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The Honest Florentine: The Life of Niccolo Machiavelli and the Five-Hundred-Year Slander of His Name
Paperback
PhilosophyGeneral Political ScienceItalian History
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 150
Weight: 0.46
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
You already know the word. To call someone Machiavellian is to call them cold, scheming, a person who smiles while calculating exactly where to put the knife. No thinker in history has been so completely reduced to an adjective, and no adjective has traveled so far from the man who gave it his name.
This is the story of that man, and it is nothing like the legend.
Niccolo Machiavelli was a devoted public servant of a free republic, a patriot who wept for his country, a husband who was missed when he traveled, and quite possibly the funniest man in Florence. He built his city an army of its own citizens. He was arrested on a false charge, stretched on a torturer's rope six times, and refused to confess to a crime he did not commit, then wrote witty poems from his cell. Cast out and ruined, he spent his evenings dressing in his finest robes to sit alone and converse with the great minds of antiquity, and out of that heartbreak he wrote the most notorious book about power ever composed.
The Honest Florentine follows him from the blood of the Pazzi conspiracy to the courts of kings, from the strangling of Cesare Borgia's captains to the quiet farm of his exile, and finally to a deathbed joke that tells you everything about who he really was. Along the way it does something the last five centuries have refused to do: it reads him fairly. It shows that the man behind The Prince loved liberty above all, wrote a far greater book in defense of self-government, and was buried beneath an epitaph that reads, No praise can match so great a name.
Warm, vivid, and grounded in the historical record, this is narrative nonfiction that restores a human being to his own reputation. If you think you know what Machiavellian means, meet the man. You may not want the word back.
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