IN this section, Machiavelli addresses the survival of Greek rule in Persia after the demise of Darius III (380-330 BCE), last king of the Achaemenid Empire. Having been defeated by the armies of Alexander III of Macedon (356-323 BCE), also known as Alexander the Great, Darius was murdered by Bessus (d. 329 BCE), a provincial governor who also happened to be his own cousin. Bessus himself was then captured by Alexander and, prior to execution, was forced to undergo the removal of his nose and both earlobes. Following his death, the Persian Empire fell into Alexander’s hands and the late Darius III became despised by his compatriots for having allowed their territory to come under Greek rule.
That Alexander’s own death did not cause the Persians to rise up against their oppressors leads Machiavelli to suppose that it was the result of a prince being able to rule without the interference of a baronial aristocracy:
The principalities of which one has record are found to be governed in two different ways: either (1) by a prince, with a body of servants, who assist him to govern the kingdom as ministers by his favour and permission; or (2) by a prince and barons, who hold that rank by inheritance and not by appointment by the prince. Such barons have states and their own subjects, who recognize them as lords and have a natural loyalty to them. Those states that are governed by a prince and his servants respect their prince more, because in all the country there is no one who is recognized as having greater power than him. If they show respect to another, they do it as to a minister and official to whom they do not bear any particular loyalty.
The sixteenth-century Turks, he argues, use the former system and have a marked advantage over the French, who employ the latter. By sending their loyal vassals to govern different parts of his territory, the Turkish ruler can ensure that, unlike the methods undertaken by the French sovereign, he does not have to contend with a powerful aristocracy that has both its own followers and inalienable rights that cannot be removed by the monarchy itself. The servants of the Turkish ruler do not enjoy the kind of power and prestige possessed by the French barons and therefore it is more difficult for them to accept bribes or to win enough support for his removal. They are, after all, little more than slaves. Indeed, whilst they do not have the wherewithal to stage a rebellion from within, the situation also makes it impossible for outsiders to create the kind of fratricidal disunity that ones often finds in Western Europe. In France, therefore, a potential invader
can easily enter there by gaining the cooperation of some baron of the kingdom for one always finds dissatisfied barons who desire a change. Such men, for the reasons given, can open the way into the state and make the victory easy. But if you wish to hold the kingdom afterwards, you meet with infinite difficulties, both from those who have assisted you and from those you have crushed.
In Ancient Persia, Machiavelli tells us, which was similar to the Turkish system, Alexander saw to it that Darius III was killed and that his country was quickly taken over. This mean that the state remained in a good condition and that it was possible for the Greeks to provide the servant of Darius with a sense of continuity. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), for example, despite his ‘revolutionary’ bluster, did much the same thing in the twentieth century by retaining the German civil service. In other words, the Persians – despite being ruled by a foreign power – did not rebel against Alexander’s successors due to the general atmosphere of political and economic uniformity.
Conversely, Frederick’s Anti-Machiavel posits the view that his Florentine opponent merely
considers these things from only one point of view. He does not discuss the structure each governments has: he appears to believe that the power of the empire of Perses and the Turks was founded only on the general slavery of these nations, and on the single rise of only one man who is the absolute ruler. He is of the idea that a despotism without restriction, established well, is the surest means that a prince has to ensure reign without disorder, and resist its enemies vigorously.
The German also claims that just one French king – Chlothar I (497-561), King of the Franks – fell victim to fratricidal conflict and that, besides, it was a fact that Turkish rulers were often traditionally strangled by their Janissaries. The French monarchy, too, was more likely to be overthrown by agents or former agents of the Church like Cardinal Armand Richelieu (1585-1642) and, in the wake of Frederick’s own death, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838). One must also consider the differing temperaments of both the French and their Turkish counterparts:
[T]he French are anxious, libertines, and very inclined to be bored of all; their love for change appears even in the most serious things. It appears that these hated and esteemed cardinals of the French, who successively controlled this empire, used to their benefit the maxims of Machiavel to lower the powerful nobles, and also used the knowledge of these customs of the nation to divert those frequent storms, of which the lightness of the subjects has threatened the sovereigns unceasingly.
When one considers the immense revolutionary upheavals that affected France in 1789, 1830, 1848 and during the Paris Commune of 1871, Frederick’s words seem rather prophetic. Absolutism, he claims, whilst appearing to consolidate the inviolable rule of the sovereign, also involved compromising with the ambitious French aristocracy and these were the ever-changing factors that Machiavelli fails to take into consideration.
TO BE CONTINUED…
