Vitellozzo Vitelli

Vitellozzo Vitelli appears in the treatise as a soldier, mercenary commander, and associate of the Vitelli family whose fate illustrates the instability of power founded on another ruler’s forces. His importance lies less in an independent biography than in the sequence through which he becomes useful to Cesare Borgia, proves unreliable, and is finally destroyed when Cesare Borgia consolidates military authority in his own hands.

Identity and Military Position

Vitellozzo Vitelli is introduced through his connection with Oliverotto of Fermo. After Paolo Vitelli’s death, Oliverotto entered the service of Paolo’s brother, Vitellozzo, and quickly became one of the leading soldiers in his company. Vitellozzo therefore appears as an established commander capable of offering military training and advancement to an ambitious subordinate.

The relationship also places Vitellozzo within a wider network of Italian military entrepreneurs. His authority rests on armed followers and service relationships rather than on a stable hereditary title or a permanent civic allegiance. That position makes him significant to the book’s distinction between a prince’s own arms and forces raised or controlled by others.

Association with Oliverotto

Oliverotto’s rise in Fermo was made possible partly through the support of the Vitelli family and the connivance of citizens who preferred submission to freedom. Having come to regard service under others as beneath him, Oliverotto designed the seizure of his native city. He concealed the plan behind a carefully staged return home, asking his uncle Giovanni Fogliani to arrange an honorable reception and entering Fermo with a hundred horsemen drawn from his friends and followers.

The crime that followed established Oliverotto’s power but also connected Vitellozzo with the conditions that produced it. During the banquet Oliverotto gathered Giovanni and the leading citizens into a private chamber, where concealed soldiers killed them. Oliverotto then rode through the streets, besieged the chief magistrate in the palace, and compelled the city to accept him as its ruler. The account identifies Vitellozzo as the commander under whom Oliverotto had learned soldiering and later describes Oliverotto as having taken Vitellozzo as his master in both villainy and valor.

Service under Cesare Borgia

Cesare Borgia first entered Romagna with French auxiliary troops and used them to take Imola and Forli. Finding those forces untrustworthy, he turned to mercenaries and employed the Orsini and Vitelli. Vitellozzo thus became part of a military arrangement that Cesare Borgia adopted as an intermediate solution: foreign auxiliaries were too dangerous to depend upon, but hired commanders seemed, at first, less threatening.

That confidence did not last. Cesare Borgia discovered that the Orsini and Vitelli were fickle, false, and treacherous. He consequently dismissed them and fell back on troops of his own raising. The sequence is central to the treatise’s argument because Cesare’s political reputation increased as he moved away from forces whose loyalty belonged to their commanders and toward an army that he himself controlled. Vitellozzo’s presence marks the stage at which Cesare Borgia still shared military power with potentially autonomous leaders; his removal marks the advance of princely independence.

Capture and Execution at Sinigaglia

Vitellozzo’s final appearance comes during the entrapment of the Orsini and Vitelli at Sinigaglia. He was captured in the same operation that overreached Oliverotto, whose seizure of Fermo had initially seemed secure. Oliverotto had held the Princedom for a year, strengthened himself through new civil and military ordinances, and become formidable to his neighbors, yet Cesare Borgia’s trap brought his rule to an abrupt end.

Vitellozzo was strangled together with Oliverotto, one year after Oliverotto’s parricidal crime. The execution turns the military association between the two men into a shared political ruin. Vitellozzo, who had once served as Oliverotto’s master in soldiering and wrongdoing, ends beside him as a defeated participant in the same violent world of private armies, shifting alliances, and opportunistic command.

Political and Thematic Significance

Vitellozzo’s function is exemplary rather than expansive. The book uses him to show why a prince cannot safely entrust the defense of a state to mercenary forces. Mercenaries are described as disunited, ambitious, insubordinate, treacherous, insolent among friends, and cowardly before enemies; their loyalty is limited to pay, and their commanders may pursue their own aggrandizement by overthrowing the prince or acting against his wishes.

Cesare Borgia’s changing treatment of military forces gives the example a clear political logic. He used auxiliaries to conquer Imola and Forli, hired the Orsini and Vitelli when he judged mercenaries less dangerous, and finally raised troops of his own after discovering the hired commanders’ unreliability. Vitellozzo’s fate therefore embodies the difference between possessing military assistance and possessing military power. A commander who controls armed men independently may be useful in conquest, but he remains a rival center of authority; once the prince can replace him with forces of his own, the commander’s value becomes a liability.

The episode also reinforces the treatise’s broader claim that newly acquired power is difficult to maintain when its foundations depend on external favor. Those who rise through good fortune or another person’s arms reach power easily but lack the knowledge, authority, and faithful troops needed to preserve it. Vitellozzo is not described as a prince created by Fortune, yet he belongs to the same political environment of unstable delegated power: his military position depends on service, alliance, and command over forces that can be redirected by changing interests. His strangling at Sinigaglia is consequently both a personal end and a demonstration of the danger faced by men who exercise power without being its unquestioned source.