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I dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo de' Medici. It was a job application, essentially. I had been the secretary of the Florentine republic for fourteen years. The Medici had returned, dissolved the republic, and I was now a bankrupt farmer writing political theory in the evenings.

I offered him the distilled knowledge of ancient history and my own experience of modern statecraft: how to acquire a principality, how to hold it, whether it is better to be loved or feared. My answer to the last question is frequently misquoted. I wrote that it is better to be both loved and feared; but since the two are difficult to combine, it is safer to be feared than loved — because love depends on the will of others, while fear depends on your own will.

Lorenzo never read it, or if he did, showed no sign. The dedication was wasted. The book survived anyway. A manuscript has the advantage over a prince that it does not die.