Machiavelli now proceeds to discuss the best method of subjugating free cities which have been acquired by a prince.  There are three ways of doing it, he says.  ’The first is to destroy them utterly; the second, to rule them in your own person; the third, to leave them their constitution under the conduct of an oligarchy chosen by yourself, and to be content with tribute.  But, to speak the truth, the only safe way is to ruin them.’  This sounds very much like the advice which an old spider might give to a young one:  When you have caught a big fly, suck him at once; suck out at any rate so much of his blood as may make him powerless to break your web, and feed on him afterwards at leisure.  Then he goes on to give his reasons.  ’He who becomes the master of a city used to liberty, and does not destroy it, should be prepared to be undone by it himself, because that name of Liberty, those ancient usages of Freedom, which no length of years and no benefits can extinguish in the nation’s mind, which cannot be uprooted by any forethought or by any pains, unless the citizens themselves be broken or dispersed, will always be a rallying-point for revolution when an opportunity occurs.’  This terrific moral—­through which, let it be said in justice to Machiavelli, the enthusiasm of a patriot transpires—­is pointed by the example of Pisa.  Pisa, held for a century beneath the heel of Florence—­her ports shut up, her fields abandoned to marsh fever, her civic life extinguished, her arts and sciences crushed out—­had yet not been utterly ruined in the true sense of depopulation or dismemberment.  Therefore when Charles VIII. in 1494 entered Pisa, and Orlandi, the orator, caught him by the royal mantle, and besought him to restore her liberty, that word, the only word the crowd could catch in his petition, inflamed a nation:  the lions and lilies of Florence were erased from the public buildings; the Marzocco was dashed from its column on the quay into the Arno; and in a moment the dead republic awoke to life.  Therefore, argues Machiavelli, so tenacious is the vitality of a free state that a prudent conqueror will extinguish it entirely or will rule it in person with a rod of iron.  This, be it remembered, is the advice of Machiavelli, the the Florentine patriot, to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine tyrant, who has recently resumed his seat upon the neck of that irrepressible republic.

Hitherto we have been considering how the state acquired by a conqueror should be incorporated with his previous dominions.  The next section of Machiavelli’s discourse is by far the most interesting.  It treats of principalities created by the arms, personal qualities, and good fortune of adventurers.  Italy alone in the sixteenth century furnished examples of these tyrannies:  consequently that portion of the Principe which is concerned with them has a special interest for students of the Renaissance.  Machiavelli begins with the founders of kingdoms who have owed