Fall of the Duchy of Milan to France
Louis XII took Milan in September 1499, and Ludovico Sforza lost the duchy he had spent his life securing. The French claim ran through Louis's grandmother Valentina Visconti, and it was a better claim in law than the Sforza's — Francesco Sforza had taken the duchy by siege in 1450 and had never received imperial investiture, which left every Sforza title formally defective. Ludovico had invited the French into Italy himself in 1494, encouraging Charles VIII to press his claim to Naples in order to protect Milan from Neapolitan pressure. It is the standing example in Italian political writing of a ruler summoning a power he could not send home. Louis prepared properly where Charles had improvised. He bought Venetian neutrality with a promise of Cremona, secured the Pope by making Cesare Borgia a French duke, and hired Swiss infantry. The army crossed in August and the fortresses fell in weeks. Ludovico's condottiere Galeazzo di Sanseverino abandoned Alessandria; the citizens of Milan, taxed heavily for years, did not resist; and Ludovico fled to the Tyrol. He came back in February 1500 with Swiss mercenaries and retook the city. At Novara in April his Swiss found themselves facing Swiss in French pay and refused to fight their countrymen. They negotiated their own withdrawal and, by most accounts, handed him over. He spent his last eight years in French custody, latterly in a cell at Loches, and died in 1508. Leonardo da Vinci had already left. Milan changed hands repeatedly for the next thirty years and ended Spanish in 1535.
- Year: 1499 CE
- Category: War
