The Prince (7 page)

But when a ruler occupies a state in an area that has a different language, different customs and different institutions, then things get tough. To hold on to a new possession in these circumstances takes a lot of luck and hard work. Perhaps the most effective solution is for the new ruler to go and live there himself. This will improve security and make the territory more stable. The Turkish sultan did this in Greece, and all the other measures he took to hold on to the country would have been ineffective if he hadn't. When you're actually there, you can see when things start going wrong and nip rebellion in the bud; when you're far away you only find out about it when it's too late. Another advantage is that the new territory won't be plundered by your officials. Its subjects will be happy that they can appeal to a ruler who is living among them. So, if they're intending to be obedient, they'll have one more reason to love you, and if they're not, all the more reason to fear you. Anyone planning an attack from outside will think twice about it. So, if you go and live in the new territory you've taken, you're very unlikely to lose it.

Another good solution is to establish colonies in one or two places. These work rather like chains to bind the captured state to your own. If you don't do this you'll have to keep large numbers of infantry and cavalry in the territory. Colonies don't cost a great deal. You can send and maintain them very cheaply and they only arouse the hostility of the people whose houses and land are expropriated to give to the colonists. Since that will only be a very small proportion of the population, and since these people will now be poor and will have fled to different places, they can hardly cause much trouble. Everyone else will be unaffected (hence prone to keep quiet) and at the same time frightened of stepping out of line for fear of having their own houses and land taken away. In conclusion, colonies are cheap, more loyal, provoke less hostility among your new subjects, and, as I've said, those few who are provoked can't fight back since they'll be dispossessed refugees. In this regard it's worth noting that in general you must either pamper people or destroy them; harm them just a little and they'll hit back; harm them seriously and they won't be able to. So if you're going to do people harm, make sure you needn't worry about their reaction. If, on the other hand, you decide to send an occupying army rather than establish colonies, the operation will be far more expensive and all the revenues from the new territory will be used up in defending it, turning what should have been a gain into a loss. And you'll provoke more hostility: an army moving about and requisitioning lodgings will do damage across the entire territory, something that has consequences for the whole population and turns them all into enemies. And these are enemies who can hit back, people beaten but still on their own ground. So however you look at it military garrisons are as pointless as colonies are useful.

A ruler who has moved into a new region with a different language and customs must also make himself leader and protector of the weaker neighbouring powers, while doing what he can to undermine the stronger. In particular, he must take care that no foreign power strong enough to compete with his own gets a chance to penetrate the area. People who are discontented, whether out of fear or frustrated ambition, will always encourage a foreign power to intervene. It was the Aetolians who invited the Romans into Greece. Every time the Romans moved into a new region it was on the invitation of local people. And it's in the nature of things that as soon as a powerful foreign ruler moves into a region, all the weaker local powers support him, if only out of resentment towards the stronger states that previously kept them down. So the new ruler will have no trouble winning their support; they'll all run to ally themselves with the territory he has taken. He just has to watch out that they don't grab too much power and authority. Then, with his own strength and their support, he can easily undermine the more powerful neighbours and hence dominate the region. However, an invader who fails to manage relations with his new neighbours will soon lose what territory he has taken; and even while he's still holding on to it, he'll be up against all kinds of trouble and hostility.

The Romans followed these principles whenever they took a new province: they sent colonists; they established friendly relations with weaker neighbours, though without allowing them to increase their power; they undermined stronger neighbours and they prevented powerful rulers outside the region from gaining influence there. Their handling of Greece will be example enough: they established good relations with the Achaeans and the Aetolians; Macedonia's power was undermined; they drove out Antiochus. They didn't reward the good behaviour of the Achaeans and the Aetolians by allowing them any new territory and whenever Philip convinced them to establish friendly relations with him they made sure he was weakened as a result. Antiochus, for all his strength, was never allowed any influence in the region. The Romans were simply doing what all wise rulers must: not restricting themselves to dealing with present threats but using every means at their disposal to foresee and forestall future problems as well. Seen in advance, trouble is easily dealt with; wait until it's on top of you and your reaction will come too late, the malaise is already irreversible.

Remember what the doctors tell us about tuberculosis: in its early stages it's easy to cure and hard to diagnose, but if you don't spot it and treat it, as time goes by it gets easy to diagnose and hard to cure. So it is with affairs of state. See trouble in advance (but you have to be shrewd) and you can clear it up quickly. Miss it, and by the time it's big enough for everyone to see it will be too late to do anything about it.

However, since they had this capacity for seeing a threat in advance, the Romans always knew how to respond. They never put off a war when they saw trouble coming; they knew it couldn't be avoided in the long run and that the odds would simply shift in favour of their enemies. They chose to fight Philip and Antiochus in Greece, so as not to have to fight them in Italy. They could have put off both wars, but they didn't. They never took the line our pundits are constantly giving us today - relax, time is on your side - but rather they put their faith in their own foresight and spirit. Time hurries everything on and can just as easily make things worse as better.

But let's get back to the King of France and see if he took any of the measures we've been discussing. And when I say the King, I mean Louis, not Charles, since Louis held territory in Italy for longer than Charles and it's easier to see what his methods were. You'll notice that he did the opposite of what a ruler must do to hold on to conquests in a region whose customs and language differ from those of his home kingdom.

It was Venetian ambitions that brought Louis into Italy. The Venetians planned to take half of Lombardy while he seized the other half. I'm not going to criticize Louis for agreeing to this. He wanted to get a first foothold in Italy, he didn't have any friends in the region - on the contrary, thanks to King Charles's behaviour before him, all doors were barred - so he was forced to accept what allies he found. And the arrangement would have worked if he hadn't made mistakes in other departments. Taking Lombardy, the king recovered in one blow the reputation that Charles had lost. Genoa surrendered. The Florentines offered an alliance. The Marquis of Mantua, the Duke of Ferrara, Bentivogli of Bologna, Caterina Sforza of Forlì, the lords of Faenza, Pesaro, Rimini, Camerino and Piombino, as well as the republics of Lucca, Pisa and Siena, all queued up to make friends. At which point the Venetians were in a position to see how rash they had been when they proposed the initial deal: for two towns in Lombardy they had made Louis king over a third of Italy.

Think how easily Louis could have held on to his position in Italy if he had observed the rules outlined above and guaranteed security and protection to all those friends. There were so many of them and they were so weak and frightened, either of Venice or Rome, that they were simply forced to side with Louis. Then with their help he could easily have defended himself against the states that were still powerful. But no sooner had he arrived in Milan than Louis did the opposite; he helped Pope Alexander to invade Romagna. He didn't see that this decision weakened his own position, losing him friends and the support of those who had run to him for help, while reinforcing the pope, adding temporal dominion to the spiritual power that already gives a pope so much authority. Having made that first mistake, he was dragged in deeper, since, to curb Alexander's ambitions and prevent him from taking control of Tuscany, he was forced to advance further into Italy himself. Not content with having lost his friends and increased the power of the Church, he was eager now to get hold of the Kingdom of Naples and so made an agreement to split it with the King of Spain. Until then Louis had been the dominant power in Italy, but this move introduced another equally great power into the peninsula, with the result that anyone in the region who had ambitions or was disgruntled with Louis now had someone else to turn to. Louis could have kept Naples under a client king but instead he kicked the man out and brought in a king who was powerful enough to kick him out.

The desire to conquer more territory really is a very natural, ordinary thing and whenever men have the resources to do so they'll always be praised, or at least not blamed. But when they don't have the resources, yet carry on regardless, then they're at fault and deserve what blame they get. If Louis was in a position to capture the Kingdom of Naples with his own forces, then he should have gone ahead and done it; if he wasn't, he certainly shouldn't have split the territory with another king. Sharing Lombardy with the Venetians was forgivable, in that it gave him a foothold in Italy; but there was nothing necessary about sharing Naples with Spain and hence it was a mistake.

So Louis made five mistakes: he eliminated the weaker states; he enhanced the power of one of Italy's stronger states; he brought in an extremely powerful foreign king; he didn't go to live in the territory he'd acquired and he didn't establish colonies there.

All the same, these mistakes might not have done serious damage during his lifetime had he not now made a sixth by stripping Venice of its power. Of course, if he hadn't increased the pope's power and brought Spain into Italy, it would have been quite reasonable and even necessary to cut the Venetians down to size. But having taken those earlier decisions, he should never have reduced Venice to such a state of weakness. As long as Venice was militarily strong, no one else was going to try to take Lombardy from the French; the Venetians wouldn't have allowed another state to attack the region unless they were going to get territory themselves and the other states would never have wanted to take Lombardy from France if it meant giving it to Venice; plus, they would never have had the courage to confront France and Venice together. Someone might object: but Louis gave Romagna to Pope Alexander and Naples to Spain to avoid war; in which case, let me repeat what I said earlier: you must never fail to respond to trouble just to avoid war, because in the end you won't avoid it, you'll just be putting it off to your enemy's advantage. Someone else might insist that Louis had promised the pope he would attack Venice on his behalf in return for the pope's granting the French king a divorce and making the Archbishop of Rouen a cardinal; in this case let me refer the reader to what I'll be saying later about when rulers should, or then again shouldn't, keep their promises.

So Louis lost Lombardy because he didn't take the measures others have taken when they conquered territory and were determined to hold on to it. There's nothing mysterious about this; it's all very normal and reasonable. In fact I discussed the matter in Nantes with the Cardinal of Rouen when Duke Valentino (that was what people used to call Cesare Borgia, Pope Alexander's son) was invading Romagna; and when the cardinal told me that the Italians knew nothing about war, I told him that the French knew nothing about politics, because if they did they wouldn't be letting the pope grow so powerful. And as it turned out, it was Rome and Spain, the two states whose power in Italy France had built up, that proved France's downfall. From which we can infer a general rule that always holds, or almost always: that to help another ruler to grow powerful is to prepare your own ruin; because it takes flair or military strength to build up a new power, and both will seem threatening to the person who has benefited from them.

4

Conquered by Alexander the Great, the Kingdom of Darius did not rebel against his successors after his death. Why not?

Now that we've seen how difficult it is to hold on to recently acquired territory some readers will be surprised to recall what happened when Alexander the Great conquered Asia in just a few years, then died very soon after his victory was complete. You would have thought the whole area would have rebelled, yet Alexander's successors held on to it and the only trouble they had arose from their own personal ambitions and infighting. To explain this situation let's start by remembering that all monarchies on record have been governed in one of two ways: either by a king and the servants he appoints as ministers to run his kingdom; or by a king and a number of barons, who are not appointed by the king but hold their positions thanks to hereditary privilege. These barons have their own lands and their own subjects who recognize the barons as their masters and are naturally loyal to them. Where a state is governed by a king and his ministers the king is more powerful since he is the only person in the state whom people recognize as superior. When they obey someone else it is only because he is a minister or official and they have no special loyalty to him.

Examples of these two forms of government in our own times are Turkey and France. The whole of Turkey is governed by one ruler, or sultan. Everyone serves him. He divides his realm into provinces, or
sanjaks
, and sends administrators to run them, appointing and dismissing them as he sees fit. The King of France, on the other hand, is surrounded by any number of barons whose rights date back to ancient times and who are acknowledged and loved by their subjects. Each baron has specific privileges which a king can only take away at his peril. Looking at these two kinds of states, it's clear that Turkey is hard to conquer but once conquered very easy to hold. France on the other hand will be somewhat easier to conquer but very hard to hold.