Cesare Borgia took the Romagna in 1499 and 1500, and inherited a province that had been run by a collection of small tyrants and had descended into banditry and disorder.
He appointed Ramiro de Lorca as governor, with full authority, and Ramiro pacified it. He did so with extreme brutality: summary executions, mutilations, punishments delivered without process. It worked. Within a period of months the Romagna was, by contemporary accounts, orderly and safe in a way it had not been for a generation.
It was also seething. The population had been terrorized into peace and hated the man who had done it.
On 26 December 1502, in the main square of Cesena, Ramiro de Lorca's body was found cut in two pieces, with a block of wood and a bloodied knife beside it.
Machiavelli's account of this in The Prince is one of the coldest passages in political literature. Borgia, he writes, judged that such excessive authority was no longer necessary, and — because he knew the past severity had generated some hatred — wished to show that any cruelty which had occurred had not originated with him but from the harsh nature of his minister. And having taken this occasion, he had him placed one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces. The ferocity of this spectacle left the people at once satisfied and stupefied.
Three mechanisms are running, and they are worth separating because the technique is still in use.
Cruelty by proxy. The unpopular necessary work is delegated to a subordinate with full authority, which means the ruler's name is not on it.
Blame transfer at the moment of completion. Once the work is done, the subordinate is destroyed, and the destruction is presented as justice on behalf of the aggrieved. The accumulated resentment has a target that can be removed, and removing it discharges the resentment rather than redirecting it upward.
And vividness. Machiavelli's phrase — satisfied and stupefied — describes the effect of a single concrete image on a population's expectations. A statistical account of policy reaches nobody. A body in two pieces in the square on the morning after Christmas reorganizes what everyone believes about who is in charge and what he is capable of, and it does so in one day.
The observers made a further error which is the reason the technique keeps working. They attributed the cruelty to Ramiro's character rather than to the position he occupied and the instructions he was given, which is the fundamental attribution error operating as a governing instrument.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Blame Transfer as Statecraft