The limits of this introduction will not permit us to follow with any detail the many important duties with which he was charged by his native state, all of which he fulfilled with the utmost fidelity and with consummate skill. When, after the battle of Ravenna in 1512 the holy league determined upon the downfall of Pier Soderini, Gonfaloniere of the Florentine Republic, and the restoration of the Medici, the efforts of Machiavelli, who was an ardent republican, were in vain; the troops he had helped to organize fled before the Spaniards and the Medici were returned to power. Machiavelli attempted to conciliate his new masters, but he was deprived of his office, and being accused in the following year of participation in the conspiracy of Boccoli and Capponi, he was imprisoned and tortured, though afterward set at liberty by Pope Leo X. He now retired to a small estate near San Casciano, seven miles from Florence. Here he devoted himself to political and historical studies, and though apparently retired from public life, his letters show the deep and passionate interest he took in the political vicissitudes through which Italy was then passing, and in all of which the singleness of purpose with which he continued to advance his native Florence, is clearly manifested. It was during his retirement upon his little estate at San Casciano that Machiavelli wrote _The Prince_, the most famous of all his writings, and here also he had begun a much more extensive work, his _Discourses on the Decades of Livy_, which continued to occupy him for several years. These _Discourses_, which do not form a continuous commentary on Livy, give Machiavelli an opportunity to express his own views on the government of the state, a task for which his long and varied political experience, and an assiduous study of the ancients rendered him eminently qualified. The _Discourses_ and _The Prince_, written at the same time, supplement each other and are really one work. Indeed, the treatise, _The Art of War_, though not written till 1520 should be mentioned here because of its intimate connection with these two treatises, it being, in fact, a further development of some of the thoughts expressed in the _Discorsi_. _The Prince_, a short work, divided into twenty-six books, is the best known of all Machiavelli's writings. Herein he expresses in his own masterly way his views on the founding of a new state, taking for his type and model Cæsar Borgia, although the latter had failed in his schemes for the consolidation of his power in the Romagna. The principles here laid down were the natural outgrowth of the confused political conditions of his time. And as in the _Principe_, as its name indicates, Machiavelli is concerned chiefly with the government of a Prince, so the _Discorsi_ treat principally of the Republic, and here Machiavelli's model republic was the Roman commonwealth, the most successful and most enduring example of popular government.