Lehal Library

the prince advance, the Romans always knew how to respond. They never put off a war when they saw trouble coming; they knew it couldn’t be avoided in the long run and that the odds would simply shift in favour of their enemies. They chose to fight Philip and Antiochus in Greece, so as not to have to fight them in Italy. They could have put off both wars, but they didn’t. They never took the line our pundits are constantly giving us today – relax, time is on your side – but rather they put their faith in their own foresight and spirit. Time hurries everything on and can just as easily make things worse as better. But let’s get back to the King of France and see if he took any of the measures we’ve been discussing. And when I say the King, I mean Louis, not Charles, since Louis held territory in Italy for longer than Charles and it’s easier to see what his methods were. You’ll notice that he did the opposite of what a ruler must do to hold on to conquests in a region whose customs and language differ from those of his home kingdom. It was Venetian ambitions that brought Louis into Italy. The Venetians planned to take half of Lombardy while he seized the other half. I’m not going to criticize Louis for agreeing to this. He wanted to get a first foothold in Italy, he didn’t have any friends in the region – on the contrary, thanks to King Charles’s behaviour before him, all doors were barred – so he was forced to accept what allies he found. And the arrangement would have worked if he hadn’t made mistakes in other departments. Taking Lombardy, the king recovered in one blow the reputation that Charles had lost. Genoa surrendered. The Florentines offered an alliance. The Marquis of Mantua, the Duke of Ferrara, Bentivogli of Bologna, Caterina Sforza of Forlı̀, the lords of Faenza, Pesaro, Rimini, Camerino and Piombino, as well as the republics of Lucca, Pisa and Siena, all queued up to make friends. At which point the Venetians were in a position to see how rash they had been when they proposed the initial deal: for two towns in Lombardy they had made Louis king over a third of Italy.