Italian wars, French (1494-1559). The invasion of Italy in 1494 by King Charles VIII of France (1483-98) sparked a series of wars that sporadically involved all of western Europe. Charles claimed the kingdom of Naples and hoped to seize it by force of arms, and at first his advance swept all aside. In the process he offended the Holy Roman Emperor, the pope, and most dangerously Ferdinand, monarch not only of Sicily but now joint monarch of a newly unified Spain that was about to send out its surplus warrior population to conquer the empire. It was an army of these hardened soldiers commanded by Ferdinand's ‘Gran Capitán’ Gonzalo de Córdoba that threw the French out of Naples and rescued Pope Alexander VI, winning Ferdinand and Isabella the title of ‘Most Catholic’.
Charles's successor Louis XII (1498-1515) invaded Naples again in 1500 having taken the precaution of hiring the Swiss (see also mercenaries) and once again ran into the Spanish under Córdoba, who handed them resounding defeats at Cerignola and at Garigliano in 1503. The French did not return to Italy in force again until Gaston de Foix, whose father had been killed at Cerignola, himself died defeating imperial and papal forces at Ravenna on 11 April 1512. The last assignment of Ferdinand's ‘Gran Capitán’ was to restore the allied situation.
Under François I (1515-47), the conflict broadened. He had the misfortune to ascend to the French throne one year before the Habsburg Charles V became king of Spain and eventually also Holy Roman Emperor. Henry VIII of England also fought against François, who began well when his artillery smashed the Swiss, now hired to fight against him, at the battle of Marignano on 13-14 September 1515. But that proved to be the high point for French arms and over the next 30 years France found herself as often as not defending her own frontiers, at one point in 1544 having to fight the Spanish in Italy, an invasion by an imperial army across the Rhine, and losing Boulogne to the English.
During the last phase of a struggle whose main theatre was no longer Italy, Henri II (1547-59) devoted his entire reign to war. Earlier he seemed to be reversing the tide and even took Calais, England's last continental possession. But a series of Habsburg successes, culminating at the battle of Gravelines on 13 July 1558, finally led him to conclude the Peace of Câteau-Cambrésis with Philip II of Spain in 1559, ending the wars.
This interminable conflict drained France, established the pre-eminence of Spain in Europe, and brought a marked change in warfare. Artillery had transformed siege warfare and an entirely new style of fortification, the bastioned artillery fortress, came into being. Field artillery had also come of age. The Spanish solved the problem of mating individual firearms with pikes and artillery in the tercio, which ruled the battlefield for a further century.
Bibliography
- Oman, Charles, The Art of War in the 16th Century (London, 1937).
- Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988)
— John A. Lynn
