(The queen) is a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccol Machiavelli. Originally called De Principatibus (About it was written in, but not published until five years after Machiavelli's death. The treatise is not representative of the work published during his lifetime, but it is the most remembered, and the work responsible for bringing "Machiavellian" into wide usage as a pejorative term. It has also been suggested by some critics that the piece is, in fact, a satire.