Peace of Lodi and the Italic League
The Italic League was concluded in 1454 and 1455 by the five major Italian powers — Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples and the Papacy — and kept the peninsula largely at peace for forty years. Its immediate origin was exhaustion. Milan and Venice had fought for decades over Lombardy, and the Peace of Lodi in April 1454 ended that war on terms negotiated chiefly between Francesco Sforza and Cosimo de' Medici, fixing the Adda as the border. The larger cause was Constantinople. The Ottomans had taken the city in May 1453, and the prospect of a Turkish advance into Italy concentrated minds that the fall of a distant Christian empire otherwise might not have. The league bound its members to a twenty-five-year mutual defence pact and to non-aggression, and it was renewed. Its working principle was the balance of power, applied deliberately and probably for the first time in European diplomacy: no single Italian state was to be allowed to dominate, and any that grew too strong would face the others. Lorenzo de' Medici became its most active manager after 1478. The system produced the institutions of modern diplomacy — resident ambassadors, permanent embassies, systematic reporting — because states that intended to watch each other continuously needed people on the spot. It also depended on keeping foreign powers out. That failed in 1494, when Ludovico Sforza invited Charles VIII of France into Italy against Naples. The Italian Wars ran for sixty-five years and left Spain in control of most of the peninsula. Guicciardini dated the ruin of Italy from that invitation, and Machiavelli wrote The Prince about what followed.
- Year: 1454 CE
- Category: Diplomacy
