Niccolò Machiavelli

Biography

Machiavelli is on this list because the Italian Wars are the reason he exists. As Florence's second chancellor he spent fourteen years as a diplomat inside the catastrophe — envoy to Cesare Borgia, to Julius II, to Louis XII, to the Emperor — watching Italian states be dismantled by foreigners while their rulers made clever arrangements that did not work. He drew two conclusions. First, that mercenaries were the disease: condottieri had no reason to win decisively or die trying, so he raised a citizen militia for Florence — which promptly ran away at Prato in 1512, and the Republic fell. Second, that politics had to be described as it is rather than as preachers said it should be. When the Medici returned he was sacked, tortured on the rope, and exiled to a small farm, and there he wrote *The Prince* in 1513 — partly as a job application, which failed. It closes with an anguished plea for a prince to unite Italy and drive out the barbarians. Nobody did. He died in 1527, weeks after the Sack of Rome confirmed everything he had argued, and his name became a synonym for the behaviour he had merely reported.

Key Battles