urely it is a great wonder’, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote to his friend Francesco Vettori in 1514, ‘to contemplate how blind human beings are in matters that involve their own sins.’ But it isn’t really very strange. Few of us have the strength to face our flaws. Machiavelli knew that he was the real wonder: a connoisseur of depravity; an atheist who passionately hated the clergy, who thought the institution of the Catholic Church should be dismantled and replaced with the bloodstained altars of pagan Rome. He had lots of sex – from the abject to the sublime and everything in between – with beautiful women and young men throughout his marriage. He hung around with people he called ‘lice’: gamblers and reprobates in the taverns of the Tuscan countryside. He pranked his friends, cheated people out of money, played elaborately cruel practical jokes on holy men. Unlike the ordinary, unselfconscious sinners he despised, he made a study of human nature in its worse aspects, casting a practised eye over the hellscape of 16th-century Italy, with its warrior popes and courtesans and condottieri. He turned that realism into the foundation for the most original political theory of his time – possibly of all time.
