Niccolò Machiavelli
Florentine diplomat, political theorist, historian and playwright (1469–1527), best known for The Prince (Il Principe, written 1513, first printed 1532) and the Discourses on Livy. From 1498 he served the Florentine Republic as a senior civil servant and envoy, observing at close range the rulers who dominated Italy — above all Cesare Borgia, at whose side he stood through the campaigns and the massacre at Senigallia. When the Medici returned to power in 1512 and wrongly suspected him of conspiracy, he was dismissed, tortured and exiled to the countryside, where he wrote his major works.
Machiavelli gives his name to Machiavellian — a byword for cunning, amoral self-advancement — and to ‘Old Nick’, an English nickname for the devil. As Ada Palmer argues, that reputation is close to the inverse of the man.
In the wiki
- Ada Palmer on Machiavelli, The Prince, and Renaissance Statecraft — Palmer’s central case that Machiavelli ‘wasn’t Machiavellian’: The Prince was written not as a manual for getting ahead but as a patriot’s secret job application to the regime that had tortured him, kept out of wider circulation so that no rival power could use its lessons against Florence. Key threads: fortune governs half of every outcome; the means matter conditionally (the feared Borgia could betray, the merely charismatic Savonarola could not); The Prince teaches how to keep power, not gain it; and the enduring ‘Old Nick’ villain is a useful thought-experiment character that split off from the real, self-sacrificing patriot.
See also
- Ada Palmer — Renaissance historian; the source for this wiki’s treatment of Machiavelli
- Aristotle — the ancient authority Renaissance scholars invoked; Machiavelli’s contemporaries couched original ideas as commentary on such figures