Almost as soon as it was published in 1532, The Prince was derided as a controversial, hereti-

cal work. Sidney Angelo collected a handful of these early reviews that he found during his research:

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we find Machiavelli depicted as the very hand of the devil; ad an "imp" of Satan, as "hell-bourne", as a "damnable fiend" of the underworld, as the "gret monster-master of hell " John Donne once went so far as to describe a vision of the netherworld in which Machiavelli, attempting to gain a place in Lucifer's innermost sanctum, was out-argued by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits And it was even possible for Samuel Butler to suggest, facetiously, that "Old Nick" himself took his name from "Nick Machiavel"

The Prince was placed on the Papal Index of Prohibited Books in 1559, but historians disagree to whether this was for...