Ibn Zafar al-Siqilli

Due to the civil unrest of the Muslim population some time later, Ibn Zafar left Sicily definitively and took refuge in Hamat, in Syria, where he died in poverty in 1170, or 1172.

The geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi referred to him as a 'refined philologist', and both Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi and Ibn Khallikan praised his scholarship and thought.

[1] When Niccolò Machiavelli, the famous Florentine, dedicated his treatise, 'The Prince', to Lorenzo di Medici four centuries later, Ibn Zafar was almost unknown to the Western world.

Amari's introduction had included a biographical account of Ibn Zafar and his manuscript's history, and Richard Bentley published an English version in 1852.

[4][5][1] At the beginning of the 20th century another Sicilian and political scientist philosopher, Gaetano Mosca, wrote of the striking parallels between Ibn Ẓafar's treatise and Machiavelli's.