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The PrinceXII. How Many Kinds of Armies There Are, and Mercenary Soldiers
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XII. How Many Kinds of Armies There Are, and Mercenary Soldiers

Having discussed in detail all the qualities of the principalities I proposed to discuss at the beginning, and having considered to some extent the causes of their well-being and their ills, and shown the methods by which many have sought to acquire and hold them, it remains for me now to discuss in general terms the offense and defense that can occur in each of them. We said above that a prince must have good foundations; otherwise he is bound to fall. The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or mixed, are good laws and good arms. And because there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws, I will leave aside the discussion of laws and speak of arms.

I say, then, that the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or mercenary, or auxiliary, or mixed. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if a man keeps his state founded on mercenary arms, he will never be steady or secure, because they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, and unfaithful; bold among friends, cowardly among enemies; they have no fear of God and keep no faith with men; and your ruin is put off only as long as the attack is put off. In peace you are despoiled by them, in war by the enemy. The reason for this is that they have no love or any other cause to keep them in the field except a little pay, which is not enough to make them want to die for you. They are glad to be your soldiers as long as you are not making war; but when war comes, they either run away or leave. I should need little effort to persuade anyone of this, because the present ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing other than its having rested for many years on mercenary arms. These did once bring some success to some, and they seemed brave among themselves; but when the foreigner came, they showed what they were. So Charles, king of France, was able to take Italy with chalk.1 And whoever said that our sins were the cause of it spoke the truth;2 but they were not the sins he believed, but these I have described; and because they were the sins of princes, the princes too have paid the penalty for them.

I want to demonstrate more fully the unhappy nature of these arms. Mercenary captains are either excellent men or not. If they are, you cannot trust them, because they will always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or by oppressing others against your intentions; but if the captain is not able, he ruins you in the ordinary way. And if someone answers that anyone who has arms in hand will do this, mercenary or not, I would reply that arms have to be employed either by a prince or by a republic. The prince must go in person and perform the office of captain himself; the republic has to send its citizens, and when it sends one who does not turn out to be a capable man, it must replace him, and when he is capable, restrain him by law so that he does not overstep the mark. And experience shows that princes on their own and armed republics make very great progress, while mercenary arms never do anything but harm. And a republic armed with its own arms falls under the sway of one of its citizens with more difficulty than one armed with foreign arms.

Rome and Sparta stood armed and free for many centuries. The Swiss are the most armed and the most free. Among ancient examples of mercenary arms there are the Carthaginians, who were almost overthrown by their mercenary soldiers after the end of the first war with the Romans, even though the Carthaginians had their own citizens as commanders. Philip of Macedon was made captain of the Thebans’ forces after the death of Epaminondas, and after the victory he took away their liberty.3 The Milanese, after the death of Duke Filippo, hired Francesco Sforza against the Venetians; and once he had defeated the enemy at Caravaggio, he joined with them to oppress the Milanese, his masters.4 His father Sforza, in the pay of Queen Giovanna of Naples, suddenly left her disarmed, so that to avoid losing her kingdom she was forced to throw herself into the arms of the king of Aragon.5 And if the Venetians and the Florentines have in the past increased their dominion with such arms, and their captains have not made themselves princes but have defended them, I answer that the Florentines in this case have been favored by luck; because of the able captains they had reason to fear, some did not win, some met opposition, and others turned their ambition elsewhere. The one who did not win was John Hawkwood,6 whose loyalty could not be known, since he did not win; but everyone will admit that if he had won, the Florentines would have been at his mercy. Sforza always had the followers of Braccio against him, so that each kept watch on the other. Francesco turned his ambition to Lombardy; Braccio turned his against the Church and the Kingdom of Naples. But let us come to what happened only a short time ago. The Florentines made Paolo Vitelli their captain, a very prudent man who had risen from private station to very great reputation. Had he taken Pisa, no one would deny that the Florentines would have had to stay with him; for if he had become the soldier of their enemies, they would have had no remedy, and if they kept him, they would have had to obey him. As for the Venetians, if we consider their progress, we will see that they acted securely and gloriously as long as they made war with their own men, which was before they turned their enterprises to the mainland. At sea, with their gentlemen and their armed common people, they fought with the greatest ability; but when they began to fight on land, they left this ability behind and followed the customs of the wars of Italy. At the beginning of their expansion on land, because they did not have much territory there and had a great reputation, they did not have much to fear from their captains; but as they expanded, which was under Carmagnola, they had a taste of this mistake.7 For they saw that he was very able, since they had beaten the Duke of Milan under his command; and they knew, on the other hand, that he had cooled toward the war. They judged that they could no longer win with him, because he did not want to win, and that they could not dismiss him, for fear of losing again what they had acquired; so to secure themselves against him they were forced to kill him. Since then they have had as their captains Bartolomeo da Bergamo, Roberto da San Severino, the count of Pitigliano, and the like, with whom what they had to fear was losing, not winning, as happened later at Vailà, where in a single day they lost what they had acquired with so much labor in eight hundred years.8 For from these arms come only slow, late, and feeble gains, and sudden and astonishing losses. And because these examples have brought me to Italy, which has been governed for many years by mercenary arms, I want to discuss them from further back, so that once their origin and progress have been seen, they can be better corrected.

You must understand, then, that as soon as the empire began to be driven out of Italy in recent times, and the pope gained more reputation there in temporal matters, Italy was divided into many states. For many of the large cities took up arms against their nobles, who, favored at first by the emperor, had held them in oppression, and the Church favored the cities so as to gain reputation in temporal affairs; in many other cities, their own citizens became princes. So Italy came almost entirely into the hands of the Church and of a few republics, and since those priests and those other citizens were not used to arms, they began to hire foreigners. The first to give this soldiery its reputation was Alberigo da Conio, from the Romagna.9 From his school came, among others, Braccio and Sforza, who in their time were the arbiters of Italy. After them came all the others who have commanded these arms down to our own times. And the result of their ability has been that Italy has been overrun by Charles, plundered by Louis, violated by Ferdinand, and insulted by the Swiss. The method they have followed has been, first, to take reputation away from the infantry in order to give it to themselves. They did this because, having no state and living by their profession, a few foot soldiers would not give them reputation, and they could not feed many; so they turned to cavalry, where with a manageable number they were fed and honored. And things were reduced to such a state that in an army of twenty thousand soldiers there were not two thousand infantry. Besides this, they had used every means to spare themselves and their soldiers fatigue and fear, not killing one another in their skirmishes but taking prisoners, and releasing them without ransom. They did not attack towns at night; those in the towns did not attack their tents; they made no stockade or ditch around their camp; they did not campaign in winter. And all these things were permitted by their military rules, devised by them, as I have said, to escape both fatigue and danger; so that they have brought Italy to slavery and disgrace.

Notes

  1. 1. That is, without a fight: the quartermasters of Charles VIII simply chalked the doors of the houses where his troops were to be billeted (1494). The phrase is attributed to Pope Alexander VI.

  2. 2. Savonarola, who preached that the French invasion was God’s punishment for the sins of Italy.

  3. 3. Machiavelli’s memory fails him here: Philip II of Macedon had lived in Thebes as a hostage in his youth, but he was never the Thebans’ hired captain. He defeated Thebes and Athens at Chaeronea in 338 BC.

  4. 4. After the death of Filippo Maria Visconti, the last Visconti duke (1447), Milan became a republic and hired Sforza; he beat the Venetians at Caravaggio in 1448, then changed sides and made himself duke in 1450.

  5. 5. Muzio Attendolo Sforza (1369–1424) abandoned Queen Giovanna II of Naples in 1420, and she adopted Alfonso V of Aragon as her heir.

  6. 6. Sir John Hawkwood (c. 1320–1394), an English mercenary captain who served Florence for many years. The Italian text has “Giovanni Aucut.”

  7. 7. Francesco Bussone, count of Carmagnola (c. 1385–1432), commanded the Venetian army against Milan; suspected of double dealing, he was tried and beheaded in Venice in 1432.

  8. 8. The battle of Vailà (Agnadello), May 14, 1509, in which the army of the League of Cambrai routed the Venetians.

  9. 9. Alberico da Barbiano, count of Cunio (c. 1348–1409), founder of the first great all-Italian mercenary company.