My Library

less effective army, you’ll have to turn to mercenary forces, which will have all the failings I discussed earlier. And even if your mercenaries are good, they’ll never be good enough to defend you against powerful enemies and a hostile people. So, as I said, a new ruler in a newly constituted state has always armed his subjects. History offers endless examples. But when a ruler acquires a new territory to add like an extra limb to an existing state, then he must disarm its people, except for the men who supported him when he took it. But with time and opportunity even those men should be kept weak and emasculated so that all the real armed force in the state as a whole resides with your own soldiers who live with you in your home base. Generations ago, the experts in Florence used to say that you had to hold Pistoia by playing on its factions and Pisa by holding its fortresses. So they encouraged factionalism in some of the towns they held, the better to control them. In times when there was a certain balance between opposing parties in Italy this was probably an effective policy, but I don’t think we should take it as a rule today. I don’t think factional divisions ever really improved the situation. On the contrary, when an enemy approaches, a subject town that’s divided in factions will fall at once. The weaker of the factions will always join forces with the attacker and the other faction won’t be strong enough to beat them both. The Venetians were reasoning along the same lines, I believe, when they fomented divisions between Guelphs and Ghibellines in the towns they held; they didn’t let the factions get as far as bloodshed but encouraged divergences so that people would be too busy with their own disputes to unite against Venice. It wasn’t, as things turned out, a successful policy. After the Venetians’ defeat at Vailà, one or other of the factions immediately took courage and seized control of the various towns. This kind of policy actually indicates weakness on a ruler’s part; in a healthy, confident state such