Machiavelli

Machiavelli (1467-1527) was a Florentine, whose father was a lawyer.

Machiavelli obtained a minor post in the Florentine government (1498). He remained in the service of the Florentine government until the restoration of the Medici family in 1512. His role was to carry out important diplomatic missions.

Once the Medici family took power, Machiavelli was arrested but then released & was allowed to live in retirement in the country near Florence.

His most famous work was called The prince & was written in 1513. The book was dedicated to Lorenzo the second in an attempted to win over the Medici family, which failed. 

The prince is concerned to discover how principalities are won, how they are held & how they are lost.  

Machiavelli admired and had high praise for Caesar Borgia Because of the skillful way he went about things. Caesar Borgia had three main objectives after his father Alexander VI died. Those were as follows: Kill his brother. Conquer by force of arms & in the name of the Pope, territories which should of belonged to himself, not the Papal states, after his father died. Lastly to manipulate the collage of cardinals, so that the next Pope should become his friend. Machiavelli was impressed with the skillful & methodical way Caesar Borgia carried out these objectives & if it wasn't for the misfortune that he was to become ill, he would have most probably successfully completed these objectives. 

However it must be said, Machiavelli's admiration for Caesar Borgia was only for his skill, not for his purposes.

My thoughts on Machiavelli are that he comes across as a very smart man, because his time in employment in government made him very wise. He was able to observe what was going on around him & learn how to & how not to go about things, just from observing the people/leaders who were in higher positions than himself. So that's why his works titled The Prince & probably more successfully Discourses where so successful. However if his books were published today, they wouldn't be as successful because the methods used or needed to gain & sustain power in the world of today are completely different to how they we used to be.