THIS section deals with the issue of whether a principality that is forced to rely on the help of others can nonetheless enjoy a state of robustness and stability. Machiavelli summarises his position thus:

I consider those who are able to support themselves by their own resources as those who can, either by having plenty of men or money, raise a sufficient army to join battle against any one who comes to attack them. I consider those always to have need of others as those who cannot show themselves against the enemy in the field, but are forced to defend themselves by sheltering behind walls.

By taking care to strengthen his own territory, he tells us, the enemies of the prince will think twice about launching an attack. Even if the principality is less strong than it appears, what is really important is for the prince to give the impression that it is considerably more powerful than it actually is and thereby avoid having to deploy his own meagre troops. Machiavelli – unwittingly provoking a response from one of the country’s future inhabitants in the shape of Frederick II – suggests that Germany is a case in point and that invasions are discouraged on account of its towns having a sturdy and inviolable reputation:

They have proper ditches and walls, they have sufficient large guns and they always keep enough supplies in public store houses for one year’s eating, drinking, and fighting. And beyond this, to keep the people quiet and without loss to the state, they always have the means of giving work to the community in those labours that are the life and strength of the city, and through the pursuit of which the people are supported. They also value military exercises, and moreover have many laws to support these exercises.

Machiavelli also implies that the population should be kept in a state of fear, although how this can be equated with the apparent need for a prince to retain his popularity is unclear. Meanwhile, if an enemy destroys the property of those citizens living on the outskirts of the principality, their natural sense of outrage will mean that they will more readily turn to the prince to lead them in the struggle to win back their territory and avenge the destruction of their property.

Frederick believes that Machiavelli’s analysis is rather outdated, claiming that by the eighteenth century the role of the sovereign was to use diplomacy as a means of safeguarding the balance of power. He also finds Machiavelli’s notion that a prince who creates the illusion of great strength would nonetheless be able to ensure his own survival without having to depend on allies:

[I]t is always very advantageous to make treaties. Allies that you make could be as much your enemy as your helper – but you can always reduce your commitments to an exact neutrality.

In reply to Machiavelli’s argument that a prince should avoid conflict with a superior neighbour by puffing up his chest and trying to convey an impression of indestructibility, Frederick suggests that it would be far more profitable to

deflate the grand opinion which they have of their size, of the extreme veneration that they have for their old and illustrious people, and of the fact-proof zeal that they have for their armoury. The judicious person knows that it is good to appear in the world only as a lord who governs well without this zeal, to put aside the stilts on which their pride climbs up, to maintain at most only one guard sufficient to drive out the robbers of their castle, in case their imperious poverty has left enough of their subjects sufficiently famished to go to their Imperiator on a grand crusade to seek the holy food; and to put aside the rampart, the wall, and all that would give the appearance of a fortified mighty town to their residence.

The justification for this strategy lies in Frederick’s belief that many of the princes in his own time were so vain and deluded that they inevitably lived well beyond their means. This meant that their own notions of grandeur were often laughable in the extreme and Frederick provides a particularly amusing example of

a distant relative of a grand noble family, who, in a burst of grandeur, maintains, with his service, an army sufficient for the needs of a large king in a principality so small that one wonders if some of them have to be billeted in a neighbouring state. His army should perhaps be strong enough to win a battle in the theatre of Verona.

Rather than try to compete with their more powerful neighbours, Frederick believes that there is a more effective way of settling the issue of security:

The stronger are of the habit of interfering with the affairs of the weaker, often with good intentions, but can also offer a bargain to their little partners which it is not prudent to refuse. Instead of the spread of blood, two strokes of a pen can often finish their quarrels.

Machiavelli would never dream of compromising in such a way and, as expected, Frederick continues by objecting to the Italian’s contention that Germany’s cities manage to keep the peace by projecting an air of militaristic strength that goes way beyond their actual means. The vast improvement in weaponry and technology, for a start, would soon tear them asunder. In addition, he says, they

are all poorly fortified, the majority with old walls flanked in some places by large towers, and surrounded by ditches that collapsed grounds have almost entirely filled. They have few troops, and those which are there, are badly disciplined: their officers are mostly the rejects of Germany, or old people who are not any more in a position to be useful. Some of the imperial cities have a rather good artillery, but that would not be enough to oppose the emperor, who has the habit of making them rather often smell their weakness.

The ‘business’ of war, he argues, should be left to the more powerful sovereigns and Frederick the Great was certainly an authority on such matters.

TO BE CONTINUED…