The Prince (11 page)

German cities are completely independent, don't have much territory around them and obey the emperor only when it suits. They are not afraid of him, nor of any other powerful rulers in the area. This is because these towns are so well fortified that everyone realizes what an arduous, wearisome business it would be to attack them. They all have properly sized moats and walls; they have the necessary artillery; they have public warehouses with food, drink and firewood for a year; what's more, to keep people well fed without draining the public purse, they stock materials for a year's worth of work in whatever trades are the lifeblood of the city and whatever jobs the common folk earn their keep with. They hold military exercises in high regard and make all kinds of arrangements to make sure they're routinely practised.

So, a ruler whose city is well fortified and who doesn't inspire hatred among his subjects isn't going to be attacked, and even if he is, his attackers will leave humiliated, because the world is such a changeable place that it's almost impossible to keep an army camped outside a city's walls doing nothing for a whole year. Someone will object: what if people have houses outside the walls and see them being burned down; won't they get impatient; won't the long siege and their worries for their own futures make them forget their ruler? My answer is that a leader with power and personality will always get round problems like this; he can raise hopes that the siege won't last long; he can frighten people with stories about the enemy's cruelty; he can move quickly to block anyone who seems too hot-headed. Aside from this, it's obvious that the enemy is going to be burning and razing the countryside as he approaches the town at a time when people are still enthusiastic and determined to resist. This actually gives the ruler less cause for concern, because a few days later, when hearts are cooling, the damage is already done, the blow struck, and there's no way back. As a result, people will rally round their ruler all the more, they'll see him as indebted to them because their houses have been burned and their property destroyed in his defence. It's human nature to tie yourself to a leader as much for the services you've done him as the good he's done you. Hence, when you think about it, if the ruler is sensible, it won't be that hard to keep people solid throughout the siege, so long as they have food to eat and weapons to defend themselves.

11

Church states

The last kind of state we have to look at is the Church state. In this case all the difficulties an eventual ruler must face come before he takes power; because while you need ability or luck to take a state like this you can hold on to it without either. Church states are upheld by ancient religious institutions that are so strong and well established as to keep their rulers in power no matter what they do or how they live. Only Church leaders possess states without defending them and subjects without governing them. And even when undefended their states are not taken off them; even when left ungoverned their subjects don't rebel; they don't think about changing ruler and wouldn't be able to anyway. So this is the only form of government that is secure and relaxed.

But since Church states depend on forces beyond the reach of human reason, I shall say no more about them. God created them and sustains them and it would be rash and presumptuous for a mere man to discuss them. All the same, if someone were to ask me how the Church has increased its temporal power so dramatically in recent times, progressing from a situation prior to Pope Alexander where even the most insignificant rulers of Italy hardly rated the Church at all in temporal terms to one where a pope can scare the King of France himself and chase him out of Italy and crush the Venetians, then I think it would be worthwhile sorting out the facts for the record, however well known they may already be.

Before Charles, King of France, came down into Italy, the country was controlled by the pope, the Venetians, the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan and the Florentines. Necessarily, these powerful states had two main concerns: to keep foreign armies out of Italy and to prevent each other from grabbing more territory. The pope and the Venetians were the most eager expansionists. The only way to hold back the Venetians was for all the other states to band together, as they did in the defence of Ferrara; to frustrate the pope, on the other hand, they relied on the Roman barons. Since these barons were divided into two factions, the Orsinis and the Colonnas, they always had something to fight about, and with their swords drawn under the pope's nose they kept him weak and indecisive. And though from time to time you might get a really determined pope, like Sixtus, all the same he was never quite cunning enough or lucky enough to solve the problem. The reason was that papacies tended to be short-lived. In the ten years, on average, that a pope was in power he might just manage to beat down one of the two factions; but if, for example, one pope had almost finished off the Colonnas, the next would be hostile to the Orsinis and so resurrect the Colonnas, but without quite having the time to see off the Orsinis. This is why the Italian states did not rate the pope's temporal power very highly.

Then came Alexander VI, who more than any other pope in history showed what could be done with finance and force of arms. Using Valentino Borgia and taking advantage of the intrusions of the French, he made all the gains I mentioned in my discussion of Duke Valentino. And though Alexander's aim was to make his son great, not the Church, all the same his achievements enhanced the power of the Church, which, after his and then Valentino's death, inherited his conquests. So on his election Pope Julius took over a Church that now possessed the whole of Romagna and was all the more powerful because Alexander had quashed the Roman barons and their factions. He also found a new way of increasing Church income which had never been used before.
¹

Julius not only followed Alexander's lead, but went further. He aimed to take Bologna, defeat the Venetians and push the French out of Italy. In the end all three goals were achieved and Julius's credit was the greater because he did it for the glory of the Church, not out of private interest. He kept the Orsini and Colonna factions in the same reduced state he found them in, and, though one or two of their leaders tried to change things, two obstacles held them back: the first was the Church's power, which unnerved them, and the second was the fact that they had no cardinals. Cardinals are always a cause of internal division; when they have their own cardinals, these factions are never quiet, because the cardinals feed party animosity both inside and outside Rome and the barons are forced to come to their party's defence. So it's the ambition of the cardinals that prompts hostility and conflict between the barons. On Julius's death, his Holiness Pope Leo found the papacy in an extremely strong position and it is to be hoped that while his predecessors made the Church great by armed force, he can make it even greater and more praiseworthy thanks to his goodness and many, many other virtues.

12

Different kinds of armies and a consideration of mercenary forces

Now that I've given a detailed account of the characteristics of the states I set out to talk about, and examined to some extent the reasons for their being powerful or weak and the ways people in the past have tried to take and to hold them, I shall offer a more general discussion of the means of attack and defence available to each kind of state. We've already said that a ruler's power must be based on solid foundations; otherwise he's bound to fall. And the main foundations of any state, whether it be new, or old, or a new territory acquired by an old regime, are good laws and good armed forces. And since you can't have good laws if you don't have good armed forces, while if you have good armed forces good laws inevitably follow, I'll leave aside a discussion of the law and go straight to the question of the army.

Now, the armies a ruler is depending on to defend his state will either be his own, or mercenaries, or auxiliaries, or some combination of these. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous. If you are counting on mercenaries to defend your state you will never be stable or secure, because mercenaries are ambitious, undisciplined, disloyal and they quarrel among themselves. Courageous with friends and cowardly with enemies, they have no fear of God and keep no promises. With mercenaries the only way to delay disaster is to delay the battle; in peacetime they plunder you and in wartime they let the enemy plunder you. Why? Because the only interest they have in you and their only reason for fighting is the meagre salary you're paying them, and that's not reason enough to make them want to die for you. Sure, they're happy to be your soldiers while you're not at war, but when war comes, they run for it, or just disappear.

It shouldn't be hard to convince the reader of this, since Italy's present ruin has been caused precisely by a prolonged dependence on mercenaries. It's true that mercenary forces did win some battles and seemed courageous when fighting other mercenaries; but as soon as a foreign army turned up we saw what they were made of: Charles, King of France, didn't even have to fight; his men just put chalk crosses on the buildings they planned to use as billets. When Savonarola said we brought this on ourselves with our own sins, he was right; except the sins were not what he was thinking of, but the ones I've been talking about. And because they were our rulers' sins, it was our rulers who paid the price.

I'd like to offer a better explanation of why mercenaries are not a good idea. A mercenary commander may or may not be an excellent military leader: if he is, you can't trust him because he will always aspire to power himself, either by attacking you, his paymaster, or by attacking others against your wishes; but if he isn't a capable leader, he'll ruin you anyway. And if someone objects that it hardly matters who commands the army since commanders always behave like this, whether mercenary or no, my response is as follows: armed forces are always at the service of a hereditary ruler or a republic. A ruler must go in person and act as commander himself; a republic must send its citizens; if it sends a man who turns out to be no good it must replace him; if he is good it must keep him in line with laws that prevent him exceeding his brief. Experience shows that only rulers and republics with their own armies make serious progress, while mercenaries bring nothing but trouble. And a republic with a citizen army is less likely to fall victim to a coup than a republic paying for mercenary armies.

Rome and Sparta stood for many centuries armed and free. The Swiss are extremely well armed and completely free. One example of the use of mercenaries in ancient times is Carthage. After the first war with Rome the Carthaginians were almost overthrown by their mercenaries despite the fact that these men were commanded by Carthaginian citizens. After the death of Epaminondas the Thebans made Philip of Macedonia commander of their army and no sooner had he won the war than he stripped them of their freedom. On the death of Filippo Maria Visconti, the Milanese hired Francesco Sforza to fight against the Venetians. Having beaten the Venetians at Caravaggio, Sforza joined forces with them to overthrow his paymasters, the Milanese. When Francesco's father was mercenary commander for Queen Joanna of Naples, he suddenly made off and left her undefended so that she had to put herself into the hands of the King of Aragon or risk losing her kingdom.

It's true that in the past both Venice and Florence did increase their territories with the use of mercenaries whose commanders did not seize power but actually defended their employers. The fact is that the Florentines were lucky; various powerful captains were indeed potential threats, but one didn't win his war, while others either found themselves facing strong opposition or turned their ambitions elsewhere. The one who didn't win was Giovanni Acuto [ John Hawkwood], and since he lost we don't know whether he would have been loyal or not; but everyone must admit that, had he won, the Florentines would have been at his mercy. Francesco Sforza had the forces of Braccio da Montone against him and the two commanders kept each other in check: Sforza turned his ambitions to Lombardy while Braccio went to fight Rome and Naples.

But let's remember what happened just a short while ago. Florence took on Paulo Vitelli as military commander, an extremely serious man who had come from nothing to achieve enormous prestige. Had he taken Pisa for them, you could hardly deny that the Florentines would have been right to hang on to him, because if he had gone over to the enemy, they wouldn't have had a chance; but keeping him would have meant accepting him as their ruler.

Turning to the Venetians, we find they fought confidently and successfully when they fought for themselves, at sea that is, where both nobles and armed commoners showed great courage. But when they began to fight on land, they left these strengths behind and, like other Italian states, hired mercenaries. In the early stages of their expansion on the mainland they had so little territory and so much prestige they hardly needed to worry about their mercenary commanders; but when they pushed deeper into the peninsula, under the leadership of Carmagnola, they got a taste of the trouble mercenaries bring. They'd seen what a fine commander Carmagnola was and under his leadership they had defeated the Duke of Milan, so they soon noticed when he lost his enthusiasm for the war. They realized they couldn't win anything else with him, because that wasn't what he wanted, but they couldn't fire him either for fear of losing what they had previously won; at which point the only safe thing to do was to kill him. Later they hired Bartolomeo da Bergamo, Ruberto da San Severino, Niccolò Orsini, Count of Pitigliano, and other such mercenary commanders who were always more likely to lose than win, and in fact at the battle of Vailà the Venetians eventually lost in a single day all the gains they had so determinedly accumulated over the past 800 years. The fact is that mercenaries bring only slow, belated, unconvincing victories, then sudden, bewildering defeats. Since these examples all have to do with Italy, which has been dominated by mercenaries for many years, I'd now like to get a broader view of the problem, because if we can trace its origin and developments it will be easier to find a solution.