Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli spent fourteen years as secretary to the second chancery of the Republic of Florence and to the war-and-diplomacy council, riding to courts across Italy and France and watching power work at close range. He lost the job when the Medici retook Florence in 1512; the following February he was arrested and tortured over a conspiracy he had no part in, released in March under the amnesty that came with the election of the Medici pope Leo X, and pushed out to the countryside — and it was that same year, 1513, that he wrote the short book he first titled De Principatibus. He never saw it printed: Il Principe circulated in manuscript in his lifetime and was not published until 1532, after his death.