The essential writings of Machiavelli (7 page)

CHAPTER TEN
H
OW THE STRENGTH OF PRINCIPALITIES IS TO BE MEASURED

In examining the characteristics of all these types of principalities I have mentioned, it is important to keep another consideration in mind: whether a prince rules a state strong enough to enable him to stand on his own or whether he will always need the protection of others. To clarify this point, I judge a prince capable of standing on his own when he has enough men or money to gather an army capable of engaging in battle anyone who comes to attack him; and I judge a prince as needing the assistance of others when he is not strong enough to engage an enemy on the battlefield and is compelled to seek refuge behind his walls, which he then has to defend. I have already discussed the first case and will discuss it further;
³⁷
as for the second, one can only urge such a prince to stock up on provisions and fortify his city but disregard the surrounding area. Whoever sufficiently fortifies his city and has looked after his subjects (which I have already touched on and will do so again later),
³⁸
will not be attacked without great hesitation, because men are always wary of enterprises in which the difficulties are obvious. And it is quite clear that attacking a prince whose city is well fortified and who is not hated by his people is not an easy matter.

The cities of Germany are very free. They own but little of the land that surrounds them, obey the emperor when it suits them, and fear neither him nor any neighboring king. This is because they are well enough fortified so that anyone who intends to invade them would see it as a strenuous and difficult endeavor, as the cities have enough ditches and walls and sufficient artillery and keep themselves stocked with a year’s supply of food, drink, and firewood. Furthermore, these cities have the means of keeping their citizens fed by providing them with enough work for a year, occupying them in activities that are the lifeblood of the city and that yield the products that sustain the people. In this way, municipal funds are not depleted either. The German cities also hold military exercises in high esteem and have many ordinances that maintain them.
³⁹

Therefore a prince who has organized his city in this way and has not given his people cause to hate him will not be attacked. (And if he should be, the enemy will withdraw in shame, because the affairs of this world are so changeable that one cannot sit idly and wait outside a city with a besieging army.) Some might argue that the populace could lose heart if it sees its possessions outside the walls in flames, and that a long siege and self-interest will result in the people’s forgetting their love for their prince. To this I reply that a prudent and spirited prince can overcome these difficulties. At times he must inspire his people with the hope that the evil will be shortlived; at other times he must instill in them a fear of the enemy’s cruelty and, when necessary, cleverly shield himself from those individuals among his subjects who might pose a threat. It is also to be expected that the enemy, as soon as it appears, will ravage and burn the area outside the city at a time when the populace is still ardent to defend itself. Therefore the prince should not hesitate, because within a few days, once the people’s spirits have flagged, the harm will have been done, the wounds inflicted, and it will be too late for remedy.

The populace will have all the more reason to unite behind their prince when they see that he is obligated to them, as their houses have been burned and their possessions ruined in his defense. (It is man’s nature to obligate himself as much for the benefits he gives as for the benefits he receives.) Therefore, all things considered, it is not difficult for a prudent prince to bolster the spirits of his people throughout a siege as long as there is no lack of provisions or ammunition.

37.
See chapter 6 and chapters 12–14.

38.
Machiavelli touched on this matter in the previous chapter when he discussed the importance of “the favor of the people” to the prince. He makes mention of it again in the following chapters.

39.
See also Machiavelli’s discussion of German cities in
Discourses
, Book I, chapter 55.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
O
F ECCLESIASTICAL PRINCIPALITIES

All that remains now is to consider ecclesiastical principalities. The difficulties they present all occur before they are acquired, for while they are acquired either by skill or by Fortune, they are maintained without the one or the other. This is because ecclesiastical principalities are sustained by age-old religious institutions, which are so strong and efficacious that these principalities will maintain their princes in power regardless of how they live or what they do. Their princes are the only ones who have states they do not defend, and subjects they do not govern. Although such states are undefended, they are not taken away from these princes, and the subjects, although they are un-governed, remain unconcerned, and neither think of, nor are able to estrange themselves from, these princes. Thus these are the only principalities that are secure and successful. But since they are under the guidance of a superior power that the mind of man cannot fathom, I will not discuss them. For, as they are exalted and maintained by God, it would be the act of a presumptuous and audacious man to do so. Nevertheless, one might ask how it is that the Church has gained so much temporal power, since up to the time of Pope Alexander VI, Italian rulers (and here I include every baron and lord, however minor) had little regard for the pope’s temporal power, though now, even the King of France trembles before it since it managed to expel him from Italy and ruin the Venetians. In this sense, it does not seem to me redundant to commit the essentials of this situation to memory.

Italy, before King Charles of France
⁴⁰
arrived, was under the power of the pope, the Venetians, the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan, and the Florentines. These rulers had two primary concerns: to prevent a foreigner from entering Italy with an army, and to prevent any single ruler among them from growing in strength by occupying more states. The pope and the Venetians worried the others most. In order to keep the Venetians in check, all the other rulers united (as happened in the defense of Ferrara),
⁴¹
and to keep the pope in check, they manipulated the barons of Rome, who were divided into the Orsini and Colonna factions, which were always fighting each other. Eyeing the pope with weapons drawn, they kept him weak and on unsteady ground. From time to time a spirited pope did emerge—like Sixtus IV—but neither Fortune nor ingenuity could free him from these warring factions. The brevity of a pope’s tenure in office was also a factor, because in the ten years that his pontificate might last, he could not be expected to subdue either faction. If, for instance, one pope managed to crush the Colonna, another pope, who might be an enemy of the Orsini, would see to it that the Colonna resurged, but he in turn would not hold office long enough to see the Orsini crushed. As a result, the pope’s temporal power was not held in high esteem in Italy.

Then came Pope Alexander VI, who of all the popes in history demonstrated the extent to which a pope could succeed with the help of money and arms. By way of his son, Cesare Borgia, and the invasion of the French, Alexander did all the things I have already discussed.
⁴²
And though his intent was to make Cesare Borgia great and not the Church, his actions ultimately resulted in the greatness of the Church, which, after his and Cesare’s deaths, became the beneficiary of all his efforts. Then came Pope Julius. He found the Church powerful and in possession of the whole of the Romagna, with the barons of Rome destroyed and their factions crushed by Pope Alexander. He also found the way open to accumulating money in ways that had never before been possible. Pope Julius not only took advantage of these opportunities but added to them. He set out to gain Bologna, destroy the Venetians, and drive the French out of Italy. In all this he succeeded, and he is worthy of even more praise since he did everything in order to strengthen the Church and not any of his own people. He also kept the Orsini and Colonna factions in the weakened condition in which he found them. Though there were leaders among these families ready to cause trouble, two factors kept them in check: the power of the Church, and the fact that they no longer had any cardinals in the College of Cardinals, which is where many of the troubles in the past had begun. Neither faction would have remained subdued had they had their cardinals in place, because it is these cardinals who incite the different factions, and the barons of the Orsini and the Colonna families are then forced to defend themselves. It is from the ambitions of the prelates of the Church that discord and tumult has always arisen among the barons.

Hence, His Holiness Pope Leo has found the pontificate in a most powerful condition, which leads one to hope that whereas the other popes made it great with the help of arms, he will make it even greater and more revered through his goodness and his many other virtues.

40.
Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494.

41.
Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara fought an alliance of the Republic of Venice and Pope Sixtus IV from 1482 to 1484.

42.
See chapter 7.

CHAPTER TWELVE
O
F THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF ARMIES, AND OF MERCENARIES

I have now laid out in detail all the qualities of the principalities that I proposed to discuss at the beginning of this work; I have weighed the reasons for their successes and failures and shown the ways in which many men tried to acquire and keep these principalities. It remains for me to discuss the means of attack and defense that can be applied to each of the previously mentioned cases.

We have already discussed how a prince needs a good foundation
⁴³
if he wants to avoid failure. The primary foundation of all states—new, old, or mixed—is good laws and a good army. And as there cannot be good laws where there is not a good army, and where there is a good army there have to be good laws, I will omit any discussion of laws and speak only of armies.

The army with which a prince defends his state is either his own, a mercenary army, an auxiliary army
⁴⁴
or one that is a mix of these. The mercenary and auxiliary armies are useless and dangerous. A prince who holds a state that is founded on the strength of mercenary armies will never be firm or secure, since such armies are divided, ambitious, without discipline, and fickle—brave in the face of friends, cowardly in the face of enemies. Such soldiers have neither fear of God nor dependability with men, and one’s ruin can be held off only as long as an assault can be deferred. In peace one is despoiled by the mercenaries, in war by one’s enemies. The reason for this is that all that keeps mercenaries on the battlefield are the negligible wages you pay them, which are not sufficient to make them want to die for you. They are eager to be your soldiers as long as you are not at war. The moment there is a war, they either take flight or desert. It is easy enough for me to make my case since the present ruin of Italy has been brought about by a reliance on mercenary armies over a period of many years.
⁴⁵
There have been mercenaries who were effective and did well fighting other mercenaries, but as soon as foreign forces invaded, they showed their true colors. As a result, King Charles of France was able to conquer Italy with a piece of chalk,
⁴⁶
and he who said that our sins were responsible was speaking the truth,
⁴⁷
though they were not the sins that he had in mind but the ones I have laid out. As these were sins committed by the Italian princes, it was they who had to pay the price.

I would like to demonstrate more fully the inadequacy of mercenary armies. Mercenary generals are either excellent or not. If they are, one cannot rely on them because they will inevitably aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing the prince they are working for, or by oppressing others whom the prince does not intend to oppress. If the mercenary general is not adroit, he will ruin the prince by losing his battles. If someone were to argue that this is true regardless of whose hand—mercenary or not—carries the weapon, I maintain that the weapons must be wielded by a prince or by a republic. The prince should personally take on the role of general.
⁴⁸
The republic should send out one of its citizens as general, and if he does not turn out to be valiant, he must be replaced. If he is valiant, he must be held in check by laws that do not let him overstep the mark. Experience has shown that only princes and republics that have their own army make great progress, while mercenary armies do nothing but harm. A republic that has its own army is much less likely to come under the sway of one of its own citizens than one that relies on foreign mercenaries.

Both Rome and Sparta were for many centuries armed and free. The Swiss are well armed and very free.
⁴⁹
As for mercenary armies in ancient times, we have the example of the Carthaginians, who were almost overwhelmed by their mercenary soldiers after the first war with the Romans, even though the Carthaginians had their own citizens as generals. The Thebans had made Philip of Macedon their general after the death of Epaminondas, but once Philip was victorious in battle he took away the Thebans’ liberty
⁵⁰
The Milanese, after the death of Duke Filippo Visconti, hired Francesco Sforza to fight the Venetians: After Sforza vanquished them at Caravaggio he joined the Venetians to oppress the Milanese, his patrons. Francesco Sforza’s father, a mercenary to Queen Giovanna of Naples, left her defenseless, and she was forced to throw herself on the mercy of the King of Aragon so as not to lose her realm.

In the past the Venetians and the Florentines managed to expand their empires with the help of mercenaries, and the mercenary generals did not make themselves princes but stood by them. This, however, in the case of the Florentines was only because they were favored by Fortune. They had employed some illustrious generals whom they had cause to fear, but some of these happened to lose battles, others ran into staunch opposition, and still others turned their ambitions elsewhere. Giovanni Aucut was one of the mercenary generals who did not win, so we do not know where his loyalty would ultimately have lain.
⁵¹
But it will be admitted that had he been victorious, the Florentines would have been at his mercy. Francesco Sforza always had the Braccio faction against him—each side watching the other. Sforza turned his ambition to Lombardy and Braccio marched against the Church and the Kingdom of Naples.

But let us consider our times. The Florentines hired as their general Paolo Vitelli, a most astute man who had risen from private citizen to a position of great prominence. Had he conquered Pisa for them, the Florentines would have been forced to keep him, for they would have been in grave danger had he gone over to the Pisans. But had the Florentines kept him, they would have ended up under his thumb.

In the case of the Venetians, if one weighs their successes it is clear that they acted wisely and bravely as long as they used their own soldiers to fight their wars, which they did before they began to expand from Venice onto the mainland. Both their noblemen and armed plebeians had always fought most valiantly. But the moment the Venetians stepped on terra firma they lost their skill and resorted to mercenaries, as was common throughout Italy. At the beginning of their expansion they had a small state but a substantial reputation, and so did not have much to fear from their mercenary generals. But as they expanded, which they did under General Carmignola, they received ample proof of their error.
⁵²
Carmignola had shown his skill in battle, having defeated the Duke of Milan, but subsequently the Venetians saw his ardor for battle cool. They saw that they could not expect any further victories from him but were not willing or able to relieve him of his duties, since they did not want to lose what they had gained if he switched allegiance. So for their own security they were compelled to execute him. After Carmignola, the Venetians hired mercenaries like Bartolomeo da Bergamo, Roberto da San Severino, and the Count of Pitigliano, from whom they had more reason to fear defeat than victory (as happened at the Battle of Vailà, where in one day Venice lost all that it had laboriously gained over eight hundred years). Mercenary armies afford only slow, laborious, and insubstantial victories, while the losses they bring are sudden and spectacular.

As these examples have brought me to Italy, which has been ruled for so many years by mercenary armies, I would like to discuss them in greater depth, so that by tracing their origin and development it will be easier to remedy the problem. It must be kept in mind how, in recent times since the empire was driven out of Italy and the pope has gained in temporal power, Italy has split into more states; for many of the great cities took up arms against their nobles who had been favored by the emperor and had oppressed them, while the Church favored the oppressed cities in order to gain temporal power. In many other cities, their own citizens became princes. As a result, Italy fell into the hands of the Church and of several republics. Since these new rulers were priests and private citizens, they knew nothing about armies and turned to foreign mercenaries. The first to give a mercenary army prominence was Alberigo da Conio from the Romagna. From his school came, among others, Braccio and Sforza, who in their day were the arbiters of Italy. After them came all the others, who up until the present day have led these mercenary armies. The result: Italy was overrun by Charles, pillaged by Louis, ravished by Ferrando, and disgraced by the Swiss.

The mercenaries moved quickly to take away the standing of the infantry and appropriate it to themselves. They did this because, not having a state of their own and living by their profession, too few soldiers would not afford them the standing they needed, while they could not support and feed as many soldiers as they did need. So they limited themselves to the cavalry, where the force was smaller and could be fed and paid. As a result, in an army of twenty thousand you could not find two thousand infantrymen. Furthermore, the mercenary generals did their utmost to keep themselves and their soldiers out of the way of fatigue and danger, and did not kill the enemy in the fray but took prisoners, and that without ransom. They did not attack cities at night, nor did those defending the cities attack the encampments outside. They did not build stockades or ditches around their camps, and they did not go on campaigns during the winter. All these things were consistent with their military conventions and, as I have pointed out, enabled them to escape fatigue and danger. They have driven Italy into slavery and disgrace.

43.
Chapters 7 and 9.

44.
As Machiavelli explains in
Discourses
, Book II, chapter 20: “Auxiliary troops are those which another prince or republic sends to help you, and which are paid and commanded by them.”

45.
Machiavelli was writing during the period of the Italian Wars, which had begun in 1494 with the invasion of Charles VIII of France. All sides relied heavily on foreign mercenaries.

46.
Philippe de Commynes (1447–1511), a noted historian and diplomat of the French court, wrote
m Memoir? (Book
VII, chapter 14): “As Pope Alexander who reigns today has said, ‘The French have come with wooden spurs, their quartermasters, quite unhindered, carrying bits of chalk to mark the doors of houses where they are to be quartered.’”

47.
Machiavelli is referring to Savonarola, who in his fiery sermons blamed the affliction of Florence on the Florentines’ luxuriant ways.

48.
See
Discourses
, Book I, chapter 30, which opens with the line: “To escape the need of living in constant suspicion or being ungrateful, a prince must himself go out on military expeditions, as the Roman emperors initially did and as the Turk does in our times.”

49.
See
Discourses
, Book I, chapter 12.

50.
Epaminondas (c. 410–362
BCE
) was a Theban statesman and general who made Thebes the foremost military power in Greece from 3 70 to 362
BCE
. After his death, Thebes declined into civil strife, and in 346 was forced to admit Philip of Macedon’s garrisons.

51.
The English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood.

52.
Francesco Bussone da Carmignola, c. 1380–1432, commanded Florentine and Venetian forces against Milan. His irresolute conduct of the war led the Venetians to suspect treason, and he was tried and executed.