Rare first edition of Machiavelli's 'The Prince' going up for auction

The Prince, represents Machievelli’s efforts to guide political action based on history’s lessons and his personal experience as a Florence foreign secretary.

By ELLIE ESQUENAZI NOVEMBER 25, 2024 11:26

Rare first edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince (photo credit: screenshot)

The most famous work by Italian Renaissance diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli is up for auction in the United Kingdom and is estimated to sell for $375,000 (€300,000), CNN reported on Friday. 

The Prince, written in 1513 by the 16th-century philosopher and author, represents Machievelli’s efforts to guide political action based on history’s lessons and his personal experience as Florence's foreign secretary.

The text advises princes to learn not to be good but to act based on needs. Machiavelli urges them to move away from utopian ideas for humanity and the world and rather to see reality. This perspective led him to be considered the founder of modern political science.

Early editions

Machiavelli wrote the piece after being imprisoned for suspicions of conspiracy. It was dedicated to Florentine ruler Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici and circulated as a manuscript before Machiavelli’s passing in 1527. 15 editions were in circulation before the Catholic Church banned it in 1559.

The Index forbade books that could be seen as dangerous to Roman Catholics' faith, and The Prince was only published again over seven decades later.

A woman looks at the painting ''Leda and the Swan'' by Jacopo Tintoretto during the inauguration of fourteen new rooms dedicated to 16th and 17th century painters, at the Uffizi Gallery Museum in Florence, Italy, May 29, 2019. (credit: REUTERS)

Up for auction

A rare first edition copy of the book, one of only 11 known copies, is to be auctioned by Sotheby’s. Books & Manuscripts specialist Gabriel Heaton told CNN, “This is the first copy that we are aware of to have come to auction, certainly in recent decades. We have one of the great works of political theory of all time, one of the most famous books of the 16th century, and it’s a very first edition and unique opportunity for a copy to come to auction.”

The auction house is excited to offer the “incredibly rare book” at Sotheby’s in London, CNN reported. It will be auctioned during its next Books & Manuscripts feature, running from November 28 to December 12.

CNN noted that this first edition copy remains in its early 17th-century Italian binding and is bound with another Machiavelli piece, a second edition of Florentine Histories. Inside The Prince, an early reader put brackets in the margins of chapter 18, a section that includes some of the piece’s “most strikingly modern pronouncements about the necessity for a savvy politician to manipulate the gulf between appearances and reality to his own ends,” in reference to its catalog note.

In reference to Machiavelli, Heaton told CNN that Machiavelli is “a writer who has intrigued people ever since the book was first written. He gives a very clear-sighted view of the nature of political power … in times of turbulence and uncertainty.”