The Prince

The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli. Officially published five years after his death, Machiavelli's best-known work is seen as the first work of modern political philosophy. Like Dante's Divine Comedy, it was written in Italian vernacular, not Latin, a practice that was gaining popularity during the Italian Renaissance. The book itself is a study of how to acquire and maintain power politically. Dedicated to Lorenzo De Medici, it is notable for creating the term machiavellian to describe a type of unscrupulous and scheming method attaining power.