VII. New Principalities Acquired by Others’ Arms and by Fortune
Those who rise from private citizens to princes by fortune alone rise with little effort but keep their position with a great deal. They meet no difficulty along the way, because they fly there; all their difficulties arise once they have landed. Such are those to whom a state is granted, either for money or by the favor of the one who grants it, as happened to many in Greece, in the cities of Ionia and the Hellespont, where Darius made men princes so that they would hold those cities for his security and glory; and such, too, were those emperors who rose from private life to the empire by corrupting the soldiers. These men rest simply on the will and the fortune of whoever granted them their state, which are two very fickle and unstable things; and they neither know how to hold that rank nor can they. They do not know how, because unless a man has great intelligence and ability, it is not reasonable to expect that, having always lived in private station, he should know how to command. They cannot, because they have no forces that can be friendly and faithful to them. Then, too, states that come quickly, like all other things in nature that are born and grow fast, cannot have their roots and branches in such a way that the first bad weather does not kill them; unless, as I have said, those who have so suddenly become princes are of such ability that they know how to prepare at once to keep what fortune has thrown into their laps, and to lay afterward the foundations that others laid before they became princes.
For these two ways of becoming a prince, by ability or by fortune, I want to bring forward two examples from the days within our memory, one for each: Francesco Sforza and Cesare Borgia. Francesco, by the proper means and with great ability, rose from private citizen to Duke of Milan, and what he had acquired with a thousand troubles he kept with little effort. On the other side, Cesare Borgia, whom the people called Duke Valentino, acquired his state through his father’s fortune and lost it through the same, even though he made every effort and did all the things a prudent and able man should do to put down his roots in the states that the arms and fortune of others had granted him. For, as was said above, whoever does not lay his foundations first may, with great ability, lay them afterward, though they are laid with trouble for the architect and danger to the building. If, then, we consider all the Duke’s progress, we will see that he had laid great foundations for his future power, and I do not judge it superfluous to discuss them, because I would not know what better precepts to give a new prince than the example of his actions. And if his measures did not profit him, it was not his fault, for it came from an extraordinary and extreme malice of fortune.
Alexander VI, in wanting to make his son the Duke great, had many difficulties, present and future. First, he saw no way of making him lord of any state that was not a state of the Church; and if he turned to taking a state of the Church, he knew that the Duke of Milan and the Venetians would not allow it, because Faenza and Rimini were already under Venetian protection. Besides this, he saw that the arms of Italy, and especially those he might have used, were in the hands of men who had reason to fear the pope’s greatness; so he could not trust them, since they were all in the hands of the Orsini and the Colonna and their associates.1 It was necessary, then, to upset the existing order and throw the states of these men into disorder, so as to be able to make himself securely master of part of them. This was easy for him, because he found that the Venetians, moved by other reasons, had set about bringing the French back into Italy; and he not only did not oppose this, but made it easier by annulling King Louis’s first marriage. So the king came into Italy with the help of the Venetians and the consent of Alexander; and no sooner was he in Milan than the pope had troops from him for the enterprise of the Romagna, which was allowed to go forward because of the king’s reputation. Having acquired the Romagna, then, and beaten down the Colonna, the Duke wanted to keep it and go further, but two things stood in his way: one, his own forces, which did not seem faithful to him; the other, the will of France. That is, he feared that the Orsini troops, which he had been using, would fail him, and not only keep him from acquiring more but take away what he had acquired, and that the king might do the same. Of the Orsini he had a sign when, after taking Faenza, he attacked Bologna and saw them go coldly into that assault; and as for the king, he learned his mind when, after taking the duchy of Urbino, he attacked Tuscany, and the king made him give up that enterprise. So the Duke decided to depend no longer on the arms and fortune of others. First, he weakened the Orsini and Colonna factions in Rome, by winning over all their adherents who were gentlemen, making them his own gentlemen and giving them large salaries; and he honored them, according to their quality, with commands and governorships. So in a few months the attachment to the factions died out in their hearts, and all of it turned toward the Duke. After this, having scattered the members of the house of Colonna, he waited for an opportunity to wipe out the Orsini. It came to him well, and he used it better. For the Orsini, having realized too late that the greatness of the Duke and of the Church meant their ruin, held a meeting at Magione, near Perugia.2 From that came the rebellion of Urbino, the uprisings in the Romagna, and countless dangers for the Duke, all of which he overcame with the help of the French. And when his reputation had returned, trusting neither France nor any other outside force, so as not to have to put them to the test, he turned to deceit. He knew so well how to hide his intentions that the Orsini, through Signor Paolo,3 made peace with him; and the Duke spared no courtesy to reassure Paolo, giving him money, clothes, and horses, until their simplicity brought them into his hands at Senigallia.4 Having wiped out these leaders, then, and turned their partisans into his own friends, the Duke had laid very good foundations for his power, holding all the Romagna together with the duchy of Urbino; and above all he believed he had made the Romagna his friend and won over all its people, since they had begun to taste well-being.
And because this part deserves notice and imitation by others, I do not want to leave it out. When the Duke had taken the Romagna, he found that it had been ruled by impotent lords who had despoiled their subjects rather than governed them, and had given them reason for disunion rather than union, so that the province was full of robberies, feuds, and every other kind of lawlessness. He judged that to make it peaceful and obedient to the sovereign arm, it was necessary to give it good government. So he put in charge there Remirro de Orco, a cruel and efficient man, to whom he gave the fullest power. In a short time this man made it peaceful and united, with very great reputation. Then the Duke judged that such excessive authority was no longer necessary, because he feared it might become hateful; and he set up a civil court in the middle of the province, with a most excellent president, where every city had its own advocate. And because he knew that the past severities had generated some hatred against him, to purge the minds of those people and win them over completely, he wanted to show that if any cruelty had been committed, it had not come from him but from the harsh nature of his minister. And taking his opportunity from this, one morning at Cesena he had Remirro laid out in the piazza in two pieces, with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside him.5 The ferocity of this spectacle left those people at once satisfied and stunned.
But let us return to where we started. I say that the Duke, finding himself quite powerful and partly secured against present dangers, since he had armed himself in his own way and had largely destroyed the forces near enough to harm him, still had to reckon with the king of France if he wanted to go on acquiring; because he knew that the king, who had realized his mistake too late, would not put up with it. So he began to seek new friendships and to blow hot and cold with France, at the time the French were marching toward the Kingdom of Naples against the Spaniards who were besieging Gaeta.6 And his intention was to secure himself against the French, which he would quickly have achieved if Alexander had lived.
Such were his measures as to present things. But as to the future, he had to fear first of all that a new successor in the Church might not be his friend and might try to take away what Alexander had given him. He planned to guard against this in four ways: first, by wiping out the families of all the lords he had despoiled, so as to take that opportunity away from the pope; second, by winning over all the gentlemen of Rome, as was said, so as to hold the pope in check with them; third, by making the College of Cardinals as much his own as he could; fourth, by acquiring so much power before the pope died that he could resist a first assault on his own. Of these four things, at the death of Alexander he had accomplished three, and the fourth was almost done. Of the despoiled lords he killed as many as he could lay hands on, and very few escaped; he had won over the Roman gentlemen; and in the College he had a very large party. As for new acquisitions, he had planned to become lord of Tuscany; he already held Perugia and Piombino, and had taken Pisa under his protection. And as soon as he no longer had to reckon with France (and he no longer had to, since the French had already been stripped of the Kingdom by the Spaniards, so that each of them was obliged to buy his friendship), he would have leapt into Pisa. After that, Lucca and Siena would have yielded at once, partly out of envy of the Florentines, partly out of fear; and the Florentines would have had no remedy. Had this succeeded for him (and it was succeeding in the very year Alexander died), he would have acquired so much strength and so much reputation that he would have stood on his own, and would no longer have depended on the fortune and forces of others, but on his own power and ability. But Alexander died five years after the Duke had first drawn his sword. He left the Duke with only the state of the Romagna consolidated, with all the others up in the air, between two very powerful hostile armies, and mortally ill.7 And there was in the Duke such ferocity and such ability, he knew so well how men are to be won or lost, and the foundations he had laid in so short a time were so sound, that if he had not had those armies on his back, or if he had been healthy, he would have held out against every difficulty. And that his foundations were good could be seen: the Romagna waited for him for more than a month; in Rome, though only half alive, he remained safe; and although the Baglioni, the Vitelli, and the Orsini came to Rome, they found no following against him. If he could not make the man he wanted pope, he could at least keep out the man he did not want. Had he been healthy when Alexander died, everything would have been easy for him. And he told me himself, in the days when Julius II was elected, that he had thought of everything that might happen when his father died, and had found a remedy for all of it, except that he never thought that at his father’s death he himself would also be close to dying.
So, gathering up all the actions of the Duke, I would not know how to reproach him; on the contrary, it seems to me that I should hold him up, as I have done, for imitation by all those who have risen to power through fortune and the arms of others. For with his great spirit and his high aims, he could not have conducted himself otherwise, and the only things that stood against his designs were the shortness of Alexander’s life and his own illness. Whoever, then, judges it necessary in his new principality to secure himself against his enemies, to win friends, to conquer by force or by fraud, to make himself loved and feared by the people, followed and respected by the soldiers, to wipe out those who can or must harm you, to renew old institutions with new methods, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and generous, to destroy a disloyal militia and create a new one, to keep the friendship of kings and princes in such a way that they must either help you graciously or think twice before harming you, cannot find fresher examples than this man’s actions. He can be faulted only in the election of Julius as pontiff, in which he made a bad choice.8 For, as was said, though he could not make a pope of his own liking, he could keep anyone from being pope; and he should never have agreed to the papacy of any of the cardinals he had injured, or of any who, once pope, would have reason to fear him. For men do injury either out of fear or out of hatred. Those he had injured were, among others, San Piero ad Vincula, Colonna, San Giorgio, and Ascanio; all the others, once pope, would have had reason to fear him, except Rouen and the Spaniards: the Spaniards because of kinship and obligation, Rouen because of his power, having the kingdom of France behind him. Therefore the Duke should above all have made a Spaniard pope, and failing that, should have agreed to Rouen and not to San Piero ad Vincula. And whoever believes that among great men new benefits make old injuries forgotten deceives himself. The Duke, then, erred in this election, and it was the cause of his final ruin.
Notes
1. The Orsini and the Colonna, rival Roman baronial families who commanded much of the mercenary soldiery of central Italy.
2. In October 1502 Cesare’s own captains (the Orsini, Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, and others) met at Magione and conspired against him.
3. Paolo Orsini, one of the conspirators.
4. On December 31, 1502, at Senigallia, Cesare seized the reconciled conspirators; Vitellozzo and Oliverotto were strangled that night, Paolo Orsini and the Duke of Gravina a few weeks later. Machiavelli was with Cesare as Florentine envoy.
5. December 26, 1502.
6. In 1503, during the war between France and Spain for the Kingdom of Naples.
7. Alexander VI died on August 18, 1503, of a fever that also struck Cesare. The French and Spanish armies were then both near Rome.
8. Giuliano della Rovere, cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli, was elected Pope Julius II (1503–13) in November 1503 with Cesare’s support, after the brief reign of Pius III. Julius soon stripped Cesare of his states; Cesare died in Navarre in 1507. The other cardinals named are Giovanni Colonna, Raffaele Riario (San Giorgio), and Ascanio Sforza.