In the autumn of 1494 the French King, Charles VIII,
launched his famous invasion of Italy, and by February 1495 he was the master
of the kingdom of Naples. No one would dispute the importance of this date and
these events in Italian history; the political scene was never to be quite the
same again. For forty years France and Spain struggled for predominance in the
peninsula, and when in the 1530’s Spain emerged as the victor large parts of
Italy had already learnt to accept the fact of foreign control. What
particularly perplexed contemporary Italian writers was how it had happened so
quickly; how had Charles been able to brush aside the resistance of three major
Italian states and occupy one of them within six months? The first answer for
writers like Machiavelli and Guicciardini lay in the weakness of Italy’s
military defence. This was the basis for much of their attack on the
condottiere system—that it had failed Italy in its time of need. Italy,
sheltered behind the Alps, had lost touch with contemporary European military
developments and the condottieri were still living in the anachronistic world
of the medieval cavalry charge. Thus, when confronted with the fury of the
French attack and the novelty of French military methods, their morale
collapsed and they were unable to resist.
These are charges to which we must return in more detail, as
they are a key to the whole understanding of Italian fifteenth-century warfare,
but for the moment it is important to assess how true the basic premise is. To
what extent had Italian warfare developed in a vacuum, isolated from
ultramontane developments? How far is it true that since the departure of the
foreign companies in the fourteenth century, and the death of Hawkwood, Italy
had had no experience of foreign military methods?
There is, of course, some truth in it. There was no major
invasion of Italy as a whole by a foreign army during the fifteenth
century—until 1494; very few of the condottieri were non-Italians. However, as
we have seen, quite a high proportion of the infantry constables were
foreigners, and by the 1480’s large numbers of Albanian stradiots and even
Turks were being used as light cavalry. Furthermore the history of Naples in
the fifteenth century had been one of a constant struggle between Aragonese and
Angevins. Several Angevin expeditionary forces had entered Italy during the
century and the core of the armies with which Alfonso won the crown of Naples
was Spanish. Nor had the activities of these French and Spanish troops been
entirely confined to Naples. There was, in fact, a series of encounters
throughout the century in which Italians had met foreign troops, from the
battle of Brescia in 1401, when the Milanese army had defeated a German force,
to the appearance of the Duke of Lorraine with 250 French lances as one of the
Venetian commanders in the War of Ferrara.
Brescia in 1401 was the only major intervention by German
troops in Italy during the century, and on this occasion the German cavalry was
defeated by Facino Cane and Jacopo dal Verme. In 1411 and 1418 the Venetians
faced massive Hungarian invasions and successfully countered both of them, and
in 1422 Carmagnola with a Milanese army won a notable victory over the Swiss at
Arbedo. Four thousand Swiss had crossed the St. Gothard pass in an attack on
Bellinzona and Domodossola. They were met by Carmagnola with an army of about
5,000 cavalry and 3,000 infantry. The Swiss formed a square of pike infantry in
their traditional custom, but soon found themselves surrounded. Carmagnola
dismounted his men-at-arms and launched them at the square in a manner
reminiscent of Hawkwood. Refusing to accept the Swiss offers to surrender, he
succeeded in completely shattering them. This was a blow which was remembered
in Switzerland for many years and perhaps contributed in some degree to the
relatively few appearances of Swiss troops in Italy for the rest of the
century.
In 1447 and 1449 it was the turn of Colleoni to meet foreign
invaders. French troops under the Duke of Orleans invaded Milan in alliance with
the Venetians attacking from the east, and were met by Colleoni at Bosco
Marengo. On this occasion he abandoned his normal Braccesco technique of
wearing the enemy down with squadrons used in succession, and threw his whole
army into a sudden impetuous charge. The French were taken by surprise and
broken, leaving about 1,500 dead on the field. Two years later, another French
expeditionary force was met by Colleoni at Romagnano Sesia, but this time he
fought a carefully planned tactical battle in the Italian style against them
and again won a complete victory. These two battles were the bases of
Colleoni’s considerable international reputation and account for the great
efforts which Charles the Bold made to obtain his services in later years.
In 1452 an Angevin force joined the Milanese in the war in
Lombardy, but completely failed to give a good account of itself. The French
troops were reluctant to engage in the slow and uncomfortable siege warfare
which characterised this campaign; nor were they prepared to fight on into the
winter as Francesco Sforza expected his troops to do. In fact it was only in
their cruelty towards civilians that this French army proved itself superior to
the Italians. In 1461 the French suffered another major defeat when they attempted
to reimpose French rule in Genoa after a revolution in the city. The Genoese
aided by a Milanese force repelled the French attack and inflicted very heavy
casualties on the French knights from a prepared defensive position.
The record of Italian encounters with foreign armies was not
entirely one of victories. In 1478 10,000 Swiss invaded the Ticino and, when
forced to retreat by a larger Milanese army, succeeded in luring the Italians
into the valley of Giornico, where, surrounded and subjected to a hail of fire
from the encircling hills, the Milanese army was badly defeated. This defeat
was avenged in 1487 when it was the turn of the Milanese led by Renato and Gian
Jacopo Trivulzio to trap a large Swiss force at Ponte di Crevola. On this
occasion, the Milanese army was largely made up of light cavalry and the new
Milanese conscript infantry, and it proved itself more than a match for the
Swiss force of over 5,000 men which was completely routed. The last major
frontier battle before 1494 was that at Calliano (1487), north of Verona, when
the Venetians, having turned back an Austrian invasion, sought to capture
Trento. Roberto da Sanseverino commanded the Venetian army which had the
difficult task of moving up the narrow valley of the Adige against heavily
defended fortifications. He succeeded in bypassing two castles, but then as he
crossed the Adige with a bridge of boats his army was attacked by a mixed force
of Swiss and the new German Landsknechte trained to fight in the Swiss manner.
Their commander was Friedrich Kappler, a veteran of the Burgundian Wars, and he
succeeded in catching the Venetian army as it was half across the river. The
centre of the Venetian cavalry was routed and driven back into the river where
many, including Roberto himself, were drowned. But the Venetian right wing led
by Guido Rossi counter-attacked and forced the Swiss and German infantry to
retire. In that they lost their commander and were unable to continue their
advance, this encounter must be regarded as a defeat for the Venetians. But
both here and at Ponte di Crevola Italians had met, and to some extent gained
an advantage over, the troops who were regarded as the masters of the European
battlefields at the time.
Finally throughout this period, Italians had the unenviable
experience of fighting the Turks. It was not only the Venetian army in Greece
and on its own frontiers in Friuli that faced this enemy, since in 1480 a
Turkish force occupied Otranto and the Neapolitans under Giulio Acquaviva and
the Duke of Calabria had to conduct a protracted siege to evict them. After
this 1,500 Turkish cavalry were hired by Naples and put in an appearance in
northern Italy in the War of Ferrara.
There is another side to this question of military contacts
and that is the appearance of Italian commanders and Italian troops in wars
outside Italy. The Genoese had the reputation of being the best crossbowmen in
Europe and were hired in large numbers as mercenaries, particularly for the
French army. But even more significant was the reputation which Italian
captains enjoyed in the second half of the fifteenth century. In 1465 a
Milanese expeditionary force took part in the War of the Commonweal in France.
It consisted of about 3,000 men led by Gaspare da Vimercate and the Sforzesco
infantry captain, Donato del Conte, and was also accompanied by Galeazzo Maria
Sforza, the eldest son of Francesco. The army had no artillery with it, but
nevertheless was able to do some useful work in the Rhone valley for the royal
cause, besieging and taking a number of small castles.
After the final collapse of the Angevin cause in Naples in
1462, a number of leading captains who had fought for the Angevins retired into
exile in France and Burgundy. Cola di Monforte, Count of Campobasso, was
probably the most notorious of these because his desertion of Charles the Bold
before the battle of Nancy earned him the outraged censure of Philippe de
Commynes in his memoirs, and subsequent reincarnation in the pages of Sir
Walter Scott. ‘There is no treachery which the human mind can imagine for which
his body and spirit are not well fitted’, was Scott’s comment, but in fact Cola
di Monforte’s desertion of the Burgundian cause was an exceptional moment in
the career of an otherwise faithful soldier. He served the Angevins in Italy,
in France and in Spain, and only moved to Burgundian service after the death of
Jean d’Anjou in 1470. The Burgundian army in the 1470’s was filled with
Italians; Charles the Bold in his determination to create a permanent fighting
force to match the French had not only recruited exiles like Monforte and his
colleague, Jacopo Galeota, but had also sent recruiting agents into Italy to
hire the best men available. Colleoni was approached, but Venice refused to
release him; Troilo da Rossano was lured from the Sforza army, and Orso
dall’Anguillara from the Papal States. The Italians numbered 1,000 lances in
Charles’ army at this time, and Commynes regarded them as the core of the army.
After the defeat and death of Charles the Bold at Nancy
Galeota took service with the French. For a further ten years he was a leading
commander in the army of Louis XI until killed by an artillery shot in the
Brittany campaign. With him in French service was another Neapolitan and
Angevin condottiere, Boffillo del Giudice. Boffillo, on the death of Jean
d’Anjou, had offered his services to Louis XI and for a time was in high favour
with the king. He was a royal councillor and principal Italian adviser to
Louis, and fought a successful campaign in Roussillon. After the death of
Louis, he began to fall from favour, but retained his position of Governor of
Roussillon where he maintained a picked company of 92 Italian men-at-arms. Both
Galeota and Del Giudice were approached by Venice and offered command of the
Venetian army in the late 1480’s, but the death of the former and the declining
fortunes of the latter made the negotiations abortive.
In addition to the presence of considerable numbers of
Italian troops and Italian captains in northern armies, one must remember also
the sophisticated diplomatic reporting of which the Italians were acknowledged
masters. Milanese and Venetian ambassadors in France, Burgundy and Germany-kept
their governments fully informed of the strength and dispositions of the
ultramontane armies. In the light of all this evidence, it is absurd to argue
that the Italians were unaware of the military developments beyond the Alps or
insufficiently prepared to meet the challenge of the Swiss infantry or the
French artillery.
Nor do the events of 1494 and the subsequent years bear out
the view that Italian warfare was notably degenerate and anachronistic. The
invasion of Italy by Charles VIII was opposed by three of the five major
Italian states and halfheartedly supported by one, Milan. The recent and uneasy
alliance of Naples, the Papacy and Florence omitted two of the best armies in
Italy. The Milanese army with its permanent core of household cavalry and
conscript infantry was on the French side, while the Venetian army, perhaps the
most experienced and certainly the best organised, remained neutral during the
opening campaign. Of the three allies, Naples had by far the largest army with
a readily mobilised potential of about 18,000 men. However, the Barons’ War,
which had recently torn Naples apart, had damaged the morale and the leadership
of the army, and its organisation does not seem to have been highly developed.
Nevertheless, the three most experienced condottieri in Italy were in
Neapolitan pay: Niccolò Orsini, Count of Pitigliano, Virginio Orsini and Gian
Jacopo Trivulzio. It is significant perhaps that two of these men were Orsini,
and yet were not leading the papal army. This army had rather declined since
the days of Paul II and Sixtus IV and, although Alexander VI was making great
efforts to build it up again, its strength was relatively small. The
Florentines had done little to put right the years of despite and neglect of a
permanent military establishment and had to start recruiting hurriedly to catch
up.
These were the armies which faced the French in 1494, and
they represented probably less than half Italy’s fighting strength. However,
even then the military imbalance was a good deal less than is sometimes
imagined. The total French force which crossed the Alps consisted of about
30,000 men, roughly equally divided between cavalry and infantry. The bulk of
the cavalry were heavy cavalry organised into lances of six men each; thus the
total figures included the usual proportion of non-combatants. The infantry
included about 5,000 of the famous Swiss, but these were outnumbered by native
French infantry of whom the majority were Gascon crossbowmen. Finally the
artillery train consisted of at least 40 pieces of heavy siege artillery, which
were both more mobile and had a greater hitting power than contemporary Italian
guns. In addition the French had the static and rather lukewarm support of the
Milanese army, and were augmented, as the invasion proceeded, by a growing
number of Italian ‘deserters’, notably the Colonna and their troops, who abandoned
the pope at an early stage.
The French army, when fully assembled, was the largest army
that had been seen in Europe for more than a century, but much of its strength
was rapidly dispersed in garrisons, and the army actually in the field rarely
outnumbered the Italians opposed to it. Indeed, at the first major battle of
the wars in 1495—Fornovo—the French were themselves considerably outnumbered.
Charles VIII launched his invasion relatively late in the
campaigning season. After being held up by a bout of smallpox at Asti, he did
not actually leave friendly Milanese soil until late October. By this time the
allied military dispositions were complete and by no means doomed to failure.
They were based on the justifiable assumption that the easiest route southwards
lay through the Romagna, whilst any attempt to march down the west side of
Italy would involve crossing the Apennines and dealing with the powerful
Florentine fortresses of Sarzanella, Pietrasanta, and, ultimately, Pisa. Thus
the main Neapolitan-papal army was concentrated on the eastern route, while the
Florentines were expected to hold the Apennine passes. The chief threat to this
comprehensive defensive plan was an amphibious landing further south, but the
Neapolitan fleet was strong and could be expected to prevent such a
possibility.
Charles and his generals, however, elected to attack on the
western side given the lateness of the season and the need to go for the most
direct route southwards, and also perhaps sensing that Florence was the weak link
in the alliance. The French army, about 17,000 strong at this stage, tackled
the Apennine passes and the Florentine fortresses without its siege artillery
which had to be sent by sea, while a small detachment with the Milanese kept
the Neapolitan main army engaged near Bologna. At this stage, political factors
began to play their part. After the French had succeeded in taking the small
fortress of Fivizzano by treachery and ruthlessly sacking it, Piero de’ Medici
took fright and began to negotiate. He surrendered his major fortresses without
a fight and allowed Charles a free passage through Tuscany. The fact that he
immediately found himself ousted from power in Florence did not alter the
situation that the Neapolitan-papal army in the Romagna was now outflanked and
had no alternative but to retreat.
Rome now lay undefended as the pope hurriedly recalled his
contingents from the eastern front. To add to his difficulties, the Colonna
chose this moment to desert, seize Ostia (another modern fortress which would
have been a real test for the French artillery), and thus provide the cover for
a small French force to be landed south of Rome. Therefore, although the
combined army got back in time to defend Rome itself, the French, now reunited
with their siege artillery, were pouring into the Papal States and had already
outflanked the city. Alexander VI decided, probably rightly, that Rome was now
indefensible and advised the Neapolitan army to continue its withdrawal
southwards while he came to terms. On 30 December 1494 Charles VIII entered
Rome having scarcely fired a shot.
The Neapolitans still had a chance to defend their own
frontiers, but by now morale was low and internal divisions rife. Charles’ army
had been joined by some of the most experienced Italian captains, notably
Prospero and Fabrizio Colonna, who took the lead in a rapid flanking march
through the Abruzzi, which again bypassed the main Neapolitan defences. The
French at last unmasked their guns to crush the small fortress of Monte S.
Giovanni, and the terror which the ensuing sack produced was sufficient to make
the populations of much more powerful cities, like Capua, refuse to co-operate
in their defence. King Alfonso had already abdicated in favour of his son, and
the will to resist had gone. On 20 February the French entered Naples and the
long march was over.
Charles VIII had indeed ‘conquered Italy with the chalk of
his billeting officers’ as Alexander VI put it, but this was not the fault of
the soldiers. The chances to resist had been undermined by political indecision
and civilian weakness. The Swiss, who only made up about a third of the French
infantry, had played no part in the campaign; the artillery had scarcely been
used. No reasonable chance of a genuine military confrontation had offered
itself. It is true that the Italian armies did not hurl themselves into forlorn
counter-attacks as they might have done, and it is also true that the strategic
conceptions of the combined army were over-elaborate for forces which were not
used to collaborating. Defensive and unduly complex tactics were weaknesses of
Italian warfare, and the Italian Wars now starting were to prove over and over
again that a new concept of war was emerging. The desire to seek final
conclusions on the battlefield, to conquer rather than to manoeuvre for the
preservation of the balance of power and the acquisition of small political
counters, was to be the spirit in which the Italian Wars were fought. To what
extent this attitude was introduced by French and Spanish armies hardened in
the Hundred Years’ War and the atmosphere of the Reconquista, and to what
extent it emerged during the course of the Italian Wars as very large armies
fought many miles from their bases for exceptionally rich prizes, is hard to
decide. Suffice it to say that the contrast between warfare in Italy before and
after 1494 was not a simple one of effete Italian mercenaries versus
battle-hardened national armies.
These points were abundantly proved and some of the lessons
of the previous year repeated when the first full scale battle of the wars was
fought at Fornovo in July 1495. Charles’ triumph in conquering Naples was
short-lived. Those internal elements which had contributed to the overthrow of
the Aragonese dynasty soon realised that French rule was not a satisfactory
alternative, and increasing unrest made the position of Charles’ army a
difficult one. The Italian states, with the exception of Florence, which was
now permanently committed to the French cause, came together in an alliance to evict
the French, and began to receive increasing encouragement from Spain and the
Empire. At the end of May, Charles decided to return to France with the core of
his army, leaving a skeleton force under Montpensier to defend Naples. The
armies of the Italian League began to gather to oppose this return march, but
there was still little real political unity, as some thought it best to let the
French pass on their way out of Italy rather than risk a confrontation with
them. However, the opportunity, as Charles marched northwards with a relatively
small army, was too good a one to be missed and Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquis
of Mantua, Venetian captain general and commander of the combined army, elected
to bring the French to open battle rather than simply hold the Apennine passes
against them. The latter course would have involved little risk and could well
have led either to the eventual surrender of the army as it was cut off from
its base, or at least to a hazardous transhipment by sea. It would have been a
strategy very much in the Italian tradition, but Gonzaga felt both sufficiently
confident and sufficiently determined to achieve the personal glory of
defeating the French, to go for a crushing victory.
The French retreated along the route they had come in the
previous year. This meant crossing the Apennines between Sarzana and Parma by
the Cisa Pass, and coming down into the valley of the Taro at Fornovo. Here,
below the town where the valley widened out, the huge Italian army was waiting
for them in a camp fortified with a ditch and a palisade. Gonzaga described his
army as ‘the finest and most powerful that has been seen in Italy for many
years’. It numbered about 25,000 men of whom about 5,000 were in Milanese
service and the remainder in that of Venice. Two thousand two hundred heavy
cavalry lances of five men each formed the core of the army, but there were
also about 2,000 light cavalry, mostly stradiots, and 8,000 professional
infantry. Four thousand Venetian militia had also arrived, although the bulk of
the militia forces were still on the march, as was most of the Venetian heavy
artillery. The French numbered about 900 lances of heavy cavalry, 3,000 Swiss
infantry, 600 archers of the royal bodyguard and 1,000 artillerymen, a total of
about 10,000 men.
When it reached Fornovo, the French army crossed the Taro
and began to move down the left bank of the river in front of the Italian camp.
Its left flank was thus protected by the hills and its right by the river. In
the circumstances the French not surprisingly expected the main assault on them
to come from straight up the valley, and to counter this the Swiss marched in a
tight square close behind the cavalry advance guard. Two further large columns
of cavalry completed the order of the march with the King commanding the centre
himself and the rear led by Gaston de Foix. The baggage train laden down with
loot from the campaign was placed towards the rear and close to the line of the
hills; the artillery moved on the right flank along the river bank.
The Italian battle plan was drawn up by Ridolfo Gonzaga,
uncle of the Marquis and himself a veteran of the Burgundian wars, with just
these dispositions of the enemy in mind. The tactical conception was masterly,
although the details for its execution were over-elaborate. Basically the plan
was to block the French advance with a holding force and launch the main attack
across the Taro on the flanks of the centre and rear columns. This would have
the effect of pinning the enemy against the hills, splitting his extended line
of march, and destroying the columns in detail. To carry out this operation the
Italian army was divided into nine divisions. The Count of Caiazzo, with the
main body of the Milanese cavalry and supported by a mixed infantry force and a
large cavalry reserve, was to cross the Taro in front of the French and engage
the vanguard. Gonzaga himself with his personal troops was to cross in the
centre, engage the French centre, and split it off from the vanguard.
Bernardino Fortebraccio had command of the third prong of the attack, made up
of the leading Venetian cavalry squadrons, and was to attack the rearguard. In
close support to Gonzaga and Fortebraccio came the cream of the Venetian
infantry, and then in reserve two further columns of cavalry. The first of
these comprised the lanze spezzate known as the Colleoneschi and commanded by
the son-in-law of the legendary Colleoni, who had died nearly twenty years
earlier. The second reserve column was led by Antonio da Montefeltro, the
illegitimate son of that other leading figure of the preceding generation,
Federigo. While all these divisions were attacking directly from across the
Taro, the stradiots were to pass right around the rear of the enemy and attack
the vanguard downhill, thus causing further confusion and preventing stragglers
from escaping into the hills. Finally a strong guard of cavalry and militia was
left in the camp.
