The Prince

In 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli was far from any palace. He had been an important official of the Republic of Florence, had traveled on diplomatic missions and had met kings, popes and generals. When the Medici family took charge of the city again, he lost his post, was jailed, went through torture and ended up sent to an estate in the countryside, where he spent his days among firewood, card games and tavern chatter.

It was in that exile that he wrote The Prince, a short book, almost a résumé. The idea was to show the new rulers that he understood power like few others and, who knows, to become useful again. Think of a laid-off professional who writes a brilliant report and sends it to the new leadership. It's more or less that, only with armies and conspiracies. The text circulated in copies and was only printed in 1532, after the author's death.

Machiavelli warns right away that he doesn't want to describe the philosophers' perfect ruler. He wants to know how power works in practice. Instead of asking how things should be, he asks how they usually are.

The author begins by classifying. There are inherited principalities, where the same family has ruled for generations, and new ones, taken by someone who previously wasn't in charge. There are also mixed ones, when a ruler joins a new territory to one he already had.

Holding on to what you inherited is easier, he says, because the people are already used to that house. You just have to avoid blunders and know how to handle day-to-day problems. It's like the bakery an owner passes on to his daughter: the customers already know the counter, the change and the smell of the bread.

A new principality, on the other hand, is a minefield. Whoever conquers a place makes enemies among those who lost privileges and shaky friends among those who helped and now want to collect. It's the manager who takes over a team from outside: half the team is suspicious, the other half is waiting for a promotion. The advice is to cut off the causes of revolt early and to know the territory well before changing everything.

Two words carry the book. Fortuna is chance, luck, whatever escapes our control. Virtù, in Machiavelli, is not virtue in the moral sense: it is capacity, energy and skill to act at the right moment, reading the situation well.

He compares fortuna to a violent river. In a flood, no one can hold back the water, but you can build dikes and channels during the calm months so the flood does less damage. One part of life is luck, another part is preparation, and preparation happens before the crisis. Anyone who lives near a creek in a big city knows: whoever clears the storm drain and keeps their documents up high suffers less when the storm hits.

Machiavelli also notes that the impetuous person does well when the times call for boldness and badly when they call for caution, and the opposite holds for the cautious one. Few can change their temperament as the era demands, and that is why luck seems to switch sides.