Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469 and entered the service of the republic in 1498 as a secretary and diplomat. For fourteen years he carried out missions to the courts of Italy and beyond, watching at close range how princes acquired and lost power.

When the Medici returned to Florence in 1512 he was dismissed, briefly imprisoned, and then retired to a small farm outside the city. There he wrote The Prince, a short book on how a new ruler should seize and keep a state, and the Discourses on Livy, a longer argument that republics are stronger when their citizens are armed and their institutions are sound.

His name became a byword for cunning, partly because his advice was stripped of the moralizing that earlier writers had wrapped around politics. In fact he wrote as an anatomist of power rather than an advocate for it, and his insistence that a statesman must reckon with how people actually behave made him the first modern political thinker. He died in 1527, the year the Medici were driven out again.

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