Who was Machiavelli The Prince?
Niccol di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (May 3, 1469 June 21, 1527)[1] was a political philosopher, musician, poet, and romantic comedic playwright. Machiavelli is a key figure of the Italian Renaissance, most known for his treatises on realist political theory (The Prince) on the one hand and republicanism (Discourses on Livy) on the other. Machiavelli was born into a tumultuous era, one that saw Popes leading armies and wealthy city-states of Italy falling one after another into the hands of foreign powers — France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire. It was a time of constantly shifting alliances, mercenaries who changed sides without warning, governments rising and falling in the space of a few weeks, and on top of all of this the rise of Lutheranism, culminating in the sack of Rome at the hands of rampaging German soldiers in 1527, the first time in nearly twelve centuries. Machiavelli did not live to see this final humiliation but steeped as he was in the Byzantine politics of the age, it
