What advice would you give a prince during the Renaissance on how to rule? Following the spirit of Machiavelli?

I read the Prince over three years ago but I need some ideas on what would be the strongest topics I can make an essay out of?





I was thinking maybe giving examples on the harm of following religion and morality does not make a good government ? Im not sure can anyone help with ideas?What advice would you give a prince during the Renaissance on how to rule? Following the spirit of Machiavelli?
Machiavelli's great contribution to political thought was the emancipation of statecraft from the chains of Christian morality--against the dominant thesis since St. Augustine, much reinforced by St. Thomas Aquinas--thus giving birth to a science of politics interested in dealing with the realities of obtaining and employing power effectively, deriving principles from historical experience rather than religious doctrine. That is to say, to use power so that the State is preserved against its foes both within and without, and ultimately achieves hegemony. Thus Machiavelli is the real father of the concept of 'reason of State'--the idea that the prince's actions should not be judged by the parameters of ordinary morality, but rather by their appropriateness for preserving the State. If I had to write an essay on 'The Prince', I would make reason of State the core of it.





I would certainly begin by explaining the origins of Machiavelli's thought--he was an Italian patriot yearning to see the peninsula united under a single government. Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries was little more than the battleground where Valois France and the House of Aragon (House of Habsburg after Ferdinand the Catholic died in 1516) fought each other over their dynastic claims, while the Italian states (Duchy of Milan, Duchy of Ferrara, Papal States, Republic of Venice, Republic of Florence, etc.) merely switched allegiance between the two great powers according to their local interests. Machiavelli yearned for the return of Italian unity--as it was during the Roman Empire--and wished for a strong prince to bring order into chaos by establishing undisputed authority. This is why he presented ruthless men like Ferdinand the Catholic and Cesare Borgia--the infamous Captain-General of the Church under Alexander VI's pontificate--as role models for the young Florentine ruler to whom he addressed his treatise. 'The Prince' is, in fact, already a manual for a Renaissance sovereign.





Then I would go on to explain why, despite not coining the term himself (Giovanni Botero made it popular a couple of years later in 'De la ragion di Stato'), Machiavelli was indeed the creator of reason of State. This would revolve on the notion of the prince's actions not being subject to public or divine scrutiny, but only to the judgment of history, in terms of the fame of preserving and enlarging his states or the ignominy of losing them.





Perhaps you could digress into his specific prescriptions about citizen armies being superior to mercenary forces, the greater merits of conquering vs. inheriting a State, the need to be merciless rather than indulgent in war, the benefits of being feared but obeyed by one's people over simply being loved, and most of all every prince's obligation to look upon the example of strong rulers of the past for guidance.





I would close the essay by exploring his importance to political thought and practice in the subsequent times. Machiavelli, for example, was a very strong influence on the aforementioned Botero, and also in Jean Bodin (and his 'Six Livres de la Republique'), and through such authors he could have induced pragmatism instead of dogmatism in some rulers. I am not sure of the point I am about to postulate, but you could even research whether Machiavelli was an influence over those rulers who embraced the Reformation because they thought it would be better for their states to be out of Papal jurisdiction--Albert of Hohenzollern in Prussia, Gustav Vasa in Sweden, and even that lecher Henry VIII of England, for example.





Finally you could explain how Machiavelli was ahead of his time in many respects--Italy was not unified until 1860, and his writing unleashed a reaction of anti-Machiavellian political philosophy in parts of Europe (Father Pedro de Rivadeneira and his 'Tratado de las virtudes del pr铆ncipe cristiano' in Spain, or Bishop Bossuet in the sermons he preached for Louis XIV of France 150 years later). At the very end you could contrast with Locke and liberalism, and how while they agree in not believing that statecraft should be bound to the tenets of Chistianity, the latter assert that the State should be limited by individual liberties, and thus not absolute in power like Machiavelli suggested.





I sincerely hope I was of any assistance.What advice would you give a prince during the Renaissance on how to rule? Following the spirit of Machiavelli?
i'd say: Waste them before they waste you.


Live drink and be merry, fore tomorrow there are axes to throw, women to steal and lands to plunder.





but that's just me.