By the early 16th century, the Italian Renaissance had produced writers such as Danté, Petrarca, Boccaccio and Castiglione, each with ideas rooted in the revival of the Greek and Roman classics, localizing Christian traditions, idealistic views of women and individualism. From these authors spread the growth of the humanistic movement which encompassed the entire Italian rebirth of arts and literature. One of many skeptics, including Lorenzo Valla, who had challenged the Catholic Church fifty years earlier by demonstrating the falsity of the Donation of Constantine, Niccolò Machiavelli projected his ideas of fraud into 16th-century Italian society by suggesting that rulers could maintain the power only through propaganda. , as seen with the success of Ferdinand of Aragon in Spain around 1490. Today, the coined term Machiavellian refers to duplicity in both politics and self-promotion. Unlike most 16th-century philosophers, Machiavelli wrote from the perspective of an anti-humanist; he criticized not only the classics and the Catholic Church, but also encouraged the deceptive use of religion and hated the humanistic concepts of freedom, peace and individualism.1Born in 1469 to an economically limited family under the parents of Bernardo di Niccolò di Buoninsegna and Bartolomea de'Nelli, Niccolò de Bernardo Machiavelli was exposed in his youth to numerous law books and classical texts, which he consequently learned to reject even before entering Florentine politics.2 A self-taught intellectual like his father Bernardo, Machiavelli began his studies in Latin all age of seven. Although he learned the language well by young adulthood, he soon refused to write his own treatises... middle of paper... Context, 2013. Web. 27 October 2013. .Lynch, Christopher. "War and Foreign Affairs in Machiavelli's Florentine Histories". The revision of politics: academic OneFile, 2012. Web. 27 October 2013. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The prince. Trans. 1532. New York: SoHo, 2011. Print."St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre." Britannica Online: Britannica Online and Web. October 27, 2013. Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.Ridolfi, Roberto. The life of Niccolò Machiavelli. Trans. Cecil Grayson. 1954. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Print.Starn, Randolph. “Borgia, Cesare (c. 1475–1507).” Encyclopedia Americana: Grolier Online, 2013. Web. 20 October. 2013. .