Horse

Horse is not a speaking or individualized animal in the book, but a recurring material presence through which the text examines wealth, prestige, military organization, and political security. It first appears among the costly objects offered to a prince, then as part of the forces used to defend or acquire a state, and finally as a component of mercenary and auxiliary warfare. Across these appearances, Horse moves from ornament and tribute to instrument and liability.

Gift, Prestige, and the Prince

Horse enters the work in the dedication to Lorenzo Di Piero De’ Medici, where the author explains the customary practice of approaching a prince with what the giver values most or what the prince is thought to enjoy. Horses are listed beside armour, cloth of gold, and precious stones as costly gifts suitable to a ruler’s greatness. In this setting, Horse signifies both material worth and political ceremony: it belongs to the visible economy of magnificence through which a subject presents devotion and acknowledges princely status.

The dedication deliberately contrasts such tangible offerings with the author’s own gift. He cannot present horses, armour, or precious stones, but instead offers knowledge of the actions of great men, gathered through long experience of modern affairs and continual study of antiquity. Horse therefore helps establish the work’s governing opposition between external splendour and practical political understanding. The animal is valuable as a courtly possession, yet the book claims that tested knowledge is the more useful gift because it can teach a prince how to master, in a short time, lessons acquired through years of danger and hardship.

Horse and the Defense of Acquired States

In the discussion of newly acquired provinces, Horse belongs to the broader problem of maintaining power after conquest. A prince who does not establish colonies must keep numerous men-at-arms and foot soldiers in the territory, whereas colonies can serve as the province’s “keys” at little or no charge to the prince. The contrast places mounted force within an expensive system of occupation: soldiers consume the revenues of the country, move from place to place, and impose hardship on the entire population.

The argument does not treat Horse in isolation from political consequences. A military presence may defend territory, but when its burden is broadly felt it turns the inhabitants into enemies. Colonies, by contrast, are presented as cheaper and more faithful, while those displaced by them remain poor and scattered. Horse thus participates in a comparison between coercive military occupation and economical territorial control. The underlying rule is severe: subjects must either be treated kindly or utterly crushed, because lighter injuries leave room for revenge, whereas greater injuries are intended to eliminate the possibility of reprisals.

Mounted Forces and Mercenary Warfare

Horse becomes more sharply political in the critique of mercenary armies. The book divides a prince’s arms into those of his own subjects, mercenaries, auxiliaries, or a mixture of these. Mercenaries are described as useless and dangerous because they are disunited, ambitious, insubordinate, treacherous, insolent toward friends, cowardly before enemies, and bound to the field only by pay. In this framework, Horse represents not merely mobility or battlefield strength but the organizational choices on which a state’s survival depends.

The history of Italian mercenary warfare is presented as a particular distortion of military value. Mercenary captains sought to make foot soldiers appear insignificant so that the worth of their own followers would increase. Since a few foot soldiers brought little distinction and large numbers were difficult to maintain, they turned toward horsemen, whose smaller retinues seemed prestigious and easier to support. The consequence was extreme: in an army of twenty thousand, fewer than two thousand foot soldiers might be found. The preference for Horse therefore reflects professional self-interest rather than a balanced conception of war.

These forces also cultivated practices designed to avoid fatigue and danger. They did not kill one another in battle but took prisoners who were later released without ransom; they refused night attacks, made no night sorties from besieged towns, used camps without ramparts or trenches, and avoided winter campaigns. The result was a military culture that made combat appear orderly while stripping it of decisive force. The book links these practices to Italy’s servitude and contempt, showing how the elevation of mounted professionals could produce an appearance of refinement alongside political ruin.

Horse in Auxiliary Alliances

Horse also appears in the account of auxiliary troops, defined as forces supplied by a powerful ruler whom a prince summons for help. Pope Julius II provides the immediate example: after the poor performance of his mercenaries during the enterprise against Ferrara, he arranged with Ferdinand of Spain to receive horse and foot soldiers. The pairing is significant because it shows Horse as part of a foreign military package rather than an independent guarantee of sovereignty.

Auxiliaries may be excellent soldiers for themselves, but they endanger the ruler who calls them in. If defeated, the ruler is ruined; if victorious, he becomes their prisoner. Pope Julius’s decision to place himself without reserve in the hands of a stranger is therefore judged rash, even though fortune spared him the full consequences. After the auxiliaries were defeated at Ravenna, the Swiss unexpectedly swept the victors from the country. Pope Julius was not left captive to his enemies, nor did he remain captive to his auxiliaries, because victory came through other arms. Horse here embodies the precarious bargain of borrowed strength: it can rescue a prince only while remaining subordinate to a political power he does not control.

The same danger appears in the Florentine siege of Pisa, where the Florentines, lacking soldiers of their own, brought ten thousand French men-at-arms and thereby exposed themselves to greater peril than before. It also appears in the Emperor of Constantinople’s summoning of ten thousand Turkish soldiers into Greece. When those troops refused to depart after the war, their presence became the beginning of Greece’s servitude to the Infidel. In both cases, mounted power obtained from outside may answer an immediate military need while converting dependence into domination.

Political Meaning and Limits

The book’s recurring Horse is ultimately a test of the difference between appearance and possession. As a gift, it belongs to princely magnificence; as part of an occupying force, it represents expense and popular resentment; as the preferred arm of mercenary captains, it reveals a professional system built around prestige and self-protection; and as an auxiliary resource, it exposes the danger of surrendering control to another ruler. Horse can enlarge the visible power of a state without giving its prince secure foundations.

Its appearances therefore support the book’s larger preference for arms tied to the ruler’s own political community. A force that fights only for pay may disappear when war begins, while a foreign force may turn victory into captivity. Horse is never granted an autonomous voice or inner life, and the text does not explore animal experience. Its function is instead structural and political: it is a conspicuous object through which the work measures wealth, military fashion, dependence, and the fragile boundary between possessing power and being possessed by it.