Quentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University between 1974 and 1979 and Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a foreign member of many other national academies, including the Academia Europea, the American Academy and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. His scholarship, which is available in more than two dozen languages, has won him many awards, including the Wolfson History Prize, the Bielefeld Wissenschaftspreis and a Balzan Prize. He has been the recipient of honorary degrees from numerous leading universities, including Athens, Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. His two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1979), was listed by The Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the hundred most influential books published since World War II. His other books include Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1997), Machiavelli (2000), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), Forensic Shakespeare (2014), From Humanism to Hobbes (Cambridge, 2018) and a three-volume collection of essays, Visions of Politics (Cambridge, 2002). Russell Price, who died in 2011, was Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Lancaster.

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• Editorial note; Introduction; Principal events in Machiavelli's life; Bibliographical note; Translator's note; Map: northern and central Italy, c.1500; Dedicatory letter: Niccolò Machiavelli to His Magnificence Lorenzo de' Medici; 1. How many kinds of principality there are, and by what means they are acquired; 2. Hereditary principalities; 3. Mixed principalities; 4. Why the Kingdom of Darius, which Alexander occupied, did not rebel against his successors after Alexander's death; 5. By what means cities or provinces that lived under their own laws before they were occupied ought to be administered; 6. New principalities acquired by one's own arms and ability; 7. New principalities acquired through the arms and fortune of others; 8. Those who become rulers through crime; 9. The civil principality; 10. In what ways the strengths of all principalities should be measured; 11. Ecclesiastical principalities; 12. How many kinds of soldiers there are, and mercenary troops; 13. Auxiliaries, mixed troops and one's own troops; 14. How a ruler should act concerning military matters; 15. The things for which men, and especially rulers, are praised or blamed; 16. Liberality and parsimony; 17. Cruelty and mercifulness; and whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the contrary; 18. In what way rulers should keep their promises; 19. How contempt and hatred should be avoided; 20. Whether building fortresses, and many other things that rulers frequently do, are useful or useless; 21. What a ruler should do in order to be thought outstanding; 22. On those whom rulers employ in secret matters; 23. How flatterers should be shunned; 24. Why the rulers of Italy have lost their states; 25. How much control fortune has over human affairs, and by what means she can be resisted; 26. An exhortation to seize possession of Italy and assert her liberty from the barbarians; Appendix A. Letters relevant to The Prince; Appendix B. Notes on the vocabulary of The Prince; Biographical notes; Index of subjects; Index of proper names.