[p. 557]
|557| hated enemy, – his death was a matter of party.
The one from whom Machiavelli had hoped for the rescue of Italy was, by all [accounts], the Duke of Valentinois, a prince who, with the help of his uncle and by valour as well as deceit of every kind, had formed a state out of the principalities of the Dukes Orsini, Colonna, of Urbino, etc. and the lordships of the Roman barons. His memory and that of his uncle: – even if one wishes to deduct all deeds charged to them merely by rumours and the hatred of their enemies, their memory as men is branded before posterity, if posterity may presume to judge men morally, and the Duke and his uncle, but not their work, have perished. It is they who acquired for the Roman See a state whose continuance Julius II knew well how to use and to make formidable, and which subsists to this day.
If Machiavelli ascribes the fall of Cesare Borgia, besides political errors, also to the chance which threw him on a sickbed precisely at the most decisive moment of Alexander’s death, we must on the contrary see in his fall rather a higher necessity, which let him neither enjoy the fruits of his deeds nor develop them into greater power, because nature, as is shown by his vices, seems to have destined [him] rather for an ephemeral brilliance and for a mere instrument of the founding of a state, and because therefore a great part of the power to which he raised himself rested neither on an inner nor on an outer natural right, but was grafted on the alien branch of his uncle’s spiritual dignity.
Machiavelli’s work remains a great testimony which he gave to his age and to his own belief that the fate of a people hastening towards its political downfall can be saved by genius. What is further remarkable, amid
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