# CHAPTER 44 — That One Often Obtains Through Impetuosity and Audacity What Would Never Be Obtained Through Ordinary Methods

Attacked by Rome’s army and unable to remain in the field with their own army facing up to the Romans, the Samnites decided to leave the towns in Samnium guarded and to pass with their entire army into Etruria, which was in a state of truce with the Romans; and to see, with this movement, whether they might be able, with the presence of their army, to induce the Etruscans once again to take up arms, something they had refused to do for the Samnite ambassadors. In the speeches the Samnites delivered to the Etruscans, especially in demonstrating to them what had induced them to take up arms, they used a noteworthy expression in declaring that ‘peace with servitude was harder to bear than war with liberty’. * And so, partly by their arguments and partly by the presence of their army, they persuaded the Etruscans once again to take up arms. Here, it is to be noted that when a prince desires to obtain something from someone else, he must, if the occasion permits, avoid giving him time to think it over and act in such a way that he will see the necessity of a prompt decision, which occurs when the person asked realizes that refusing or deferring will result in an immediate and dangerous provocation.

It can be seen that this expedient was well used in our own times by Pope Julius II with the French and by Monsieur de Foix, general of the king of France, with the marquis of Mantua: Pope Julius wished to drive the Bentivogli family out of Bologna and decided that to do this, it would be necessary for French and Venetian forces to remain neutral, and having approached both of them, receiving from both an ambiguous and vacillating response, he decided to force them both to join in his decision by not giving them any time. Once he left Rome with as many troops as he could scrape together, he marched toward Bologna; he sent a message to the Venetians telling them to remain neutral, and one to the French telling them to send troops. In this way, both were constrained by the small period of time, and seeing that deferring or negating his request would result in a very obvious provocation of the pope, they both gave in to his wishes; the king sent reinforcements and the Venetians remained neutral.

Again, Monsieur de Foix, who was with his army in Bologna when he learned about the rebellion in Brescia and decided to go and retake the city, had two paths, one through the territory of the king, which was long and tedious, and the other short but through the territory of Mantua; not only did he need to pass through that marquis’s territory, but he was obliged to go through certain passages between swamps and lakes, of which that region is full, which were blocked off by fortresses and other devices and guarded by the marquis. As a result, once de Foix decided to go by the shortest path and to overcome every difficulty, without giving the marquis the time to deliberate, in an instant, he set his troops down that path and again asked the marquis to send him his permission to pass through. Thus, constrained by this sudden decision, the marquis sent him the permission, which he would never have done had de Foix acted more cautiously, since the marquis was in league with the pope and the Venetians, and since one of his sons was in the hands of the pope, all matters which gave him many honest excuses to refuse the request. But assailed by this sudden decision, for the reasons explained above, he conceded. The Etruscans dealt with the Samnites in the same way when, in the presence of the Sam-nite army, they took up arms, which they had refused to do on other occasions.