A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Then he was allowed to go to Spain. But he had forgotten that his brother Juan had left a widow,
and that she was determined to revenge her husband’s murder. Cesare was arrested again and
imprisoned at Cincilla. The Spaniards had only one reason for keeping him alive: he was a valuable
pawn to use against the pope. To have Cesare in prison was like having a plague germ in a bottle.
In 1506, Cesare escaped, and succeeded in joining his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre, who was
engaged in a territorial dispute in Spain. Cesare again became a commander - of a mere hundred
troops. Determined to demonstrate that he was as bold as ever, he rode ahead of the rest of the army
and engaged the enemy. Luck had deserted him. He was badly wounded and left to die of thirst,
stripped naked. It was 12 March 1507, and Cesare Borgia was still under thirty-one years of age.
Cesare had only three mourners: his mother Vannozza, his sister Lucrezia, and his one-time
adviser, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat who began to make his mark
shortly after the execution of Savonarola; the son of a poverty-stricken lawyer, he felt - like most of
these Renaissance men - that success was the only thing that mattered. Being interested in power,
he studied the gigantic chessboard of Renaissance Italy with fascination. When the Medicis came
back to power, aided by the pope and the Spaniards, Machiavelli fell from favour and decided to
write a book to try to ingratiate himself with the younger Lorenzo de Medici. Arrested, tortured and
finally released, he spent his retirement producing The Prince, a work that has baffled generations
of scholars. Its advocacy of cynical opportunism is so extraordinary that it seems inconceivable that
he wrote it without some ulterior motive. It has been suggested that it is intended as satire - like
Swift’s pamphlet suggesting that the people of Ireland should overcome starvation by eating their
own children - or that he hoped to lure the younger Lorenzo to his own downfall. Both suggestions
overlook the essential simplicity of Machiavelli’s outlook. He had no more inclination towards
religion than Cesare Borgia had - or Rodrigo. Therefore, life was a question of how to achieve your
objectives as economically as possible. For Machiavelli, the only worthwhile political objective
was Italian unity. Cesare had brought that closer by conquering Romagna, and if it had not been for
his bad luck in falling ill in 1503, he might have conquered the whole of Italy. With objectives as
important as this, what did a little poisoning and a little treachery matter?
The argument sounds quite plausible - until we study the life of Cesare Borgia. Then we see that
Machiavelli’s argument has one serious flaw. Cesare was a half-insane sadist, a Right Man driven
by an outsize ego. Whatever success he achieved, the inner worm would have finally destroyed him
- the total inability to control his own negative emotions. Even his political policies were shortsighted;
his ruthlessness made him dangerous and therefore hated. Cesare was a symbolic figure;
but not, as Machiavelli thought, of the ideal Renaissance Prince. He was, quite simply, the
archetypal criminal, the man who spends his life taking short-cuts. Nothing is worse for a criminal
than early success; it trains his reflexes to develop the lightning-grab. And without a
counterbalancing self-control, he is bound to go too far. On one occasion when Cesare lost his
temper with a cardinal in front of the pope, he drew his sword and actually stabbed the man so that
blood splashed on the pope’s robes. (The. cardinal survived.) This was not the quality of a ‘man of
iron’; it was mere lack of self-control. The death of his father made him realise that he had never
possessed real power; he had been standing on his father’s shoulders. This is what he meant when
he told Machiavelli that he had died on the same day as his father. The megalomaniac dream was
over.
It becomes possible to see why reformers all over Europe were longing for the downfall of the
Church. It was not simply that it had become corrupt - that could be remedied. It was that the