The Prince was a book of its time both politically (as we saw in week one) and intellectually (last week). But it was also a personal book, and we miss something of its power if we ignore its biographical context.

Machiavelli's family was neither wealthy nor well-connected. His father, Bernardo, was a lawyer and humanist who diligently grounded his son in the studia humanitatis but was unable to arrange for him a life of aristocratic luxury or even a cushy government stipend.

Instead, although Machiavelli's early years are poorly documented, it seems certain that it was a combination of humanist education, hard work and intelligence that earned him a major appointment in 1498. Machiavelli was as close to being a self-made man any anyone in Renaissance Florence.

As secretary of the Ten of War, Florence's foreign affairs and war committee, he was the city's highest-ranking diplomat for 14 years, leading embassies to and spending months in the courts of the French king, the pope, the holy Roman emperor, and others. The Prince was written by a man who, as he informs Lorenzo de' Medici in the dedication, had "knowledge [that was] gained through long experience of contemporary affairs". When it came to geopolitics, Machiavelli knew whereof he spoke.

The author's diplomatic career saturates The Prince. Alongside the Greek and Roman models so favoured by humanists, the book is populated with contemporary examples and lessons, many of them transposed, almost verbatim, from Machiavelli's personal correspondence and legations. Thus his breathless praise for Cesare Borgia's ruthlessness, his admiration of Pope Julius II's boldness, and his criticism of the Emperor Maximilian's ineptitude passed largely unaltered from diplomatic communiques into The Prince.

Even when his diplomatic memos are not quite so obvious, Machiavelli's experience remains in view. His time at the French court taught him that the Florentine view of their city's power and importance was utterly naive and inflated. If the republic wished to survive it needed to recognise how the real world worked. The Prince offered some candid and blunt advice along these lines, explicitly drawn from a career at the ambassadorial coalface. The author was, in effect, leaking the diplomatic cables in order to help "save [Italy] from the cruelty and barbarity of [the] foreigners" encroaching upon it.

The Prince is even more personal than this, however. In 1512, the Medicis, with papal encouragement and Spanish help, defeated the Florentines and dismantled the republic. Machiavelli found himself out of favour and out of work. Worse, he was under suspicion for plotting against the new ruling clan and was subsequently tortured by strappado, in which the body was hoisted to the ceiling by wrists bound behind the back and then dropped to the floor, thereby usually tearing the arms out of their sockets.

Machiavelli survived, maintained his innocence and was released. But the experience marked him. "Fear means fear of punishment, and that's something people never forget," he wrote in the chapter 17, on cruelty and compassion.

The Prince was Machiavelli's attempt to worm his way back into favour following this disaster, and is marked not only by examples drawn from his diplomatic career but by a heartfelt plea for preferment. This entailed the mandatory obsequiousness that came with such "mirror for princes" books: "your illustrious house … favoured by God and church … [is] well placed to lead Italy to redemption," he writes towards the end of the book.

More strikingly, however, it also involved a personal entreaty that sounded clear and early in the book. The dedication explains how The Prince's wisdom derived from what the author had "discovered and assimilated over many years of danger and discomfort". The book was written because the author was "eager myself to bring Your Highness some token of my loyalty". And it was hoped, the dedication concluded, that "this small gift" would encourage "Your Highness" to "look down on those far below" and to see "how very ungenerously and unfairly life continues to treat me". If there is a dark and a desperate tone to The Prince, it is because the author's life had, of late, taken a dark and a desperate turn.

The sensitive diplomatic material and the personal nature of The Prince helps explain why, although written in 1513, the book was not published until after Machiavelli's death, over 15 years later. For all its subsequent fame, it had little immediate impact, at least not in the way Machiavelli had desired. The Prince failed in its mission and Machiavelli lived the rest of his life in political obscurity.
 

This article first appeared in The Guardian