Such an intense vehemence of tone stands in need of some explanation, especially in view of the fact that most historians have concluded that the mercenary system usually worked quite effectively. One possibility is that Machiavelli was simply following a literary tradition at this point. The contention that true citizenship involves the bearing of arms had been emphasized by Livy and Polybius as well as Aristotle, and taken over by several generations of Florentine humanists after Leonardo Bruni and his disciples had revived the argument. It would be very unusual, however, for Machiavelli to follow even his most cherished authorities in such a slavish way. It seems more likely that, although he mounts a general attack on hired soldiers, he may have been thinking in particular about the misfortunes of his native city, which undoubtedly suffered a series of humiliations at the hands of its mercenary commanders in the course of the protracted war against Pisa. Not only was the campaign of 1500 a complete disaster, but a similar fiasco resulted when Florence launched a fresh offensive in 1505: the captains of ten mercenary companies mutinied as soon as the assault began, and within a week it had to be abandoned.
As we have seen, Machiavelli had been shocked to discover, at the time of the 1500 débâcle, that the French regarded the Florentines with derision because of their military incompetence, and especially because of their inability to reduce Pisa to obedience. After the renewed failure of 1505, he took the matter into his own hands and drew up a detailed plan for the replacement of Florence’s hired troops with a citizen militia. The great council provisionally accepted the idea in December 1505, and Machiavelli was authorized to begin recruiting. By the following February he was ready to hold his first parade in the city, an occasion watched with great admiration by the diarist Luca Landucci, who recorded that ‘this was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence’.[4] During the summer of 1506 Machiavelli wrote A Provision for Infantry, emphasizing ‘how little hope it is possible to place in foreign and hired arms’, and arguing that the city ought instead to be ‘armed with her own weapons and with her own men’ (3). By the end of the year, the great council was finally convinced. A new government committee — the Nine of the Militia — was set up, Machiavelli was elected its secretary, and one of the most cherished ideals of Florentine humanism became a reality.
One might have supposed that Machiavelli’s ardour for his militia-men would have cooled as a result of their disastrous showing in 1512, when they were sent to defend Prato and were effortlessly brushed aside by the advancing Spanish infantry. But in fact his enthusiasm remained undimmed. A year later, we find him assuring the Medici at the end of The Prince that what they must be sure to do ‘above all else’ is to equip Florence with her own armies (90). When he published his Art of War in 1521 — his only treatise on statecraft to be printed during his lifetime — he continued to reiterate the same arguments. The whole of Book I is given over to vindicating ‘the method of the citizen army’ against those who have doubted its usefulness (580). Machiavelli allows, of course, that such troops are far from invincible, but he still insists on their superiority over any other type of force (585). He concludes with the extravagant assertion that to speak of a wise man finding fault with the idea of a citizen army is simply to utter a contradiction (583).
We can now understand why Machiavelli felt so impressed by Cesare Borgia as a military commander, and asserted in The Prince that no better precepts could be offered to a new ruler than the example of the duke’s conduct (23). For Machiavelli had been present, as we have seen, when the duke made the ruthless decision to eliminate his mercenary lieutenants and replace them with his own troops. This daring strategy appears to have had a decisive impact on the formation of Machiavelli’s ideas. He reverts to it as soon as he raises the question of military policy in chapter 13 of The Prince, treating it as an exemplary illustration of the measures that any new ruler ought to adopt. Borgia is first of all praised for having recognized without hesitation that mercenary leaders are dangerously disloyal and deserve to be mercilessly destroyed. And he is even more fulsomely commended for having grasped the basic lesson that any new prince needs to learn if he wishes to maintain his state: he must stop relying on Fortune and foreign arms, raise soldiers of his own, and make himself ‘complete master of his own forces’ (25–6, 49).
Arms and the man: these are Machiavelli’s two great themes in The Prince. The other lesson he accordingly wishes to bring home to the rulers of his age is that, in addition to having a sound army, a prince who aims to scale the heights of glory must cultivate the right qualities of princely leadership. The nature of these qualities had already been influentially analysed by the Roman moralists. They had argued in the first place that all great leaders need to some extent to be fortunate. For unless Fortune happens to smile, no amount of unaided human effort can hope to bring us to our highest goals. As we have seen, however, they also maintained that a special range of characteristics — those of the vir — tend to attract the favourable attentions of Fortune, and in this way almost guarantee us the attainment of honour, glory and fame. The assumptions underlying this belief are best summarized by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations. He declares that, if we act from a thirst for virtus without any thought of winning glory as a result, this will give us the best chance of winning glory as well, provided that Fortune smiles; for glory is virtus rewarded (I.38.91).
This analysis was taken over without alteration by the humanists of Renaissance Italy. By the end of the fifteenth century, an extensive genre of humanist advice books for princes had grown up, and had begun to reach an unprecedentedly wide audience through the new medium of print. Such distinguished writers as Bartolomeo Sacchi, Giovanni Pontano, and Francesco Patrizi all wrote treatises for the guidance of new rulers, all of which were founded on the same basic principle: that the possession of virtus is the key to princely success. As Pontano rather grandly proclaims in his tract on The Prince, any ruler who wishes to attain his noblest ends ‘must rouse himself to follow the dictates of virtus’ in all his public acts. Virtus is ‘the most splendid thing in the world’, more magnificent even than the sun, for ‘the blind cannot see the sun’ whereas ‘even they can see virtus as plainly as possible’.[5]
Machiavelli reiterates precisely the same beliefs about the relations between virtú, Fortune, and the achievement of princely goals. He first makes these humanist allegiances clear in chapter 6 of The Prince, in which he argues that ‘in a completely new principality, where there is a new ruler, the difficulty he will have in maintaining it’ will depend basically on whether he is ‘more or less virtuoso’ (19). This is later corroborated in chapter 24, the aim of which is to explain ‘Why the rulers of Italy have lost their states’ (83). Machiavelli insists that they should not blame Fortune for their disgrace, because ‘she only shows her power’ when men of virtú are not prepared to resist her (84, 85). Their losses are simply due to their failure to recognize that the only ‘effective, certain and lasting’ defences are those based on your own virtú (84). The role of virtú is again underlined in chapter 26, the impassioned ‘Exhortation’ to liberate Italy that brings The Prince to an end. At this point Machiavelli reverts to the incomparable leaders praised in chapter 6 for their ‘outstanding virtú’ — Moses, Cyrus, and Theseus (20). He implies that nothing less than a union of their astonishing abilities with the greatest good Fortune will enable Italy to be saved. And he adds — in an uncharacteristic moment of flattery — that the glorious family of the Medici luckily possess all the requisite qualities: they have tremendous virtú; they are immensely favoured by Fortune; and they are no less ‘favoured by God and by the Church’ (88).
4
Luca Landucci,
5
Giovanni Pontano, ‘De principe’ in