Life of Castruccio Castracani E-Book

Niccolò Machiavelli

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The Life of Castruccio Castracani is a short work by Niccolò Machiavelli, an Italian politician, diplomat, writer, philosopher and initiate and one of the greatest protagonists of the magnificent period of the Renaissance. It is made in the form of a short biographical account of the life of the medieval Tuscan condottiere Castruccio Castracani degli Antelminelli (1281-1328), Duke of Lucca and Lord of Carrara, Lerici, Pisa, Pontremoli and Sarzana.
The book is thought to have been written during a visit to Lucca in 1520. It was dedicated to Zanobi Buondelmonti and Luigi Alamanni, both affiliated, along with Machiavelli, with the secret Pythagorean Order and members of the Florentine Platonic Academy in its last historical phase, that of the Orti Oricellari.

Leseprobe

SYMBOLS & MYTHS

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

LIFE OF CASTRUCCIO CASTRACANI

Sent to his friends Zanobi Buondelmonti

and Luigi Alamanni

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: Life of Castruccio Castracani

Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

Publishing series: Symbols & Myths

With a preface by Nicola Bizzi

Editing and illustrations by Nicola Bizzi

ISBN: 979-12-5504-054-5

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2022 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato

[email protected]

www.auroraboreale-edizioni.com

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NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, AN EXTRAORDINARY PROTAGONIST OF THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE

By Nicola Bizzi

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, more commonly known as Niccolò Machiavelli, was an Italian politician, diplomat, writer, philosopher and initiate and one of the greatest protagonists of the magnificent period of the Renaissance.

He was born in Florence on May 3 1469, in a tumultuous era in which popes waged acquisitive wars against Italian city-states, and people and cities often fell from power as France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire battled for regional influence and control. He was third child and first son of attorney Bernardo di Niccolò Machiavelli and his wife, Bartolomea di Stefano Nelli. The Machiavelli family is believed to be descended from the old marquesses of Tuscany and to have produced thirteen Florentine Gonfalonieres of Justice, one of the offices of a group of nine citizens selected by drawing lots every two months and who formed the government, or Signoria; he was never, though, a full citizen of Florence because of the nature of Florentine citizenship in that time even under the republican regime.

Machiavelli learned grammar, rhetoric, and Latin from his teacher, Paolo da Ronciglione. It is unknown whether Machiavelli knew Greek even though Florence was at the time one of the centers of Greek scholarship in Europe, especially after the arrival in the city of Manuel Chrysoloras, a great Byzantine scholar, who assumed the chair of the Greek language. It was probably at this stage of his life that Machiavelli approached the very secret Pythagorean Order, an initiatory institution that had firmly established itself in Florence after Georgios Gemistos Plethon arrived in the city in 1439.

In 1494 Florence restored the republic, expelling the rich and powerful Medici family who had ruled Florence, albeit unofficially, for about sixty years, transforming the city into a new Athens, the center of Humanism and the Renaissance. Shortly after the execution of Girolamo Savonarola, Machiavelli was appointed to an office of the second chancery, a medieval writing office that put him in charge of the production of official Florentine government documents. Shortly thereafter, he was also made the secretary of the Dieci di Libertà e Pace.

In 1502Machiavelli married Marietta Corsini, heir to one of the most important Florentine families. In the first decade of the sixteenth century, he carried out several diplomatic missions, most notably to the Papacy in Rome. Florence sent him to Pistoia to pacify the leaders of two opposing factions which had broken into riots in 1501 and 1502; when this failed, the leaders were banished from the city, a strategy which Machiavelli had favored from the outset. From 1502 to 1503, he witnessed the brutal reality of the state-building methods of Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) and his father, Pope Alexander VI, who were then engaged in the process of trying to bring a large part of Central Italy under their possession. The pretext of defending Church interests was used as a partial justification by the Borgias. Other excursions to the court of Louis XII and the Spanish court influenced his writings such as The Prince.