Bilingual edition	Edizione bilingue
In Estonian/Italian		In estone/italiano

Introduction

Though Machiavelli searched for copies of his manuscript of Il Principe not a long time before his death, aiming to destroy them, he did not succeed and the treatise was first published in 1527, five years after the author's death. In the following 20 years the treatise was published at least 25 times. Il Principe was translated into French in 1553 and into Latin in 1560. There exist(ed) at least two translations of the treatise into English in the 16^th century. The present translation aims to present the Estonian reader a translation of the treatise, as comprehensive as possible, basing on all available sources of the text in Italian.

Sources
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote his Il Principe about half a thousand years ago. Since then Italian as well as the text of Il Principe has undergone certain changes. The present commented translation of the text into Estonian is based upon up to ten different texts of Il Principe in Italian. Amongst others the critical edition of Il Principe by lord Arthur Burd¹⁸ (based on the so called text of Capo di Lago (1849) that is almost similar to the so called text of 1813) should be mentioned. A. Burd has based also on the text of of 1532 edited by Blado, on the text of 1550 ¹⁹ (published under supervision of the Church) and ot the text of 1848 (ed. by Polidor). Besides the above mentioned texts I used in translating Il Principe also the texts of Il Principe of 1905²⁰, 1950²¹ and 1987 ²² and several electronic texts of Il Principe from the Internet.