MACHIAVELLI’S Il Principe was written in 1513, after its author had been removed from his important diplomatic role with the Florentine bureaucracy and then returned to his secluded farmhouse.

In 1532, when the book first appeared in printed form, five years after his death, the enormous power of the Catholic Church and Italy’s intolerant attitude towards ‘immorality’ in general meant that it was quickly regarded as an extremely controversial publication. In 1559, after going through fifteen editions, Machiavelli’s work was included on Pope Paul IV’s (1476-1559) Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or index of forbidden texts, and in the wake of this decision some of Il Principe‘s most vociferous and outspoken opponents included the Italian bishop, Ambrogio Caterino Politi (1484-1553); the English cardinal, Reginald Pole (1500-1558); and the Portuguese bishop and historian, Jerónimo Osório (1506-1580).

In 1576, on the other hand, the French lawyer and politician, Innocent Gentillet (1535-1588), published his Discourse against Machiavelli and set about attacking his counterpart on account of promoting ‘immoral’ strategies. Alternatively, as if to cement the anti-Catholic nature of Machiavelli’s text, King Henry VIII (1491-1547) – who, in the 1530s, systematically destroyed the Roman Church in both England and Ireland – became one of its most avid readers.

As the Medieval period came to an end and materialistic interpretations of religion, politics and society became increasingly more commonplace, the inherent realism of Il Principe influenced a large number of Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers and historians like Jean Bodin (1530-1596), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), John Milton (1608-1674), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), David Hume (1711-1776), Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), Adam Smith (1723-1723), Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), René Descartes (1596-1650), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) and Charles-Louis Montesquieu (1689-1755).

In the modern period, Machiavelli’s work has been studied by dictators and autocrats such as Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) and Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), as well as by the Marxian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Each of these personages had their own reasons for doing so, of course, but it is debatable whether a significant proportion of them ever truly understood Machiavelli’s real objectives. He wrote, not for the hereditary prince who was inevitably forced to suppress his own ambitions in order to maintain the wider institution of his dynastic line, but for a new prince who refused to be contained by such responsibilities. In this sense, therefore, Machiavelli’s sixteenth-century prince, as the symbol of a coming age of modernity, was pitted against the world of tradition.