Italian Wars

For sixty-five years, from 1494 to 1559, the rich but divided states of Italy were the main battlefield of a struggle between the French monarchy and the Habsburgs who ruled Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. The Italian Wars were a chain of separate conflicts, with fighting also spilling into Flanders, the Rhineland and the Mediterranean. They ended with Spain dominant in much of the peninsula, and they transformed European warfare, as handguns and mobile artillery replaced the tactics of the Middle Ages.

Since the Peace of Lodi in 1454, a balance between Milan, Venice, Florence, the papacy and Naples had kept outside powers largely at bay. The death of the Florentine leader Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492 weakened that system. Encouraged by Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan, Charles VIII of France pressed an inherited claim to the Kingdom of Naples and invaded in September 1494. His army, with a fast-moving siege train that could batter down walls in hours, marched through Italy almost unopposed and entered Rome on the last day of the year. Alarmed, Venice, Milan, Spain and the Emperor formed the League of Venice in March 1495. Charles fought his way home at Fornovo in July, and his conquest of Naples soon collapsed.

His successor Louis XII seized Milan in 1499 and agreed to share Naples with Ferdinand of Aragon, but the two fell out, and Spanish victories at Cerignola and the Garigliano in 1503 left Naples in Spanish hands. Pope Julius II then united France, Spain and the Emperor against the Republic of Venice in the League of Cambrai of 1508, before turning on the French with a new Holy League in 1511. Francis I recovered Milan by defeating the Swiss at Marignano in September 1515.

In 1519 Charles V, already king of Spain, was elected emperor, leaving France surrounded by Habsburg lands. War over Milan resumed in 1521. On 24 February 1525 the French army was crushed at the Battle of Pavia, and Francis was captured and taken to Spain. Freed after signing the Treaty of Madrid, he repudiated it at once, and Pope Clement VII joined him in the League of Cognac. In May 1527 unpaid imperial troops carried out the Sack of Rome. The Peace of Cambrai in 1529 confirmed Charles's hold on Milan and Naples, and he was crowned in Bologna the following year.

Francis renewed the war in 1536 and again in 1542, now in open alliance with the Ottoman Empire, whose fleet helped the French besiege Nice in 1543. Neither campaign changed much. Under Henry II the fighting moved largely to the north, where a Spanish army won at St Quentin in 1557 and the French took Calais from England in January 1558.

The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, signed on 3 April 1559, ended the wars. France gave up its Italian ambitions but kept Calais and the bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun. Spain held Naples, Sicily, Sardinia and the Duchy of Milan, while Savoy was restored as an independent state. Historians still debate whether this amounted to Spanish hegemony, since the Papal States, Venice and other states remained independent.

Contemporaries such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini wrote about the conflict as it happened, making it one of the first wars recorded by many literate observers. Pike and arquebus formations, wheeled artillery and new fortifications all developed during these decades.

Our 1492 map shows Italy on the eve of the French invasion, and the 1530 map shows the peninsula after Charles V's victories, with the Kingdom of France shut out of Italy.