Italy

Italy is presented not through a description of its landscapes or cities, but as a prize in the schemes of an imagined French royal council. In Raphael Hythloday’s argument, the proposed campaigns there reveal how expansionist policy can serve a ruler’s ambitions while impoverishing the people expected to sustain it.

Italy in the French Council’s Plans

Hythloday asks what he could accomplish if invited to advise the King of France. In the council he imagines, advisers debate how to keep Milan and recover Naples, which has repeatedly slipped from French hands, before proposing the subjugation of the Venetians and the rest of Italy. Their plans treat Italian territories as pieces in a contest for power: one adviser recommends an alliance with the Venetians, to be maintained only while useful and discarded once France can take the spoils without them. Other proposals for hiring German soldiers, buying influence, and arranging alliances extend the same calculus across Europe.

The episode is a hypothetical political argument, not an account of a French campaign in Italy. Its imagined council lets Hythloday put the logic of conquest on display before asking what counsel might interrupt it. The book’s introductory framing adds an important qualification: More sometimes presents a case as concerning France when he means England. Italy therefore belongs both to the council’s specific imperial plans and to a broader critique of policies that could be recognizable beyond their stated setting.

The Case for Leaving Italy Alone

Hythloday says that he would urge the French king to leave Italy alone and remain at home, since France was already too extensive for one ruler to govern well. To explain why acquiring another kingdom could weaken the conqueror, he invokes the Achorians, a people southeast of Utopia. They conquered a neighboring kingdom to which their prince had an old claim, then found that holding it demanded as much effort as winning it. The new subjects remained rebellious or faced foreign invasion, keeping the Achorians perpetually at war and preventing them from disbanding their army.

The costs spread beyond the battlefield. Taxes oppressed the people, money left the kingdom, and people died for the king’s glory without any corresponding benefit to them, even in peacetime. Prolonged war corrupted manners, encouraged robbery and murder, and brought the laws into contempt. Distracted by two kingdoms, the king could attend adequately to neither. The Achorians eventually asked him to choose one; he gave up the newly acquired kingdom and kept his original realm. Hythloday uses their history to argue that the proposed Italian conquests would expose France to the same burden of rule and recurring conflict.

Political Meaning and Narrative Limits

Italy’s significance in the book is thus argumentative: it gives Hythloday a named theater for examining the distance between royal glory and public welfare. The imagined advisers measure success by territory, alliances, and spoils; his counterargument measures it by whether people bear taxes, lose their lives, or suffer disorder without gaining anything in return. The contrast makes Italy part of the book’s larger challenge to the assumption that territorial enlargement is itself a public good.

The discussion remains inside a staged philosophical dialogue. Hythloday offers the Achorians as a precedent and asks how his counsel to the French king would be received; he does not report that the king heard or acted on it. At the book’s close, the narrator says that he cannot agree with everything Hythloday has related, while wishing that some features of Utopia could be adopted. That reservation leaves the critique of ambitious war forceful but framed as a position for examination, rather than an unqualified statement that every proposal in the dialogue is settled truth.