Lehal Library

Why Italian rulers have lost their states Followed carefully, the guidelines I’ve laid down will allow a ruler who’s just taken over a state to assume the aura of a hereditary king and give him even greater security and staying power than if his government was well established. People watch what a new ruler does far more attentively than they do a hereditary one and if his achievements are impressive they’ll have a greater hold on people and command greater loyalty than an old royal bloodline. Men are more interested in the present than the past and when things are going well they’ll be happy and won’t look elsewhere; on the contrary, they’ll do everything they can to defend a ruler so long as he doesn’t let himself down in other ways. So he’ll enjoy the double glory of having both founded a new kingdom and graced and consolidated it with good laws, a good army, good allies and good policies. Conversely, the man who’s born to power but behaves so stupidly as to lose it is shamed twice over. Turning now to those Italian rulers who’ve lost power in recent years – the King of Naples, for example, and the Duke of Milan and others too – the first thing we find is that they all had poor armies, this for the reasons I discussed at length above. Then we see that some of them had the people against them, or if they did have the people’s support they couldn’t keep the nobles on their side. Without these failings you don’t lose a state that’s strong enough to field an army. Philip of