Oppression

Oppression is a recurring political condition in which a population is dominated, burdened, or exposed to the arbitrary power of rulers and elites. In the work’s political vocabulary, it is not merely a private experience of suffering: it is a force that drives rebellion, shapes the formation of civil principalities, determines whether conquered territories can be retained, and gives urgency to the appeal for Italy’s rescue. The text repeatedly treats the fear of oppression as a motive for political action, while also showing how liberation rhetoric can become the pretext for a new domination.

Oppression in Conquered States

In a mixed principality, subjects often accept a new ruler because they believe that a change of masters will improve their condition. That expectation can lead them to take up arms against the former government, but the promise is frequently deceptive: after the conquest, they discover that they are worse off than before. The new Prince cannot avoid offending them through the troops quartered among them and through the many vexations associated with acquisition. He therefore inherits enemies among those injured by the conquest while failing to satisfy those who helped him win it, since he cannot reward them as they expect and may be unable to punish them without violating obligations created by the takeover.

The experience of Milan illustrates this cycle. Louis XII of France gained the city quickly and lost it just as quickly because the people who had opened the gates had been deceived in their hopes of future benefits and could not endure the insolence of their new ruler. When Milan was recovered from France a second time, the task was more difficult: the entire world had to be brought against the French, and their armies had to be destroyed and driven from Italy. Rebellion gave the conqueror a pretext to punish the guilty, investigate the suspected, and reinforce weak points, so the population’s initial resistance altered the political conditions of later rule.

The text therefore distinguishes between territories whose inhabitants share the conqueror’s language and customs and those marked by differences in language, usage, and law. In the first case, the new ruler can retain the state more easily by destroying the former ruling line while leaving laws and taxes unchanged. The old condition is then gradually incorporated into the hereditary dominion. In the second case, legal and cultural difference multiplies the sources of opposition. The Prince is advised to reside personally in the acquired territory, so that disorders can be detected at their beginnings, officials cannot pillage the inhabitants without immediate oversight, and subjects have direct access to their ruler. Personal presence can make them love him if they are well disposed and fear him if they are not, while a foreign enemy becomes more cautious about attacking a state in which the Prince is physically established.

Colonies offer another method of controlling a conquered province. They cost less than maintaining a large military force, remain more faithful, and offend only those whose fields and houses are taken for the new settlers. Because the dispossessed are few, scattered, and poor, they cannot easily become dangerous; those left untouched are quieted by the absence of direct injury and by fear of sharing the dispossessed people’s fate. The method exposes the material mechanism of oppression: security for the new regime is purchased through concentrated dispossession, while the wider community is governed through the combined pressure of limited benefit and exemplary fear.

Freedom, Law, and the Memory of Subjection

A city or province accustomed to live under its own laws and in freedom presents a more persistent danger than a population long accustomed to princely obedience. Such a state may be destroyed, occupied by the new Prince, or permitted to retain its laws under a tribute-paying government controlled by a few citizens dependent on the conqueror’s protection. The first method removes the political body that could resist; the second keeps rebellion under the ruler’s immediate eye; the third attempts to convert local institutions into instruments of submission.

The examples of Athens, Thebes, Capua, Carthage, Numantia, and Greece establish a sharp contrast. The Spartans held Athens and Thebes through oligarchies but eventually lost them. The Romans destroyed Capua, Carthage, and Numantia and did not lose them. When Rome tried to hold Greece while leaving its cities free and governed by their own laws, the arrangement failed, and many cities had to be destroyed before the province could be secured. The argument is severe because freedom is treated as an active political memory rather than a passive legal condition: whenever misfortune comes upon the occupying power, the old name of liberty and the ancient laws can be turned against it.

Pisa’s rising against the Florentines after a century of servitude demonstrates that prolonged subjection does not necessarily erase the memory of freedom. Lengthy domination and benefits granted by the conqueror cannot guarantee that the old order will be forgotten, particularly when the inhabitants remain concentrated rather than scattered. In this account, oppression may silence institutions without extinguishing the concepts that once gave those institutions meaning.

The danger differs in a territory formerly ruled by a Prince. Once the ruling line is extinguished, inhabitants accustomed to obedience may lack both the habit of freedom and the confidence to choose a leader among themselves. They can therefore be won over by a foreign power. Republics, by contrast, possess stronger vitality, fiercer hatred, and a keener thirst for revenge because the memory of former freedom continues to disturb them. The safest choices for a conqueror are consequently to destroy such a republic or reside in it personally; otherwise its political memory remains a reservoir of resistance.

Oppression and Civil Rule

The formation of a civil principality begins with two opposed social desires. The people do not wish to be dominated or oppressed by the nobles, while the nobles wish to dominate and oppress the people. From this conflict emerge a principality, liberty, or licence. A Prince may therefore rise through popular support or through the favour of the nobles, but the two routes place him in different relationships with oppression.

Nobles who cannot withstand the people may elevate one of their own number, using his authority as a shield behind which they can pursue their desires. The people, unable to resist the nobles, may instead invest a single citizen with their influence so that his authority protects them. The noble-backed Prince faces greater difficulty because many around him consider themselves his equals and cannot be governed as readily. The popular Prince is more isolated but generally has fewer immediate rivals, while the people’s demand is described as less dangerous because they chiefly seek not to be oppressed.

The difference is also institutional. The demands of the nobles cannot be satisfied without harming others, since their aim is domination; the people’s demand can be satisfied without the same injury because their aim is defensive. A Prince cannot secure himself against a hostile multitude as easily as against hostile nobles, but the danger posed by nobles includes both desertion and active betrayal. They possess greater craft and foresight, can choose the moment most favorable to their safety, and can seek the protection of whichever side appears likely to win. A ruler therefore may make and unmake nobles, but must continue living with the same people.

A Prince who rises through the people’s favour should remain on good terms with them, which the text considers comparatively easy because they ask only not to be oppressed. A Prince raised by the nobles against popular will must instead conciliate the people by protecting them. Such protection can produce stronger attachment than popular origin itself, because people treated well by someone they expected to mistreat them feel especially indebted to him. The example of Nabis, Prince of Sparta, shows the practical value of this relationship: attacked by the armies of Greece and by a victorious Roman army, he defended his country and crown because only a few subjects required guarding. Had the people been hostile, that limited internal security would not have been enough.

Military Instruments of Subjection

Oppression is also connected to the organization of force. A state’s foundations are identified as good laws and good arms, with laws dependent upon arms. The available forces are the Prince’s own subjects, mercenaries, auxiliaries, or a mixture of these. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are condemned as useless and dangerous because they are disunited, ambitious, insubordinate, treacherous, insolent among friends, and cowardly before enemies. Their loyalty is tied to pay rather than to the state, so they may remain present in peace while disappearing when war begins.

This military dependence produces a form of political vulnerability that can turn directly into oppression. Mercenary troops plunder their employers in peace and abandon them in war, leaving the population exposed to both internal predation and foreign attack. The text attributes Italy’s present ruin to long reliance on such forces and argues that the ease with which Charles of France conquered Italy revealed the consequences of rulers’ dependence on armies without a durable bond to the community.

The captains of mercenaries create a further danger. If a captain is capable, he cannot be trusted because he may seek his own advancement by overthrowing his employer or acting against the employer’s wishes. If he is incapable, the state risks ruin through his incompetence. By contrast, a Prince should command personally, while a Republic should appoint one of its citizens and restrain or replace him through law. Rome and Sparta remained armed and free for ages, and the Swiss are presented as both exceptionally armed and exceptionally free. The argument connects freedom not with the absence of force but with control over the force that protects the political community.

Italy’s National Condition

At the close of the work, oppression expands from a local condition into a national diagnosis. Italy is described as more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, and more divided than the Athenians. It is without a head or order, beaten, spoiled, torn apart, overrun, and abandoned to destruction. The accumulation of verbs turns oppression into a landscape of political dismemberment rather than a single act by a single ruler.

The injuries are named concretely. Lombardy suffers devastation and plunder; Naples and Tuscany endure exactions and imposts; wounds neglected for so long have become running sores. Italy is represented as praying for rescue and ready to follow any standard if someone will raise it. The appeal thus depends upon both coercion and consent: a deliverer must possess the force to end devastation, but the population’s readiness to follow supplies the social basis for a new political order.

The text recognizes that earlier figures may have seemed destined to redeem Italy, only for Fortune to disown them as their actions unfolded. The desired new Prince must therefore unite opportunity, ability, arms, and political judgment. The final appeal does not present liberation as an escape from power; it asks for a power capable of ending foreign domination, internal disunity, and predatory exaction. Oppression becomes the condition that makes extraordinary political action necessary, while the unresolved question is whether the force that ends subjection can establish a stable order without reproducing it in another form.