Machiavelli, Volume I | Page 8

had lent a certain stern resolution, and as with Julius and Sulla the lust for sloth and sensuality were quickened by the lust for sway. He unfrocked himself with pleasure. He commenced politician, soldier, and despot. And for the five years preceding Alexander's death he may almost be looked upon as a power in Europe. Invested Duke of Romagna, that hot-bed of petty tyranny and tumult, he repressed disorder through his governor Messer Ramiro with a relentless hand. When order reigned, Machiavelli tells us he walked out one morning into the market-place at Cesena and saw the body of Ramiro, who had borne the odium of reform, lying in two pieces with his head on a lance, and a bloody axe by his side. C?sar reaped the harvest of Ramiro's severity, and the people recognising his benevolence and justice were 'astounded and satisfied.'
But the gaze of the Borgia was not bounded by the strait limits of a mere Italian Duchy. Whether indeed there mingled with personal ambition an ideal of a united Italy, swept clean of the barbarians, it is hard to say, though Machiavelli would have us believe it. What is certain is that he desired the supreme dominion in Italy for himself, and to win it spared neither force nor fraud nor the help of the very barbarians themselves. With a decree of divorce and a Cardinal's hat he gained the support of France, the French Duchy of Valentinois, and the sister of the King of Navarre to wife. By largesse of bribery and hollow promises he brought to his side the great families of Rome, his natural enemies, and the great Condottieri with their men-at-arms. When by their aid he had established and extended his government he mistrusted their good faith. With an infinity of fascination and cunning, without haste and without rest, he lured these leaders, almost more cunning than himself, to visit him as friends in his fortress of Sinigaglia. 'I doubt if they will be alive to-morrow morning,' wrote Machiavelli, who was on the spot. He was right. C?sar caused them to be strangled the same night, while his father dealt equal measure to their colleagues and adherents in Rome. Thenceforth, distrusting mercenaries, he found and disciplined out of a mere rabble, a devoted army of his own, and having unobtrusively but completely extirpated the whole families of those whose thrones he had usurped, not only the present but the future seemed assured to him.
He had fulfilled the first of Machiavelli's four conditions. He rapidly achieved the remaining three. He bought the Roman nobles so as to be able to put a bridle in the new 'Pope's mouth.' He bought or poisoned or packed or terrorised the existing College of Cardinals and selected new Princes of the Church who should accept a Pontiff of his choosing. He was effectively strong enough to resist the first onset upon him at his father's death. Five years had been enough for so great an undertaking. One thing alone he had not and indeed could not have foreseen. 'He told me himself on the day on which (Pope) Julius was created, that he had foreseen and provided for everything else that could happen on his father's death, but had never anticipated that, when his father died, he too should have been at death's door.' Even so the fame and splendour of his name for a while maintained his authority against his unnumbered enemies. But soon the great betrayer was betrayed. 'It is well to cheat those who have been masters of treachery,' he had said himself in his hours of brief authority. His wheel had turned full cycle. Within three years his fate, like that of Charles XII., was destined to a foreign strand, a petty fortress, and a dubious hand. Given over to Spain he passed three years obscurely. 'He was struck down in a fight at Viana in Navarre (1507) after a furious resistance: he was stripped of his fine armour by men who did not know his name or quality and his body was left naked on the bare ground, bloody and riddled with wounds. He was only thirty-one.' And so the star of Machiavelli's hopes and dreams was quenched for a season in the clouds from which it came.
[Sidenote: The Lesson.]
It seems worth while to sketch the strange tempestuous career of C?sar Borgia because in the remaining chapters of The Prince and elsewhere in his writings, it is the thought and memory of Valentinois, transmuted doubtless and idealised by the lapse of years, that largely inform and inspire the perfect Prince of Machiavelli. But it must not be supposed that in life or in mind they were intimate or even sympathetic. Machiavelli criticises his hero liberally and even harshly. But for the work he