Lessons From Renaissance Italy Political survival in Renaissance Italy was an art practiced under conditions of extreme instability and violence. Princes rose and fell with stunning rapidity. Families that ruled cities for generations could be exiled overnight. Republics collapsed into tyrannies and tyrannies into republics with bewildering frequency. The Italian peninsula was a laboratory of power politics where every conceivable strategy for gaining and maintaining power was tested under the most brutal selective pressures imaginable. Machiavelli observed this chaos firsthand and distilled from it principles of political survival that remain relevant wherever power is contested without stable legal frameworks to...