XVII. Cruelty and Mercy, and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved Than Feared, or the Reverse
Coming now to the other qualities mentioned above, I say that every prince should want to be held merciful and not cruel; nevertheless he must take care not to misuse this mercy. Cesare Borgia was held to be cruel; nevertheless that cruelty of his had restored order in the Romagna, united it, and brought it to peace and loyalty. If this is considered well, it will be seen that he was much more merciful than the Florentine people, who, to avoid a name for cruelty, allowed Pistoia to be destroyed.1 A prince, therefore, should not mind the infamy of cruelty in order to keep his subjects united and loyal; because with a very few examples he will be more merciful than those who, out of too much mercy, allow disorders to continue, from which come killings and robberies. For these usually harm a whole community, while the executions that come from the prince harm one individual. And of all princes, it is impossible for a new prince to escape a name for cruelty, because new states are full of dangers. And Virgil, through the mouth of Dido, says:
Harsh necessity and the newness of my kingdom force me
to do such things, and to guard my borders far and wide.2
Nevertheless he should be slow to believe and to act, and should not make himself afraid of shadows, and should proceed in a temperate way, with prudence and humanity, so that too much confidence does not make him careless and too much distrust does not make him intolerable.
From this a dispute arises: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if you have to do without one of the two. For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, feigners and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. As long as you do them good, they are all yours; they offer you their blood, their property, their lives, and their children, as I said above, when the need is far off; but when it comes near you, they turn away. And the prince who has relied entirely on their words, finding himself stripped of other preparations, is ruined. For friendships acquired with a price, and not with greatness and nobility of spirit, are paid for but not possessed, and when the time comes they cannot be spent. And men have less hesitation in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a bond of obligation which, because men are wretched creatures, is broken at every opportunity for their own advantage, but fear is held by a dread of punishment that never leaves you. Nevertheless the prince should make himself feared in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because being feared and not hated can very well go together. He will always manage this if he keeps his hands off the property of his citizens and his subjects, and off their women. And when he does need to proceed against someone’s life, he should do it when there is proper justification and a manifest cause. But above all he should keep his hands off the property of others, because men forget the death of their father more quickly than the loss of their patrimony. Besides, reasons for taking property are never lacking, and whoever begins to live by plunder always finds reasons for seizing what belongs to others; while reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are rarer and run out sooner.
But when the prince is with his armies and has a multitude of soldiers under his command, then it is absolutely necessary not to mind a name for cruelty, because without it no army was ever kept united or fit for any action. Among the admirable actions of Hannibal is counted this one: that having a very large army, made up of countless kinds of men, which he had led to fight in foreign lands, no dissension ever arose in it, either among themselves or against their prince, in bad fortune as well as in good. This could not have come from anything but his inhuman cruelty, which, together with his countless abilities, always made him venerated and terrible in the sight of his soldiers; and without it his other abilities would not have been enough to produce that effect. And the writers, with little consideration, on the one hand admire this achievement of his and on the other condemn its principal cause. And that it is true that his other abilities would not have been enough can be seen in Scipio, a most extraordinary man not only in his own times but in all the memory of things we know, whose armies rebelled against him in Spain. This came from nothing but his excessive mercy, which had given his soldiers more license than befits military discipline. For this he was reproached in the Senate by Fabius Maximus, and called by him the corrupter of the Roman soldiery. The Locrians, having been destroyed by one of Scipio’s legates, were not avenged by him, nor was that legate’s insolence corrected, all of which came from his easygoing nature; so that someone in the Senate, wanting to excuse him, said that there were many men who knew better how not to err than how to correct errors.3 This nature would in time have spoiled the fame and glory of Scipio had he persisted in it while in command; but since he lived under the government of the Senate, this harmful quality of his was not only hidden but brought him glory.
I conclude, then, returning to being feared and loved, that since men love at their own pleasure and fear at the pleasure of the prince, a wise prince should build on what is his own, not on what is another’s. He must only contrive to avoid hatred, as has been said.
Notes
1. In 1501–2 Florence, which ruled Pistoia, failed to put down the feud between the Panciatichi and Cancellieri factions there, and the city was devastated.
2. Virgil, Aeneid 1.563–64: Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt / moliri, et late fines custode tueri.
3. Scipio’s troops mutinied at Sucro in Spain in 206 BC. In 205 BC his legate Pleminius plundered Locri in southern Italy. Livy reports both episodes and the debate in the Senate (28.24–29; 29.8–22).