things you have about her, one of the few things we know about her, she complained often that he was never around. he was always going off on these

trips to the court of france and she complained that he wasn't there for her, which suggests that when he was there, she enjoyed his company and they had a good family life and they did produce six children so they managed to spend a good deal of time together. host: i have a question about where you find this stuff. i know it's not "stuff," the material in the book. how do you know 500 years later that he visited a house of prostitution? he wrote about it. machiavelli was not shy about exposing his own peccdillos. one of the great things about machiavelli is his kind of humanity, his warmth, his ability to sort of see the ridiculousness in other people but also in himself which is why he was quite popular. there are many letters from his friends talking about his wonderful sense of humor, which was rather course, and he writes

this awful letter of an experience he had while he was away in which he visited a prostitute in the dark and he was sold some procurious came and said i have a lovely young thing for you, pay two duckets and you can have her and of course it tran spires that when he turns on the light, she's an old toothless hag, and this is the kind of humor and sort of earthy stuff, machiavelli and his friends trafficked in. it was not a victorian age by any means. it was very earthy, scurrilous things you probably can't say on tv. so we do know he reported on his various loves, his affairs, and his friends did, as well. they often teased him, you know,

saying, if you come back to florence, you're going to get in trouble for having engaged in unnatural sex acts. much of it was humorous but he was no saint in his personal behavior. host: do you have any idea how many people were in the world 500 years ago? guest: many four than -- fewer than today. i don't know the answer. host: do you have any idea around florence? guest: florence was surprisingly small. considering if you think about florence and how florence looms in the culture of the west, it's surprising that it was a city of less than 50,000 people at the time that machiavelli lived there. i don't know what it compares to in terms of very small american town, but it produced bruinaleski and da vinci,

michelangelo, donatello, dante -- the list of geniuses in a population that small is incredibly impressive, and almost inexplicable. but it was a small town and had been larger in the middle ages. it was decimated by the black plague in the 14th century and its population probably shrunk by half so at its peak in the 14th century it was probably a city of 100,000. host: what would happen if the 538 people who have a seat in the house and the senate and the three that don't have voting that are representatives read your book and thought through what machiavelli said back in those years and also read the prints. what could they learn from it? guest: despite his reputation, the greatest contribution made tolli has political thought is sort of to look at things practically.

the philosophers that came before him, those who wrote about politics before him going back to plato and aristotle and st. thomas aquinas believed essentially that the world and politics and human society really advanced and was really based on something rational. for the greeks, reason, both aristotle and plato thought that reason ruled the way the world worked and the way human societies worked and he said that politics is the knowledge by which we make men good. that is not machiavelli's philosophy. machiavelli believed and he says this, he says that many have believed, have written about societies that never were and never could be. i want to show you the way men really are. so i think in the broadest sense, he was the first to sort

of look at men as they really are, and to say, ok, men are selfish, they're ambitious, they're deceitful. how can we build a government based on this premise, and i think certainly the founding fathers had a very similar attitude towards politics, that men are basically ambitious, untrustworthy, known -- no one has a monopoly on the truth. this is why we have to balance one group against another, this is why we have our checks and our balances. madison famously said, in one of the federal papers -- i don't remember which -- that ambition must be made to counteract ambition, and by that balancing of opposing interests, this is how we form a more perfect union and i think this is something that really goes back to machiavelli's notion of looking at men as they really are, as selfish, men who work for their own interests. host: the people that wrote our did they read

machiavelli? guest: we know john adams did because he wrote about machiavelli. ones, there's no or very little direct testimony but we know they read people who read machiavelli, particularly a group of english political philosophers known as the commonwealth men, and the commonwealth men came out of the english liberal tradition and were the sort of people like john locke. there's a famous treatise most the founding fathers had in their libraries called "cato's letters" which is a long passage about machiavelli and why we should not regard machiavelli as a philosopher of evil as he had been believed but as a man who are showing us that men are selfish that we may guard against it, that we may build systems that can work with and sort of balance one interest off against the other. so, indirectly, if not directly, we know that machiavelli had an influence on the founding

fathers and on the way our constitution was framed. host: i have a copy here of the prints. do you have any idea how many of these have been sold in 500 years? guest: no. i would say it was a best seller shortly after his death, particularly after it was put on the index of prohibited books by the pope. host: why did the pope prohibit the book to be read by catholics? guest: in 1559 was the counter reformation, the reaction to and the response to martin luther and the reformation and the church was trying to reform its ways and to combat the growing threat of protestantism by reviving the church and sort of fighting back and one of the things they wanted to do was crack down on dissent to come up with a unified line and machiavelli had written terrible things about the church. he had pretty much raked them

over the coals, particularly in the discourse where is he blames the church for having made -- basically having destroyed italy. he said the church was too strong to allow a proper government to form in italy but not strong enough to unify it. they were continually inviting in foreigners to sort of save their bacon. they invited in the french or the spanish or the austrians whenever they were threatened, thereby stirring the pot or making it impossible for italy to develop a unified government so machiavelli was very tough on him. host: was he religious? guest: he was not -- he paid lip service to religion and many people have asked over the years whether machiavelli was an atheist or not. my own sense is that machiavelli didn't care enough about religion to be an atheist. he didn't care for metaphysics. he was outwardly conventional

though there are times he says i don't attend mass like i know you do, he wrote to one of his friends. he often made fun of religious people. he thought they were corrupt, as they were, as you know, the renaissance popes, they were -- borgia who acknowledged his own children and sictus the 12. giovanni de'medici was a cardinal. lorenzo de'medici's son was made a religious leader as a political favor to him and it's not entirely the church's fault. the church was stuck between a rock and a hard place because they were the spiritual leader of christendom but they were

also a state, a political entity that had to fight for its fight for its life like any other territory so they were caught betwixt and between trying to be the spiritual father to their flock and acting like a renaissance princeling. host: how often do you run into that have never read the prints? guest: most people have sort of in school. you find it in interesting places. shortly after i started writing this book, my editors wrote me a clip of an article that lindsay lohan was carrying around a copy of it with her everywhere. i don't know what she did with it. he has an appeal outside of the realm of politics that i think very few other political writers have. i think because he represents such a kind of personality type, you know, the gad fly, the guy who's not going to put up with

funny business, who's going to puncture the piety and the assumptions, and in a way, you know, any time sort of, you know, talked about how people are basically good, people will believe that but there are the other types of people who believe people are basically scoundrels and you have to check your pockets to make sure they haven't been picked. that is machiavelli. people who feel that way feel a kinship with machiavelli. they relate to him on a visceral level. host: where did you get your education? guest: informally, i got my education largely in florence. i went to brandeis and i was an art major. i wrote about art for many years before i went back to my original love of history and italian renaissance history in particular. host: how do you make your

living? guest: as a writer. host: no teaching? guest: i have taught before and i used to be a journalist and an editor at a paper but right now i earn my living writing. host: where were you a journalist? guest: i edited an art magazine called "art new england" for many years and i wrote for the "new york times" for many years and numerous other publications along the way and i also taught some. teaching was not my calling. i prefer sitting there in front of a computer. host: what happened to mom in all this? is she still alive? guest: she died some years ago. we eventually decided we couldn't financially manage to stay in italy. it was a lark, as i said, a spontaneous thing, and i don't think my father appreciated it that much and he was paying child support to have his kids 3,000 miles away. it was not ideal for him.

and so we stayed there 4 1/2 years, about, and i came back to complete high school in the united states. host: where are your siblings? guest: one of them lives in new and the other actually lives in germany right now. he writes for "the economist" and goes all over the world. host: either one of them as interested in all this as you are? guest: no, i think i'm the one stuck with that period the most. even before i moved there, i was very interested in art and when you're in florence and surrounded by michael michelangd don telo and -- donatello and my father is also a writer and historian and has written many books. host: where does he live now? guest: he taught at n.y.u. for years. he lives in new jersey. i came to history in a round-about way.

host: what's his first name? guest: irwin unger. host: back to the prints. you have a photograph in the book, a couple of them, i'd ask you, did you take those by any chance? guest: i took some of them. host: the one i'm thinking of, where he wrote the prints, the house. guest: yes, i did. host: where is that? guest: a little village 10 miles south of florence and i urge going to florence to visit it because you can see it's a lovely countryside. machiavelli wasn't too happy there, felt he was exiled there. that's machiavelli's house, very much the way it was when he lived there. if you have the concierge open up the house, and it's funny, because italians have so much history around them, they don't -- it's not like going to mount vernon with a big deal made of it, you have to go across the street and find someone to open the door for you

and they'll show you around and they'll say, here's the desk where he wrote the prints and the village is very much the way it was in machiavelli's day. host: how much time did you spend there? guest: i spent a day there. a beautiful day trip out of florence sort of roaming, we walked around the olive fields, the vineyards. you can feel you're back in the 15th or 16th century, and to see the sort of the world through machiavelli's eyes, what he considered his place of exile. he only spent time there, large chunks of time there, after he lost his job and he was sort of he felt very much -- you can actually see florence. brunoewski's dome you can still see and the tower of the palace where he worked as the second

of florence, you can sill -- still see and he must have sat there and mind and he talked about this and he would do anything to get back to work in florence. host: how old -- when he lost h? >> he was about 45. host: how old was he when he wrote "the prince"? guest: he was a man not suited to sort of puttering around his farm, tilling the soil, clipping the vines. that was not him. he was very much a political animal. and as soon as he lost his job, as soon as he got out of prison and then recovered from the physical ordeal of the torture he had undergone, he was very anxious to get back into the good graces of the people who now ran the government. if he wanted to have any position in government, he needed to ingratiate himself

with de' medici. >> in "the prince" he writes a letter to de' medici up front and he says this -- "i realized this --" this is in his letter. "i realized there was nothing more precious or important to me than my knowledge of great men and their doings." was he planning? guest: partly. he did this well. machiavelli, despite the name, was very than machiavellian. he was constantly advising princes to be deceitful, to do anything they could to be underhanded. but he, in his own life, was rather too frank for his own good. he tended to tell people unpleasant truths that they didn't want to hear. in effect "the prince" was sort of a job application to get back. he originally wrote it for julian no domenici, and

lorenzo, his nephew, takes over. so the final dedication goes to lorenzo de' medici. he presents it to him as a job application. he says here is the fruit -- i can't give you expensive gifts, i can't give you poetry, but what i can give you is the wisdom accrued over 14 years of service to the government. and lorenzo didn't want to hear anything about it. host: is your original manuscript anywhere? guest: no. it was not published in its own day, in fact. as far as i know, there are no exigent copies of the written manuscript. but it circulated in manuscript in its own day and a few years after he died, it was published. but it was quite well known in intellectual circles in florence during his lifetime. and it made him actually quite notorious among the florentine

intelligence. host: here's something out of chapter 15. and it's a small book. guest: that's one the reasons it's so popular. it's an easy read. host: this is in the middle of chapter 15. this particular translator uses rulers for the word "prince" all throughout. he says, "if you always want to play the good man in a world where most people are not good --" this is what machiavelli is saying -- "you'll ends up badly. hence, if a ruler wants to survive, he'll have to learn to stop being good, at least when the occasion demands." guest: that is a classic formulation of machiavelli. again, he made the rather reasonable assumption that no ruler can do anything unless he's in power, and no ruler who always follows the path of virtue will remain in power long. but he did say that best thing for a ruler to do would not necessarily be to always be

virtuous, but to appear virtuous. that is the key. appearing virtuous can often be useful. being virtuous rarely is. host: actually, the next chapter. "hence, if you're determined to have people think of you as generous, you'll have to be lavish in every possible way. naturally, a ruler who follows this policy will soon use up all his wealth to the point that, if he wants to keep up his reputation, he'll have to impose special taxes and do everything a ruler can to raise cash. his people will start to hate him and no one will respect him. now he has no money." guest: that's very applicable to today's situation. host: that's what i was going to ask you. guest: in order to engrasheyatewurs the people, you have to con -- ingratiate yourself with the people, you have to spend on them. give them what they want, don't raise their taxes, then you eventually run out of money and

you're stuck with a situation like we are now, where we have to get revenue somewhere. so stop spending. neither of which is palatable to a people who have constantly been given everything. host: there was no electricity or cell phones in those days, no ways to play music except live. do you have any idea when he was in that house, how he wrote? what did they use in that is days? guest: the quill pen. ink or parchment -- probably paper, since parchment was expensive and he was not -- particularly after he lost his job, was not rich of the was constantly complaining about money. so he wrote with a quill pen on paper. and this was the early days of printing. sort of the birth of printing in italy, right around the same time machiavelli was writing. and a couple of pieces were actually published.

the only book that was published in his lifetime was the art of war. the other ones circulated in manuscript. but there would be copies, if a work were popular. if people wanted to read it, there would be professional copyists. host: are there first editions of "the prince" anywhere? guest: i would imagine there are from the 15 30's. i'm not -- i don't know the market, but i'd love to have one. host: we'll see if we can get you one. put a time frame on it again. he left the government when he was around 45, he died when he was 58 and he wrote it right in the 46 -- guest: he wrote it very quickly. in a letter of december 10, 1513, he said i've written this pamphlet and i'm hoping that

de' medici will read it. i think he put it, allow me to at least roll stones for them. an expression of at least he's put me to some useful work. he wrote it quickly, but he was out of prison in february, 1513 p. by december he claimed he had finished it and was ready to sends it off. it was a quick work. he dashed off in the sort of heat of the moment. as he pointed out, quite a short book. host: how long had he been in prison? guest: he was in prison for about three weeks, which wouldn't have been so terrible. the conditions were not good. but the worst thing about it was that he was constantly threatened with being executed. a couple of the people who were implicated in the same plot he was were beheaded sort of right outside his window. that must have been an unnerving experience for him. and he was also tortured. the florentines favored a torture where they take your arm and they bind them behind your back and put you on a

platform, then pull the platform out and basically dislocate your shoulders and rip your muscle. not a pleasant thing. the same torture had been applied before another man's execution, and he broke quickly and confessed to all the crimes they wanted him to. machiavelli seemed to be made of sterner stuff, though perhaps it was because he really didn't have much to confess. he was innocent. but he was rather proud of himself for how he came out of that, saying he thought of himself a better man than he had before for having endured this like such a man. host: here's chapter 18. "pope alexander vi never did anything but con people. that was all he ever thought about. and he always found people he could con. no one ever gave more convincing promises than alexander or swore greater oaths to back them up, and no one ever kept his promises

less. yet, his deceptions always worked because he knew this side of human nature so well." guest: i think that's the definition of grudging respect. he had a grudging respect for pope alexander, who is the same as borgia, the infamous scion of the borgia family. and this was one of machiavelli's -- the points he makes throughout and has given him the reputation for wickedness. more than his defense of violence is his defense of lying, that has gotten him into such trouble over the years. but he makes the point that alexander, by lying, managed to succeed, where others more honest failed. which would you rather have, a man whose ruler's job is to succeed, and alexander succeeded. so in the case of alexander, he also chastises him because he says that his lies and his success were meant only for his

own family. he contrasts this with julius ii, alexander's successor, who was equally due police to us and equally vial -- duplicitous and equally violent. but his lies and his violence were for the sake of the church, for the sake of something charger -- larger than pure nepotism. so i think it's fair to say that machiavelli's attitude towards alexander was grudging with respect, and perhaps the emphasis on the grudging. host: how many of those popes back then were married? guest: none were married. many had children. few acknowledged their children. one of the things about borgia, alexander the vi, he openly acknowledged his children. usually popes passed off their children as nerve fuste. host: did he have children while he was pope? guest: no, he was an older man.

but when he was cardinal, certainly -- and he was very open about his mistresses. he had his favorites mistresses. there are stories of orangies in the vatican, which -- or jeese in the vatican, murders in the vatican. it was sort of like rome under nero. pretty much -- of course, his most infamous child was a borgia, and the famously beautiful and mysterious lukretia borgia, as well. host: you say that his son had syphilis. guest: yes. people had speculated it came over with columbus' ship and had spread. when the french armies invaded in 1494, the italians assumed they brought it with them. i don't know if that's fair, but it certainly seemed to coincide with the french invasion a year or two after

syphilis becomes a serious problem in italy and around the rest of europe. and the italians called it the french pox. host: you say that rodrigo borgia, who was hope alexander vi, born in spain, that he committed the deadly since of greed, gluttony and pride? guest: yes. and one the refreshing things about rodrigo borgia is many of his predecessors and successors were equally corrupt. he sort of refuse elled in his corruption -- reveled in his corruption. he felt comfortable enough in his power that he could get away with this. given the track record of people who went around murdering people, murdering his political enemies, it was pretty safe for him to assume that he could get away with it. even when people started railing against him from the pulpit in florence, he pretty much put up with the insults as

long as he was political leon board. he didn't mind being called a lustful, greedy, corrupt man. he said pretty much i am. host: i wrote down a quote when i was reading your book, "i believe christ speaks through my mouth" was his quote. and then you give the impression, or maybe it's the truth, that he was an evangelist. guest: he was a fundamentalist. he was a religious visionary. he's an interesting character because he had some very scary attributes and some very admirable attributes. host: but who was he? guest: he was a dominican friar who came to florence in 1492 from ferrara. so he was a foreigner, which always made him a bit suspicious to florentines. but he quickly gained the reputation of a fire and brim stone creature, calling on

florentines to reform their ways, saying the judgment is at hand, you know, fire and pest lens and floods will -- pest lance and floods will come. he got a good response, because i think florentines felt guilty about their lifestyle, the corruption. i think this is the most admirable aspect of him. he was very much an advocate for the poor and repressed. he gained a following among the poor. the disenfranchised workers, the urban proletariat. so he was very much a democrat. he was responsible for restoring the democratic institutions of florence after the de' medici expulsion. but he was also dangerously convinced, i think, that, as you say, god spoke through him. he kept talking about his own martyrdom. he might have been emotionally unstable. so he really put -- through the four years that he, in effect, ruled florence, he really put

them through the ringer. many people thought the rapture -- the sort of second coming was about the common people had to reform their ways. he built these huge bonfires of the vanities and the central square of florence, where people would throw their paintings and jewels would be thrown and brocaded dresses. so all this great cultural wealth of florence ended up being consumed in these bonfires. very much a reaction to the kind of corruption and sort of luxury of florence. host: did i read in the book that he really didn't believe this stuff? guest: well, when he was tortured he claimed he was made to confess that he didn't believe it. but then he recanted that original confession. i think he did believe it. it's always difficult to tell with people like that, where personal ambition and genuine

belief separate. i think it was both. he was very ambitious. but his ambition, as he saw it, was for christ, for a better world. and i think we see that in sort of contemporary figures who fix sort of religious visionary qualities with sort of a methianic belief in themselves. it's very hard to know where belief ends and pure personal religion ends. host: back to this book that you wrote. contrast where you wrote it with where machiavelli wrote "the prince." what were the circumstances for you? where did you do it? >> guest: well, i did a lot of research in italy and florence. when i say research, i mean i spent a lot of time at restaurants, having a good time and doing some research as well. sort of getting a feel for the place. and i think -- i always like to go back. every book i write about florence, i take at least one

trip to drink in the atmosphere and the chianti. but most of the circumstances are not quite as romantic. i spent a lot of time, i think like most writers, in front of a computer screen. fortunately for something like this, there's a lot of material available. machiavelli's letters, which are a wonderful read, either in the original italian or even in english translation, they're just very lively, full of wonderful incident and colorful tales. he's quite a storyteller himself. host: are they online? guest: i haven't found them online. host: where do you go to get them? guest: they're italian editions of his complete letters. there's also an english version. i think it's something called machiavelli and his friend. host: are you fluent in italian? guest: my speaking is a bit rusty, but my reading is still pretty good. 15th century, 16th century

tuscan is different from modern italian, but -- host: this is a simon and schuster book. big publisher. a name from 500 years ago. whose idea was it, yours or theirs? guest: well, it was originally my idea. was shaped as we went along, as most of these projects are. we had talked about maybe doing a book on machiavelli and others. it's interesting that two people who represent almost diametrically opposed visions of the world were sort of in the same place at the same time. one of the early chapters of the book i sort of talk about that point in which machiavelli in his the crowd while rolla is preaching one of his hell-fire sermons and machiavelli is commenting on it. he was sent there to write a report of what machiavelli was saying to the ambassador in

rome. the idea of those two people being there, their having completely opposite views of what made the world tick, what the world was about, i thought it was such a fascinating thing. it ended up being pared down a bit to machiavelli. but certainly we were both interested in this period of florentine history. it's endlessly fascinating. host: do you have any idea how many copies of this book that the publisher thinks will sell? guest: i don't. i'm not sure. i do not know how many they ran off. but i try to stay away from that sort of marketing end of things. host: what's the audience, from their perspective -- is this one for colleges? guest: it could be for colleges. it's also for people who like biographies, interesting figures from different periods. people read biographies of

three yo pat tra. there's an endless hunger for biographies. he's one of the seminal figures of sort of western thought. he's a very interesting guy and a very entertaining guy to be around. i certainly enjoyed spending a couple of years with him and i hope people reading the book get that sense. host: there's a sense from reading your book at the end under the headline "finger of satan," to describe someone as a milwaukee bucksist is to define his political views. to describe someone as machiavellian is to impugn his character. machiavelli was certainly not the world's first cynic, but he has been so closely identified with a certain kind every unscrupulousness, that any self-serving behavior is now described as machiavellian." how cynical was he? >> he had a rather skeptical view of human nature, i think you can say. he believed people were basically selfish, weak,

fearful, pursued their own advantage. but he also had a very humane view of the human race. i think he was a very warm -- i think it certainly comes through in his comedies. he had a warm understanding of human nature. he said men are scoundrels, in some sense, but then he said we're basically animals pursuing our own basic needs. he was accepting of human nature. i think that's one of the things that made him different from other people who had a bleak view of human nature, like st. augustine, for instance, who talks about how -- you know, from human beings as essentially wicked. machiavelli, when he said they were wicked, is much more accepting. he said it is impossible to go against what nature compels you to do. in a way he's sort of an early darwinnist saying we're basically animals competing for

power, and what is unnatural is to expect people not to live like this. so he had a very sort of -- skeptical of human nature, but also sympathetic with it. host: you write this, too -- "he took pleasure in scandalizing his readers, standing traditional no, sir trums on their head and how following the recommendations could lead to disaster." what do you think his reaction would be if he came back today 500 years later and he saw that his book was everywhere? guest: i think he'd get a kick out of it. he was very ambitious. he was not modest. not falsely modest. i think one of the things that drove him was a sense of his own sort of marginal tee in florentine society. he always had to work at the behest of some rich, stupid man that he had to court, like lorenzo de' medici or juliano

de' medici. it irritated him that they treated him with such disdain. would get a kick out of who remembers -- not lorenzo the magnificent, many people remember him, but the lorenzo to whom he dedicated the book, nobody remembers him, except that machiavelli dedicated "the prince" to him and the fact that michelangelo built a wonderful tomb in his honor. host: did he ever get a job after he was run out of government? guest: not quite a job. he was sent on missions after a number of years of sort of being in the political wilderness, he got a number of assignments from giulio de' medici, who was more sort of a sympathetic figure. cardinal giulio de' medici becomes pope clement vii, and they're both fellow intellectuals. he has a mutual administration and he gets small assignments late in life. he he sort of gets back in the saddle again, fighting for

florentine independence in a very difficult time. so he never really got a steady job, but sort of late in life he did manage to at least contribute something to his country and he was an ardent patriot. that was very important to him. host: here's more from "the prince." in this regard it's worth noting that you can be hated just as much for the good that you do as the bad, which is why, as i said before, a ruler or a prince, who wants to stay in power is often forced not to be good, because when a powerful group, whether they be the common people, the army, or the no bibblet is corrupt, then if you -- nobility is corrupt, then if you reckon you need their support you'll have to play to their mood, keep them happy, and at that point any good you do will will only put you at risk." again, what would he think about -- if he came to this country today and looked at

what was going on -- guest: i think he would see there's a lot of pandering going on. he lived in a less squeamish age. i don't think that the most hard-headed politician today would imprison and behead his political opponents. i don't think that's something that's going to happen. but machiavelli would look at our political system and he would see that there are a lot of people who are afraid to tell the truth, who are afraid to do the hard work necessary to get things done. i think -- he's not a big fan of pandering. he wrote a scathing indictment of those who, during a period of war, when florence was trying to reconquer the little republic of pizza that had escaped its grasp, and people were refusing to pay their taxes. he wrote a scathing indictment of this thing. how can you, who claim to want

to be free, but will do nothing to, you know, bring that about. and i think he probably would have been very harsh on the lack of civic-mindedness that he would find, i think, in contemporary american politics. host: do you think you'd like him? guest: i think i would. i do like him. host: i mean personally, from what you know of him. guest: i mean, yeah. it was a coarser age. there's a kind of level of coarse humor and rib aledry, disrepresent pew tabble living. i think as a married man i have a hard time accepting. host: do you have kids? guest: two. i have two daughters. i would keep him far away from my daughters. he was a bit of a lech. but i think he's a very warm, withey guy. he's tactless -- witty guy. he's tactless and acerbic.

he yells at a lot of enemy, particularly those who were his political superiors. host: this cover you have, is that the only likeness we have of machiavelli? guest: there are no likenesses of him from life. this was done a few years after his death based on descriptions of people who knew him. but it's probably -- most of them agree it's fairly close. there are some descriptions of him. his wife wrote a letter to him, the only letter we have from her, and when he was away in rome, describing the birth of her young son saying his jet black hair, just like you. so there are a couple of descriptions that we have of him. that's, i think, the best of them and the most convincing. host: what's your next book? guest: i have a couple of ideas. i'm thinking about doing something again on the italian renaissance, which i love, or branching out to something else, and i haven't entirely decided.

i'd like -- i wouldn't mind doing -- mining this territory as long as possible. there are many great characters and figures from the age. host: got to go back to florence and try some of that chianti. guest: yes, that's another reason to mine this particular territory. the perqs there. the perqs are nice. host: jay unger is the author of "machiavelli: a biography." and we thank you very much. guest: thank you. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national satellite corp. 2011] >> dor a d.v.d. copy of this program, call 1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. q&a programs are also available as c-span podcasts.

>> tonight the farewell speech by the outgoing prime minister. after that, former extremists talk about terrorism and radicalism. and later on q&a, miles j. unger, author of a new biography on the life and writings of noted italian author and playwright. niccolo machiavelli. on tuesday, republican presidential candidate and former massachusetts governor, mitt romney, will announce his jobs plan. . . .