Volker Reinhardt, in his portrayal of the life and work of the Florentine politician Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540), highlights both the historical context and the relevance of a fascinating world of ideas at the dawn of modernity. Francesco Guicciardini, a Florentine patrician, provincial governor in the Papal States, and from 1523 to 1527 one of the most influential advisors to Pope Clement VII Medici, is one of the outstanding political and historical thinkers of the European Renaissance. His texts are rooted in the immediate experience of a tumultuous historical period. They reflect on no less than three internal revolutions in Florence and, above all, the catastrophe of the Sacco di Roma in 1527, the looting and devastation of the Eternal City, which profoundly shook Guicciardini's personal existence. Starting from these external upheavals.