Who was the most Machiavellian politician in history, diabolical mastermind unhinged yet effective in strife for power...

sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1850Macaulay-machiavelli.asp

Is this bait?

>tfw smugly smirk while reading The Prince

Tiberius.

Cao Cao

unironically this

Stalin

also machiavelli wasn't a machiavellian, didn't advocate machiavellian tactics, and was a hugely deluded idealist who thought gathering a civic militia and lecturing them about roman ideas of virtue would make them better soldiers than professional armies

Didn't Machiavelli advocate to use professional armies instead of hiring mercenaries?

Probs the Rothschilds

Brainlet answer. Read about Stalin, and by that I don't mean "read what butthurt Trotsky wrote".
Was he a paranoid murderer? Yes.
Was he just in it for power? No. He was a fanatic communist. Almost all of shit he did he did because he thought it's the best course of action for his country. He made plenty of mistakes of course.
Why would such a power-hungry man be a Bolshevik? Bolsheviks were a fringe group for most of their existence. Are you saying a purely opportunistic man would spend the best years of his life in such a movement, living the life on the fringes of society, if he wasn't ideologically commited?
Would such a man leave his son to die in a German POW camp?

no, he advocated for militias motivated by civic pride. he didn't see much of a distinction between professional soldiers and mercenaries

OP's criteria is
>diabolical mastermind unhinged yet effective in strife for power
it's hard to argue stalin does not fit that description

Unironically Napoleon
>tfw the guy who presents your bride almost kills her with a fiery ball

>ywn go back to the banter of ed, Nick and David
;-;

Since he was proven correct multiple times I don’t see what’s wrong with that

Well second guy implied he was purely power-hungry man, not an idealist. That's just false. Stalin was an idealist.

Portugal as a country

He was proven catastrophically wrong when he was Florentine minister for war and his militia got hideously boned by Spanish professional soldiers

Not mutually exclusive. Hitler, Mao, Castro, Chavez, all idealists, all involved in fringe movements but also ruthlessly power-hungry

Yes those were formed from Spaniards, not Italian conditerri

the word "Machiavellian" still has a fucking definition you absolute überautists

Yes

Not him, but a Machiavellian would be a pragmatist, not an idealist. Stalin did a lot of stupid shit like forced collectivization and industrialization because he literally thought he was the genius that would lead the working class towards communism.

>diabolical mastermind unhinged yet effective in strife for power
>I have never actually read anything by Machiavelli

Jesus Christ, what a fucking normie-tier understanding of the man and his writings.

Tbh Machiavelli said the Prince must be ruthless in favor of the well being of the state, most rulers/politicians were out for themselves and went out of their way to harm the state in many occasions for purely selfish reasons.

I think Talleyrand is the closest one can get to being the ideal Prince