Among other examples of bringing in “barbarian” powers, Machiavelli refers to the very French invasions he analyzed in chapter 3 when dissecting Louis XII’s failure to conquer Italy, an invasion to which he points in the present chapter as the occasion that allowed the Church to increase its temporal power. When discussing chapter 3, I suggested that Machiavelli’s seemingly unpatriotic advice about how to conquer Italy could be seen as a recipe for how to unite Italy, and now we see that the temporal power of the Church is a major obstacle to such unification. What remedy to this problem might Machiavelli be contemplating?8