207 - Niccolò Machiavelli

About this episode

Episode Show NotesLove poems that sound like a lovestruck teenager wrote them, but whose author has become a byword for scheming? In this episode we meet the real Niccolò Machiavelli, the Renaissance Florentine whose name became the adjective "Machiavellian." His reputation rests on one part of his most famous work, The Prince (De Principatibus), a treatise on gaining and keeping power that many see as the foundation of modern political science. But was Machiavelli really the ruthless opportunist we imagine, or something more complex? We follow his life from his birth in Florence in 1469, through his years as Secretary of the Florentine Republic, his imprisonment and exile under the Medici, and his late success as a playwright. Along the way we find a loving son, a humorous friend, a rather unsuccessful politician and one of the most influential thinkers in Italian Renaissance history. In this episode:• Machiavelli's reputation: why chapter 15 of The Prince and its advice to lie, cheat and break oaths for the good of the state shaped how history remembers him, and how writers from the Enlightenment onward offered a less damning picture. • Childhood in Santa Croce: legends about h