The essential writings of Machiavelli (44 page)

O
N THE
N
ATURE OF THE
F
RENCH

Machiavelli’s first diplomatic contact with the French was early in 1500 on the Pisan front when Florence, after its failed campaign against Pisa, sought the help of King Louis XII, who had come to Italy to conquer Milan and Naples. Later that year Machiavelli had his second diplomatic encounter with the French at the court of Louis XII in Lyons. This piece, titled originally in Latin
De natura Gallo rum,
is believed to be from that period. It reflects Florentine anti-French sentiment, for though Louis XII was prepared to support Florence’s quest to regain its former territories, his help cost Florence a large sum of money and the exorbitant expense of provisioning and quartering the French army, which Louis used primarily for his own campaigns
.

—

The French are so intent on immediate advantage or injury that they have little memory of past wrongs or benefits, and little care for future good or evil.

For the French, first agreements are always best.

While they might not be able to do you a good turn, this does not hinder them from promising to do so. Yet if they are in a position to do you a good turn, they will do so only with great reluctance, or never. The French are most humble in bad fortune, and most insolent in good.

They are miserly rather than cautious.

They weave their bad cloth with vigor and expertise.

They care little for what is said or written about them.

They are more eager for money than blood.

The French court is generous only at audiences.

A victorious Frenchman is constantly summoned into the presence of the king, he who loses a battle, rarely. Therefore, anyone who is about to embark on a campaign must first weigh whether he is likely to succeed or not, and whether or not this is likely to please the king. Cesare Borgia knew this well, which enabled him to march to Florence with his army
⁶

If a courtier and gentleman disobey the king in a matter concerning a third party, if he is in favor with the king he is not punished, but must show obedience in the future. If he is not in favor, he must stay away from the royal court for four months. This has twice cost us Pisa: once when Entragues held the citadel, and the second time when the French troops came to Pisa.
⁷

He who wishes to conduct business at court must have money, great diligence, and good fortune.

If the French are asked to do a favor, they will first weigh the benefit it will bring them.

Unlike Italian gentlemen, they are usually not very particular about their honor. They were not overly concerned about losing face when they sent to Siena to demand the town of Montepulciano and were not obeyed.
⁸

They are capricious and nonchalant.

They have the arrogance of the victor.

They are enemies of the Latin language and of the glory of Rome.

Italians have a bad time at the French court, except for those whose ship is heading for the rocks and who have nothing more to lose.

6.
Cesare Borgia, as head of the papal army, with assistance from Louis XII of France, marched through Florentine territory in 1501. (Machiavelli was one of the Florentine ambassadors attached to his camp.)

7.
In 1496, Robert de Balzac, Comte d’Entragues, returned the occupied citadel of Pisa to the populace against the wishes of Charles VIII, and in 1500 the French army refused to help the Florentines recapture Pisa, despite a promise by Louis XII, Charles’s successor, to do so.

8.
Louis XII sent Francesco da Narni to Siena to ask Pandolfo Petrucci, Lord of Siena, that the town of Montepulciano be returned to Florence, which Petrucci refused to do, despite being an ally of Louis XII.

O
N
H
OW TO
T
REAT THE
P
OPULACE OF
V
ALDICHIANA
A
FTER
T
HEIR
R
EBELLION

In June 1502, as the Florentines were preparing a new expedition against Pisa and concentrating all their forces on that front, the city of Arezzo and the Valdichiana region to the south, in secret negotiations with Cesare Borgia, rebelled against Florentine authority. Borgia had already conquered the territories surrounding Florence, while Piero de’ Medici, in the hope of returning to power in Florence, had made Arezzo his headquarters. Florence had a respite, as Borgia was busy confronting a major conspiracy among his generals, described in “How Duke Valentino [Cesare Borgia] Killed the Generals Who Conspired Against Him,” which is also set in 1502. However, Borgia quickly and efficiently quelled the conspiracy and was again ready to turn his sights on Florence. This fragment of a discourse, written by Machiavelli in the summer of 1503, offers an important early example of how he looked to ancient Rome as a paradigm for solving contemporary problems
.

—

[Appearing before the Senate, Lucius Furius Camillus spoke of]
⁹
what should be done with the territories and cities of Latium. These are the words he used, and the decision that the Senate reached, more or less verbatim, as Livy reports them:
¹⁰

“Senators! What needed to be done in Latium with armies and wars has, by grace of the gods and the skill of our soldiers, been done. Slaughtered are the enemy armies at Pedum and Astura. All the lands and cities of Latium, and the city of Antium in the land of the Volsci, either were conquered or surrendered, and are now in your power. As they keep rebelling and putting Rome in peril, we must consult about how to secure ourselves, either by cruelty or by generously forgiving them. God has granted you the ability to deliberate whether Latium is to be maintained, and how to make it secure for us indefinitely. So consider whether you want to punish harshly those who have given themselves to you and want to ruin Latium entirely, turning into a desert a country that has often supplied you with auxiliary armies in dangerous times; or whether you intend to follow the example of our forefathers and enlarge the Roman Republic, forcing those conquered to live in Rome. This would give you the glorious opportunity of expanding Rome. All I have to say to you is this: The most enduring power is the state which has loyal subjects who love their prince.
¹¹
But what must be deliberated must be deliberated swiftly, as you have many peoples hovering between hope and fear. You must free these peoples from their uncertainty and anticipate their every action, either with punishment or reward. My task was to ensure that this decision would be yours, and my task has been done. It is now for you to decide what is for the benefit of our republic.”

The senators praised Furius Camillus’s speech, and as the case in each rebellious city and territory was different, they agreed that it would be impossible to pass a general resolution, but that each instance would have to be considered separately. Furius Camillus specified the case of each of the territories, and the senators decided that the Lanuvians were to become Roman citizens, and that the sacred objects taken from them during the war were to be returned. They also made the Aricians, the Nomentians, and the people of Pedum Roman citizens, while the people of Tusculum were allowed to keep their privileges, their rebellion being blamed on a few individuals.
¹²
The people of Velitrae, however, were severely punished for having been Roman citizens who had revolted numerous times. Velitrae was destroyed, and all its citizens sent to live in Rome. To secure Antium the Romans sent new settlers, confiscated all the Antian ships, and prohibited the building of new ones.

It is clear from the judgment the Romans passed on these rebellious territories that they strove either to win their loyalty through benefits, or to treat the territories so harshly that they would never need fear them again. The Romans regarded any middle way as harmful. In their resolutions, they chose one extreme or the other: benefiting those with whom they saw hope for reconciliation, and, where there was no hope, making certain Rome could not be harmed again. The Romans carried this out in two ways: One was to destroy the city and bring the inhabitants to live in Rome; the second was either to strip the city of its inhabitants and send in new ones, or, leaving the former inhabitants in place, to send in so many new ones that the original inhabitants could never again conspire against the authority of Rome. The Romans used these two methods in the case of Latium, destroying Velitrae and providing Antium with new inhabitants.

I have heard it said that in our actions we should look to history as our teacher, which is particularly true for princes. The world has always been inhabited in the same way by men who have had the same passions: There have always been those who rule and those who serve, those who serve willingly and those who serve unwillingly, those who rebel and those who are punished. Should anyone doubt this, he has only to look at the incidents in Arezzo and the territories of Valdichiana last year,
¹³
where we saw a repetition of the example of the peoples of Latium. They had rebelled against Rome and Rome had reacquired their territories, as was recently the case with Florence reacquiring Arezzo and Valdichiana. Even though the particulars of the rebellion and reacquisition of these territories was quite different, the fact of the rebellion and the reacquisition are the same.

If it is true that in our actions we should look to history as our teacher, it would be good if those who will have to judge and punish the territories of Valdichiana would follow the example of those who once ruled the world, particularly in a case where the ancients teach us in no uncertain terms the best course of action. Just as the Romans judged each territory differently, as the offense of each people was different, so must we now strive to evaluate the difference in offense in each of our rebellious territories.

If you were to assert that this is precisely what we have done, I would reply that we have done so only to some extent, but that we have fallen short in important ways. It is good that we allowed Cortona, Castiglione, Borgo Sansepolcro, and Foiano to keep their assemblies, and that we indulged them, managing to reconquer them with benefits, because I equate them with the Lanuvians, Aricians, Nomentians, and the people of Tusculum and Pedum whom the Romans treated in a similar manner. But it is not good that the people of Arezzo, who acted in the same way as those of Velitrae and Antium, have not been treated the same way they were. If the judgment of the Romans merits commendation, our judgment merits criticism. The Romans believed that rebellious populaces had to be either benefited or destroyed, and that any other course of action was dangerous. From what I see with Arezzo, we have not adopted either of these two courses. One cannot claim that the Arezzans have benefited by having to come to Florence every day, their offices abolished, their possessions seized, their being disparaged publicly and having soldiers quartered in their homes. And yet one cannot claim, either, that we are securing ourselves against them by leaving their city walls intact and allowing five-sixths of their citizens to go on living there, not sending in new settlers who would keep them in check. In any future war that we might have to fight, we will have to face a greater expenditure in Arezzo than we will in fighting the enemy. Experience taught us this in 1498, before Arezzo rebelled or we began our cruel reprisals. For when the Venetian troops assaulted Bibbiena,
¹⁴
we had to send the forces of Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan to Arezzo along with Count Rinuccio Marciano and his company in order to keep the city stable, instead of using those troops in Casentino against the enemy. Nor would we have had to pull Paolo Vitelli and his men from the Pisan front to send them to fight the Venetians in Casentino. Arezzo’s disloyalty resulted in our having to face considerably more peril and expenditure than if it had remained loyal. Hence, putting together what one sees now and what one saw then, and the conditions we have imposed on the Arezzans, one can categorically conclude that if—God forbid!—we were to be invaded, Arezzo would either rebel or cause us so many problems as we tried to secure it that it would become an expenditure Florence would not be able to bear.

I do not want to neglect discussing the prospect of Florence’s being invaded, and the inevitable designs any invader will have on Arezzo, as at the moment this is a central topic of discussion. Let us not concentrate on the danger we can expect from ultramontane princes,
¹⁵
but let us turn our sights on a peril closer at hand. Anyone who has observed Cesare Borgia’s course of action will note that in his strategy for maintaining the states he has occupied, he never looks to Italian alliances, having little esteem for Venice and even less for Florence. One can only conjecture that he intends to create such a powerful state in Italy that he will be unassailable, making allegiance to him desirable for any ruler. Should this be his design, then he is clearly aspiring to possess all of Tuscany in order to form a greater kingdom with the states surrounding Tuscany that he already holds.
¹⁶
There is no doubt that these are his designs, because of what I have just mentioned, but also because of his boundless ambition, and the way he has drawn out negotiations with us without ever concluding any agreements. It now remains for us to see if the time is right for him to put his designs into practice. I remember hearing Cardinal Soderini
¹⁷
say that among the many reasons one could call Cesare Borgia and the pope
¹⁸
great is that they are experts at seeing an opportunity and seizing it. This view is proved by our experience of what they have carried out when they had the opportunity. If one were to debate whether now is an opportune moment for them to assault Florence, I would say no. But one must consider that Cesare Borgia cannot wait for the kind of moment in which he can be assured of victory, as time is not on his side: His father the pope cannot be expected to live long,
¹⁹
and Cesare will have to grasp the first opportunity that presents itself and place his cause to a great extent in Fortune’s hands.

9.
This is a conjectured beginning of the sentence, as the original manuscript began with the words
Quello che si dovesse fare
(what should be done). Lucius Furius Camillus (d. 365
BCE
) was a heroic Roman general of the first Samnite War and a consul of Rome in 339
BCE
. See also
Discourses
, Book I, chapter 8.

10.
Machiavelli is translating and paraphrasing Camillus’s speech and the Senate’s reaction to it from Livy’s
History of Rome
, Book VIII, chapters 13 and 14.

11.
Livy in fact says (Book VIII, chapter 1): “The most stable and long-standing empire is definitely that in which subjects take pleasure in obeying.” Machiavelli adapts Livy’s words, anticipating one of the ideas he develops in
The Prince
.

12.
Lanuvium, Aricia, Nomentum, Pedum, Tusculum, and Velitrae were cities of Latium within twenty-five miles of Rome.

13.
There had been a rebellion against the Florentine occupation in 1502.

14.
A city eighteen miles from Arezzo, and thirty-five miles from Florence. The Venetians had attacked the Casentino Valley and occupied Bibbiena in 1498 in an attempt to aid Pisa in its fight to remain independent of Florence. See “Discourse on Pisa.”

15.
Primarily the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor.

16.
Romagna and Urbino.

17.
Francesco Soderini, Bishop of Volterra, and brother of Piero Soderini, the Gonfalonier of Florence.

18.
Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia’s father.

19.
Pope Alexander did in fact die a few months after Machiavelli wrote this discourse.