Machiavelli The Renaissance’s Anti-Humanist - 2452 Words

By the turn of the sixteenth century, the Italian Renaissance had produced writers such as Dantà ©, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Castiglione, each with ideas rooted in the revival of Greek and Roman Classics, localization of the Christian traditions, idealistic opinions of women and individualism. From these authors spread the growth of the humanistic movement which encompassed the entirety of the Italian rebirth of arts and literature. One among many skeptics, including Lorenzo Valla, who had challenged the Catholic Church fifty years earlier in proving the falsity of the Donation of Constantine, Niccolà ² Machiavelli projected his ideas of fraudulence into sixteenth century Italian society by suggesting that rulers could only maintain power†¦show more content†¦His immersion into foreign culture and exposure to princes dissimilar to his own, namely the Louis XII and Cesare Borgia, began with a diplomatic mission to France in 1500. It was before the French court at Nevers that Machiavelli was fundamentally astounded and soon became envious of the strong and central French government because he believed it to have more power than Florentine republics, which had been modeled after classical republics such as ancient Rome.11 Upon his return from France, Florence mandated that Machiavelli control the state’s affairs with Cesare Borgia, Pope Alexander VI’s illegitimate son, who had had attempted to unite the Italian City Stat as part of his regime from 1492 to 1503 during the Italian Wars.12 Despite Borgia’s widespread hatred, Machiavelli noticed that he possessed many qualities of what he believed to be an ideal prince, such as utilizing Catholic justification under God and the devastation of the