Battle of Pavia

Outside the walls of Pavia in Lombardy, on the morning of 24 February 1525, an imperial and Spanish army destroyed the French army of King Francis I in a few hours of fighting and took the king himself prisoner. The battle decided the Italian War of 1521–1526 in favour of the Emperor Charles V, killed a large part of the French high nobility, and showed how firearms were changing warfare.

France had lost Lombardy after defeat at Bicocca in 1522, and a further invasion in 1523–24 had failed. In October 1524 Francis crossed the Alps himself with a large army, retook Milan when the imperial commander Charles de Lannoy withdrew to Lodi, and then laid siege to Pavia, held by about 9,000 men under the Spanish captain Antonio de Leyva. An assault on 21 November was beaten back, and the French settled down to starve the town out. Francis weakened his own force by sending a detachment under the Duke of Albany south towards Naples, and several thousand Swiss mercenaries from the Grisons left to defend their homes.

In January 1525 Lannoy was reinforced by German landsknechts under Georg Frundsberg and advanced towards Pavia with the Marquis of Pescara and Charles, Duke of Bourbon, a French nobleman who had gone over to the Emperor. Francis camped most of his army in the walled Visconti hunting park of Mirabello, outside the town walls, between the garrison and the relief force. According to the commonly cited figures, the French had some 26,000 men and the imperial side about 28,000, including the garrison. Short of money and supplies, the imperial commanders decided to attack.

During the night of 23–24 February imperial engineers broke through the park wall, and by dawn several thousand arquebusiers were advancing on Mirabello castle, which they quickly took. In foggy conditions the battle broke into separate fights. Francis led his heavily armoured gendarmes in a charge that scattered the imperial cavalry, but in doing so he rode in front of his own guns, which could no longer fire, and became separated from his infantry. Spanish and German pikemen and arquebusiers then closed in on the French horsemen among the woods and cut them down. Frundsberg's landsknechts routed the Swiss and destroyed the Black Band, a body of renegade German pikemen in French pay. Leyva's garrison sallied out against the siege lines, while the French rearguard under the Duke of Alençon withdrew without fighting. The battle was over by about nine in the morning.

The king's horse was killed under him and he was taken prisoner; several men later claimed the credit. Estimates of French losses range from 8,000 to 15,000, against perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 on the imperial side. Among the French dead were Bonnivet, Louis de la Trémoille, Jacques de la Palice and Richard de la Pole, the last Yorkist claimant to the English throne. Writing to his mother from captivity, Francis told her that he had lost everything except his honour and his life.

Francis was held at Pizzighettone and then in Madrid. To win his release he signed the Treaty of Madrid in 1526, renouncing his claim to Milan and ceding Burgundy. Once free he declared it invalid because it had been signed under duress, and the war resumed within months, leading to the Sack of Rome in 1527. The battle showed how far massed pikes and handguns had overtaken the charge of armoured knights during the Italian Wars.

Our 1530 map shows Lombardy after the battle, firmly within the sphere of Charles V's Holy Roman Empire and Spain, with the Kingdom of France beyond the Alps.