SECTION II

 

Charles VIII and the Invasion of Italy. 1494

Ludovico Sforza, having formed the design of deposing his nephew the duke of Milan, and of placing himself on the ducal throne, was so much afraid of a combination of the Italian powers to oppose this measure, and to support the injured prince, with whom most of them were connected by blood or alliance, that he saw the necessity of securing the aid of some able protector. The king of France was the person to whom he applied; and without disclosing his own intentions, he labored to prevail with him to march into Italy, at the head of a powerful army, in order to seize the crown of Naples, to which Charles had pretensions as heir of the house of Anjou. The right to that kingdom claimed by the Angevin family, had been conveyed to Louis XI by Charles of Anjou, count of Maine and Provence. But that sagacious monarch, though he took immediate possession of those territories of which Charles was really master, totally disregarded his ideal title to a kingdom, over which another prince reigned in tranquility; and uniformly declined involving himself in the labyrinth of Italian politics. His son, more adventurous, or more inconsiderate, embarked eagerly in this enterprise; and contemning all the remonstrances of his most experienced counselors, prepared to carry it on with the utmost vigor.

The power which Charles possessed was so great, that he reckoned himself equal to this arduous undertaking. His father had transmitted to him such an ample prerogative, as gave him the entire command of his kingdom. He himself had added considerably to the extent of his dominions, by his prudent marriage with the heiress of Bretagne, which rendered him master of that province, the last of the great fiefs that remained to be annexed to the crown. He soon assembled forces which he thought sufficient; and so impatient was he to enter on his career as a conqueror, that sacrificing what was real, for what was chimerical, he restored Roussillon to Ferdinand, and gave up part of his father's acquisitions in Artois to Maximilian, with a view of inducing these princes not to molest France, while he was carrying on his operations in Italy.

But so different were the efforts of the states of Europe in the fifteenth Century, from those which we shall behold in the course of this history, that the army with which Charles undertook this great enterprise, did not exceed twenty thousand men. The train of artillery, however, the ammunition, and warlike stores of every kind provided for its use, were so considerable, as to bear some resemblance to the immense apparatus of modern war.

When the French entered Italy, they met with nothing able to resist them. The Italian powers having remained, during a long period, undisturbed by the invasion of any foreign enemy, had formed a system with respect to their affairs, both in peace and war, peculiar to themselves. In order to adjust the interests, and balance the power of the different states into which Italy was divided, they were engaged in perpetual and endless negotiations with each other, which they conducted with all the subtlety of a refining and deceitful policy. Their contests in the field, when they had recourse to arms, were decided in mock battles, by innocent and bloodless victories. Upon the first appearance of the danger which now impended, they had recourse to the arts which they had studied, and employed their utmost skill in intrigue in order to avert it. But this proving ineffectual, their bands of effeminate mercenaries, the only military force that remained in the country, being fit only for the parade of service, were terrified at the aspect of real war, and shrunk at its approach. The impetuosity of the French valor appeared to them irresistible. Florence; Pisa, and Rome, opened their gates as the French army advanced.

The prospect of this dreadful invasion struck one king of Naples with such panic terror, that he died (if we may believe historians) of the fright. Another abdicated his throne from the same pusillanimous spirit. A third fled out of his dominions, as soon as the enemy appeared on the Neapolitan frontiers. Charles, after marching thither from the bottom of the Alps, with as much rapidity, and almost as little opposition, as if he had been on a progress through his own dominions, took quiet possession of the throne of Naples, and intimidated or gave law to every power in Italy.

Such was the conclusion of an expedition, that must be considered as the first great exertion of those new powers which the princes of Europe had acquired, and now began to exercise. Its effects were no less considerable, than its success had been astonishing. The Italians, unable to resist the impression of the enemy who broke in upon them, permitted him to hold on his course undisturbed. They quickly perceived that no single power, which they could rouse to action, was an equal match for a monarch who ruled over such extensive territories, and was at the head of such a martial people; but that a confederacy might accomplish what the separate members of it durst not attempt. To this expedient, the only one that remained to deliver or to preserve them from the yoke, they had recourse. While Charles inconsiderately wasted his time at Naples in festivals and triumphs on account of his past successes, or was fondly dreaming of future conquests in the East, to the empire of which he now aspired, they formed against him a powerful combination of almost all the Italian states, supported by the emperor Maximilian, and Ferdinand king of Aragon. The union of so many powers, who suspended or forgot all their particular animosities, that they might act in concert against an enemy who had become formidable to them all, awakened Charles from his thoughtless security. He saw now no prospect of safety but in returning to France. An army of thirty thousand men, assembled by the allies, was ready to obstruct his march; and though the French, with a daring courage, which more than countervailed their inferiority in number, broke through that great body and gained a victory, which opened to their monarch a safe passage into his own territories, he was stripped of all his conquests in Italy, in as short a time as it had taken to acquire them; and the political system in that country resumed the same appearance as before his Invasion.

The sudden and decisive effect of this confederacy seems to have instructed the princes and statesmen of Italy as much as the irruption of the French had disconcerted and alarmed them. They had extended, on this occasion, to the affairs of Europe, the maxims of that political science which had hitherto been applied only to regulate the operations of the petty states in their own country. They had discovered the method of preventing any monarch from rising to such a degree of power, as was inconsistent with the general liberty; and had manifested the importance of attending to that great secret in modern policy, the preservation of a proper distribution of power among all the members of the system into which the states of Europe are formed. During all the wars of which Italy from that time was the theatre, and amidst the hostile operations which the imprudence of Louis XII and the ambition of Ferdinand of Aragon, carried on in that country, with little interruption, from the close of the fifteenth century, to that period at which the subsequent history commences, the maintaining a proper balance of power between the contending parties, became the great object of attention to the statesmen of Italy. Nor was the idea confined to them. Self-preservation taught other powers to adopt it. It grew to be fashionable and universal. From this era we can trace the progress of that intercourse between nations, which has linked the powers of Europe so closely together; and can discern the operations of that provident policy, which, during peace, guards against remote and contingent dangers; and, in war, has prevented rapid and destructive conquests.

 

The Black Bands