# CHAPTER 24 — Fortresses Are Generally Much More Harmful Than Useful

To the wise men of our times, it will perhaps seem a matter not well considered that the Romans, in their desire to secure themselves from the peoples of Latium and the city of Privernum, did not think of building fortresses, which would have served as a check to keep those peoples faithful, especially given the existence of a saying in Florence, cited by our own wise men, * that Pisa and other cities like it must be held with fortresses. And truly, if the Romans had been made like these Florentines they would have thought about building fortresses, but because they possessed a different kind of ability, a different kind of judgement, and a different kind of power, they did not build them. While Rome lived in freedom and maintained her institutions and her virtuous laws, she never built fortresses in order to hold either cities or provinces, but she did conserve some of those already built. Hence, seeing how the Romans conducted themselves in this matter and how the rulers of our times have acted, I should like to consider whether building fortresses is a good idea and whether they bring harm or advantage to those who construct them.

It should, then, be considered whether fortresses are constructed to defend against one’s enemy or against one’s subjects. In the first case they are not necessary, in the second they are harmful. And beginning with the reasons why in the second case they are harmful, I would say that where a principality or a republic fears its subjects and the possibility of their rebellion, such a fear must arise first of all from the hatred that its subjects harbour for it, hatred for its evil conduct; this evil conduct arises either from the belief that it can hold its subjects with force, or from the lack of prudence of the one who governs them. One of the things that makes him believe he can then rule them by force is having fortresses nearby, because the bad treatment causing their hatred derives in good measure from the fact that such a ruler or such a republic possesses fortresses, which, when this is true, are far more harmful than useful. For in the first place, as was mentioned, they make you more bold and violent toward your subjects, and then they fail to give you the security within, which you were convinced would exist, since all the forces and all the violence used to hold a people are worth nothing, with two exceptions: either you must always put a good army in the field, as the Romans did, or you disperse, destroy, disorganize, and disunite the people in such a way that they cannot unite to harm you. Thus, if you impoverish them, ‘to those despoiled, arms remain’; * if you disarm them, ‘anger supplies weapons’; * if you kill their leaders and continue to injure the others, these leaders will be reborn like heads of the Hydra; if you build fortresses, they will be useless in peacetime, because they make you more inclined to mistreat your subjects, but in times of war they are completely useless, because they are assaulted both by the enemy and by your subjects, nor is it possible to offer resistance to both one and the other. And if fortresses ever were useless, they are especially so in our own times against artillery, the destructive power of which makes small locations, where it is impractical to retreat behind embankments, impossible to defend, as was discussed earlier.

I should like to discuss this matter in greater detail. Either you, prince, desire to hold in check the people of your own city or you, prince or republic, wish to hold in check a city seized through warfare. I now wish to turn to the prince and declare to him that such a fortress cannot be more useless to hold one’s citizens in check, for the reasons cited above, because they make you more ready and less hesitant to oppress your subjects, and this oppression makes them so disposed to seek your ruin that it inflames them to the degree that such a fortress, which is the cause of all this, can no longer defend you. Hence, in order to maintain his reputation, a wise and good prince will never build a fortress, to avoid giving his sons either a reason or the temerity to become wicked, and to make them rely not upon their fortresses but upon the goodwill of their people. And if Count Francesco Sforza, * who became duke of Milan, was reputed to be a wise man and none the less constructed a fortress in Milan, let me say that in this respect he was not wise, and the result of such a fortress has demonstrated that it has brought harm rather than security to his heirs. * Because, thinking that by means of this fortress they could live securely and would be able to offend their citizens and their subjects, they spared their subjects no kind of violence, making themselves so despised that they lost their state when the enemy first attacked them; nor did that fortress protect them or prove useful in war, and in peace it did them great harm, because had they not possessed it and, through a lack of prudence, treated their citizens harshly, they would all the sooner have discovered this danger and might well have restrained themselves; and they would have then been able to resist with greater courage the French onslaught with their subjects as friends and without a fortress, rather than with a fortress and all their subjects as enemies. Fortresses are of no use to you whatsoever, because you lose them either through the treachery of those who guard them or the violence of those who attack them, or through starvation. If you wish them to be useful to you and to help you regain a government that you have lost, where only the fortress remains in your hands, you need an army with which you can attack the person who has driven you out, and when you possess this army you will regain the state in one way or another, just as if the fortress did not exist, and you will do it much more easily, since men will be friendlier to you than they were after you treated them badly because of the pride you took in your fortress. Experience has shown that this fortress in Milan has in no way benefited either the Sforza family or the French in adverse times; on the contrary, it has brought much harm and damage to them all, since with the presence of this fortress they have not thought about a more honourable method of holding on to that state.

Guidobaldo, duke of Urbino and the son of Federigo, who was in his day a greatly esteemed military leader, was chased out of his state by Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI; later, after an unforeseen incident, Guidobaldo returned there, and he had all the fortresses in that province destroyed, judging them harmful. Because he was loved by his people, he did not need fortresses to protect himself, and he saw that he could not defend them against the enemy, since they required an army in the field to defend them; thus, he chose to destroy them. * After having driven the Bentivoglio family from Bologna, Pope Julius II constructed a fortress in that city, and then allowed one of his governors to brutalize that people. As a result the Bolognese rebelled, and the pope immediately lost the fortress, and it therefore served no good purpose and did him harm, whereas had he acted differently it would have been useful to him. * Niccolò da Castello, the father of the Vitelli, upon returning to his homeland from which he had been exiled, immediately dismantled two fortresses that Pope Sixtus IV had built there, judging that not a fortress but, rather, the goodwill of his people would have to maintain him in that state. *

But of all the other examples, the freshest and most notable in every regard, and the one most likely to demonstrate the use-lessness of constructing fortresses and the usefulness of tearing them down, is what happened in Genoa in recent times. Everyone knows that Genoa rebelled in 1507 against King Louis XII of France, who personally came with all his troops to reconquer the city, and once he had retaken it he built a fortress, which was stronger than all of those we know about up to the present day, because its location and every other detail made it impregnable, situated as it was atop some hills extending toward the sea, called Codefà by the people of Genoa; and with it he dominated the entire port and a large part of the city of Genoa. Then, in 1512 when the French troops were driven out of Italy, Genoa, notwithstanding the fortress, rebelled and the state was seized by that Ottaviano Fregoso, who with great effort, at the end of sixteen months, took the fortress by means of starvation. Everyone thought (and many advised) that he should preserve the fortress as a refuge for any emergency, but being a most prudent man and recognizing that it is not fortresses but, rather, the will of the people that maintains rulers in their position of power, he destroyed it. Thus, without basing his power upon the fortress but upon his own exceptional ability and prudence, he has held and still holds it, and whereas to change the government of Genoa it was once enough to employ a thousand foot soldiers, his adversaries have attacked him with ten thousand and have not been able to do him harm. It is obvious, therefore, from this example that tearing down the fortress has done no harm to Ottaviano and that constructing one did not protect the king, for when the king was able to come into Italy with an army, he was able to recover Genoa without having a fortress, but when he was unable to come into Italy with an army, he could not hold Genoa even while having one there. It was, then, expensive for the king to build it and shameful for him to lose it, while for Ottaviano, reacquiring it was glorious, and destroying it was useful.

But let us come to republics that build fortresses not in their homeland but in lands that they conquer. To demonstrate the fallacy of relying on fortresses, if the example we have cited of France and Genoa is not enough, I believe that of Florence and Pisa will suffice; the Florentines, in this case, built fortresses to hold that city, not realizing that in a city to which the very name of Florence had always been inimical, which had lived in freedom, and which had in that freedom a reason to rebel, it was necessary, if one wished to hold it, to follow the Roman method: either make it your ally or destroy it. The merit of fortresses is shown by what happened upon the arrival of King Charles, to whom they were given up either because of the treachery of those who defended them or fear of greater harm; if the fortresses had not existed there, the Florentines would not have based their capability to hold Pisa upon them, and that king would not have been able in that way to deprive Florence of that city; and the methods by which Florence held Pisa until that time would have perhaps been sufficient to save it, and without doubt they would have given no worse an account of themselves than with the fortresses.

Let me conclude, therefore, that to hold one’s own native city, a fortress is harmful, and for holding cities that have been acquired, fortresses are useless. As for me, I want the authority of the Romans to suffice, for in the cities they wished to hold with force, they tore down walls instead of building them. To anyone who would cite contrary to this opinion the example of Tarentum * in ancient times or that of Brescia in the present day, places which were recaptured by means of fortresses after a rebellion of their subjects, I would reply that for the recovery of Tarentum, Fabius Maximus was sent at the beginning of a year with an entire army, which would have been enough to regain the city even if no fortress had existed there; and even though Fabius employed this method, had it not existed, he would have used another means which would have produced the same result. I do not know of what use a fortress is if, in the retaking of a city, you need a consular army and a Fabius Maximus as general in order to do so. That the Romans would have captured the city in one way or another can be seen from the example of Capua, * where there was no fortress and which was recaptured through the army’s exceptional skill. But let us turn to Brescia. * Let me say that what happened in that rebellion rarely happens: that is, the fortress remains in your hands after the city has rebelled, and you have a large army close by like the one the French had, for when Monseigneur de Foix, the king’s general, had heard about the loss of Brescia while in Bologna with his troops, without delay he went there directly; and arriving in three days, he retook the city using the fortress. Still, to serve any useful purpose, the fortress needed a Monseigneur de Foix and a French army to come to its assistance within three days. Certainly, this example as compared to the contrary ones does not really suffice, because in the wars of our times, many fortresses have been taken and retaken with the same kind of fortune with which the countryside has been captured and recaptured, not only in Lombardy but also in Romagna, in the kingdom of Naples, and throughout Italy.

But with respect to building fortresses to defend yourselves from foreign enemies, I must say that they are unnecessary for those peoples and kingdoms that have good armies, and for those that do not have good armies they are useless, because good armies without fortresses are sufficient to defend themselves, while fortresses without good armies cannot defend you. This is seen through the experience of those who have been considered excellent in governmental affairs and in other matters as well, such as the Romans and the Spartans: if the Romans did not build fortresses, the Spartans not only abstained from doing so but also did not permit their city to have walls, because they wanted the exceptional ability of the individual man, and no other type of defence, to protect them. Hence, when a Spartan was asked by an Athenian if the walls of Athens seemed beautiful to him, he replied: ‘Yes, if there were only women living there.’ * That prince who has good armies will sometimes, therefore, find fortresses on the coasts and borders of his state useful in holding back the enemy for a few days until he has put things in order, but they are not essential. Furthermore, when a prince lacks a good army, possessing fortresses in his state or on his borders is either harmful or useless to him: they are harmful, because he can easily lose them, and losing them, they can be used to make war against him, or even if they are so strong that the enemy is unable to occupy them, they are left behind the enemy army and come to be of no use, because good armies, when they meet no strong resistance, enter enemy territory without respect to the cities or fortresses they may leave behind, as we can see in ancient histories and in the actions of Francesco Maria, * who in recent times in order to attack Urbino left behind ten enemy cities without concern.

That prince, therefore, who can create a good army can do so without building fortresses; the prince who lacks a good army must not build them. He must carefully fortify the city in which he lives and keep it supplied and its citizens well disposed, in order to hold back the enemy attack long enough to free himself either through an agreement or through outside help. All other plans are expensive in peacetime and useless in times of war. Thus, anyone who will consider everything I have said will recognize that the Romans, so wise in every other institution, were also prudent in their judgement concerning the Latins and the Privernates; giving no thought to building fortresses in this situation, they ensured their own security with more skilful and wiser methods.