Italian Wars Begin
Charles VIII of France crossed the Alps in September 1494 with some 25,000 men and a siege train, and began sixty-five years of war on Italian soil. His claim was to the throne of Naples, inherited through the house of Anjou, and it was a pretext he had been encouraged to act on by Ludovico Sforza of Milan, who wanted French help against Naples and expected to control what followed. The march to Naples took five months and almost no fighting. Florence expelled the Medici and surrendered its fortresses to him; the pope let him pass; Naples' king fled. What frightened Italy was the artillery. French guns were bronze, cast on trunnions, mounted on wheeled carriages and firing iron shot, and they reduced fortifications in hours that had previously held out for months. Guicciardini wrote that they made in a few hours the destruction that in Italy used to require days. The response was the League of Venice — Milan, Venice, the Papacy, Spain and the Emperor — assembled within months to expel the man Milan had invited. Charles fought his way home through Fornovo in July 1495 and kept nothing. The wars ran on under Louis XII, Francis I and Henry II against the Habsburgs, and turned Italy into the arena in which France and Spain fought for European supremacy — with the sack of Rome in 1527 as its worst single episode. Spain won at Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 and dominated the peninsula for a century and a half. Machiavelli and Guicciardini both wrote to explain how Italy had let it happen. The invasion is the conventional end of the Renaissance as a political era.
- Year: 1494 CE
- Category: War
