 While the Politica was Campanella’s most analytic treatise on the subject, he also articulated his political ideas in many other writings. Apart from numerous works linked to particular moments in the complex itinerary of his life and his thought, his political writings form part of a more general philosophical framework, which often makes it difficult to consider them on their own, since they are located in a zone that borders on theology, ethics and natural philosophy. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is precisely in this area, so full of contradictions and ambiguities, that the debate among his interpreters is most lively and most enflamed by polemics. It is difficult to reconcile the prophet of the Calabrian conspiracy, who, reading celestial and natural signs, proclaimed the advent of an epoch of profound renewal, with the defender of the unconditional primacy of the papacy; or the thinker who believed in the “idea” of a philosophical republic in which everything would be governed according to nature with the supporter of a universal monarchy under the king of Spain; or, finally, the harsh critic of Machiavelli, whom he accused of having cut the bonds between politics, ethics and religion, with the subtle politician who in his writings frequently supported some of the most unscrupulous Machiavellian maxims. Campanella’s reading of Machiavelli left such an impression on his works that even his early readers did not hesitate to define him as a “harsh critic and at the same time a disguised master of Machiavelli’s precepts” (Hermann Conring’s introduction to the Latin translation of Machiavelli’s Prince, in his Opera, 5 vols, Braunschweig 1730, II, p. 979) and to affirm that he had relaunched on the scene, suitably camouflaged and consequently in a more insidious manner, the same principles that Machiavelli had had the courage to express without disguise (Conring, De civili prudentia, in his Opera, III, p. 41).