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.
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.