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The PrinceIII. Mixed Principalities
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III. Mixed Principalities

But it is in the new principality that the difficulties lie. First, if it is not entirely new but a limb added to an older state (so that the whole together may be called mixed), its upheavals arise in the first place from a natural difficulty found in all new principalities: men are glad to change their lord in the belief that they will better themselves, and this belief makes them take up arms against him. In this they deceive themselves, because they later see by experience that they have made things worse. This follows from another natural and ordinary necessity, which means that a new prince must always offend those over whom he becomes prince, both with his soldiers and with the countless other injuries that a new conquest brings in its train. So you have as enemies all those you have offended in seizing the principality, and you cannot keep as friends those who put you there, because you cannot satisfy them as they had expected, and you cannot use strong medicine against them, since you are in their debt. For however strong a man may be in his armies, he always needs the goodwill of the inhabitants to enter a province. For these reasons Louis XII, king of France, quickly occupied Milan and quickly lost it;1 and the first time, Ludovico’s own forces were enough to take it from him,2 because the people who had opened the gates to him, finding themselves deceived in their expectations and in the future good they had counted on, could not bear the annoyances of the new prince.

It is quite true that when rebellious lands are acquired a second time, they are lost with more difficulty. The lord, taking the rebellion as his opportunity, has fewer scruples about securing himself by punishing the offenders, exposing the suspects, and shoring up the weakest places. So if a Duke Ludovico making a commotion on the borders was enough to make France lose Milan the first time, to make it lose Milan the second time the whole world had to be against it, and its armies had to be destroyed or driven out of Italy;3 and this came about for the reasons given above. Nevertheless, Milan was taken from France both the first and the second time. The general causes of the first loss have been discussed; it remains now to speak of the causes of the second, and to see what remedies the king had, and what remedies someone in his position could have, to hold on to his conquest better than France did. I say, therefore, that the states which, when acquired, are added to the old state of the one who acquires them are either of the same province and the same language, or they are not. When they are, it is very easy to hold them, especially if they are not used to living in freedom; and to possess them securely it is enough to have wiped out the line of the prince who ruled them, because in other things, as long as their old conditions are kept and there is no difference in customs, men live quietly. We have seen this in Burgundy, Brittany, Gascony, and Normandy, which have been with France for so long; and although there is some difference of language, the customs are similar, and they can easily get along with one another. Whoever acquires such lands and wants to keep them must have two things in view: first, that the family of their old prince be extinguished; second, that neither their laws nor their taxes be altered. In this way they become one body with his old principality in a very short time.

But when states are acquired in a province that differs in language, customs, and institutions, here the difficulties lie; and here one needs great fortune and great diligence to hold them. One of the greatest and most effective remedies would be for the person who acquires them to go and live there. This would make the possession safer and more lasting, as the Turk has done with Greece: with all the other institutions he has observed to hold that state, he could not have held it had he not gone to live there.4 For when you are there, you see disorders as they arise and can quickly remedy them; when you are not, you hear of them only when they have grown great and there is no longer any remedy. Besides this, the province is not plundered by your officials; the subjects are satisfied by having recourse to a prince close at hand, so that they have more reason to love him if they mean to be good, and more reason to fear him if they mean to be otherwise. Any outsider who might want to attack that state will be more wary of it; so that, while the prince lives there, he can lose it only with the greatest difficulty.

The other and better remedy is to send colonies to one or two places that serve as shackles on that state; for it is necessary either to do this or to keep a large force of men-at-arms and infantry there. Colonies cost little; the prince can send and keep them at little or no expense of his own, and he offends only those whose fields and houses he takes to give to the new inhabitants, who are a tiny part of that state. And those he offends, left scattered and poor, can never harm him, while all the others are left unharmed, which should keep them quiet, and also afraid of putting a foot wrong, for fear that what happened to those who were despoiled may happen to them. I conclude that these colonies cost nothing, are more faithful, and give less offense; and the offended cannot do harm, being poor and scattered, as I have said. For it must be noted that men must either be caressed or crushed; because they avenge themselves for slight injuries but cannot for grave ones. So the injury you do to a man should be such that you need not fear his revenge. But if he keeps soldiers there instead of colonies, he spends much more, since he must consume all the revenues of that state in guarding it, so that the acquisition turns into a loss for him. And he gives much more offense, because he harms the whole state by moving his army about from one billet to another. Everyone feels this hardship, and everyone becomes his enemy; and they are enemies who can do him harm, since, though beaten, they remain in their own homes. From every point of view, then, this kind of garrison is as useless as colonies are useful.

Whoever is in a province that differs from his own, as I have said, must also make himself the leader and defender of the less powerful neighbors, and contrive to weaken the powerful ones there, and take care that no foreigner as powerful as himself gets in by some accident. And it will always happen that such a foreigner is brought in by those in the province who are discontented, either from too much ambition or from fear: as we once saw the Aetolians bring the Romans into Greece; and in every other province the Romans entered, they were brought in by the inhabitants. And the order of things is that as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a province, all the less powerful there join him, moved by the envy they bear toward whoever has held power over them. So with respect to these lesser powers, he has no trouble at all in winning them over, because they all quickly join in a single bloc with the state he has acquired there. He has only to see that they do not gain too much strength and too much authority; and with his own forces and their goodwill he can easily bring down those who are powerful, so as to remain the sole arbiter of that province. Whoever does not govern this part well will quickly lose what he has acquired, and while he holds it he will have endless difficulties and troubles within it.

The Romans observed these rules well in the provinces they took. They sent colonies, kept the less powerful friendly without increasing their power, brought down the powerful, and did not let powerful foreigners gain a reputation there. I will let the province of Greece alone serve as an example. The Achaeans and the Aetolians were kept friendly; the kingdom of the Macedonians was brought down; Antiochus was driven out.5 Nor did the merits of the Achaeans or the Aetolians ever make the Romans allow them to enlarge any state of theirs; nor did the persuasions of Philip ever induce them to be his friends without bringing him down; nor could the power of Antiochus make them consent to his holding any state in that province. For in these cases the Romans did what all wise princes must do: they must have regard not only to present troubles but to future ones, and guard against them with every effort. Foreseen from afar, they are easy to remedy; but if you wait until they are upon you, the medicine is too late, because the disease has become incurable. It is with this as the physicians say of consumption: at the beginning of the illness it is easy to cure and hard to recognize, but as time goes on, if it has not been recognized and treated at the start, it becomes easy to recognize and hard to cure. So it is in affairs of state. If the evils that arise in a state are recognized from afar (which is given only to a prudent man), they are quickly healed; but when, for lack of being recognized, they are allowed to grow until everyone can see them, there is no longer any remedy.

So the Romans, seeing troubles from afar, always remedied them, and never let them run their course in order to avoid a war, because they knew that war is not avoided but only put off to the advantage of others. So they chose to make war on Philip and Antiochus in Greece so as not to have to fight them in Italy; and they could have avoided both for the time being, which they did not want. Nor did they ever like what is constantly on the lips of the wise men of our day, to enjoy the benefit of time; they preferred the benefit of their own ability and prudence. For time drives everything before it, and can bring with it good as well as evil, and evil as well as good.

But let us return to France and examine whether it has done any of the things I have spoken of. I will speak of Louis and not of Charles,6 since Louis held possessions in Italy longer and his course can be seen more clearly; and you will see that he did the opposite of what must be done to hold a state in a province unlike one’s own.

King Louis was brought into Italy by the ambition of the Venetians, who wanted to win half the state of Lombardy for themselves through his coming.7 I do not mean to blame the king for the course he took; for since he wanted to begin to get a foothold in Italy, and had no friends in this province (on the contrary, every door was shut against him because of the conduct of King Charles), he was forced to take what friendships he could. And this well-chosen course would have succeeded if he had made no mistakes in his other dealings. Having acquired Lombardy, then, the king at once regained the reputation Charles had lost him. Genoa yielded; the Florentines became his friends; the Marquis of Mantua, the Duke of Ferrara, the Bentivoglio, the Lady of Forlì, the lords of Faenza, Pesaro, Rimini, Camerino, and Piombino, the people of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena, every one of them came to meet him to be his friend. And then the Venetians could see the rashness of the course they had taken: to acquire two towns in Lombardy, they had made the king lord of two-thirds of Italy.

Consider now how little difficulty the king would have had in keeping his reputation in Italy if he had observed the rules set out above and kept all those friends of his secure and defended. They were many, and weak, and afraid, some of the Church, some of the Venetians, and so they were always obliged to stay with him; and through them he could easily have secured himself against whoever remained great there. But no sooner was he in Milan than he did the opposite, giving help to Pope Alexander so that he could occupy the Romagna.8 Nor did he realize that with this decision he was making himself weak, depriving himself of his friends and of those who had thrown themselves into his lap, and making the Church great by adding so much temporal power to the spiritual power that gives it so much authority. And having made one first mistake, he was obliged to go on with it, until, to put an end to Alexander’s ambition and keep him from becoming lord of Tuscany, he was forced to come into Italy himself. It was not enough for him to have made the Church great and to have lost his friends; because he wanted the Kingdom of Naples, he divided it with the king of Spain.9 Where he had been the arbiter of Italy, he brought in a partner, so that the ambitious men of that province, and those who were discontented with him, would have somewhere to turn; and where he could have left in that kingdom a king who was his pensioner, he took him out, in order to put in one who could drive Louis himself out.

It is truly a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire; and when men who can do so do it, they will always be praised, or at least not blamed. But when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here is the error and the blame. If France, then, could have attacked Naples with its own forces, it should have done so; if it could not, it should not have divided it. And if the division of Lombardy with the Venetians deserved excuse, since by it the king got a foothold in Italy, this one deserves blame, because it was not excused by that necessity.

Louis, then, had made these five errors: he had destroyed the lesser powers; he had increased the power of one who was already powerful in Italy; he had brought into it a very powerful foreigner; he had not come to live there; he had not sent colonies. And even these errors, while he lived, might not have hurt him, had he not made the sixth, of taking away the Venetians’ state.10 For if he had not made the Church great or brought Spain into Italy, it would have been quite reasonable and necessary to bring them down; but having taken those first steps, he should never have consented to their ruin. Being powerful, they would always have kept the others away from any attempt on Lombardy, partly because the Venetians would not have consented to it unless they became its lords themselves, and partly because the others would not have wanted to take it from France in order to give it to them, and would not have had the courage to go and attack both. And if someone should say that King Louis gave up the Romagna to Alexander and the Kingdom to Spain in order to avoid a war, I answer, for the reasons given above, that one must never let a disorder run its course in order to avoid a war, because the war is not avoided but only put off to your disadvantage. And if others should cite the promise the king had given the pope to undertake that enterprise for him in return for the annulment of his marriage and the cardinal’s hat for Rouen,11 I answer with what I will say later about the faith of princes and how it should be kept. King Louis, then, lost Lombardy because he did not observe any of the conditions observed by others who have taken provinces and wanted to keep them. Nor is there any miracle in this; it is very ordinary and reasonable. I spoke of this matter at Nantes with Rouen, when Valentino (as Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander, was commonly called) was occupying the Romagna. When the cardinal of Rouen told me that the Italians did not understand war, I answered him that the French did not understand statecraft, because if they did, they would not let the Church grow so great. And experience has shown that the greatness of the Church and of Spain in Italy was caused by France, and France’s ruin was caused by them. From this we can draw a general rule that never or rarely fails: whoever is the cause of another becoming powerful ruins himself; because that power is brought about by him either through skill or through force, and both of these are suspect to the one who has become powerful.

Notes

  1. 1. Louis XII (1462–1515), king of France from 1498. He took Milan in 1499, lost it to Ludovico Sforza in February 1500, and recovered it in April.

  2. 2. Ludovico Sforza (1452–1508), called “il Moro,” Duke of Milan from 1494. Captured at Novara in April 1500, he died a prisoner in France.

  3. 3. The Holy League formed in 1511 by Pope Julius II with Venice and Spain, later joined by England and the Swiss. Though the French won at Ravenna in 1512, they were driven out of Italy the same year.

  4. 4. The Ottoman sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453 and made it his capital.

  5. 5. In 211 BC the Aetolian League allied with Rome against Philip V of Macedon. Rome defeated Philip at Cynoscephalae in 197 BC, and the Seleucid king Antiochus III at Thermopylae in 191 BC.

  6. 6. Charles VIII (1470–1498), king of France from 1483. He invaded Italy in 1494 to claim the Kingdom of Naples, took the city in 1495, and withdrew within months.

  7. 7. By the Treaty of Blois (1499) Venice joined Louis XII against the Duchy of Milan in return for Cremona and the Ghiara d’Adda.

  8. 8. Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, 1431–1503), pope from 1492. From 1499 Louis lent troops to the pope’s son Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) for the conquest of the Romagna; in 1502, when Cesare threatened Tuscany, Louis came to Italy in person.

  9. 9. By the Treaty of Granada (1500) Louis and Ferdinand of Spain agreed to depose King Federico of Naples and divide his kingdom. They soon fell out, and by 1504 all of it was Spain’s.

  10. 10. In the League of Cambrai (1508) Louis joined Julius II, the emperor Maximilian, and Spain against Venice, and crushed the Venetian army at Vailà (Agnadello) in 1509.

  11. 11. Georges d’Amboise (1460–1510), archbishop of Rouen and Louis’s chief minister. In 1498 Alexander VI annulled the king’s first marriage and made d’Amboise a cardinal. Machiavelli met him on a Florentine mission to the French court in 1500.