Page:The Prince (translated by William K. Marriott).djvu/17

Rh great actors in them, so far only as they impinge on the personality of Machiavelli. He had several meetings with Louis XII. of France, and his estimate of that monarch's character has already been alluded to. Machiavelli has painted Ferdinand of Arragon as the man who accomplished great things under the cloak of religion, but who in reality had no mercy, faith, humanity, or integrity; and who, had he allowed himself to be influenced by such motives, would have been ruined. The Emperor Maximilian was one of the most interesting men of the age, and his character has been drawn by many hands; but Machiavelli, who was an envoy at his court in 1507–8, reveals the secret of his many failures when he describes him as a secretive man, without force of character—ignoring the human agencies necessary to carry his schemes into effect, and never insisting on the fulfilment of his wishes.

The remaining years of Machiavelli's official career were filled with events arising out of the League of Cambray, made in 1508 between the three great European powers already mentioned and the Pope, with the object of crushing the Venetian Republic. This result was attained at the battle of Vaila, when Venice lost in one day all that she had won in eight hundred years, Florence had a difficult part to play during these events, complicated as they were by the feud