# CHAPTER 11 — It Is Not a Prudent Policy to Form a Relationship With a Prince Who Has More Prestige Than Power

In his wish to demonstrate the error of the Sidicini in trusting the assistance of the Campanians and the error of the Campanians in believing that they could defend the Sidicini, Livy could not have employed more lively words than by saying: ‘The Campanians had brought a reputation rather than actual strength to protect their allies.’ * In this regard, it should be noted that alliances concluded with princes who possess neither the ability to assist you because of their distance from you, nor the power to do so on account of their poor organization, or for some other cause, offer more fame than real assistance to those who entrust themselves to them; this happened in our times to the Florentines when, in 1479, the pope and the king of Naples attacked them, because, as allies of the king of France, they derived from that relationship ‘a reputation rather than actual strength’; * this would happen as well to any prince who, having placed his trust in Maximilian the emperor, * would engage in some enterprise, for this is one of those relationships that would offer to the one who makes it ‘a reputation rather than actual strength’, just as Livy says in this passage the alliance with the Capuans offered to the Sidicini. *

The Capuans, therefore, erred in this matter by assuming that they possessed greater forces than they had. Thus, the small measure of prudence possessed by men is such that, not knowing how or not being able to defend themselves, they sometimes wish to engage in the enterprise of defending others; the Taren-tines once did this by sending ambassadors to the Roman consul, while the Roman armies were marching against the Samnites, to inform him that they desired peace between those two peoples and that they were disposed to wage war upon the party that rejected peace, so that the consul, amused by this proposal, sounded the battle-cry and ordered his army to confront the enemy in the presence of the said ambassadors, demonstrating to the Tarentines with his actions and not with words the reply they deserved. After having discussed in the present chapter the poor decisions that princes make in the defence of others, I should like in the following chapter to speak of the decisions they make in their own defence.