This paper examines Niccolò Machiavelli's treatment of religion across three major works — The Prince, The Discourses, and The Florentine Histories — arguing that he regarded religion not as a moral guide but as an instrument of political power. Drawing on Machiavelli's realpolitik framework, the paper explores his critique of the Roman Catholic Church for weakening and dividing Italy, his ambivalent portrayal of Cesare Borgia, and his contention that stable governance requires subordinating religious authority to political will. The paper concludes that for Machiavelli, religion functions purely as a tool of statecraft rather than a sincere expression of faith.
The paper demonstrates sustained interpretive synthesis: rather than treating each of Machiavelli's three works in isolation, the author traces a single thesis — that religion is purely an instrument of statecraft — across multiple texts, showing how the same argument appears in different registers and genres of writing. This cross-textual method strengthens the claim by demonstrating its consistency throughout Machiavelli's corpus.
The paper opens by establishing Machiavelli's realpolitik identity before moving to a close reading of The Prince, where Cesare Borgia's story anchors the discussion of church authority. It then widens the lens to The Discourses and The Florentine Histories to address Italy's political fragmentation. A focused section on reforming Christianity bridges the textual analysis to the paper's broader political argument, which is consolidated in the penultimate section on unity and the final summary-and-conclusion section.
Machiavelli, in his works, uses his political outlook and views about the power given to the Church and Christianity to present both his religious and political perspectives, keeping readers in a constant state of reflection about what he truly believes and why.
This paper discusses Machiavelli's political expressions and views in light of three of his writings: The Prince, The Discourses, and The Florentine Histories. In all three works, the author uses his characters and plots to describe settings that lead him to express his views about the political mishaps and mistakes that produced inflated, lasting problems.
It is essential to establish, from the outset, what Machiavelli's politics consist of and how he arrives at his viewpoint, in order to fully appreciate his perspective on religion in politics. Machiavelli can be categorized as a realist philosopher whose major arguments relate to upholding political power over a state by means of historical accounts — predominantly Roman — in order to support his hypotheses. His major writings are a design of realpolitik, a governing principle that emphasizes maintaining power through any means necessary, including war and deception. Consequently, one should keep in mind when reading Machiavelli that he is working to use religion as a tool to uphold political power rather than as an instrument for attaining moral ideals.
In The Prince, Machiavelli challenges his readers by painting an ambiguous portrait of his central figure, Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI and the future prince of Romagna. It is through the flaws and mistakes of this character that the author expresses and debates his views on politics and on the authority granted to the Church and Christianity — authority which, in his opinion, is unwarranted and overrated.
Although many agree that the character of Cesare represents an idealized portrait of a virtuous man in the author's eyes, even Cesare makes the mistake of choosing the future warrior pope, Julius II, as his supporter for future elections. This decision enabled and empowered the Church with an exaggerated authority over state affairs, which Machiavelli believed was the root cause of unjust rule.
Many readers have determined that Cesare was the hero of the work and the author's own representative figure, clearly indicating what Machiavelli believes should be the proper process of handling state affairs. As Rousseau put it: "The choice of his execrable hero is in itself enough to make manifest his hidden intention … The Prince is the book of republicans." This reading is further supported by Machiavelli's more explicitly republican work, The Discourses.
In a chapter of The Prince dedicated entirely to the authority of the Pope and the Church in Rome, Machiavelli makes his ideas more lucid. He observes that the influence of the pope is determined by the assembly of cardinals, and vice versa. He argues that for a state to fully reclaim its authority, both the power of the pope and the cardinals must be abolished. In the work, the author suggests that Cesare had the capability to accomplish this but was unable to put it to any practical effect.
To understand the author's suggestions of such drastic action, one must revisit the history of Italy and how it was shaped by the authority of the Church and Christianity more broadly. In The Discourses and The Florentine Histories, Machiavelli argues that the downfall of Italy resulted from an irrational division of political power within the state — a point he also elaborates at the conclusion of The Prince. He contends that the Church not only initiated but sustained this division over time, while still retaining power. Although the state possessed enough territorial strength to create a single sovereign authority capable of defending it against every threat, it could not overcome the Church's influence for fear of losing its own territorial footing:
"The Church has kept and still keeps this region divided. . . . The reason why Italy is not in that same condition and why she too does not have one republic or one prince to govern her is the Church alone; because, though she has dwelt there and possessed temporal power, she has not been so strong or of such ability that she could grasp sole authority [occupare la tirannide] in Italy and make herself ruler of the country. Yet on the other hand she has not been so weak that, when she feared to lose dominion over her temporal possessions, she could not summon a powerful man to defend her against anyone who in Italy had become too powerful." (1.12 [Machiavelli, 1971, 96]; see also Florentine Histories 1.9)
Machiavelli returns to this point at various places in The Prince. For instance, he writes that Louis XII of France made a blunder "by giving aid to Pope Alexander so that the pope might seize the Romagna," because Louis failed to see that by doing so he was "making the Church great by adding so much temporal greatness to the spiritual one that gives it so much authority."
Later in the work, Machiavelli points out that "before Alexander, the Italian powers, and not only those that are called powers but every baron and lord, even the least, held her in low esteem in temporal affairs." Alexander, however, was shrewd enough to augment the territorial power of the Church through his son Cesare. At first, Machiavelli might appear to be an advocate of such a move when he discusses the influential legacy found in Leo X, the uncle of the direct heir addressed in The Prince.
In truth, however, Machiavelli does not believe that Italy's problems will be resolved by the strength of the Church, so long as it continues to rely on mercenary armies. He makes this point immediately after describing the Church's accession to power: "the present ruin of Italy is caused by nothing other than its having relied for a period of many years on mercenary arms. . . . And he who said that our sins were the cause [of the French invasion of Italy] spoke the truth. But the sins were surely not those he believed, but the one I have told of." He specifically blames the Church for this condition when he adds that "Since Italy had almost fallen into the hands of the Church and a few republics, and since the priests and the other citizens did not have knowledge of arms, they began to hire foreigners."
In The Discourses, Machiavelli writes that the Italians owe "our first debt to the Church and to the priests that we have become without religion and wicked" (1.12; see also 1.27). Some readers interpret this as evidence of his steadfast Christian faith and of his desire to see the priests and the Church reformed accordingly. On the contrary, however, it is clear that Machiavelli blames both the Church and Christianity for Italy's misery and for the troubles of modern states more generally. In his view, the Christian religion "has made the world weak and turned it over as prey to wicked men, who can in security control it, since the generality of men, in order to go to Heaven, think more about enduring their injuries than about avenging them." For Machiavelli, Christianity reinforces his argument about the division of political power and a strong, influential Church would do nothing to improve Italy's condition.
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