Italian War of 1494–1495

Pope Innocent VIII, in conflict with King Ferdinand I of Naples over Ferdinand's refusal to pay feudal dues to the papacy, excommunicated and deposed Ferdinand by a bull of 11 September 1489. Innocent then offered the Kingdom of Naples to Charles VIII of France, who had a remote claim to its throne because his grandfather, Charles VII, King of France, had married Marie of Anjou[3] of the Angevin dynasty, the ruling family of Naples until 1442. Innocent later settled his quarrel with Ferdinand and revoked the bans before dying in 1492, but the offer to Charles remained an apple of discord in Italian politics. Ferdinand died on 25 January 1494 and was succeeded by his son Alfonso II.[4]

A third claimant to the Neapolitan throne was René II, Duke of Lorraine. He was the oldest son of Yolande, Duchess of Lorraine (died 1483), the only surviving child of René of Anjou (died 1480), the last effective Angevin King of Naples until 1442. In 1488 the Neapolitans had already offered the crown of Naples to René II, who set an expedition to gain possession of the realm, but he was then halted by Charles VIII of France, who intended to claim Naples himself. Charles VIII was arguing that his grandmother Marie of Anjou, the sister of René of Anjou, had a closer connection than Rene II's mother Yolande, the daughter of René of Anjou, and therefore he came first in the Angevin line of Neapolitan succession.

Casus belli of the conflict was the rivalry that arose between the Duchess of Bari, Beatrice d'Este, wife of Ludovico, and the Duchess of Milan, Isabella of Aragon, wife of Gian Galeazzo, who both aspired to control of the Duchy of Milan and to the hereditary title for their children. When, in January 1493, Beatrice gave birth to Hercules Maximilian, she wanted him to be appointed Count of Pavia - a title belonging exclusively to the heir to the throne - in place of Isabella's son.[5] The latter, feeling threatened, asked for the intervention of her father Alfonso of Aragon who, ascending to the throne of Naples after the death of her father Ferrante, did not hesitate to come to the rescue of her daughter.[6] From this came the reaction of Ludovico who, in response to the threats of Alfonso, who had occupied the city of Bari, gave a free hand to the monarch French to go down to Italy.[7]

Charles was also being encouraged by his favorite, Étienne de Vesc, as well as by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, the future Pope Julius II, who hoped to settle a score with the incumbent Pope, Alexander VI.

Charles VIII gathered a large army of 25,000 men, including 8,000 Swiss mercenaries and the first siege train to include artillery, and invaded the Italian peninsula.[1] He was aided by Louis d'Orleans' victory over Neapolitan forces at the Battle of Rapallo which allowed Charles to march his army through the Republic of Genoa.[8] On 19 October, a contingent of Charles' army besieged the fortress of Mordano. After refusing to surrender, the fortress was bombarded, taken by French-Milanese forces, and the surviving inhabitants massacred.[9]

The arrival of Charles's army outside Florence in mid-November 1494 created fears of rape and pillage.[10] The Florentines were led to exile Piero de' Medici and to establish a republican government. Bernardo Rucellai and other members of the Florentine oligarchy then acted as ambassadors to negotiate a peaceful accord with Charles.

The French finally reached the city of Naples in February 1495, capturing it without a siege or a pitched battle.[11]

The speed of the French advance, together with the brutality of their sack of Mordano, left the other states of Italy in shock. Ludovico Sforza, realizing that Charles had a claim to Milan as well as Naples, and would probably not be satisfied by the annexation of Naples alone, turned to Pope Alexander VI, who was embroiled in a power game of his own with France and various Italian states over his attempts to secure secular fiefdoms for his children. The Pope formed an alliance of several opponents of French hegemony in Italy: himself; Ferdinand of Aragon, who was also King of Sicily; the Emperor Maximilian I; Ludovico in Milan; and the Republic of Venice. (Venice's ostensible purpose in joining the League was to oppose the Ottoman Empire, while its actual objective was French expulsion from Italy.) This alliance was known as the Holy League of 1495, or as the League of Venice, and was proclaimed on 31 March 1495.[12] England joined the League in 1496.[13]

The League gathered an army under the condottiero Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua. Including most of the city-states of northern Italy, the League of Venice threatened to shut off King Charles's land route by which to return to France. Charles VIII, not wanting to be trapped in Naples, marched north to Lombardy on 20 May 1495,[11] leaving Gilbert, Count of Montpensier, in Naples as his viceroy, with a substantial garrison.[11] After Ferdinand of Aragon had recovered Naples, with the help of his Spanish relatives with whom he had sought asylum in Sicily, the army of the League followed Charles's retreat northwards through Rome, which had been abandoned to the French by Pope Alexander VI on 27 May 1495.[14]

Over the centuries, historians did not agree in attributing the blame for a conflict that would then start a series of wars spanning over half a century, as a result of which the Italian peninsula lost its independence.

Historians of the importance of Bernardino Corio commonly attribute to Beatrice d'Este and Isabella of Aragon the cause of the extinction of the Sforza as of the Aragon of Naples:[31][32]

There between Isabella, wife of the Duke, and Beatrice, for wanting each of them to prevail over the other, both in position and ornament, as in anything else, so much competition and indignation arose, that at last they were the causes of the total ruin of the their Empire

— Bernardino Corio, Historia di Milano

Others, on the other hand, such as Carlo Rosmini and Paolo Giovio, blame it entirely on Beatrice, absolving Isabella in this:[33]

Beatrice, a lofty and ambitious young girl, seeing her husband despotic rule over the State, granting graces, dispensing honors and offices, and leaving her nephew only the bare title of Duke, she warned herself to imitate him, and, already in possession of his heart, he also wanted to take part in the public administration of affairs. [...] Isabella suffered so much insolence from her for some time, but even if finally from the indignation of her moved and from the suggestions pushed by her family, she began to complain highly of the injustice [...]

— Dell'istoria di Milano del cavaliere Carlo de' Rosmini roveretano. Tomo 1

Neither one nor the other, however, recognize the importance of Beatrice's intervention in rejecting the French from Lombardy, nor her positive influence in the government of the Milanese state, to which some contemporary authors, such as Ludovico Ariosto and Marin Sanudo, and with much greater transport Vincenzo Calmeta, although not fully recognized until the advent of nineteenth-century historians, and forgotten by subsequent ones.

In a perspective that tends to conceal the presence of women in history, the blame was traditionally attributed only to Ludovico Sforza, as did for example Niccolò Machiavelli[34] and Francesco Guicciardini, who calls him "author and engine of all evil".[35]

Although he was a lord of great talent and a valiant man, and thus lacked the cruelty and many vices that tyrants are accustomed to, and could in many considerations be called a virtuous man, yet these virtues were obscured and covered by many vices; [...] but that because he found less compassion was an infinite ambition, which, to be arbiter of Italy, forced him to let King Charles pass and fill Italy with barbarians

— Francesco Guicciardini, Storia fiorentina.[36]

This had a great following in the Romantic current. Giovan Battista Niccolini, in his own tragedy, will in fact put in the mouth of Count Belgioioso words of harsh reproach for the Moro: Ciò ebbe molto seguito nella corrente romantica. Giovan Battista Niccolini, nella propria tragedia, metterà infatti in bocca al conte Belgioioso parole di duro biasimo per il Moro:

Hai compra

La servitù d'Italia, e quanto costa
Saper non puoi; lo sveleranno i molti
Secoli di sventura e di vergogna,

Che tu sul capo alla tua patria aduni.

— Giovanni Battista Niccolini, Ludovico Sforza detto il Moro.

Today this opinion tends to be revised, recalling how even Prince Antonello Sanseverino and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, both refugees at the court of France, had played a considerable part in inciting Charles VIII to descend into Italy, thus hoping to recover their possessions respectively against the Alfonso of Aragon and Pope Alexander VI.[37]

Even Ercole I d'Este, Moro's father-in-law, seemed to have been among the inciters and then supporters of Charles VIII as well as his successor Louis XII, in order to regain, with the help French, the territories that the Venetians had taken from him during the Salt War. This despite the apparent policy of neutrality that made him a real judge between the two parties, at the time of deciding on peace. Florence believed him to be the main instigator, but more guilty than him appeared the son-in-law Duke of Milan.[38]

Some judge that the ambitious and fanatical Charles VIII would in any case have accomplished the feat of Italy even without the incitements of the Italian lords, although the latter were worth to take away any delay and to overcome the resistance of his advisers, almost all opposed.[39]

It is right, moreover, to recognize that they [Lodovico il Moro and Ercole d'Este] were not the main cause of our ruin, because after all the enterprise of Charles VIII, successful at first happily, failed because the Moor immediately understood the mistake made and quickly formed a league against that sovereign; but the Venetians, who, as Machiavelli put it, "to buy two lands in Lombardy made the King [Louis XII] of the third of Italy". Nor could Venice excuse an inextinguishable hatred against the Duke of Milan, as it flared between him and the King of Naples, because shortly before it had been his ally against Charles VIII, having then understood what later, blinded by an ambition unbridled, he disavowed: the main interest of Italy consisted in the union of all the states of the peninsula against the too powerful foreign sovereigns.

— Giuseppe Pardi, Prefazione al Diario ferrarese di Bernardino Zambotti.[40]

During this war an outbreak of syphilis occurred among the French troops. This outbreak was the first widely documented outbreak of the disease in human history, and eventually led to the Columbian theory of the origin of syphilis.[41]

• 
  French troops under Charles VIII entering Florence, 17 November 1494, by Francesco Granacci
• 
  French troops and artillery entering Naples in 1495.
• 
  Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495.
• 
  Francesco II Gonzaga at the Battle of Taro, Jacopo Tintoretto, 1578-1579.
• 
  The Battle of Fornovo, Galleria delle carte geografiche, Vatican museums.

• Mallett, Michael; Shaw, Christine (2012). The Italian Wars: 1494–1559. Pearson Education Limited.
• Pastor, Ludwig von (1902). The History of the Popes, from the close of the Middle Ages, third edition, Volume V Saint Louis: B. Herder 1902.
• Nelson, Jonathan K.; Zeckhauser, Richard J. (2008). The Patron's Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art. Princeton University Press. Most sources, both the rewriting of Italian and French, state clearly that the French won at Fornovo, a triumph celebrated in a rare engraving of the battle made shortly after the event by an anonymous French artist. The conclusion of French victory is based on two factors: the Italians did not stop the northward march of the French, and the French sustained far fewer losses.
• Bernardino Corio (1565). L'Historia di Milano. Giorgio de' Cavalli.
• Bernardino Zambotti. Giuseppe Pardi (ed.). Diario ferrarese dall'anno 1476 sino al 1504. Rerum Italicarum scriptores ordinata da Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Giuseppe Pardi. Zanichelli.
• Marin Sanudo (1883). La spedizione di Carlo VIII in Italia. Mancia del Commercio di M. Visentini.
• René Maulde-La-Clavière (1891). Histoire de Loius XII: ptie. Louis d'Orléans. Vol. 3.

• Charles VIII's Italian War