Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought? The Prince and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār from Baghdad to Florence and Back

Abstract

The Kitāb sirr al-asrār is an apocryphal letter in which Aristotle gives advice to his pupil Alexander the Great on how to maintain the state, meant as both state of health and political possession. Originally written in ninth-century Syria, the text was revised one century later in Baghdad and then translated first into Latin with the title of Secretum secretorum (Secret of Secrets) and later on into vernacular languages becoming an extraordinarily popular book in late medieval and early Renaissance Europe. Analyzing Machiavelli’s re-appropriation of the Secret provides a new insight into the well-known morphological resemblance between Arabic and European political thought in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.