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Excellent point. I agree with Victor Davis Hanson that Sun Tzu's Art of War was fairly obviously heavily edited and appended by persons who knew more about politics than combat. Machiavelli's Art Of War was read more by condotieri than anyone else. But it wasn't The Prince that was influential in the Renaissance, it was its companion volume Discourses On The First Ten Books Of Titus Livy, which is known simply as the Discourses these days and is seldom read because it isn't as sexy as The Prince and it presupposes a knowledge of Roman history that was common in Machiavelli's time but is not today. But it is here that the seminal ideas about the superiority of the Republic as a form of government are revived after nearly a millennium of slumber. His defense of faction is just about unprecedented and sounds hilarious in this time of political conventions in the U.S. - we laugh, but he was probably right.