September 1494 – February 1495 · The length of Italy Theater

Charles VIII crossed the Alps with 25,000 men and a siege train of forty bronze guns on horse-drawn carriages, invited in by Milan to claim the throne of Naples. Italy's fortresses had been built to withstand months of medieval siege; the French guns reduced them in hours. He walked the length of the peninsula in four months and entered Naples without fighting a real battle.

July 6, 1495 · Taro valley, Emilia Theater

Alarmed at how easily Charles had taken Naples, the Italian states formed a league and caught his army crossing the Apennines on the way home. The fighting was brief and vicious, and by the standards of Italian warfare astonishingly bloody. The League held the field and claimed the victory; the French cut their way through and marched home with their loot.

April 28, 1503 · Apulia, Kingdom of Naples Theater

Outnumbered, Gonzalo de Córdoba dug a ditch and an earth rampart across the French line of advance, lined it with arquebusiers, and waited. The French gendarmes — the finest heavy cavalry in Europe — charged into the ditch and were shot to pieces at point-blank range. Nemours was killed. The Spanish lost perhaps a hundred men.

December 29, 1503 · Latium – Campania border Theater

After weeks of stalemate across a flooded winter river, Gonzalo built a pontoon bridge in secret several kilometres upstream and crossed at night in freezing rain, hitting the French flank at dawn. The French army broke and was pursued to Gaeta, which surrendered. Naples was Spanish.

May 14, 1509 · Lombardy Theater

Pope Julius II assembled the League of Cambrai — France, Spain, the Empire, and the Papacy all at once — to destroy Venice, and at Agnadello the French shattered the Venetian army in an afternoon. Venice lost its entire mainland empire in a matter of weeks.

April 11, 1512 · Romagna Theater

The bloodiest battle Italy had seen. Gaston de Foix, twenty-two years old and six months into the most brilliant campaign of the age, used his artillery to enfilade the Spanish entrenchments — guns firing along the line of a trench rather than at it — and forced them into the open, then destroyed them. Then he chased the retreating Spanish infantry and was killed doing it.

September 13–14, 1515 · Lombardy Theater

Twenty-one years old and newly crowned, Francis I met the Swiss — the most feared infantry in Europe, undefeated for two centuries — and fought them for two days. French artillery tore lanes through the pike squares while the gendarmes charged into the gaps, and Venetian reinforcements arrived on the second morning. The Swiss withdrew in good order having lost perhaps half their men.

April 27, 1522 · Outside Milan Theater

Colonna fortified a sunken road with earthworks and four ranks of Spanish arquebusiers. Lautrec knew better than to attack it; his Swiss mercenaries, unpaid and mutinous, demanded battle or they would go home. They charged, and were shot down in the sunken lane — 3,000 dead in half an hour without reaching the enemy.

February 24, 1525 · Lombardy Theater

The Imperial army broke into the walled park of Mirabello before dawn to relieve besieged Pavia. Francis, seeing a chance, led the gendarmes in a charge that masked his own artillery — and rode into 1,500 Spanish arquebusiers dispersed among the trees, who shot the French cavalry apart from cover. The flower of the French nobility died in the park. Francis's horse was killed under him and the King of France was captured.

May 6, 1527 · Rome Theater

Charles V's army in Italy went unpaid and mutinied, and its commander — the Constable of Bourbon, a French traitor leading Germans and Spaniards — could not control it. They marched on Rome to pay themselves. Bourbon was shot dead scaling the wall, reportedly by Benvenuto Cellini, and the army, now leaderless, took the city and destroyed it over eight days. The Swiss Guard died almost to a man covering the Pope's escape; 147 of 189 were killed.

April 11, 1544 · Piedmont Theater

One of the strangest engagements of the century. Both sides had crammed arquebusiers into the front ranks of their pike blocks, and when the blocks met, the two lines discharged into each other's faces at a range of a few feet. Contemporaries reported the entire front rank of both armies going down together. The French won a tactical victory that changed nothing strategically.

August 10, 1557 · Picardy, northern France Theater

By now the war had left Italy entirely. Philip II's Spanish army, with English support, destroyed a French relief force in Picardy and captured the Constable of France. The road to Paris was open and Philip did not take it — he had no money to continue.

April 3, 1559 · Picardy Theater

Bankrupt and frightened of the Protestant movements growing in both kingdoms, France renounced every claim in Italy it had pursued for sixty-five years. Spain kept Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. To seal it, Henry II married his daughter to Philip II — and was killed weeks later in a tournament celebrating the wedding, a lance splinter through the eye.