Niccolo Machiavelli: Advice on Disarming

Gun Watch ^ | 31 December, 2015 | Dean Weingarten

[M1903A1]

“The Prince” is perhaps best understood as a “resume” or “demo reel”. Machiavelli was a decent man personally, but he was a political functionary and lived for the “game” of politics. He had backed the losing side in a war, and had been exiled from Florence to his rural estate, which for him was a stultifying nightmare. In writing “The Prince” and “Discourses on Livy”, he was trying to show to the new power brokers in Florence that he understood the game of politics well, and could be of use to them. Unfortunately for him (or fortunately, perhaps) they did not take him up on his offer.

[marktwain]

The Prince is well worth the time, and is pretty easy reading.

I recommend it to all.

The Discourses, on the other hand, are a little dated because of advances in military tech.

[marktwain]

Yes, you have it right.

The Prince was a long job application.

Everything in The Prince had aready long been in practice, and there were considerable works already.

But Machiavelli put it together in a concise, easily digested form.

I suggest “The Conquest of Mexico” by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, written about 1565. The 1956 American translation is supposed to be good; I found it to be the best history book that I have read.

Once you have read The Prince, the Machiavellian machinations of both Montezuma and Cortez simply jump out at you from the pages.

[marktwain]

Machiavelli, Cortez, Montezuma, and Bernal Diaz were all contemporaries.

There is no way that Cortez could have read Machiavelli; The Prince was first made available while Cortez was conquering Mexico.

[archy]

There is no way that Cortez could have read Machiavelli; The Prince was first made available while Cortez was conquering Mexico.

Maybe he read it on the internet?

[archy]

The Prince was first made available while Cortez was conquering Mexico.

When I lived and worked in Memphis, I had several discussions with Civil War historian and novelist Shelby Foote regarding Nathan Bedford Forrest's meteoric rise from Confederate Private to the Cavalry commander reportedly described by General Lee as his most able commander. I had suggested that in his travels perhaps Forrest, then a young veteran of the 1836 Texas War for Independence from Mexico who arrived too late for most of the fighting, might have come across one of the very early 1772 Jesuit French-language translations of Sun-Tzu's The Art of War, possibly in New Orleans or from a New Orleans source.

Mr. Foote was as usual way ahead of me, and opined that Forrest might have just as easily encountered a copy of Bernal Diaz del Castillo's The Conquest of Mexico while in the Texas or elsewhere, and that was my introduction to the work. And of course Hernando de Soto and his exploratory patrol of some 400 Spanish soldiers are recorded as having first reached the Mississippi River, May 8, 1541, south of present-day Memphis, Tennessee, not terribly far from where de Soto was killed and buried. There was most certainly a Spanish presence in the Mississippi Delta region at least some twenty years before The Conquest was set to print.

I suppose we'll never know, but we should wonder.