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Brief Lives
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Graeme Garrard on one of the few writers whose name has become an adjective.
Five centuries ago this year, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, an unemployed former civil servant sat in the study of his modest country farm in the tiny village of Sant’Andrea just south of Florence, pouring everything he knew about the art of governing into a long pamphlet. He hoped that by making a gift of it to Lorenzo de Medici, the new ruler of Florence, it would win him back the job he passionately loved. But it was ungraciously brushed aside by a prince who had little interest in the musings of an obscure, exiled bureaucrat on the principles of statecraft. The pamphlet was eventually published in 1532, five years after Niccolò Machiavelli’s death, as Il Principe (The Prince).
Machiavelli’s Devotion
For fourteen years Machiavelli had worked tirelessly and with utter devotion for his native city of Florence as a diplomat and public official, travelling constantly on its behalf to the courts and chancelleries of Europe, where he met Popes, princes and potentates.
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