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Historical person
1469–1527
Niccolò Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, civil servant, historian and political writer. After the Medici restoration removed him from office, he wrote The Prince and other works analysing power, republican government, military organisation and the unstable politics of Renaissance Italy.
Machiavelli served the Florentine Republic in diplomatic and administrative posts from 1498 until the Medici restoration in 1512. After losing office he wrote The Prince, the Discourses on Livy and other works that analysed power, republican institutions, war and political necessity.
In Rozsa Gaston’s Anne and Louis, While France intervenes in Milan and Naples, papal diplomacy and figures such as Cesare Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli draw Anne and Louis deeper into the dangerous politics of Renaissance Italy. In Sarah Dunant’s In the Name of the Family, Niccolò Machiavelli arrives as a Florentine envoy and studies a ruler whose methods may provide a new model of statecraft, while Pope Alexander VI struggles to restrain an increasingly independent son and preserve the family’s alliances.
Series
Sarah Dunant’s Borgias novels reconstruct the rise and collapse of Pope Alexander VI’s family in Renaissance Italy. Beginning with Rodrigo Borgia’s election in 1492, the sequence follows Alexander, Cesare and Lucrezia as papal office, dynastic marriage and military ambition turn family loyalty into an instrument of government. Across…
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Rozsa Gaston’s four-volume Anne of Brittany sequence follows the last independently ruling Duchess of Brittany from her contested inheritance to her final years as queen of France. The novels move through the French–Breton conflict, Anne’s compelled marriage to Charles VIII, her restoration to ducal authority after his death…
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