Vitelli family

The Vitelli family appears in the book as a powerful military house whose influence rests on commanders, followers, and factional allegiance rather than on a prince’s direct control of national forces. Its importance lies in the family’s double role: it supplies soldiers capable of advancing a ruler’s conquests, yet its independent interests make that ruler vulnerable to betrayal, hesitation, and eventual violence. The family therefore serves as one of the clearest examples of the political instability created when military power is delegated to ambitious subjects.

Identity and Position

The Vitelli family belongs to the world of Italian factional politics, where armed households and partisan networks could rival the authority of territorial rulers. Its members were not merely soldiers hired for an isolated campaign. They possessed their own reputation, followers, and political weight, allowing them to act as a distinct power within the states they entered or served. This structure placed them closer to the ancient barons described in the comparison between the government of France and that of the Turk than to replaceable ministers whose authority derived entirely from a single prince.

The book’s political analysis distinguishes between a state governed by one prince through servants and a state surrounded by hereditary lords who possess subjects of their own and are naturally loved by them. In the latter arrangement, powerful families can open a country to an invader, but they also remain possible centers of resistance after the conquest. The Vitelli family embodies this problem in military form: its authority is personal and factional, and its armed following can be transferred, withheld, or redirected according to the family’s own calculations.

Military Service and Mercenary Power

The family’s most important representative is Vitellozzo Vitelli, who served as the military superior of Oliverotto of Fermo after the death of Paolo Vitelli. Under Vitellozzo’s command, Oliverotto quickly became one of the foremost soldiers in the company. The episode shows how the family functioned as a training ground and power base for ambitious captains: service under a Vitelli could provide military experience, advancement, and access to a wider network of force.

The family’s position also illustrates the danger of mercenary armies. Mercenaries are described as disunited, ambitious, insubordinate, treacherous, insolent among friends, and cowardly before enemies. Their loyalty is tied to pay rather than to the survival of the state, so they may serve during peace but disappear when war becomes dangerous. Even an able mercenary captain is a threat because he may seek personal aggrandizement by overthrowing his employer or by acting against the employer’s wishes; an incapable captain may ruin the state through incompetence.

This danger is sharpened by the family’s participation in Cesare Borgia’s military career. Cesare Borgia first entered Romagna with French auxiliary troops and used them to take Imola and Forlì. Finding foreign auxiliaries unreliable for his own purposes, he turned to mercenaries and employed the Orsini and Vitelli. Their military value did not remove their political danger. On the contrary, their fickleness, falsehood, and treachery convinced him that a ruler could not safely base his power on forces that remained under the influence of their own commanders.

Relationship with Cesare Borgia

The Vitelli family’s relationship with Cesare Borgia develops from cooperation to confrontation. Cesare Borgia used the family’s soldiers because he needed immediate military strength, but he also recognized that such aid made his position dependent on men whose interests did not necessarily coincide with his own. The family therefore belonged to the class of forces that could enlarge a prince’s territory while simultaneously limiting his freedom of action.

Cesare Borgia’s response was to abandon dependence on the Orsini and Vitelli and fall back on troops of his own raising. The book treats this change as a visible progression in his reputation. His standing increased when he ceased to rely on French arms, improved further when he moved beyond the mercenary forces of the Orsini and Vitelli, and reached its highest point when observers saw him as the sole master of his own troops. Military autonomy becomes a measure of political authority: a prince is strongest when victory cannot be credited to a foreign king, a mercenary captain, or an autonomous family.

The conflict reached its decisive stage after the revolt associated with the Orsini and Vitelli. Cesare Borgia used the crisis to weaken their factions and then resorted to stratagem rather than confronting them openly. Through carefully cultivated assurances and the mediation of Paolo Vitelli, whom he won with clothing, money, horses, and other friendly attentions, he drew the leaders to Sinigaglia. The family’s military prestige could not protect it once its leaders had been separated from their independent base and placed within Cesare Borgia’s control.

Oliverotto and the Family’s Violent Legacy

Oliverotto’s career reveals how the Vitelli network could transmit military ability while also enabling political crime. Orphaned young and raised by his maternal uncle Giovanni Fogliani, Oliverotto was sent to serve under Paolo Vitelli so that he might be trained for high military rank. After Paolo’s death, he served under Paolo’s brother, Vitellozzo Vitelli. His quick intelligence, courage, and resolution made him one of the leading soldiers in the company, but military distinction intensified his impatience with subordinate status.

With the support of the Vitelleschi and the connivance of citizens of Fermo who preferred submission to the freedom of their country, Oliverotto decided to seize Fermo. He concealed the plan beneath a family visit. Writing to Giovanni Fogliani, he announced that he wished to see his native city and inspect his patrimony after many years away. He proposed to return with one hundred horsemen from among his friends and followers and asked his uncle to arrange a reception worthy of his supposed success.

Giovanni Fogliani accepted the appearance of reconciliation and organized a splendid welcome, lodging Oliverotto in his own house. After spending several days making the necessary preparations, Oliverotto held a formal banquet for his uncle and the leading men of Fermo. He directed the conversation toward Pope Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia and their enterprises, then suggested that such grave matters should be discussed in a more private place. Once the guests had followed him into another chamber, concealed soldiers rushed out and killed Giovanni and the other citizens.

The massacre immediately became a seizure of government. Oliverotto rode through the streets, besieged the chief magistrate in the palace, and compelled the city through fear to accept him as its ruler. He killed those whose disaffection might obstruct him and introduced new civil and military ordinances. For one year he held Fermo firmly and became formidable to neighboring powers. His success demonstrates the short-term effectiveness of a concentrated act of violence, but it also binds the Vitelli military tradition to the book’s distinction between power and glory: cruelty and treachery may lead to authority without constituting merit in any honorable sense.

Defeat and Political Significance

Oliverotto’s rule ended when Cesare Borgia trapped the Orsini and Vitelli at Sinigaglia. Oliverotto was captured and, one year after the murder of his uncle, strangled alongside Vitellozzo Vitelli, whom he had taken as his master in both villainy and valor. The shared death gives the family’s political trajectory a stark symmetry. Its military network first raises ambitious men into prominence, then becomes vulnerable to the prince who has learned that autonomous armed factions cannot safely coexist with consolidated rule.

The Vitelli family consequently marks the boundary between delegated power and sovereign power. A prince may use such a family to conquer territory, but the same family can withhold cooperation, pursue its own enlargement, or become the center of rebellion. Cesare Borgia’s eventual reliance on troops of his own raising is presented as the corrective. The family’s reputation remains evidence of military capacity, yet its political fate confirms the larger rule that a ruler who wishes to be secure must control the arms on which his state depends rather than entrust its survival to ambitious captains.