IL PRINCIPE

ander so that he might occupy the Romagna. Nor did he perceive with this deliberation that he was making himself weak, by stripping himself of his friends and of those who had thrown themselves into his lap, and making the Church great by adding to the spiritual, which gives it so much authority, so much temporal power. And having made a first error, he was forced to follow it up, to the extent that, to put an end to the ambition of Alexander and so that he would not become master of Tuscany, he was forced to come to Italy.

And it was not enough for him to have made the Church great and stripped himself of his friends; he wanted the Kingdom of Naples and divided it with the King of Spain. And where he was previously the arbiter of Italy, he brought in a companion, so that the ambitious of that province and the malcontents with him would have somewhere to turn. And where he could have left a King in that Kingdom who was his pensioner, he removed him in order to put in someone who could drive him out.

It is a truly natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and always, when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it at any cost, here is the blame and the error. If France, therefore, with her own forces could assault Naples, she should have done so; if she could not, she should not have divided it. And if the division she made with the Venetians of Lombardy deserved excuse for having set foot in Italy with it, this one deserves blame for not being excused by that necessity.

Louis had therefore made these five errors: he extinguished the lesser powers; increased the power of a powerful one in Italy; brought into it a most powerful foreigner; did not come to reside there; did not put colonies there. These errors, while he was still living, might not have offended him had he not made the sixth: to take the State from the Venetians. Because if he had not made the Church great and had not brought Spain into Italy, it would have been quite reasonable and necessary to humble them. But having taken those first steps, he should never have consented to their ruin. Because, as long as they were powerful, they would have always kept others away from the enterprise of Lombardy; both because the Venetians would not have consented to it without becoming masters of it themselves, and because the others would not have wanted to take it from France to give it to them, and they would not have had the spirit to go and strike them both. And if any should say King Louis ceded the Romagna to Alexander and the Kingdom to Spain to avoid a war, I answer with the reasons stated above: that one should never...