Lehal Library

Auxiliaries, combined forces and citizen armies until now Auxiliary armies – that is, when you ask a powerful ruler to send military help to defend your town – are likewise useless. In recent times we have the example of Pope Julius during his Ferrara campaign: having seen what a sad lot his mercenaries were in battle, he reached an agreement with Ferdinand, King of Spain, to have his forces come to help. Auxiliaries may be efficient and useful when it comes to achieving their own ends, but they are almost always counterproductive for those who invite them in, because if they lose, you lose too, and if they win, you are at their mercy. Although ancient history is full of pertinent examples, I’d like to stick to this recent case of Pope Julius II, whose decision to put himself entirely in a foreign army’s hands merely to take Ferrara could hardly have been more rash. But he was lucky and the unlikely outcome of the campaign spared him the possible consequences of his mistake: when his Spanish auxiliaries were beaten at Ravenna, the Swiss turned up and against all expectations – the pope’s included – routed the hitherto victorious French, so that Julius escaped being a prisoner either to his enemies, who had fled, or to his auxil- iaries, who weren’t the ones to win the day for him. The Florentines, who had no armed forces at all, took 10,000 French auxiliaries to lay siege to Pisa, a decision that put them in greater danger than any they had experienced in their whole troubled history. To fight his neighbours, the emperor of