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Here, then, is Macchiavelli's story of the event: On the morning of December 31 Cesare's army, composed of 10,000 foot and 3,000 horse, was drawn up on the banks of the River Metauro some five miles from Sinigaglia in accordance with his orders, awaiting his arrival.
The only motive served by this statement is once more to show Alexander and his son in the perpetration of simoniacal practices, and the statement springs, beyond doubt, from a passage in Macchiavelli's Extracts from Dispatches to the Ten. Elsewhere has been mentioned the confusion prevailing in those extracts, and their unreliability as historical evidences.
But it is staggering to find the statement in such a place, amid Macchiavelli's letters on Cesare, breathing an obvious and profound admiration of the duke's talents as a politician and a soldier an admiration which later is to go perilously near to worship. To Macchiavelli, Cesare is the incarnation of a hazy ideal, as is abundantly shown in The Prince.
Were not these masterstrokes of diplomacy worthy of a King whom his mother, from boyhood upwards, had caused to study Macchiavelli's "Prince," and who had thoroughly taken to heart the maxim, often repeated in those days, that the "Science of reigning was the science of lying"? The joy in the Spanish camp before Mons was unbounded.
She may also have been acquainted with Macchiavelli's "Prince," in which the genial statesman describes Cæsar as the ideal ruler. Although the power of the Borgias had passed away and their children were either dead or scattered, their greatness was felt in the city as long as Vannozza lived.
Were not these masterstrokes of diplomacy worthy of a King whom his mother, from boyhood upwards, had caused to study Macchiavelli's "Prince," and who had thoroughly taken to heart the maxim, often repeated in those days, that the "Science of reigning was the science of lying"? The joy in the Spanish camp before Mons was unbounded.
But to have allowed Astorre Manfredi, or even his bastard brother, to live would have been bad policy from the appallingly egotistical point of view which was Cesare's a point of view, remember, which receives Macchiavelli's horribly intellectual, utterly unsentimental, revoltingly practical approval.
Were not these masterstrokes of diplomacy worthy of a King whom his mother, from boyhood upwards, had caused to study Macchiavelli's "Prince," and who had thoroughly taken to heart the maxim, often repeated in those days, that the "Science of reigning was the science of lying"? The joy in the Spanish camp before Mons was unbounded.
In the end Cesare, a little out of patience at so much inconclusiveness, though outwardly preserving his immutable serenity, sought to come to grips by demanding that Florence should declare whether he was to account her his friend or not. But this was precisely what Macchiavelli's instructions forbade him from declaring.
It is not strange, however, to find a descendant of Alexander VI in the garb of a Jesuit, for the diabolic force of will which had characterized that Borgia lived again in the person of his countryman, Loyola, in another form and directed to another end. The maxims of Macchiavelli's "Prince" thus became part of the political programme of the Jesuits.