Last week, I had to read Machiavelli's famed "The Prince" for my Renaissance history class; it was a good thing, actually, to be compelled to read it, as it was something that I had always meant to get to but never found the time. First, I was surprised by just how short it is, just over ninety pages in the Penguin edition that I had. Second, and perhaps most importantly of all, I can't help but feel like it wasn't written almost five hundred years ago. It reads in many places like it was written yesterday. It seems that, as a political culture, we have learned more from Machiavelli than many of us would wish to admit. That is not to say that there isn't much he wrote about that is good and useful. He explicitly condemned the use of mercenaries in wartime, asserting rightly that they owe no loyalty other than to themselves and their pay. Give them a little more and they'll stay, or perhaps as the Sforza did in Milan, simply take over the government thems...
Occasional author. Lover of coffee.