Turning from mercenary arms to the other sorts of military forces he has promised to discuss, Machiavelli keeps his sights on the Italian scene. “Auxiliary arms, which are the other useless ones, are when one calls on a powerful person who with his arms comes to help and defend you, as Pope Julius did in recent times,” he begins. Admitting that such arms may be useful, he nonetheless warns that they are almost always harmful: “For if they lose, you remain defeated, and if they win, you are left their prisoner.” In order to illustrate his point, Machiavelli coyly states that the ancient histories are full of examples, but he nonetheless refuses to leave the “fresh example” of Pope Julius. What ancient examples might he have in mind? As we shall see, even though he claims that he refuses to leave his “fresh example” and the contemporary Italian scene, in fact through the course of this chapter he will sketch a historical landscape stretching from King David and the ancient Israelites to Philip of Macedon to the fall of the Roman Empire to the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire during the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries to his own times. Relying on the arms of others rather than one’s own arms would appear to be another perennial issue of politics. As for the “fresh example” of Pope Julius, strangely enough it

does not prove Machiavelli’s point. The specific example he chooses is the culminating battle of the War of the Holy League, at which time Julius was allied with the Venetians and Ferdinand of Aragon, who provided most of the troops, against the French, with Julius’ aim being to recapture the cities in the Romagna which had gotten free of the domination of the Church after the death of Pope Alexander VI and fall of Cesare Borgia a decade earlier. The battle on which Machiavelli focuses is the Battle of Ravenna, fought on Easter Sunday 1512, in which the Spanish forces were severely defeated by the French, a crushing blow to Julius’ aims. Unexpectedly, however, the Swiss mercenaries Julius had hired were able to drive off the French, who had lost their commander in the battle, and who were facing an English invasion back in France and shortly afterward withdrew from Italy. Machiavelli states that Julius’ reliance on the arms of others “could not have been less considered,” and yet he did not suffer the consequences because of his “good fortune.” Given that he could have chosen numerous examples, ancient and modern, to prove his point, why does Machiavelli choose this one? We may get some help in answering this question by looking at his discussion of auxiliary arms in the Discourses on Livy (II.20), where Machiavelli refers his reader to his treatment of the subject in The Prince. For our purposes he helpfully remarks there: “If past things are read well and those of the present are reviewed, it will be found that for one who had a good end from [using auxiliary arms], infinite ones were left deceived by it” (II.20, 176). Similarly, in a letter written while he was following Pope Julius on his campaigns, in which he rehearses some of the themes that would later occupy him in The Prince, Machiavelli writes of the pontiff: “This pope, who has no scales or measuring stick in his house, obtains through chance-and disarmed-what ought to be difficult to attain even with organization and with weapons.”3 Perhaps Julius is the exception of success that proves the general rule of failure. Whatever the reasons for him choosing the apparently inapt example of Julius,

his choice does have the effect of continuing his argument about the ruin of Italy owing to reliance on mercenary and auxiliary arms and his focus on the role of the Church in this regard. To the “fresh example” of Julius he adds two more examples

from recent times, only one of which supports his argument, once again oddly enough. First, he points to the Florentines, who turned to French troops in their attempt to retake Pisa (in 1498) and ran the dangers of the French turning on them, which did not in fact occur. Second, he mentions how the emperor of Constantinople sent Turkish troops into Greece (in 1353-54), with those troops remaining there after the war was over and establishing the first Turkish settlement there. “This was the beginning of the servitude of Greece to the infidels,” he bluntly remarks, alluding to the growth of the Ottoman Empire in Greece and the Balkans and the eventual collapse of the Byzantine Empire with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Earlier, in chapter 3, when he adduced “the Turk” as a positive example of how to hold a new dominion by going to live there, Machiavelli used no such pejorative language about “the infidels” he now employs when looking at the same events from the perspective of the defeated. At any rate, we now finally have an example that more or less proves Machiavelli’s argument about the dangers of using auxiliary troops, although even here it must be admitted that the ultimate outcome in the case of the emperor of Constantinople employing the Turks as auxiliary arms took a full century to come to fruition. Are we meant to compare Machiavelli’s analysis in chapter 12 of the century-long process of the vulnerability of Italy due to its political division and the rise of the temporal power of the Church, or what might be said to be the successor to the Roman Empire in the west, to the century-long fall of the Byzantine Empire, the successor to the Roman Empire in the east, to the Turks? Once again, we have to puzzle over why Machiavelli would choose examples that do not persuasively prove his point. “Whoever, therefore, wants not to be able to win should avail

himself of these arms, since they are much more dangerous than mercenary arms,” Machiavelli now writes, with his “therefore” connecting this summary judgment to the preceding examples we have examined. He explains that auxiliary arms are more

dangerous than mercenary arms because they are already united and directed by someone and thus ready to be turned against you. “Awise prince, therefore, has always avoided these arms and relied on his own; and he has wanted rather to lose with his own men than to win with others, judging it a not true victory if it was acquired with the arms of others.” As we have anticipated, Machiavelli’s overarching point is that a prince should rely on his own arms rather than the arms of others, whether mercenary or auxiliary. In order to illustrate his main point he returns to the example

of Cesare Borgia: “I shall never hesitate to cite Cesare Borgia and his actions.” According to Machiavelli, Cesare began with auxiliary troops provided by the French, then turned to mercenary troops “since he judged there was less danger in them,” and then found these mercenary arms to be “doubtful and faithless and dangerous to manage,” and so finally “relied on his own.” Yet as we saw in Machiavelli’s account in chapter 7, Cesare in fact never succeeded in ridding himself of mercenary arms, so Machiavelli’s analysis here would seem at best to praise Cesare’s intentions rather than his actions.4 As proof of the improving situation of Cesare in going from auxiliary arms to mercenary arms to his own arms, Machiavelli cites Cesare’s growing “reputation.” “And one will find that his reputation always increased, and he was never esteemed so much as when everyone saw that he was completely in possession of his own arms.” Note that Machiavelli emphasizes Cesare’s “reputation” rather than the results of his actions, in keeping with his implicit praise of his intentions rather than his actions. If he begins his account here of Cesare Borgia by declaring, “I shall never hesitate” (Io non dubiterò mai …) to bring forward Cesare as an example, perhaps we are meant to doubt (dubitere = “hesitate” or “doubt”) whether he is an apt example. Yet again Machiavelli’s example does not fully support his argument. Machiavelli now takes a sudden turn: “I did not want to depart

from my examples, which are Italian and fresh, nevertheless, I do not want to leave out Hiero the Syracusan, since he was one of those who were named by me above.” In writing this Machiavelli simultaneously emphasizes that he has thus far kept his sights on recent Italian examples while nevertheless shifting his gaze to an ancient example. Perhaps his ancient example will be more to the

point. Machiavelli also reminds us that he named Hiero earlier, at the end of chapter 6, as an example of a new prince who rose to become “prince” of Syracuse through his own arms and virtue. He now gives us more information about how Hiero did so, relating that when he was made captain of the Syracusan forces he immediately saw that the mercenary military they were using was not useful, “because their commanders were made like our Italians,” Machiavelli writes in order to emphasize the parallel to his own times, and therefore “had them all cut to pieces, and afterward he made war with his own arms, and not those of others.” Unlike the case of Cesare Borgia, Hiero actually accomplished his goal and reigned successfully for over fifty years. Machiavelli’s implied comparison of the two is reminiscent of the way in which he juxtaposed Agathocles the Sicilian, who was similarly successful, to Liverotto de Fermo, who was not successful for very long, in chapter 8. At any rate, the comparison to Hiero is not flattering for Cesare Borgia. As if the successful example of Hiero were not enough,

Machiavelli now unexpectedly brings forth a wildly successful new prince: David. “I want also to recall to memory a figure of the Old Testament suited to his purpose,” he begins. The term “figure” (figura) means an example or parable that is called to memory as an exemplary case, or a “literary figure” of a kind, and the use of “figures” were common in sermons, for example in Savonarola’s frequent appeals to Moses in his sermons. Recall that Machiavelli characterized his treatment in chapter 6 of Moses and the other exemplary princes as a “speech” (parole), or something akin to a sermon. In the present chapter, then, it seems that Machiavelli is preaching a sermon with David as his “figure”: “When David offered himself to Saul to go to combat Goliath… .” In his version of the story, Machiavelli states that Saul first gave David his own arms, “in order to give David spirit,” but then David, having donned the arms, decided to refuse them, “saying that with those arms he could not acquit himself well, and for that reason he wanted to meet the enemy with his sling and his knife.” Machiavelli then concludes the sermon with a moral: “In the end, the arms of others fall off your back, or they weigh you down, or they constrict you.”