Giovanni Botero

Giovanni Botero (1544 to 1617) was an Italian political thinker, born in 1544 at Bene, today Bene Vagienna, in the lands of the Duke of Savoy. His father Francesco was of modest condition. The first document that mentions him dates from 1559, when as a fifteen-year-old student he was at the Jesuit college of the Society of Jesus in Palermo, where a paternal uncle, a respected priest, had called him. He was sent early to teach rhetoric, and in Venice in 1589 he published the ten books of Della ragion di Stato, dedicated to Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, archbishop of Salzburg, the work for which he is remembered as a theorist of the reason of state. A portrait of 1603 shows him not yet an abbot. He died on 23 June 1617 and, according to his last wishes, was buried in the Jesuit church