Why Religious Institutions Are the Most Secure Power Structures in Existence — The Prince

Machiavelli closes his survey of principality types with ecclesiastical states. They are hard to acquire but easy to hold because ancient religious ordinances sustain them no matter how the prince lives. Such rulers alone have states they do not defend and subjects they do not rule, yet remain secure. Machiavelli says discussing their divine support would be presumptuous, then answers a practical question anyway: how did the papacy become a temporal power kings fear?

Before Charles VIII entered Italy, the peninsula was divided among the Pope, Venice, Naples, Milan, and Florence. Italian powers wanted no foreign armies and no neighbor's expansion. They checked Venice by union and kept the papacy weak by playing Rome's barons, the Orsini and Colonnesi factions, against each other under the pope's eyes. Even a courageous pope like Sixtus could not escape that trap, and a pope's short life made it nearly impossible to destroy a faction before another rose.

Alexander VI showed what money and arms could do. Through Cesare Borgia and the French entry he executed the campaigns Machiavelli described earlier. He meant to aggrandize his son, not the Church, yet after Alexander's death and Borgia's ruin the Church inherited the gains.

Julius II found the papacy strong, with the Romagna, broken barons, and new methods of raising money. He took Bologna, ruined Venice, and drove the French from Italy, always strengthening the Church rather than a private heir. He kept the Orsini and Colonnesi in check by terrifying them with papal greatness and refusing to let factions have their own cardinals, since cardinals stir baronial disorder. Leo X therefore inherited the most powerful pontificate yet.