# CHAPTER 18 — Nothing Is More Worthy of a Commander Than to Anticipate the Decisions of the Enemy

Epaminondas the Theban used to say that nothing was more necessary and more useful to a commander than having some knowledge of the deliberations and decisions of the enemy. Since such knowledge is difficult to obtain, the commander deserves even more praise when he does so by speculation. It is not as difficult to understand the enemy’s plans as it is sometimes difficult to understand his actions, and not so much the actions carried out by him some distance away but, rather, those which are present and nearby. Accordingly, it has happened many times that when a battle has lasted into the night, the victor believes he has lost and the vanquished thinks he has won. This kind of error has brought about decisions contrary to the well-being of the person who made them; this occurred to Brutus and Cassius, who by virtue of such an error lost the war, because after Brutus had won on his wing, Cassius believed that he had lost and that the entire army was routed; and in despair over this misjudgement of the situation, he killed himself. * In our own times, in the battle that Francis, king of France, fought in Lombardy at Santa Cecilia with the Swiss, the part of the Swiss army that remained intact thought they had won when night fell, unaware that their fellow-soldiers had been routed and killed; this error made them fail to save themselves, since to their great disadvantage they waited to fight again the next morning; this mistake also caused the army of the pope and Spain to commit another error, and because of it they were on the verge of ruin, for after false news of the Swiss victory, they crossed the Po River, and if they had proceeded too far forward they would have remained prisoners of the French who were victorious. *

This same mistake happened in Roman camps and in those of the Aequi; * Sempronius the consul had marched with his army to face the enemy, and once he had initiated the battle, the two armies struggled until evening with changing fortunes on both sides. When night came, since both armies were half destroyed, neither one returned to its camp; on the contrary, each army withdrew into the nearby hills, where it thought it would be more secure; and the Roman army divided itself into two parts: one went with the consul, and the other went with a certain centurion named Tempanius, through whose skill the Roman army that day had not been entirely destroyed. When morning came, the Roman consul, without learning anything further about the enemy, drew back towards Rome; the army of the Aequi did likewise, because each side thought the enemy had won, and each, therefore, withdrew, caring very little about leaving behind their camps as spoils of war. It happened that while Tempanius, who was with the rest of the Roman army, was also retreating, he learned from some wounded Aequi that their commanders had departed and had abandoned their camps. Hence, upon hearing this news, Tempanius marched into the Roman camps and saved them, then sacked the camps of the Aequi, and returned to Rome victorious. This victory, it is evident, was only a matter of who among them was first to understand the disarray of the enemy. Here, it must be noted that it can often happen that two armies which are confronting one another are in the same disarray and suffering from the same necessities, and that the one which remains the victor is the first to understand the necessities of the other.

I want to give a domestic and modern example of this. In 1498, when the Florentines had a huge army in Pisan territory and were besieging the city, which the Venetians had taken under their protection, the Venetians saw no other means of saving Pisa and decided to create a diversion in the war by attacking the dominion of Florence from another side, and after they had created a powerful army they entered the Val di Lamona, occupied the town of Marradi, and besieged the stronghold of Castiglione, which stood on a hill above. When the Florentines heard this, they decided to send help to Marradi without diminishing the forces they had in Pisan territory, and after they had raised new infantry and organized new cavalry, they sent them in that direction under the command of Jacopo IV d’Appiano, lord of Piombino, and Count Rinuccio da Marciano. When these troops were then led to the top of the hill overlooking Marradi, the enemy lifted the siege around Castiglione and withdrew into the town, and since both of these two armies had opposed each other for some days, both were very short of provisions and every other necessary thing. Lacking the courage to attack each other or any knowledge of the problems each was suffering, they both decided on the same evening to strike camp the following morning and to draw back in retreat, the Venetians toward Bersighella and Faenza and the Florentines toward Casaglia and the Mugello. When morning came and each of the camps began to send their baggage ahead, by chance a woman left the village of Marradi and went toward the Florentine camp, feeling safe because of her old age and her poverty, wishing to see certain of her relatives who were in that camp; when she told the commanders of the Florentine forces that the Venetian army had departed, this news raised their courage, and changing their decision, as if they had dislodged the enemy, they marched against them and wrote to Florence that they had driven the Venetians back and won the war. * This victory arose from nothing but having understood, before the enemy, that they were marching away; had this news reached the other side first, it would have produced the same effect against our troops.