For a time the fortunes of the new war favored the French. D’Aubigny’s forces overran almost all southern Italy, and Gonzalo shut up his troops in the fortified town of Barletta. There a medieval incident brightened a dismal war (February 13, 1503). Angered by the comment of a French officer that the Italians were an effeminate and dastardly people, the commander of an Italian regiment in the Spanish army challenged thirteen Frenchmen to fight thirteen Italians. It was agreed; the war was interrupted; and the hostile armies stood as spectators while the twenty-six combatants fought until all thirteen Frenchmen had been disabled by wounds and taken prisoner. Gonzalo, with the Spanish chivalry that often rivaled Spanish cruelty, paid from his own pocket the ransoms of the prisoners, and sent them back to their army.6
The incident restored the morale of the Great Captain’s troops; they issued from Barletta, defeated and dispersed the besiegers, and defeated the French again at Cerignola. On May 16, 1503, Gonzalo entered Naples unresisted, and was acclaimed by the populace, which can always be relied upon to applaud the victor. Louis XII sent another army against Gonzalo; he met it on the banks of the Garigliano, and routed it (December 29, 1503); in that rout Piero de’ Medici, fleeing with the French, was drowned. Gonzalo now laid siege to Gaeta, the last stronghold of the French in southern Italy. He offered them generous terms, which they soon accepted (January 1, 1504); and the fidelity with which he kept to these terms after the French had been disarmed led them—struck by so great a violation of precedents—to call him le gentil capitaine.7 By the treaty of Blois (1505) Louis saved a bit of face by assigning his Neapolitan rights to his relative Germaine de Foix, who was, however, to marry the widowed Ferdinand and bring Naples to him as her dowry. The crowns of Naples and Sicily were added to those already on Ferdinand’s insatiable head; and thereafter, till 1707, the Kingdom of Naples remained an appanage of Spain.
III. THE LEAGUE OF CAMBRAI: 1508–16
Italy was now half foreign: southern Italy was Spain’s; northwestern Italy from Genoa through Milan to the outskirts of Cremona was in the power of France; the minor principalities accepted French influence; only Venice and the papacy were comparatively independent, and they were intermittently at war for the cities of the Romagna. Venice longed for additional mainland markets and resources to replace those lost to the Turks or threatened by Atlantic routes to India; she took advantage of Alexander’s death, and Caesar Borgia’s illness, to seize Faenza, Ravenna, and Rimini; Julius II proposed to recapture them. In 1504 he persuaded Louis and Maximilian to stop their unchristian quarreling and join him in attacking Venice and dividing among them the Venetian possessions on the mainland.8 Maximilian’s spirit was willing, but his treasury was weak, and nothing came of the plot. Julius kept on trying.
On December 10, 1508, a grand conspiracy was hatched against Venice at Cambrai. The Emperor Maximilian joined it because Venice had taken from imperial control Goriza, Trieste, Pordenone, and Fiume, because Venice ignored his imperial rights in Verona and Padua, and because Venice had refused him and his little army free passage toward Rome for the papal coronation upon which he had set his heart. Louis XII joined the League because disputes had arisen between France and Venice as to the division of northern Italy. Ferdinand of Spain joined it because Venice insisted on retaining Brindisi, Otranto, and other Apulian ports which for centuries had been part of the Kingdom of Naples, but had been seized by Venice during Naples’ troubles in 1495. Julius joined the League (1509) because Venice not only refused to evacuate the Romagna, but made no secret of her ambition to acquire Ferrara—an acknowledged papal fief. The European powers now planned to absorb all the mainland holdings of Venice: Spain would recover her cities on the Adriatic; the Pope would regain the Romagna; Maximilian would get Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, Friuli, and Verona; Louis would receive Bergamo, Brescia, Crema, Cremona, and the valley of the Adda River. Had the plan succeeded, Italy would have ceased to exist; France and Germany would have reached down to the Po, Spain almost up to the Tiber; the Papal States would have been hemmed in helplessly; and the Venetian bulwark against the Turks would have been destroyed. In this crisis no Italian state offered Venice aid; she had provoked almost all of them by her rapacity; indeed, Ferrara, reasonably suspicious of her, joined the League. The noble Gonzalo, rudely retired by Ferdinand, offered his services as general to Venice; the Senate dared not accept, for its sole hope of survival lay in detaching one ally after another from the League.
Venice deserved sympathy now only because she stood alone against overwhelming power, and because her loyal rich and her conscripted poor alike fought with incredible pertinacity to a Pyrrhic victory. The Senate offered to restore Faenza and Rimini to the papacy, but the angry Julius responded with a blast of excommunication, and sent his troops to recapture the Romagna cities while the French advance compelled Venice to concentrate her forces in Lombardy. At Agnadello the French defeated the Venetians in one of the bloodiest battles of the Renaissance (May 14, 1509); six thousand men died there on that day. The desperate Signory recalled its remaining troops to Venice, allowed the French to occupy all Lombardy, evacuated Apulia and the Romagna, confessed to Verona, Vicenza, and Padua that she could no longer defend them, and gave them full freedom to surrender to the Emperor or resist him as they chose. Maximilian came down with the largest army—some 36,000 men—yet seen in those parts, and laid siege to Padua. The surrounding peasantry made all the trouble they could for his men; the Paduans fought with a bravery that attested the good government they had enjoyed under Venice. Maximilian, impatient and always pinched for funds, left in disgust for the Tirol; Julius suddenly ordered his troops to withdraw from the siege; Padua and Vicenza voluntarily returned to Venetian control. Louis XII, having obtained his share of the spoils, disbanded his army.
Julius had by this time realized that the full victory of the League would be a defeat for the papacy, since it would leave the popes at the mercy of northern powers among whom the Reformation was already beginning to find voice. When Venice again offered him all that he could ask, he, “vowing that he would ne’er consent, consented” (1510). Having reclaimed what he considered to be the just property of the Church, he was free to turn the fury of his spirit against the French who, controlling both Lombardy and Tuscany, were now unpleasant neighbors of the Papal States. At Mirándola he vowed never to shave till he had driven the French from Italy; so grew the majestic beard of Raphael’s portrait. Now the Pope gave to Italy, too late, a stirring motto, Fuori i barbari!—” Out with the barbarians!” In October, 1511, he formed a “League of Holy Union” with Venice and Spain; soon he won to it Switzerland and England. By the end of January, 1512, Venice had recaptured Brescia and Bergamo with the joyful co-operation of the inhabitants. France kept most of her troops at home to meet possible invasion from England and Spain.
One French force remained in Italy, under the command of a dashing and courtly youth of twenty-two years. Resenting inaction, Gaston de Foix led this army first to the relief of besieged Bologna, then to defeat the Venetians at Isola della Scala, then to retake Brescia, finally to win a brilliant but costly victory at Ravenna (April 11, 1512). Nearly 20,000 corpses fertilized that battlefield; and Gaston himself, fighting in the front, received mortal wounds.