Born in Florence in 1469 Niccolo Machiavelli was one of the principal secretaries to the Signoria at Florence & undertook diplomatic missions to various courts before his imprisonment & exile To"e his own words this book discusses "what a principality is what kinds there are how they can be acquired how they can be kept & why they are lost" The book was written at a crisis when Machiavelli considered the case of Italy so desperate that it could hope for salvation only by the intervention of a powerful despot The significance of this work today is that it marks a stage in the development of the scientific method whether in statecraft or in general political analysis