Lehal Library

the prince eliminate the king’s family because there will always be barons ready to assume authority when circumstances swing their way, and, since you can never give them everything they want and never eliminate them all, you’ll lose the territory you took as soon as your enemies get an opportunity to rebel. If we go back now to the Kingdom of Darius, we’ll find that it was of the Turkish variety. So Alexander first had to defeat its entire army and get control of the country; but once he’d done that, and once Darius was dead, he was securely in command for the reasons cited above. And if his successors had been united they could have run the region without any worries; in fact the only trouble was the infighting they started themselves. But states organized the French way can never be held so easily. The frequent uprisings against Roman power in Spain, Gaul and Greece, for example, were the result of those regions’ being internally divided into so many princi- palities. So long as people remembered their old loyalties to local lords, Rome was never in complete control. But once the power and permanence of empire had extinguished those loyalties, then Rome became the undisputed master of the region. In fact, when the Romans started fighting among themselves, each warring commander was able to bring the province he was running into the conflict on his side, since once the families of the old local rulers had been eliminated the only authority people recognized was Rome’s representa- tive. When you take all this into account, it’s really not sur- prising how easy it was for Alexander to hold Asia, nor how hard it was for many others, Pyrrhus for example, to hold on to the territories they took. It wasn’t a question of the abilities of each particular conqueror, but of the different kinds of state they had invaded.