Chapter 24 — Why the Princes of Italy Have Lost Their States
The princes of Italy blamed fortune for losing their states — but sloth and mismanagement of arms are the true causes.
Summary
The chapter opens with the observation that a new prince who follows the book's prescriptions will appear well established in his state more quickly than a prince who has ruled for generations. The reason is that the new prince's actions are watched closely and, when they demonstrate the qualities the book describes, they establish a reputation for competence that long possession alone cannot create. Princes of long tenure who have done things correctly can weather even extreme adversity, as Philip of Macedon — who held off Rome and all of Greece with limited resources by knowing how to attract the people and secure the nobles — demonstrated.
The Italian princes who lost their states — the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan, and others whom recent events have removed from power — lost them not through fortune's caprice but through the failure to maintain two things: military capability and the confidence of either the people or the nobles. These failures were not inevitable; they were the consequence of choices. The princes who let their military rot, who allowed their subjects to be alienated, who could not sustain loyalty among the great — they were creating the conditions for their own displacement long before the foreign armies arrived. Fortune does not determine outcomes; she reveals what was already there.
The closing condemnation is direct: these princes' plans were good enough in calm times, when it never occurred to them that conditions might change — which is a common defect of men, not to make provision in calm for the storm. When the bad times came, they thought only of flight rather than of defense, hoping that their subjects would eventually recall them once the foreign invasion had passed. This plan is not wrong as a last resort, but a prince who relies on it as a primary strategy has already failed. The lesson the chapter delivers is the same lesson the book has been building toward: preparation during tranquility is the only defense against adversity when it arrives.
- Chapter 1Machiavelli opens not with a chapter but with a letter — one of the most celebrated dedications in European literature.
- Chapter 2The book's first chapter is a taxonomy so compressed it reads like a table of contents for the entire argument.
- Chapter 3Machiavelli's analysis of hereditary principalities is deliberately brief because the argument is simple: long-settled states are easier to hold than new ones.
- Chapter 4This is the book's first major analysis, and Machiavelli uses France's disastrous Italian campaigns as his case study.
- Chapter 5Machiavelli uses Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia versus the repeated French failures in Italy to introduce one of his sharpest analytical distinctions: the difference between states governed through a single lord with servile administrators and states governed through a lord with independent barons.
- Chapter 6Machiavelli confronts one of the hardest problems in The Prince: what to do with a conquered city that has historically governed itself.
- Chapter 7Machiavelli turns to the most admirable category: the prince who rises from nothing by his own ability.
- Chapter 8This is the chapter that establishes Cesare Borgia as The Prince's central case study — the man who came closest to the political ideal, whose eventual failure was attributable entirely to fortune rather than to any deficiency in his method.
- Chapter 9Machiavelli refuses to praise Agathocles's murders as virtù, but he cannot deny that they worked.
- Chapter 10Chapter 9 introduces Machiavelli's social analysis: every city contains two humours, the people who wish not to be oppressed and the great who wish to oppress.
- Chapter 11This short chapter introduces a practical test for evaluating a principality's stability: can the prince, if attacked, maintain himself with his own resources, or must he always rely on others? Machiavelli uses the fortified German free cities as his model — towns with strong walls, substantial reserves, and organised citizens who can defend themselves for at least a year without outside help.
- Chapter 12Machiavelli's treatment of the Church is one of the book's most revealing moments — not because it is disrespectful, but because it applies the same analytical framework to the papacy that it applies to every other state.
- Chapter 13Machiavelli's hatred of mercenary armies is the most consistent passion in The Prince, and this chapter is its fullest expression.
- Chapter 14Auxiliaries — troops borrowed from a foreign power — are worse than mercenaries, Machiavelli argues, because at least mercenaries are divided among themselves.
- Chapter 15The chapter is short and absolute.
- Chapter 16Chapter 15 is the hinge on which the entire book turns.
- Chapter 17The argument of Chapter 16 runs against the ordinary wisdom of every medieval mirror-of-princes tradition: a reputation for liberality, sincerely maintained, is ruinous.
- Chapter 18Chapter 17 contains the most famous argument in the book, and it is more careful than its reputation suggests.
- Chapter 19Chapter 18 is the most disputed in the book and the one that earned Machiavelli his reputation as the theorist of bad faith.
- Chapter 20The longest chapter in the book synthesises the ethical analysis of the preceding chapters into a comprehensive theory of internal security.
- Chapter 21Machiavelli surveys the range of defensive strategies princes have used — disarming subjects, fostering internal factions, building fortresses, cultivating those they mistrusted — and delivers a nuanced verdict.
- Chapter 22Chapter 21 turns from the negative task of avoiding hatred and contempt to the positive task of building a reputation that sustains power.
- Chapter 23This short chapter on the choice of ministers is a compressed theory of institutional trust.
- Chapter 24The problem of flattery is, for Machiavelli, an epistemic problem before it is a moral one.
- Chapter 25Chapter 24 applies the book's principles to the immediate Italian political situation and delivers a harsh verdict.
- Chapter 26Chapter 25 contains the book's most sustained philosophical argument and its most famous image.
- Chapter 27The book's final chapter drops the cool analytical register of everything that preceded it and becomes a plea.