Charles VIII’s 1494 Naples march opened sixty-five years of war
The Italian Wars (1494–1559) tore through the peninsula and spilled into Flanders, the Rhineland, and the Mediterranean. After the Italic League frayed in 1492, Charles VIII of France invaded Naples in 1494, pulling Spain and the Holy Roman Empire into a grinding contest. Reformation-era brutality flavoured later campaigns.
At root this was a French–Habsburg feud, with France facing Spain and the Holy Roman Empire while Italian states, England and the Ottomans switched sides over time. The 1454 Treaty of Lodi had ended the long Venice–Milan wars, but Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in April 1492 weakened the peace just as France eyed the old Angevin claim to Naples. Ludovico Sforza, regent of Milan, invited Charles VIII in; Charles first bought neutrality with deals such as the Peace of Étaples with Henry VII.
The French marched almost unopposed, entering Pisa, Florence and Rome in late 1494 with Savonarola’s blessing and papal free passage. In February 1495 Neapolitan defenders murdered French envoys, and the attackers stormed their castle and killed everyone inside. Outrage produced the League of Venice that March, uniting Venice, Milan, Spain and the Empire. At Fornovo in July the French broke through and escaped north, leaving their baggage, and by September Naples was back in Ferdinand II’s hands. The raid achieved little except to show outsiders that Italy was rich and weak.
Louis XII returned in 1499 with 27,000 men, blasting Rocca d’Arazzo’s walls in under five hours and entering Milan that October, then agreed to split Naples with Ferdinand of Aragon, a move Machiavelli judged a blunder. After 1503 French thrusts into Lombardy and Piedmont took ground they could never keep.
Growing Protestantism forced both crowns to look inward, and the 1559 Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis largely expelled France from Italy in exchange for Calais and the Three Bishoprics, leaving Spain master of Naples, Sicily and Milan. The wars marked a shift toward modern warfare, with arquebuses and better siege guns, and literate witnesses such as Guicciardini, Machiavelli and Montluc left unusually rich accounts.
Source: Italian Wars
