Borgia, CesareCesare Borgia, oil painting; in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.Alinari/Art Resource, New York
French victories in Lombardy
In order to reconquer the lost papal lands, Julius II organized an anti-Venetian alliance, the League of Cambrai (1508). All the great powers of Italy, along with those across the Alps—the Holy Roman Empire, France, and Spain—joined forces to defeat the Venetians at Agnadello (May 14, 1509). But dissension among the victorious allies, who were manipulated by skillful Venetian diplomacy, turned the alliance against France, because that kingdom now seemed to be the greatest power in Italy. A Holy League, organized in 1511 to curtail French power in Lombardy, restored the Medici in Florence in 1512 with the help of Spanish arms and allowed Venice to keep its old terra ferma (mainland) empire (without its recent acquisitions in Lombardy, the Romagna, and Puglia). Nonetheless, Agnadello profoundly shook Venetian self-confidence and remained the turning point in the republic’s imperial ambitions in mainland Italy.
At the same time, Louis XII enjoyed his greatest triumphs, including the defeat of Julius II’s Holy League at Ravenna (April 11, 1512). But, with the death of his brilliant general Gaston de Foix in that battle, the French suffered an irreparable loss. Further, in May 1512, 20,000 Swiss troops entered Italy on the papal side, and the French army was recalled to repel invasions of Navarre (Navarra) by the Spanish and of Normandy and Guyenne by the English. Francis I (ruled 1515–47), who succeeded his cousin and father-in-law, Louis XII, reopened hostilities in Italy. His army of 40,000 men defeated the Swiss at Marignano (Sept. 13–14, 1515), which allowed him to retake Milan. The new pope, Leo X (reigned 1513–21), who was a Medici and a dependent of Spain, hurried to secure peace. Within the year, the new king of Spain, Charles I (ruled 1516–56), who had succeeded his maternal grandfather, Ferdinand II, as coruler because of his mother’s insanity, signed the Peace of Noyon (Aug. 13, 1516), which gave Milan to France and confirmed Naples for Spain. The peace would not endure, however, as local Italian affairs became subordinated to the dynastic struggle between the young heirs to Habsburg and Valois (the ruling French dynasty) fortunes and to the Reformation movement that intertwined religion and politics into the 17th century. The age of Charles V
Charles I, who was elected Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1519 upon the death of his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, aspired to universal monarchy over the far-flung territories he had inherited, from Germany, the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain to the New World. The Piedmontese humanist Mercurino de Gattinara, Charles’s chancellor from 1518 to 1530, fueled his ambitions, but the providential design for Charles to be a new Charlemagne collided with political realities. The revolt of the comuneros (1520–21), an uprising of a group of Spanish cities, was successfully quelled, securing Castile as the bedrock of his empire, but the opposition of Francis I of France, of Süleyman I (the Magnificent; ruled 1520–66) of the Ottoman Empire, and of the Lutheran princes in Germany proved more intractable.
Early success in Italy, nevertheless, provided Charles with the most important base outside Spain for exercising his power. Imperial troops forced the French to retreat from Milan and restored the Sforza in 1522. When a refitted French army of 30,000 men retook Milan in 1524, the new Medici pope, Clement VII (reigned 1523–34), changed sides to become a French ally. But, at the most important battle of the Italian wars, fought at Pavia on Feb. 24, 1525, the French were defeated and Francis I was captured. Soon after his release, he abrogated the Treaty of Madrid (January 1526), in which he had been forced, among other concessions, to abandon his Italian claims. He headed a new anti-Spanish alliance, the Holy League of Cognac (May 1526), which united France with the papacy, Milan, Florence, and Venice. With no French forces in the field, some 12,000 of Charles’s imperial troops, largely unpaid Lutheran infantry, marched south to Rome. On May 6, 1527, they attacked and sacked the city, forcing the pope to take refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo. The repercussions of this chastisement of the corrupt church were heard throughout Europe, and some scholars still date the end of the Renaissance in Italy to this event. New warfare
New military technologies in siegecraft (cannon and bastion) and new techniques in open-field engagements (mixing pike and harquebus) not only transformed the nature of warfare but also threatened the order of a society still dominated by an aristocratic military caste. In the course of the Italian wars, the non-noble infantry adopted tactical innovations that unseated the cavalry of heavily armoured nobility, which had dominated medieval warfare. Charles VIII’s invading army employed the Swiss pike phalanx, whose moving squares of 6,000 men had already developed the ability to engage in offensive as well as defensive maneuvers. In the fighting against France for the Kingdom of Naples, Fernández de Córdoba first developed the Spanish tercios, more-flexible units of 3,000 infantrymen using both pikes and harquebuses. Spanish military superiority eventually owed its success to the introduction in 1521 of the musket (an improved harquebus) and to the refinement of pike and musket tactics in the years preceding the Battle of Pavia. Such tactics dominated land warfare until the Battle of Rocroi in 1643.
The new social composition of the enlarged infantry, as well as the need for large quantities of metal and the financial requirements for equipping and launching an army, pushed military affairs further into royal hands, strengthening the growing power of the central monarchy at the expense of the aristocracy. Commoners could forge a new relationship directly with royal authority. They could also, as in the case of the republics, create new images of citizenly power. In 1503 the Florentine republic, for example, planned two monumental mural paintings for the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio (town hall) to be executed by two of the giants of High Renaissance art, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The former’s Battle of Anghiari and the latter’s Battle of Cascina, if completed, would have emphasized the strength and righteous rage of republican virtue and the necessity for citizens to be vigilant, challenging them to retake Pisa and subdue Tuscany during the republic’s ongoing wars. Ludovico Ariosto, singing his epic poetry at the chivalric pro-French court of Ferrara, lamented the loss of glory, honour, valour, and courage to the “wretched and foul invention” of firearms. Even 20 years after the fact, when the diplomat and writer Baldassare Castiglione nostalgically portrayed the graceful court of Urbino of 1508 in The Courtier (1528), he did so in order to instruct courtiers and court ladies on how to adapt their roles to the changing times.
Delphic Sibyl, fresco by Michelangelo, 1508–12; in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.Scala/Art Resource, New York
Spanish victory in Italy
In the immediate wake of the sack of Rome and the consequent disgrace of the Medici papacy, the Florentines expelled their Medici overlords. A French army under General Odet de Foix Lautrec finally arrived in 1528, but Andrea Doria, a Genoese admiral and aristocrat whose galleys had formerly been in the service of the French, unexpectedly switched sides and became a staunch supporter of Charles V. Plague took Lautrec’s life and decimated the French army, and in 1529 the pope was forced to make peace with Charles in the Treaty of Barcelona—as did Francis I in the Treaty of Cambrai. After almost 40 years of war, Italy submitted to Spanish pacification. Francis I renounced his claims in Italy, as well as in Artois and Flanders. The last Sforza was restored in Milan with the provision that the duchy would pass to Spain upon his death. Venice lost its recent mainland conquests. The Papal States were restored, and in 1530 the pope crowned Charles V emperor and king of Italy and made vague promises to call a council to address the Protestant schism and reform the church. In exchange, Spanish forces reinstated the Medici in Florence.