# CHAPTER 30 — Truly Powerful Republics and Princes Do Not Buy Friendships With Money But, Rather, With Their Exceptional Skill and the Reputation of Their Forces

The Romans were besieged in the Capitol, and although they were expecting help from Veii and Camillus, driven by hunger, they came to an agreement with the Gauls to ransom themselves for a certain quantity of gold, and while the gold was being weighed out according to this pact, Camillus arrived with his army; fortune brought this about, says the historian, so that the Romans would not ‘owe their lives to a cash payment’. * This is worth noting not only in this case but also in the series of actions taken by the republic, where it can be seen that the Romans never acquired territory with money, never made peace with money, but always did so with their exceptional skill at arms, something I do not believe ever to have occurred in any other republic. Among the other signs through which the power of a strong state is recognized is the manner in which it lives with its neighbours. When it governs itself in such a way that its neighbours are its tributaries in order to keep it friendly, this is a sure sign that such a state is powerful, but when these neighbours, even while inferior to it, take money from it, then this is a significant sign of its weakness.

Read all the Roman histories, and you will see that the Massilienses, the Aedui, the Rhodians, Hiero of Syracuse, kings Eumenes and Masinissa, who all lived near the confines of the Roman empire, competed with payments and tributes to Rome’s needs to gain her friendship, seeking nothing else from her but to be defended. The opposite is seen in weak states. Beginning with our state of Florence, in times past when her reputation was greatest there was not a single lord in Romagna who did not receive some payment from her, and besides, she gave money to the Perugians, the inhabitants of Città di Castello, and to all her other neighbours. If this city had been armed and bold, everything would have gone in the opposite direction, for many cities would have given money to her in order to have her protection, and would have sought not to sell their own friendship but to purchase hers. Nor did the Florentines live alone in this cowardice, but also the Venetians and the king of France, who, with such a great kingdom, lives as a tributary of the Swiss and the king of England. All this arises from the fact that this king disarmed his peoples and from the fact that he and the others mentioned above have preferred to enjoy the immediate benefit of being able to plunder their people and to avoid imaginary and unreal danger, rather than to accomplish things that would make them secure and their states happy in perpetuity. This disorder, even when it creates some tranquillity, is necessarily the cause, with the passage of time, of damage and irremediable ruin. It would take far too long to recount how many times the Florentines, the Venetians, and that kingdom of France have bought themselves out of a war and how often they have exposed themselves to a disgrace to which the Romans were on the point of exposing themselves only a single time. It would take too long to recount how many cities the Florentines and the Venetians have bought off; disorder was later seen in them, and it was evident that those things acquired with gold cannot be defended with steel. The Romans observed this proud conduct and this way of life as long as they lived in liberty, but later, when they came under the rule of emperors and the emperors began to be evil and to love the shade more than the sun, the Romans also began to buy themselves off from the Parthians, then from the Germans, and then from other nearby peoples, and this was the beginning of the ruin of so great an empire.

Similar disadvantages arise, then, from having disarmed your peoples; from this arises another, even greater disadvantage, for the nearer the enemy comes to you, the weaker he will find you. Anyone who lives in the ways outlined above treats the subjects inside his dominion badly and those who live on its borders well, in order to have men strongly disposed to keeping the enemy at a distance. As a consequence, in order to keep the enemy further off he makes payments to those rulers and peoples living near his borders. Hence, states of this kind put up very little resistance on their borders, but when the enemy passes nearby they have no remedy whatsoever, and they do not realize that their mode of conduct is contrary to every good institution. Accordingly, the heart and the vital organs of a body, and not its extremities, have to be kept armed, since without the latter the body is alive, but if the former are harmed it dies; and these states keep the heart disarmed while arming the hands and feet.

What this disorder has brought about in Florence has been seen and can still be seen every day, because whenever an army crosses the borders and comes near to its heart, it has no other remedy left. A few years ago * the same thing was true of the Venetians, and if their city were not surrounded by water, it would have seen its end. This experience is not so commonly seen in France, which is such a large kingdom that it has few enemies that are superior to it in number; none the less, when the English attacked that kingdom in 1513 * the entire country trembled, and the king himself and everyone else thought that a single defeat could take the kingdom and the state from him. Exactly the opposite happened to the Romans, for the nearer the enemy came to Rome, the more powerful he found that city in resisting him. This is evident in Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, because after three defeats and so many dead commanders and soldiers, the Romans were not only able to hold out against the enemy but to win the war. This arose from the fact that they had armed their heart well and paid less attention to the extremities. Thus, the foundation of their state was the people of Rome, the Latin nation, the other allied cities in Italy, and their colonies, from which they drew so many soldiers that with them they were able to fight and to hold on to the entire world. The truth of this is obvious in the question that Hanno, the Carthaginian, asked the emissaries of Hannibal after the defeat of Cannae, for after they had glorified Hannibal’s deeds, they were asked by Hanno if anyone from the Roman people had come to sue for peace and if any among the Latin nations or the colonies had rebelled against the Romans, and when they replied in the negative to both these questions, Hanno declared: ‘This war is still as undecided as it was before.’ *

Both this discourse and what we have said elsewhere many times before show how greatly the mode of conduct in republics of the present differs from that in republics of ancient times. Thus, we see miraculous losses and miraculous gains every day, because when men possess little of that exceptional ability, fortune shows her power all the more; and because fortune is changeable, republics and states often change, and they will continue to change until someone rises up who is so devoted to antiquity that he will regulate fortune in such a way that she will have no cause to demonstrate, with every revolution of the sun, how powerful she can be.