Chapter 7 — New Principalities Acquired by the Arms of Others or by Good Fortune

Those who rise by fortune, Machiavelli argues, have little trouble rising and much trouble staying. They fly to the summit on borrowed wings and have no independent foundation when circumstances change. His principal example is Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, who received the Romagna as a gift from his father's papacy and French arms from Louis XII. Borgia's situation was therefore entirely dependent on two external powers, both of which could be withdrawn. What makes him exemplary, however, is not how he rose but what he did once he had risen — the systematic construction of foundations that did not depend on his father or the French.

Machiavelli traces Borgia's consolidation with admiring precision. He weakened the factional Roman noble families by attaching their members to himself through patronage. He built alliances among the Italian lords that isolated those he could not win over. He secured the neutrality of France and the goodwill of Spain. He installed Remirro de Orco in the Romagna — a man energetic and ruthless enough to pacify a disordered province in short order. Then, when the pacification was complete and the resentment it had generated was threatening to become a political problem, he had Remirro arrested, cut in two, and displayed in the piazza at Cesena with a piece of wood and a bloodstained knife, in a spectacular act of justice that left the people both satisfied and appalled. The calculation is explicit: Borgia had given them harsh medicine through Remirro; Remirro's public execution told them the harshness was Remirro's fault, not the duke's.

Borgia's downfall came not from any failure of method but from the coincidence of two catastrophes: his father's death and his own near-fatal illness at the same time. He had not anticipated that his father would die when he himself was also near death and could not manage the succession. The one mistake Machiavelli identifies — acquiescing in Julius II's election, knowing Julius was his enemy — was made from the weakness of illness, not from political miscalculation. Machiavelli's verdict is unusual in its generosity: Borgia's ruin was the result of extraordinary and extreme malignity of fortune. He had done everything a prudent man should do; fortune defeated him anyway.