Machiavelli's Works Around Machiavelli’s time the papacy held much of the European power. Many popes held notoriously corrupt positions and mismanaged the entirety of Western Europe. They were the dictators during the Italian Renaissance. Not just religiously, but politically, militarily, and socially. They taxed and sent off leagues of soldiers to kill all people and to command all land of differing religious or political association. There was no separation between church and state as the inhabitants of today’s West have come to expect. In one Italian city lived a family of republican jurists of th