Lehal Library

the prince Constantinople brought 10,000 Turks into Greece and when the war was over they wouldn’t leave, which was how the infidels began to get control of Greece. So anyone looking for a no-win situation should turn to auxiliaries, because they are far more dangerous even than mercenaries. With auxiliaries your ruin is guaranteed: they are a tightly knit force and every one of them obedient to someone else; when mercenaries win they need time and a convenient opportunity before they can attack you, if only because they’re not a solid united force, you chose them, you’re paying them, and hence it will take the man you put in command a while to build up sufficient authority to turn against you. To summarize, the big danger with mercenaries is their indecision, with auxiliaries their determination. So, sensible rulers have always avoided using auxiliaries and mercenaries, relying instead on their own men and even preferring to lose with their own troops than to win with others, on the principle that a victory won with foreign forces is not a real victory at all. As always Cesare Borgia offers a good example. He invaded Romagna with an army entirely made up of French auxiliaries and took Imola and Forlı̀ with them; but since he felt they weren’t reliable he turned to mercenaries as a less dangerous option. He hired the Orsini and Vitelli armies, but when he found that they dithered in battle and were disloyal and dangerous, he had them killed and trained his own men. It’s easy to see the difference between these various kinds of armies if you look at the duke’s standing when he had just the French, when he had the Orsinis and the Vitellis, and when he had his own soldiers and relied on his own resources. With each change his prestige grew and he was only truly respected when everyone could see that his troops were entirely his own. I had planned to stick to these recent Italian examples, but I wouldn’t like to leave out Hiero of Syracuse since he is one of the men I talked about before. Given command, as I