Let's begin by presenting some newly discovered documents concerning Niccolò Machiavelli. The biographical detail may at first appear overwhelming, but the light these documents shed on the chronology of Machiavelli's composition of The Prince helps to answer some old questions concerning the character of Machiavelli's little treatise. The new documents date from the year 1515. They were drawn up at a time of financial difficulty and profound personal disappointment in the life of the former Florentine secretary and second chancellor. In 1512 Machiavelli had been fired from the chancery of the Florentine Republic. In 1513 he had been arrested on a probably false charge of conspiracy, tortured (although he gave no confession), and then unexpectedly freed in a general amnesty following the election of a Florentine, Giovanni de' Medici, as Pope Leo X. In 1515, at the time these documents were drawn up, Machiavelli was still out of favor. But he was also putting into prose the theoretical work that established the extraordinary reputation still associated with him today.

On 3 July 1515 there took place a small family meeting in Florence involving several members of the Machiavelli, including Niccolò, the former Secretary. We know about the meeting from three notarial acts, hitherto unknown to scholars, that were drawn up in the course of the meeting.Footnote ¹ Those present included the brothers Niccolò and Totto, and Battista di Buoninsegna Machiavelli, the grandson of their grandfather's brother, with whom the two brothers had a close rapport.Footnote ² A more distant relative, a priest, Prior Battista di Filippo Machiavelli, who was mentioned in the first act but not present, joined them later in time to take part in drawing up the second and third of the documents. A notary from the archbishop's curia was also present, as were two witnesses who belonged to the politically and socially important Guicciardini and Federighi families.Footnote ³ The meeting was held in the home of Niccolò's younger brother, Totto, in the parish of Santa Felicita, just across the Ponte Vecchio from the center of Florence. It was appropriate that they should have met in Totto's house, since his was the future that was being decided.

The first of the three documents states that Prior Battista, who had not yet arrived, proposed to resign his principal ecclesiastical benefice, the Priory of Sant'Andrea, which was in Montespertoli, a small town south of Florence, with which the Machiavelli family had historical connections that dated at least to the fourteenth century. The document accordingly assigned for the next six months the presentation right—the right of presenting to the archbishop a new holder of the benefice—to a family member, the absent Lorenzo Machiavelli, once the priory became vacant.Footnote ⁴ The priory in Montespertoli was a reasonably well-endowed church whose patronage was shared by the Machiavelli with the Captains of the Guelph Party.Footnote ⁵ In fact the Machiavelli family possessed patronage rights to a network of about a dozen rural churches and oratories outside of Florence. It has been suggested that Niccolò did not take a particular interest in these benefices, possibly as a consequence of a lack of religious feeling.Footnote ⁶ Yet documentation uncovered more recently has shown that for nearly two decades it was Niccolò who took the lead role in preserving the family's rights over these churches and in managing appointments to the benefices. As we shall see, the intention in this case had been that Niccolò's brother, Totto, would receive the Priory from Battista.

But then Prior Battista arrived at Totto's house. A change of plan is evident in the two further documents that were drawn up that day. First of all, it was decided that Prior Battista would not have to relinquish his priory. Instead it was agreed that a different benefice would be assigned to Totto, not by Prior Battista but by Battista's son, Giampiero Machiavelli, who also happened to be a priest.

It was, to be sure, irregular for a priest, in this case Prior Battista Machiavelli, to have fathered a son—and yet Battista had two of them.Footnote ⁷ It was also irregular for a priest's son, in this case Giampiero Machiavelli, to serve as a priest. But with a certain frequency these were things that happened in the Church in the decades before and after 1500. Dispensations, moreover, were obtainable.

Giampiero, the holder of the benefice that was now designated for Totto, had been living in France after leaving Florence in October 1513. At the time of his departure he had made his father, Prior Battista, his procurator with full power over his affairs.Footnote ⁸ Since the first document had stated that Battista intended to resign his own benefice, but after he arrived it was agreed that Giampiero would resign his benefice, it seems quite possible that it was Giampiero's assent that made the change possible. Battista, in other words, would have arrived at the meeting with word from France that his son was willing to resign the church. The benefice that Giampiero was to resign happened to be the parish church at Sant'Andrea in Percussina. The Machiavelli had patronage rights there that they shared with the parishioners. Sant'Andrea in Percussina was where Niccolò Machiavelli's family farm was located—the farm described in Machiavelli's famous letter to Francesco Vettori of 10 December 1513, where Machiavelli wrote much of The Prince. Prior Battista had himself been the rector there from at least 1493 down to 1504, when, with the connivance of Niccolò, he had arranged to have the church passed to Giampiero, thus circumventing the rule that strictly forbade the passing of an ecclesiastical benefice from father to son.Footnote ⁹ In the second of these three documents of 3 June, Prior Battista, exercising his powers as procurator, transferred to Niccolò Machiavelli the ability to resign the benefice of Sant'Andrea in Percussina on Giampiero's behalf.Footnote ¹⁰

The church at Sant'Andrea in Percussina was hardly a prize benefice. The run-down state of the property is evident in the report of an episcopal visitation of 1514: “Everything is in bad condition. The lamp before the body of Christ was not lit. The house of the priest is in ruins, and the church's condition is deplorable. We are informed that Niccolò Machiavelli is the renter of all [the church's property].”Footnote ¹¹ The report stated that the church served one hundred “souls” (anime) and its income was valued at thirty gold florins per annum—not a large sum. With the rector Giampiero absent in France, and with Niccolò, the chief tenant, in financial straits and possibly in arrears with his rent, it is not surprising that the episcopal visitor found the church in “deplorable” condition. The participants in the meeting of 3 July were surely aware of this troubled situation.

After more discussion a third document was drawn up. The witnesses to the first two documents were no longer present. It was perhaps convenient for Niccolò and Totto that such patrician friends as Battista Guicciardini and Carlo Federighi were no longer present, since the third document involved a socially embarrassing concession. New witnesses—a tailor and a rag-dealer—were called in from the neighborhood so that the notarial act could be formalized.

The subject of the day's third agreement was a ruined castle or castellaccio that stood next to Battista's priory at Montespertoli.Footnote ¹² More than a century earlier, in a testament dated 1393, the last castellano had transferred the ownership of the castle to two Machiavelli brothers living in Florence, one of whom was Niccolò's great-grandfather.Footnote ¹³ In the intervening years various Machiavelli had ceded their shares of the castle to other members of the family, chiefly through the repudiation of debt-laden inheritances. By 1515 the sole owners of the castle were two pairs of brothers: Niccolò and Totto on the one hand, and Battista di Buoninsegna (not to be confused with Prior Battista) and his brother Messer Piero, on the other.Footnote ¹⁴ Even as a ruin, the castle must have been a source of pride. Sold out of the family in the seventeenth century, it eventually became the home of Sidney Sonnino, a two-time prime minister of the early twentieth century, whose family built a new castle on the site that incorporated some of the existing structure. (See photograph.) Today the “Castello Sonnino” produces some very fine wines.

What was agreed upon in the third document was that Niccolò and Totto, with the additional consent of Battista di Buoninsegna and his absent brother, would lease the castle at Montespertoli to Prior Battista and his two sons, Messer Giampiero and Alessandro, at no cost, save for two pounds of white wax that was to be provided each year in acknowledgment of the lease.Footnote ¹⁵ Although the initial lease was for five years, later documents inform us that the castle remained in the hands of Prior Battista and his heirs for several decades, until the death of Alessandro, the prior's second son, who left his estate to Niccolò's children.Footnote ¹⁶ Possession of an old castle, even a ruined one, conferred a great deal of social prestige. It is unlikely that Niccolò Machiavelli would have ceded the castle gratis, as was done now, to a priest and his two illegitimate sons, without a pressing motive. Clearly a favor from Prior Battista was anticipated.

What that favor was becomes clear in two documents drawn up on the following day, on 4 July 1515, in the archbishop's curia.Footnote ¹⁷ These inform us that Prior Battista, as his son's procurator, resigned the church at Sant'Andrea in Percussina and that Battista di Buoninsegna, acting on behalf of the Machiavelli patrons, presented the same church to his cousin Totto. The upshot of the two days of family negotiations was that in exchange for the free lease of the castle, Totto was to become the rector at the church next to his brother's house. It had been decided that Totto would become a country priest.

For Totto this represented a significant and disappointing reversal. His initial career plans had not involved the priesthood. Younger than Niccolò by six years, Totto had received a humanistic education under some of the same teachers as his brother. Then Totto had dedicated himself to commerce. It is true that at some point prior to 1510 Totto took minor orders. As a formal matter, this enabled him to accept certain benefices and it left open various ecclesiastical options.Footnote ¹⁸ But minor orders also involved little commitment. They made a career in the church a possibility, on short notice, should it become necessary. Thus it was as a form of insurance that Niccolò and Totto arranged in 1502 for their sixteen-year-old nephew Giovanni Vernacci, the son of their late sister Primavera, to take minor orders in Venice. Giovanni became a merchant, however, and there is no indication that he was interested in an ecclesiastical career.Footnote ¹⁹

Still, after several of Totto's commercial ventures in the eastern Mediterranean failed, he seems to have altered his career plans.Footnote ²⁰ In 1510, he arranged the confirmation in Rome of the minor orders that he had taken previously, together with his title as a “cleric,” although he was not a priest.Footnote ²¹ Totto may have sought the confirmation of his status in order to protect himself from the scandal then affecting his Niccolò in Florence regarding the possible illegitimacy of their father, Bernardo. Two years later, in 1512–1513, it must have been hard for Totto when Niccolò lost his job and was then arrested. However the election of Giovanni de' Medici as Pope Leo X in March 1513 appears to have been propitious for Totto, who, together with his brother, is likely to have known Giovanni de' Medici from their boyhood in pre-1494 Florence, before Giovanni was exiled with the Medici family. Niccolò was freed from prison as a result of the papal election, and even as he attempted to win some kind of government appointment for himself via friends in Rome, he also campaigned vigorously for Totto's appointment as one of the pope's familiares.Footnote ²² The idea, advanced in letter after letter to Francesco Vettori, was for Totto to receive a position in the papal court with the possibility of advancement. But that was not what was on offer for Totto in July 1515.

A position as a prete di contado was frowned upon by Florentines who were well-off. In 1477, for instance, Giovanni Tornabuoni had asked for Lorenzo de' Medici's help in securing a rich benefice for a nephew so that “he won't have to be a country priest.”Footnote ²³ Now, in early July 1515, it was clear that Totto's hopes for a post in the Roman curia had come to naught. Instead of moving to Rome, Totto would have to become a simple country cleric—and in the poor church at the farm of his own family. Totto delayed his ordination as a priest—the sacerdotal ordination that was required of a church rector—until he was granted a privilege by Pope Leo, on 28 January 1516, permitting him to become a “pluralist,” by holding more than one benefice, if others were presented to him.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, on 2 March 1516, Totto took sacerdotal orders, taking the customary vows that included celibacy.Footnote ²⁵ He must have felt helpless when, two months later, on 28 April 1516, Pope Leo assigned to Sant'Andrea's former rector—Giampiero Machiavelli, who was still in France—an annual pension of eight gold ducats that were to be subtracted from the church's meager revenues.Footnote ²⁶

The documents presented above tell us that the Machiavelli brothers were facing a major crisis in the summer of 1515. To be sure, the concession at no cost of the old castle in Montespertoli was mostly a symbolic matter. But Totto's decision to become a country priest was an irrevocable one. It is true that five years later, after his brother Niccolò was restored to the good graces of the Medici, Totto found other opportunities for advancement.Footnote ²⁷ But in July 1515 Totto could not have known that that would be the case.

The difficulty the two brothers faced explains the anguish evident in the only letters from Niccolò that survive from the second half of 1515. To put them in perspective, earlier in 1515, on 31 January, Niccolò had been ecstatic about what seemed a likely appointment with Giuliano de' Medici, thanks to some assistance from Francesco Vettori's brother Paolo.Footnote ²⁸ But after months of silence, the next letter that we have from Niccolò is only a very brief note of 18 August, addressed to his nephew Giovanni Vernacci, who was then working in the wool trade at Pera, near Istanbul. The tone is completely different from that of the hopeful letter of January:

As Hugo Jaeckel once observed of this letter, “these are the words of a man still suffering from shock.”Footnote ³⁰

The August letter was followed in November by an even darker letter, again to Vernacci:

It appears from the correspondence as though there was a great disappointment that befell Machiavelli between the end of January and the middle of August in 1515. Our new documents, which are from early July, indeed show the brothers relying only on a small number of “family” and “friends.” They would appear to be related to this disappointment. We don't have a letter that says what Machiavelli's disappointment might have been. But Machiavelli's firing in 1512 and his arrest and subsequent release in 1513 were several years in the past. What new event or events might have pushed the two brothers to the extremes outlined in these new documents? There is a good likelihood that the difficulty the brothers now faced were the diminished expectations that resulted from the failure of Machiavelli's dedication of The Prince to Lorenzo de' Medici the Younger.

* * *

Long ago it was pointed out by Gennaro Sasso that the arguments advanced by scholars concerning the dating of Machiavelli's composition of The Prince and Discourses were often related to the hypotheses these same scholars had proposed concerning Machiavelli's purpose in writing his treatise.Footnote ³² What Machiavelli meant to do or to show in The Prince has been a matter of contention almost from the time the small book first began to circulate. Some have said that Machiavelli was secretly advancing an antimonarchical, “republican” thesis in The Prince. Others have said that the book offers forthright advice for rulers. Some have characterized The Prince as an exception in Machiavelli's oeuvre, while others think it is part and parcel of his thought. The early negative reception of The Prince in many quarters, even while the work was still in manuscript, seems to have led Machiavelli himself to muddy the waters since late in his life he is reported to have excused the work to friends as having been written with a secretly democratic or anti-Medicean agenda.Footnote ³³ Given these disagreements, many scholars have imagined, not unreasonably, that Machiavelli's intentions might more satisfactorily be discovered if it could be established to a more precise degree when, and under what circumstances, Machiavelli composed The Prince. Thus some scholars have said that the work was composed in a brief time and rushed, and that therefore it contains regrettable lapses. Others have argued that it was laboriously reworked and remained more or less a work in progress—and therefore contains regrettable lapses. Others have maintained that it is a perfected rhetorical gem: The Prince, they think, corresponds well with the author's aims, and it contains no serious flaws. By now so much has been written on the dating of The Prince that Paul Larivaille recently called it a “rompicapo,” or puzzle, “awaiting its Rosetta Stone.”Footnote ³⁴ Yet, as the analogy suggests, this does not mean that progress is impossible. As will be shown, the new evidence that has been presented helps better to establish an end date for the work's composition. But to understand the extent to which The Prince should be seen as a considered and “finished” work of prose it will be of use, first, to review what is known concerning the work's beginnings.

Machiavelli's famous letter to Vettori dated 10 December 1513 and written from Florence—not from the farm he describes, as is commonly supposed—announces that he has written and is revising and adding to a work “on principalities” (de principatibus).Footnote ³⁵ Machiavelli almost certainly began writing his treatise in 1513, in the period between his release from prison on 13 March and the letter to Vettori of 10 December. The notion that The Prince was hastily written in 1513, in extreme circumstances, with precise aims, and after apparently little reflection, was advanced most notably by Federico Chabod. He doesn't say it outright, but it seems clear that Chabod was looking for a way to excuse what he found morally objectionable in The Prince.Footnote ³⁶ The idea was further developed by Hans Baron to excuse as an aberration what Baron thought only a fleeting endorsement of princely rule, written in a time of dire necessity, in a career otherwise dedicated to republican ideals.Footnote ³⁷ Supposedly the work was a hasty exercise, the moral implications of which were not completely thought through by its author. But these views can be dismissed in a fairly definitive way as a consequence of Jean-Jacques Marchand's discovery of the autograph draft of Machiavelli's remarkable draft letter to Giovanni Battista Soderini of September 1506, known as the Ghiribizzi, or “Caprices for Soderini.”Footnote ³⁸ Previously known from a poor transcription made by Machiavelli's grandson Giuliano de' Ricci, the Ghiribizzi had been ascribed to 1512–1513 and thought to be addressed to Pier Soderini, the former Florentine head of state. The Ghiribizzi anticipate many of the ideas later to be found in The Prince that concern matters ranging from fortifications to Fortuna, so that dating the draft to 1506 makes clear Machiavelli's long-standing engagement with the issues he was treating in 1513 in The Prince. As Roberto Ridolfi put it:

It is worth noting, too, that the Ghiribizzi were addressed to the nephew of Florence's own quasi prince, or principe civile: Pier Soderini, the republic's Life Standard-Bearer was a head of state who was childless, with the result that the children of his late older brother Paolantonio received special consideration, both in Florence and abroad. This gives the draft letter philosophical and pedagogical dimensions that are consonant with the dedication of The Prince to Lorenzo de' Medici the Younger and the earlier planned dedication to Giuliano de' Medici. Moreover, Machiavelli's substantial insertions on the draft—which is brimming over with corrections, marginal scribblings, and added sections, indicate that he worked at it over some period of time. Since he preserved this particular draft, although he did not generally keep minutes or copies of his letters, the possibility that Machiavelli may have referred to the Ghiribizzi when he was later writing The Prince in 1513 cannot be excluded. To call the Ghiribizzi a first sketch of the later work seems not inaccurate.

Still, our first definite evidence that Machiavelli was specifically writing the work titled De principatibus is from December 1513. At what point he began writing The Prince is not clear. With good reason most scholars think the book was at least begun by late August of 1513, although, as has already been stated, many of the book's ideas had been percolating in Machiavelli's mind since at least 1506. Most importantly, the idea that the treatise was written in unthinking haste is now impossible of acceptance. But did he ever consider it “finished”?

Another way of defending a text that engenders difficulties is to say that it remained in some respects unfinished. Such would appear to be the defense implicit in the arguments offered over several decades by Mario Martelli. According to Martelli, although the book was begun in 1513, it only entered a final draft phase in the last months of 1518, when Machiavelli allegedly turned it from a technical work into an aggressive treatise stating the political program for a coup d'état that was being planned by Lorenzo the Younger.Footnote ⁴⁰ For Martelli The Prince was still an “open work” (opera aperta). In 1518, he argued, “unfinished and still ‘up in the air,’ [the book] was corrected and patched up (possibly not by the author alone) so that it could be given out to the public.” And even so it was not published until after 1532, five years after the author's death. Thus, for Martelli, The Prince remained to the end a work that was never completed to its author's satisfaction.Footnote ⁴¹

Martelli's position has not won much support. It has been objected that the work did circulate rather widely in manuscript and that the early manuscripts offer a fairly consistent text. And the early readers of The Prince in manuscript, beginning in 1516—not 1518 as Martelli would have it—seem to agree on the passages that interested them. Finally, although Machiavelli is reported to have defended The Prince in several ways, he is never said to have complained that it was unfinished—that it was ripped untimely from his hands.

But when was it finished? The first known reading of The Prince by a contemporary of Machiavelli's can be dated in the first months of 1516. At that time Francesco Guicciardini was writing his Discorso del modo di assicurare lo stato ai Medici, a work that engages The Prince on a series of points that are immediately recognizable.Footnote ⁴² So The Prince was almost certainly completed by 1516, and probably, as we shall see, somewhat earlier. But how much earlier? Some scholars, most notably Gennaro Sasso and Giorgio Inglese, have been persuaded by rhetorical and stylistic considerations that The Prince is a tightly unified and coherent work completed in its entirety by the summer of 1514. There is indeed good reason to think that the work was in most respects complete by then.Footnote ⁴³ But, meanwhile, evidence has also been mounting to the effect that Machiavelli must have made minor revisions in the first half of 1515.

In an article that was published posthumously, Hans Baron noted that in chapter 26 of The Prince, Machiavelli follows a remark concerning “tante guerre fatte nei passati venti anni” (so many wars that have been waged in the past twenty years) with a list of battles that begins with the battle of Fornovo on the Taro, which was fought on 6 July 1495.Footnote ⁴⁴ Twenty years after 1495 puts us in July 1515. Some ambiguity remains, however, since the reference to guerre, as Sasso once correctly noted, could also indicate the initial French invasion of 1494 and thus indicate Sasso's preferred date of 1514.

Passages that can be more securely called alterations appear in remarks in chapters 3 and 16 relating to Louis XII of France. An intervention in chapter 3 that suggests a date was first noted in my own English translation of The Prince, published in 2005. When Machiavelli discusses the “cinque errori” (the five mistakes) made by Louis XII of France in his invasion of Italy, he writes “Even these errors could not have harmed him, if he had lived.” The phrase “if he had lived” (vivendo lui) surely refers to the death of Louis, who expired during the night of 31 December 1514 and 1 January 1515, so surely the passage must have been inserted after that date.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Martelli already pointed out in a study of chapter 3 published in 1981, there are several paragraphs regarding Louis's policies in Italy that appear slightly out of order from a logical and stylistic perspective. They suggest that the author returned to his text and intervened in a second moment without having reread the existing text.Footnote ⁴⁶ Robert Black in a recent article accepts that vivendo lui is a later insertion, and he points, too, to the deletion in certain manuscripts of the word presente appearing in the phrase “el re di Francia presente” of chapter 16. Since there was no effort in the manuscripts to eliminate the word presente from a similar mention, also in chapter 16, of Ferdinand of Spain (“el re di Spagna presente”) and since Ferdinand died on 23 January 1516, Black correctly concludes that the two alterations regarding Louis (the insertion of vivendo lui and the elimination of presente) must have been made between 1 January 1515 and 23 January 1516.Footnote ⁴⁷ But the events of that year were dramatic for Florence and for Italy. It was also the time, most scholars believe, when Machiavelli was busily writing his Discourses on Livy, which he referenced in chapters 2 and 8. If at all possible, one would like to be able to further narrow the range of the period within which The Prince was put in final form.

The reference to Louis's death in chapter 3 is the last item mentioned in The Prince that can be assigned a solid date. Not all will agree, however. Recently Robert Black reprised an idea of Federico Chabod—an idea that Chabod himself later retracted—concerning a passage in chapter 14, when Machiavelli writes that “Francesco Sforza, because he was armed, from being a private man became duke of Milan; his sons, because they fled the hardships of arms, from being dukes became private men” (Francesco Sforza, per essere armato, di privato diventò duca di Milano; e' figliuoli, per fuggire e' disagi delle arme, di duchi diventorono privati). Black, following Chabod's original view, reads figliuoli here not in its direct sense as “sons,” which is the accepted reading, but instead as “descendants.” He then reads the passage as one in which Machiavelli refers to recent events concerning the Sforza dynasty: in August 1512, at the Congress of Mantua, Massimiliano Sforza, the grandson of Francesco Sforza, was awarded the Duchy of Milan; and on 12–13 September 1515, after the Battle of Marignano, Massimiliano lost the Duchy. According to Black, Machiavelli's passage could only have been written after Massimiliano was defeated at Marignano. He thus dates the final version of The Prince between the period shortly after Marignano in September 1515 and the death of Ferdinand of Spain on 23 January 1516.

But dating the completion of The Prince after Marignano brings with it new difficulties. To begin with, as Hans Baron pointed out, Machiavelli does not mention Marignano in The Prince: neither in the “twenty-year” list of battles in chapter 26, nor elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁸ Marignano, moreover, seen from a broader perspective, was a decisive battle and an affirmation of French power. As Carlo Dionisotti points out, had the tremendous French victory at Marignano already occurred, Machiavelli's exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians would have appeared ridiculous.Footnote ⁴⁹ A more secure reading of the passage concerning the figliuoli of Francesco Sforza avoids these difficulties and perhaps even explains why Chabod retracted the suggestion that Black has made his own. If we read figliuoli in its primary sense, as referring not to Francesco Sforza's grandson Massimiliano, but to his real “sons,” Galeazzo Maria, Ludovico, and Ascanio, Machiavelli's message becomes quite clear. It was Galeazzo Maria who chose to abandon the military lifestyle of his condottiere father, Francesco, becoming instead a corrupt devotee of luxury while earning the reputation that led to his assassination as a tyrant. Massimiliano, on the other hand, was raised in exile in Flanders, at the imperial court, and was never in a position from which he could choose to abandon the armed way of life of his grandfather.Footnote ⁵⁰ Galeazzo Maria's brothers, Ludovico and Ascanio, are, moreover, nicely captured by Machiavelli's use of the plural figliuoli, since these two sons of Francesco were bound closely together, first in the loss of Milan in September 1499, then in their brief recovery of the city in February 1500, and finally in their definitive loss of it in April 1500.Footnote ⁵¹ At this point, it seems only logical to accept that the plural figliuoli does not refer to Francesco's grandson Massimiliano—and to embrace, for the reasons already stated, the hypothesis of Baron and Dionisotti that The Prince must have been finished prior to the Battle of Marignano in September 1515.

A preliminary range of dates during which The Prince must have been put into final form has now been established on the basis of internal textual evidence. The work must have been completed between 1 January 1515 (the death of Louis XII) and 13 September 1515 (the Battle of Marignano). But it may be possible even further to narrow the suggested period if we look beyond the text to the evidence concerning the treatise's dedication.

Machiavelli's famous letter to Vettori of 10 December 1513 indicated that he was intending to dedicate The Prince to Giuliano de' Medici. Moreover, as already noted, on 31 January 1515, Machiavelli wrote a letter to Francesco Vettori concerning the likelihood that he would be appointed to a position with Giuliano de' Medici in what he anticipated would be the government of a principality in north-central Italy. Machiavelli was still hoping for a position with Giuliano. So it is unlikely, as Dionisotti pointed out, that Machiavelli had already at that date changed the work's dedication, naming Giuliano's nephew, Lorenzo the Younger.Footnote ⁵² Thus the hope for a position with Giuliano remained alive at least until 14 February 1515, the date of a letter from Pietro Ardinghelli to Giuliano de' Medici. It was a letter that forwarded instructions from Cardinal Giulio de' Medici prohibiting Giuliano from employing Niccolò Machiavelli.Footnote ⁵³ Whether or how the veto was communicated to Machiavelli is not known. But until that point it would not have made sense for Machiavelli to be dedicating a work on princely rule to Lorenzo while hoping for employment with Giuliano. In all likelihood it was Paolo Vettori or his brother Francesco who communicated to Machiavelli the fact that he would not be receiving a post with Giuliano. In the period 1514–1515 the two brothers, both working mostly in Rome, had in almost opportunistic fashion divided between them the sources of Medici patronage. Paolo, who was one of those who had initiated the coup that led to the flight of Pier Soderini and the return of the Medici to Florence, had attached himself to the pope's brother Giuliano. Meanwhile Francesco, while serving as Florentine ambassador in Rome, had become a trusted companion of the pope's nephew, Lorenzo the Younger.Footnote ⁵⁴ The fact that The Prince as we now have it is dedicated to Lorenzo is our surest indication that Machiavelli was in some way informed that a post with Giuliano would not be forthcoming and that his best chance for employment lay with Lorenzo the Younger. Another consequence seems to have been an audience with Lorenzo where he could present his work.

That there was actually an audience with Lorenzo in which Machiavelli presented the young prince with the final version of his treatise finds reasonable confirmation in an anecdote written down late in the sixteenth century by the Florentine Riccardo Riccardi. The passage reads as follows:

The anecdote, which was first published by Edoardo Alvisi in 1883, is sometimes challenged as apocryphal.Footnote ⁵⁵ To be sure, its author, Riccardo Riccardi, who lived from 1558 to 1612, was writing long after Machiavelli's death. But Riccardi was a Florentine with connections. And the fact that the anecdote is known only from Riccardi's Ricordi lessens the chance that it was merely invented to be shopped around for literary purposes. The second part of the anecdote (“And he had occasion to say, among his friends…”) is somewhat similar to Reginald Pole's remarks of 1539, based also on comments from Machiavelli's friends, which suggests that some of the same friends were the source of Riccardi's anecdote. Both Pole and Riccardi agree in presenting a Machiavelli who retailed the story that he wrote The Prince with a view to making the Medici more tyrannical and unpopular, hoping that that would lead to their overthrow. It was and is an unlikely explanation, but the audacity and the implicit humor are characteristic of the Florentine secretary.

What is more important for our present purpose, however, is that the Riccardi anecdote would seem to confirm that there was an actual presentation to Lorenzo, which moreover would have been customary, thus marking a date at which the treatise was finalized in its present form. The anecdote is true to what we know of Lorenzo the Younger, whose mother, Alfonsina, complained in a letter that the young man was more interested in hunting than in finding a wife.Footnote ⁵⁶ If there had been no such presentation, Machiavelli had close friends, like Francesco Guicciardini, who survived him by many years, and who would have been in a position to deny it.

The presentation to Lorenzo of the finalized text of The Prince would have occurred most naturally in the period soon after Lorenzo's return to Florence, in the company of Francesco Vettori, on 15 May 1515.Footnote ⁵⁷ Lorenzo, who had been absent in Rome, was now returning with the express mission of organizing the Florentine military. Francesco Vettori, moreover, was advising Lorenzo on the militia, which was precisely Machiavelli's area of expertise. It would have been logical at this point to have introduced to Lorenzo the former chancellor of the Nine of Militia.

Let us return now to the archival documents that were mentioned at the outset. It seems clear that the family meeting that resulted in Totto's assuming a career as an ecclesiastic had been called with the intention of stabilizing the financial and social position of the two Machiavelli brothers. The hopes that Niccolò had had for himself and his brother in January 1515 were not to be realized. Niccolò's employment with the Medici was no longer on the table—and neither was Totto's. The Prince, considered as a job application, had failed. These new notarial documents, like the letters to his nephew Vernacci, show that for Machiavelli it was a time for saving what could be saved, relying only on his closest family and friends. Given the straitened circumstances of the Machiavelli brothers, Prior Battista had indicated that he was willing to resign to Totto his priory at Montespertoli. But it is likely that word had also been sent to Giampiero in Paris. So, when Battista arrived at the meeting on 3 July, he brought the news that Giampiero would cede to Totto the church of Sant'Andrea in Percussina where Totto could become a country priest.

Let me conclude. The Prince was not a hastily composed work. It was a deeply considered work that should be seen as originating in ideas that Machiavelli first attempted to put down in writing in 1506. In 1513 and 1514 Machiavelli reformulated these ideas in the context of a treatise de principatibus that he hoped would win him employment with Giuliano de' Medici. He made small revisions to the work in the first half of 1515, when the dedicatee was changed from Giuliano de' Medici to Lorenzo the Younger. The Prince is not a work that has come down to us in an incomplete or unsatisfactory form. It must have been complete to the satisfaction of the author, insofar as an author can ever be satisfied, at the time of its presentation to Lorenzo the Younger. To be sure, Machiavelli would later regret his work, but that is not the same thing as leaving it unfinished. And, finally, the presentation of The Prince—the meeting between Machiavelli and his dedicatee—should now be dated sometime between Lorenzo's arrival in Florence on 15 May 1515 and the unhappy family meeting that took place in the house of Totto Machiavelli in Florence on 3 July 1515.