Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, into an old but impoverished family. His father, a lawyer with a passion for books, gave him a humanist education in Latin and the classics. In 1498, after the fall of the friar Savonarola, the young Machiavelli was appointed secretary of the Second Chancery of the Florentine Republic, and for fourteen years he served it as a diplomat and administrator. His missions took him to the court of the king of France, to the emperor Maximilian, to the pope, and to Cesare Borgia, whose ruthless brilliance he observed at close quarters. He also organised a citizen militia for Florence, convinced that a state relying on mercenaries could never be secure.

In 1512 the republic fell and the Medici returned to power. Machiavelli lost his post; the following year, suspected of conspiracy, he was imprisoned and tortured, then released in a general amnesty. Retiring to his small farm at Sant'Andrea in Percussina outside Florence, he spent his days among woodcutters and at the village inn, and his evenings, as he wrote to a friend, in his study, putting on the robes of court to converse with the ancients. There, in 1513, he wrote The Prince, dedicating it to Lorenzo de' Medici in the hope of returning to public service.

The hope was largely disappointed, but the years of leisure were extraordinarily fruitful. He wrote the Discourses on Livy, his great study of republics; The Art of War; the History of Florence, commissioned by the Medici pope Clement VII; and The Mandrake, one of the finest comedies of the Italian Renaissance. He died in Florence in 1527, shortly after the republic was briefly restored.

The Prince was printed only after his death, in 1532. It was soon condemned by the Church and his name became a byword for cunning and unscrupulous politics. Yet later readers — from Spinoza and Rousseau to modern political science — have seen in him the founder of the realistic study of politics: the first to describe how states are actually won, kept and lost, rather than how they ought to be.