Niccolò Machiavellithe realist in exile

For fourteen years he was a senior official of the Florentine Republic, running diplomatic missions across Italy and France and building a citizen militia to replace the mercenaries he considered worse than useless. Then the Medici returned in 1512, the Republic fell, and he was dismissed, accused of conspiracy, tortured, and released into exile at a small farm a few miles south of Florence.

He spent his days there with woodcutters and card players at the local inn. In the evening — by his own account, in a letter to a friend in 1513 — he changed out of his mud-caked clothes into court dress before entering his study, on the grounds that one does not meet the ancients improperly attired. The Prince was written that winter, in a few months, essentially as a job application. It did not get him the job.

It was published five years after he died, and the reputation arrived almost immediately: within a lifetime 'Machiavel' was a stock villain on the English stage and the book was on the Papal Index. Read straight it is less a manual for tyrants than a field report on how power actually behaves when nobody is being watched — written by a man who had watched closely and been broken for it.

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”

Niccolò Machiavelli