Battle of Marignano

Fought over two days on 13 and 14 September 1515 near Marignano, today's Melegnano, about 16 kilometres south-east of Milan, this battle pitted the new French king Francis I against the army of the Swiss Confederation. The French, with German landsknecht mercenaries and late-arriving Venetian allies, broke the Swiss pike columns that had dominated Italian battlefields for years. Francis won the Duchy of Milan, and the Swiss soon made a peace with France that endured for nearly three centuries.

Marignano belongs to the long Italian Wars, and specifically to the War of the League of Cambrai. Milan, the gateway to Italy for French kings, had been lost by France after a Swiss victory at Novara in 1513. The Swiss restored Maximilian Sforza as duke and effectively made the duchy their protectorate.

In 1515 Francis led his army over the Alps by an unexpected route across the Col d'Argentière, hauling some 72 heavy guns with him. A French cavalry raid captured the papal commander Prospero Colonna at Villafranca. The shock led the pope and many Swiss to look for terms. An agreement was reached that would have returned Milan to France, and part of the Swiss army went home. Fresh contingents from some cantons refused to accept it, however, and Cardinal Matthäus Schiner, a bitter enemy of Francis, is said to have provoked them into fighting by exaggerating a minor skirmish. Around 22,000 Swiss marched out of Milan.

The French, who believed a treaty had been agreed, were caught off guard; Francis is said to have been trying on new armour when the alarm came. His army formed in three divisions, with the artillery arrayed in a crescent around the vanguard. Close to sunset the Swiss advanced in three dense blocks of pikemen, with almost no artillery or cavalry. A forward detachment charged the guns, aiming to seize them and turn them on the French, and drove back the landsknechts, but cavalry under the Duke of Bourbon threw it back.

Fighting continued into the night in smoke and moonlight. The king himself led repeated cavalry charges, and many French commanders were killed or wounded. In the darkest hours both armies drew apart to regroup, and some Swiss quietly left the field.

At dawn the Swiss attacked the reassembled French battery again. This time the guns tore into their columns, and although they pushed the landsknechts back once more, they could not advance further. A Swiss attack on the French left under the Duke of Alençon also failed. The decisive moment came mid-morning, when Venetian troops under Bartolomeo d'Alviano arrived. Beaten back everywhere, the Swiss withdrew in good order. Casualty estimates in the sources run to about 5,000 French and 10,000 Swiss dead. The veteran marshal Gian Giacomo Trivulzio called it a battle of giants.

Francis occupied Milan, where Maximilian Sforza surrendered the castle and went into exile on a French pension. In December 1515 the king met Pope Leo X at Bologna, opening negotiations for a concordat with the papacy, signed by the pope in August 1516; Leonardo da Vinci, present at the meeting, later accompanied Francis to France. In the longer run, however, the victory rallied opposition in Italy and across Europe against Francis.

For the Swiss, Marignano ended their ambitions in Lombardy, though they kept Bellinzona and the neighbouring valleys, and further defeats of Swiss mercenaries followed, including at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. On 29 November 1516 they signed the Treaty of Fribourg, the so-called Perpetual Peace, giving up claims to Milan in return for 700,000 crowns and trade privileges. It held until the French invasion of 1798, and from 1521 Swiss regiments served regularly in French armies. Among those present at the battle was Huldrych Zwingli, whose experience turned him against mercenary service and helped lead him towards the Reformation.

Our 1500 map shows the Duchy of Milan between France, the Republic of Venice and the Swiss cantons, and the 1530 map shows northern Italy after the wars that followed.