Abstract
Machiavelli's VITA DI CASTRUCCIO CASTRACANI has been something of an enigma in the corpus of his work, partly because of its manifest historical inaccuracy and partly because the view of fortune which it appears to express is at variance with that associated with his more famous books, notably Il Principe. Scholars such as Tommasini, Villari and Whitfield have sought to account for its at first sight puzzling characteristics by considering it within the context of his other writings and his personal experience, while others such as Chabod have seen it as signalling a change in his outlook from an optimistic confidence in the efficacy of political action to a fatalistic acceptance of the power of destiny over human affairs. In this paper, I propose to approach the problems raised by this little treatise or fable from another direction by attempting to place it within the tradition of earlier interpretation of the life of its subject, Castruccio Castracani, and in particular, by examining the relationship between Machiavelli's biography of this despot and Nicolao Tegrimi's which immediately preceded it.
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