In his book The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli names the Achaemenid Empire as a historical example of a centralized state, claiming that Alexander's successors could fight each other because they did not need to care about internal enemies. How true is this assumption?
In Chapter 4 of The Prince**, Machiavelli compares centralized and decentralized states, naming the Kingdom of France as a contemporary example of a decentralized state and the Ottoman Empire as an example of a centralized state. He claims that decentralized states are easier to conquer because one can find dissatisfied nobles within the realm as potential allies, but difficult to hold because these nobles continue to be powerful actors who can quickly turn against the new ruler. Centralized states, on the other hand, are supposedly harder to conquer because one will not find any powerful conspirators to ally with, but easier to hold because there is no rival nobility or feudal elite that one needs to deal with.**
He names the Achaemenid Empire as a historical example of a centralized empire and claims that Alexander the Great's successors therefore did not need to worry about internal enemies, as there was no independent nobility that could possibly revolt. Was he correct? What confuses me is that I had always thought that the Persian Empire, apart from the Great King, was governed by several subordinate rulers, called satraps, and that they de facto formed a kind of aristocracy or nobility.
