Civic humanism facts

He is best known for his political treatise The Prince Il Principe , written around but not published until , five years after his death. For many years he served as a senior official in the Florentine Republic with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry.

Civic humanism significance

His personal correspondence is also important to historians and scholars of Italian correspondence. After his death Machiavelli's name came to evoke unscrupulous acts of the sort he advised most famously in his work, The Prince. Some consider it to be a straightforward description of political reality. Others view The Prince as a manual, teaching would-be tyrants how they should seize and maintain power.

Even though Machiavelli has become most famous for his work on principalities, scholars also give attention to the exhortations in his other works of political philosophy. While less well known than The Prince , the Discourses on Livy composed c. Machiavelli married Marietta Corsini in Machiavelli was born in a tumultuous era. The Italian city-states , and the families and individuals who ran them could rise and fall suddenly, as popes and the kings of France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire waged acquisitive wars for regional influence and control.

Political-military alliances continually changed, featuring condottieri mercenary leaders , who changed sides without warning, and the rise and fall of many short-lived governments. Machiavelli was taught grammar, rhetoric, and Latin by his teacher, Paolo da Ronciglione. Shortly after the execution of Savonarola , Machiavelli was appointed to an office of the second chancery, a medieval writing office that put Machiavelli in charge of the production of official Florentine government documents.

In the first decade of the sixteenth century, he carried out several diplomatic missions, most notably to the papacy in Rome.