Lehal Library

the prince bias and in part because, if a person has always been successful with a particular approach, he won’t easily be persuaded to drop it. So when the time comes for the cautious man to act impulsively, he can’t, and he comes unstuck. If he did change personality in line with times and circumstances, his luck would hold steady. Pope Julius II always acted impulsively and lived in times and circumstances so well suited to this approach that things always went well for him. Think of his first achievement, taking Bologna while Giovanni Bentivoglio was still alive. The Venetians were against the idea, the King of Spain like- wise, and Julius was still negotiating the matter with the French. All the same, and with his usual ferocity and impetu- ousness, the pope set out and led the expedition himself. This put the Venetians and Spanish in a quandary and they were unable to react, the Venetians out of fear and the Spanish because they hoped to recover the whole of the Kingdom of Naples. Meanwhile, the King of France was brought on board: he needed Rome as an ally to check the Venetians and decided that once Julius had made his move he couldn’t deny him armed support without too obviously slighting him. insulting With this impulsive decision, then, Julius achieved more than any other pope with all the good sense in the world would ever have achieved. Had he waited to have everything arranged and negotiated before leaving Rome, as any other pope would have done, the plan would never have worked. The King of France would have come up with endless excuses and the Venetians and Spanish with endless warnings. I don’t want to go into Julius’s other campaigns, which were all of a kind and all successful. His early death spared him the experi- ence of failure. Because if times had changed and circum- stances demanded caution, he would have been finished. The man would never have changed his ways, because they were natural to him. To conclude then: fortune varies but men go on regardless.