Machiavelli and Soderini
\M 4ACHIAVELLI, like Christ, came into history only in his thirties. His youth is virtually unknown to us, until today. We find only a few facts in his father's Ricordi, which covers the period 1474-87; there we learn that at the age of seven Niccolo studied the 'donatello' (the short edition of the late-classical grammar of Donatus), first with Master Matteo, near S. Trinita bridge, then, from March 1477, with Battista di Filippo da Poppi, who taught in the church of St. Benedict.1 At ten, he went to live with Master Piero Maria, to study the Abacus (a short arithmetical treatise) and 'librettine,' the elementary calculating system. Lastly, in November 1481, Niccolo began to study Latin, under Pagolo da Ronciglione's direction. And that is all. Abruptly, he vanished like a ghost, to reappear, when twenty-nine years old, as Second Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, onJune 19, 1489, succeeding Alessandro Braccesi, who had been removed from office after Savonarola's ruin.2 A month later, he was also ordered to serve as secretary of the Ten of War, the inner and the most important magistracy of the Republic as a whole. Generally, these positions were reserved for humanists or for notaries, since the secretaries were required to write the letters to foreign princes and republics (for the Ten of War) or to inspect the whole correspondence between the Signori and the provincial judgeships (for the Second Chancery). No documents survive to support the image of Machiavelli as a humanist or a notary at this time. On the contrary, I must underline what his father told us