MACHIAVELLI, Niccolò (1469-1527). The Arte of Warre, translated by Peter Whitehorne, London, 1562, small 4to, (lacking a few leaves), old calf. THE FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH AND THE FIRST OF ANY WORK BY MACHIAVELLI TO BE TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH.

MACHIAVELLI, Niccol (1469-1527).  The Arte of Warre, written first in Italia ... and set forthe in Englishe by Peter Whitehorne, student of Graies Inn: with an addicio of other like Marcialle feates and experimentes, as in a Table in the ende of the Booke maie appere. [London: Printed by John Kingston for] Nicolas Englande, July 1560. Small 4to (196 x 130mm). Title within wide woodcut pictorial border, fine woodcut initials, black letter, blank leaf before title and after folio C.viii (the title torn and laid down with significant loss to two corners, lacking the three leaves of the translator's dedication to Queen Elizabeth I [a2-4], lacking all after folio C.viii [i.e. after signature [Ddiv], being Eei-Hhii, see Cockle], the final text leaf with two repaired tears without loss, lightly and consistently browned throughout, a darker stain to the lower quarter of some leaves, more particularly to folios lxxvii-lxxxvii). Old calf (scuffed, rubbed at the corners, rebacked). Provenance: some modern pencil annotation to the endpapers. THE FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH AND THE FIRST OF ANY WORK BY MACHIAVELLI TO BE TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH. Machiavelli's Libro della arte della guerra was first published in Florence in 1521, the only of his works to be published in his lifetime. It takes the form of a series of Ciceronian dialogues between notable historical figures of the Florentine Republic - most notably Fabrizio Colonna and Bernardo Rucellai - and is divided into a preface and seven books. The present copy of the first English translation of The Arte of Warre ends on folio C.viii of the seventh book and, taking into account the defects and omissions stated, can be considered substantially complete in itself, although anything corresponding to the "... addicio of other like Marcialle feates and experimentes, as in a Table in the ende of the Booke maie appere" referred to in the title are not present. However, some confusion has arisen - including for this cataloguer - over what constitutes a complete English edition, in part, perhaps, because of the great scarcity of the first, and an over-dependence on the copy in the British Library as an exemplar for all other copies. In the second English edition, printed in 1573 [or 1574], the significant words: "Newly imprinted with other additions" appear on the title page which are absent from the first: these "additions" principally take the form of Peter Whitehorne's Certain wayes for the orderying of souldieurs in battelray. While being published as a separate work in 1562, it was often bound into the author's second English edition of the Machiavelli as a kind of supplement to the principal work which he had translated, whilst retaining its own elaborately engraved title page and foliation. Cockle, the military bibliographer, treats them as separate works, although alludes to their association, and a modern pencil note on the final blank of the present copy states, unambiguously: "A separate work [Cockle 13] dated 1562 is often bound with this book." The description of the British Library's copy of the first English edition of The Arte of Warre refers to the the presence of Certain wayes for the orderying of souldieurs but hedges its bets by putting the title of the latter in brackets, stating the whole work is in two parts, and formatting the date, idiosyncratically, as "1560 1562" (i.e. un-hyphenated), and it may be that the presence of the second work here, bound in with the first, has contributed to the questionable notion that they are integral parts of the same work. The DNB also refers to this dating discrepancy, with the title page to The Arte of Warre dated 1560 and the colophon (presumably at the end of Whitehorne's second, additional, work) dated 1562: "About 1550 [Whitehorne] was serving in the armies of the emperor Charles V against the Moors ... While in Africa he translated into English from the Italian Machiavelli's treatise on the art of war, but it was not published until ten years later, when Whitehorne terms it 'the first fruites of a poore souldiour's studie'. It was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth ... The title-page is dated 'Anno MDLX. Mense Julii', but the colophon has 'MDLXII Mense Aprilis.' Other editions appeared in 1573-4 and 1588, both in quarto" (DNB). Bertelli & Innocenti Bibliografia Machiavelliani (1979) 131 (supporting Cockle's view that the "supplementary" work by Whitehorne is a separate one that has been bound into the BL copy); cf. Brunet III, 222 (citing the first Italian edition of 1521, "fort rare"); Cockle A Bibliography of British Military Books up to 1642 (1957) 12; STC 17164. See also Alexander Lee's Machiavelli. His Life and Times (2020), pp.449-455, and Robert Black's Machiavelli. From Radical to Reactionary (2022), pp.149-155, for full accounts of the inception and publishing history of Libro della arte della guerra. VERY RARE.