Charles VIII of France

Biography

A small, physically frail, poorly educated young king with a head full of chivalric romances, Charles VIII inherited a France that was — for the first time in centuries — unified, solvent, and possessed of the best artillery in the world. He decided to use it to claim the throne of Naples through a tenuous Angevin inheritance, and beyond Naples he imagined a crusade to retake Jerusalem. In September 1494 he crossed the Alps with 25,000 men and forty bronze guns on horse-drawn carriages, and Italy simply opened. Fortresses built to hold out for months fell in hours; the condottieri system, which had made war in Italy into a manageable and rarely lethal business, evaporated on contact. He reached Naples in four months having barely fought. Then the Italian states, Spain, and the Empire allied against him, and he had to cut his way home at Fornovo. He got nothing and started everything. Four years later he hit his head on a door lintel at Amboise and died at twenty-seven, leaving no heir and a war that would run for another sixty-one years. Guicciardini wrote that all the calamities of Italy dated from his arrival, and that judgement has never really been revised.

Key Battles