As an Italian student who is currently studying Italian literature, I think I can help on this one.

My source is my literature school book, unfortunately only in Italian: "Visibile Parlare" , by Marta Sambugar and Gabriella Salà.

So, during Machiavelli's life, the book was not printed, but it spread widely via manuscripts. But in 1532, five years after his death, it was printed and intellectuals began to criticize it. The first was one of Machiavelli's friends, Francesco Guicciardini, who criticized the possibility to learn from Roman History (Ricordi , 110 e 117) and Machiavelli's pessimism (Ricordi 134).

Then, during the Council of Trent (1545-1563) a lot of ecclesiastics asked for a formal condemnation, which happened in 1559 when Machiavelli's books were included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (English: List of Prohibited Books), by the Pope Paul IV.

After that, one of the biggest opponents was Gentillet, who wrote Antimaclavellus where he accused Macchiavelli to have the moral responsibility of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and he created the word "Machiavellianism".

But Machiavelli's book continued to continued to spread clandestinely, influencing Francis Bacon and Jean Bodin, for example. During the XVI-XVII century, it was common to refer to Macchiavelli's political thought under the cover of the Tacitean studies , pretending that Machiavelli's thoughts were Tacitus's thoughts.

In the XVIII, there were two schools of thought:

• the "classical" one, supported by people like Frederick II the Great , who wrote the Antimachiavel
• the "modern" one, supported by Rousseau, Diderot (in his encyclopedia wrote the word Machiavélisme ), Vittorio Alfieri (in Del principe e delle lettere, "Of the prince and the letters), Ugo Foscolo (Sepolcri, "Sepulchres")

And then, during XIX Machiavelli was seen as was seen as a precursor of Italian independence, and in the XX century was used by both fascists (Benito Mussolini said that he was the "armed prophet" arrived to liberate Italy) and communists (Antonio Gramsci in Quaderni del Carcere, "Prison Notebooks", in 1932 said that Machiavelli showed to the proletarians the crudelty of the ruling class).

Hope this can help, and sorry for my terrible English!

I studied Machiavelli and "The Prince" in a Social and Political Thought class this year.

Five years after Machiavelli's death, "The Prince" was published and was received negatively pretty much everywhere. As a result, the Medicis (who "The Prince" was directed to) labelled Machiavelli and his work as immoral. In 1557 Pope Paul I put the book on the Index Exprgatorious, the Catholic Church's list of banned books.

Source: Porter, J. (2000). Classics in Political Philosophy (3rd ed.) Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall Canada Inc.

--

^(edit: wording)