The present book shows that Niccolò Machiavelli's (1469-1527) political thinking goes back to a political concept that developed in the late Middle Ages. Contrary to what is traditionally assumed in European intellectual history, political pragmatism, Machiavelli's thinking, played a role and whose roots go back to the ancient understanding of politics, did not only play a role again in the early modern period and the Italian Renaissance. The author completely reconstructs the history of political discourse from the 12th to the 16th centuries - on the basis of a large number of Sources from European scholasticism, jurisprudence, humanism as well as historiography and entertainment literature, but also with recourse to antiquity. In the end, Machiavelli's pragmatism does not present itself as a complete break with medieval tradition, but as the climax of a change that has been taking place for a long time. In this way, this work arrives at a new understanding of the history of political thought in the West in general and in Machiavelli in particular.