Niccolo Machiavelli

The name Machiavelli is so instinctively associated with the dark arts of political expediency that it is hard to conceive of the eponymous writer as a poet, playwright, carnival songster and humanist. But if he has suffered from the fame of his most lasting work, it is equally possible that this work has itself been misunderstood for the best part of 500 years, a process that began almost as soon as he died.

Machiavelli came from a largely powerless but formerly influential family in Florence, at the time one of several significant and independent city-states within the country now known as Italy. These cities were either at each others' throats, or had another power at their own. The Vatican, the French, the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empire were all hunting for power, influence and control. Rulers and republics (of a sort) came and went with alarming frequency, allegiances and alliances were dissolved as soon as they were formed, and militias and mercenaries added to the factional confusion. Machiavelli, however, both rose to prominence and fell from grace because of a loyalty to his home city, which suffered precisely the complex shifts in fortune of the rest of the country. --Naxos Audiobooks