While he dallied in Naples, and his army enjoyed the women of the streets and the stews and caught or spread the “French disease,” trouble was organizing behind him. The Neapolitan nobles, instead of being rewarded for helping depose their king, were in many cases deprived of their estates for the benefit of former Angevin possessors, or to pay Charles’s debts to his servitors; all state offices were given to Frenchmen, and nothing could be obtained from them except by bribes offensively exceeding Neapolitan custom; the occupying army added insult to injury by their open contempt of the Italian people; in a few months the French had worn out their welcome, and earned a hatred that waited in fierce patience for a chance to expel the invaders.
On March 31, 1495, the resilient Alexander, the repentant Lodovico, the angry Ferdinand, the jealous Maximilian, the cautious Senate of Venice joined in a league for the united defense of Italy. King Charles, parading through Naples with a scepter in one hand and a ball—presumably the globe—in the other, took a month to realize that the new alliance was raising an army against him. On May 21 he left Naples in charge of his cousin the Count of Montpensier, and led half his army northward. At Fornovo, on the River Taro in the territory of Parma, his 10,000 troops found their passage blocked by an allied army of 40,000 men led by Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. There, on July 5, 1495, came the first real test of French vs. Italian arms and tactics. Gonzaga, though he himself fought bravely, mismanaged his forces, so that only half of them took part; the Italians were not mentally prepared to fight warriors who gave no quarter, and many of them fled; the Chevalier de Bayard, a lad of twenty, offered his men an inspiring example of reckless courage, and even the King fought valiantly. The battle was indecisive; both sides claimed victory; the French lost their baggage train, but remained masters of the field; and during the night they marched unimpeded to Asti, where Louis, third Duke of Orléans, awaited them with reinforcements. In October Charles, with damaged repute but a whole skin, was back in France.
The territorial results of the invasion were slight. Gonzalo, the “Great Captain,” drove the French out of Naples and Calabria, and restored the Aragonese dynasty in the person of Federigo III (1496). The indirect results of the invasion were endless. It proved the superiority of a national army to mercenary troops. The Swiss mercenaries were a temporary exception; armed with pikes eighteen feet long, and formed in solid battalions that presented a discouraging “hedgehog” to advancing cavalry, they were destined to many victories; but soon, at Marignano (1515), the invincibility of this revived Macedonian phalanx would be ended by improved artillery. It was probably in this war that cannon were first placed on carriages that allowed them to be readily manipulated for direction and range;2 these carriages were drawn by horses, not (as hitherto in Italy) by oxen; and the French brought into action, says Guicciardini, such a number of “field pieces and battering cannon as Italy had never seen before.”3 The French knights, descendants of Froissart’s heroes, fought magnificently at Fornovo; but the knights too would soon yield to cannon. In the Middle Ages the arts of defense had outrun the means of attack, and had discouraged war; now attack was gaining on defense, and war became bloodier. The wars of Italy had heretofore hardly engaged the people, and had afflicted their fields rather than their lives; now they were to see all Italy ravaged and incarnadined. The Swiss learned in this year of war how fertile were the plains of Lombardy; they would hereafter invade them repeatedly. The French learned that Italy was divided into fragments that awaited a conqueror. Charles VIII lost himself in amours, and almost ceased to think of Naples, but his cousin and heir was of sterner stuff. Louis XII would try again.
II. THE ATTACK RENEWED: 1496–1505
Maximilian, “King of the Romans”—i.e., of the Germans—provided an interlude. He fretted at the thought that his great enemy, France, should be strengthened, and outflank him, by capturing Italy; he had heard how rich and fair and weak that land was, not yet a country but only a peninsula. He too had claims on Italy; technically the cities of Lombardy were still imperial fiefs, and he, head of the Holy Roman Empire, might legally give them to whomever he wished; indeed, had not Lodovico bribed him, with florins and another Bianca, to confer upon him the duchy of Milan? Moreover, many Italians invited him: both Lodovico and Venice were appealing to him (1496) to enter Italy and help them resist a threatened repetition of the French assault. Maximilian came, with a handful of troops; Venetian subtlety persuaded him to attack Livorno, the final outlet of Florence on the Mediterranean, and so weaken a Florence still allied with France and always competing with Venice. Maximilian’s campaign failed through inadequate co-ordination and support, and he returned to Germany only slightly a wiser man (December, 1496).
In 1498 the Duke of Orléans became Louis XII. As the grandson of Valentina Visconti he had not forgotten the claims of his family to Milan; and as a cousin of Charles VIII he inherited the claims of the Anjous to Naples. On the day of his coronation he assumed, among others, the titles of Duke of Milan, King of Naples and Sicily, and Emperor of Jerusalem. To clear his path he renewed a treaty of peace with England, and concluded another with Spain. By promising her Cremona and the lands east of the Adda, he lured Venice into signing an alliance with him “for the purpose of making war in common upon the Duke of Milan, Lodovico Sforza, and against everyone save the Lord Pope of Rome, for the purpose of restoring to the Most Christian King… the duchy of Milan as his rightful and olden patrimony.”4 A month later (March, 1499) he made an agreement with the Swiss cantons to supply him with soldiers in return for an annual subsidy of 20,000 florins. In May he brought Alexander VI into the alliance by giving to Caesar Borgia a French bride of royal blood, the duchy of Valentinois, and a pledge of aid in reconquering the Papal States for the papacy. Lodovico felt helpless against such a coalition; he fled to Austria; in three weeks his duchy disappeared into the realms of Venice and France; on October 6, 1499, Louis entered Milan in triumph, welcomed by nearly all Italy except Naples.
Indeed, all Italy but Venice and Naples was now under French domination or influence. Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna hastened to submit. Florence clung to her alliance with France as her only protection against Caesar Borgia. Ferdinand of Spain, though so closely kin to the Aragonese dynasty in Naples, entered into a secret compact at Granada (November 11, 1500) with the representatives of Louis, for the joint conquest of all Italy south of the Papal States. Alexander VI, needing French aid in reconquering these States, co-operated by issuing a bull that deposed Federigo III of Naples and confirmed the partition of the Kingdom between France and Spain.
In July, 1501, a French army under the Scot Stuart d’Aubigny, Caesar Borgia, and Lodovico’s traitorous favorite Francesco di San Severino marched through Italy to Capua, took and plundered it, and advanced upon Naples. Federigo, abandoned by all, yielded the city to the French in return for a comfortable refuge and annuity in France. Meanwhile el gran capitán, Gonzalo de Córdoba, won Calabria and Apulia for Ferdinand and Isabella; and Federigo’s son Ferrante, who surrendered Taranto after being promised his liberty by Gonzalo, was sent as a prisoner to Spain on Ferdinand’s demand. When the Spanish army came into contact with the French on the borders between Apulia and the Abruzzi, disputes arose over the boundary line between the two thefts; and to Alexander’s relief Spain and France went to war over the exact division of the spoils (July, 1502). “If the Lord had not put discord between France and Spain,” said the Pope to the Venetian ambassador, “where should we be?”5