Repercussions

Italy entered these wars as the richest, most inventive, most sophisticated society in Europe and left them a board that other people played on. Cateau-Cambrésis handed Spain Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia; Spain held them for a century and a half and then passed them to Austria and the Bourbons. Italy was not a sovereign country again until 1861 — three hundred years of foreign rule, all of it downstream of a French king walking through an open door in 1494. The Risorgimento's whole emotional charge comes from this: Italians spent three centuries as subjects in the place that had invented the Renaissance.

For a century Italy had outsourced war to contractors, and it had worked so well that it hollowed the states out. Condottieri had no incentive to win decisively or die trying, so campaigns became manoeuvre, negotiation, and few deaths — a system that looked like military capability and was actually a private arrangement. It collapsed on contact with 25,000 Frenchmen who intended to kill people. Machiavelli spent his career arguing that mercenaries were the disease and citizen soldiers the cure; his own militia broke and ran at Prato in 1512 and the Republic fell, which suggests the problem was deeper than the contracts.

Cerignola in 1503 was the first battle decided by handheld gunpowder weapons: French gendarmes charged a ditch lined with arquebusiers and were shot to pieces. Pavia in 1525 finished the argument — 1,500 arquebusiers scattered among trees destroyed the flower of the French nobility and captured the King of France. Five hundred years of heavy cavalry as the decisive arm ended in twenty-two years, and the social order built on it went with it: a nobleman trained from childhood and armoured at enormous expense could now be killed by a labourer with a tube who had been taught his trade in a fortnight. Bayard understood exactly this, and executed captured arquebusiers for it.

Charles VIII brought forty bronze guns on horse-drawn carriages that travelled with the army, firing iron shot — and Italian fortifications, built high and thin to resist a medieval siege, fell in hours instead of months. Italian engineers answered within a generation with the *trace italienne*: low, thick earth ramparts faced in brick, angled into arrow-headed bastions so every face was covered by fire from the next. Earth absorbed cannonballs where stone shattered. The answer worked so well that it swung war back toward the siege for two centuries, and Italian engineers exported it across Europe — including to the Low Countries, where it made the Eighty Years' War last eighty years.

Gonzalo de Córdoba, beaten by the French in 1495, rebuilt Spanish infantry around mixed self-contained units of pike, sword, and arquebus rather than asking for better knights. Formalised as the tercio in the 1530s, it was the finest infantry formation in the world for the next 150 years — deep, professional, fiercely proud, and effectively unbeatable in the open field. It won Spain southern Italy for two centuries, and it was still winning when it reached the Netherlands, which is precisely why the Dutch had to reinvent warfare from first principles to beat it at Nieuwpoort in 1600.

These wars ran on hired men — Swiss pikemen, German landsknechts, Italian condottieri, Spanish veterans — recruited on a European labour market and paid in coin that was frequently not there. Unpaid mercenaries did not disband; they mutinied and took what they were owed. That mechanism dictated the plan at Bicocca in 1522, where 3,000 Swiss demanded a battle that killed them, and it destroyed Rome in 1527, when Charles V's own army marched on the city to pay itself and its commander could not stop it. The lesson took another century to learn: Maurice of Nassau's insistence on paying his soldiers on time was the direct answer to what everyone had watched happen here.

An unpaid Imperial army destroyed Rome over eight days in 1527, killing perhaps 12,000 people and cutting the population from 55,000 to about 10,000. It ended the Roman High Renaissance outright — artists scattered, libraries burned, patronage evaporated — and it left Clement VII a prisoner and thereafter a Habsburg client. Which is why, when Henry VIII asked him to annul a marriage to Charles V's aunt, the answer was no, and why Henry broke with Rome instead. The Church of England exists because a mercenary army in Italy had not been paid.

The wars ended because the money did. Spain declared bankruptcy in 1557 and France in the same year — two of the greatest powers on earth, one of them receiving the silver of the Americas, spent into insolvency by sixty-five years of fortresses, mercenaries, and artillery trains. Philip II could not march on Paris after the greatest victory of his reign because there was nothing left to pay the army with. The wars established the principle that would govern European conflict thereafter: campaigns are won by whoever can borrow longest, and the winner is often simply the last state still solvent.

Spain emerged holding Milan, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and the military reputation of Europe, and for the next hundred years it was the power everyone else organised against. The Spanish Road — the corridor from Milan through Savoy and the Rhineland to Flanders — was built to move the tercios from Italy to the Netherlands, and it made Italy the logistical base of Spanish power in northern Europe. The hegemony was real and it was hollow: it rested on silver that arrived mortgaged and an army that mutinied when it did not, and the Dutch spent eighty years proving the point.

Cateau-Cambrésis was signed partly because both kings were more frightened of the Protestants in their own kingdoms than of each other. Weeks later Henry II was killed by a lance splinter at the tournament celebrating the peace, opening the French succession crisis that became the Wars of Religion — thirty-six years of killing, at home. Charles V had already spent decades fighting Lutherans he could not subdue while chasing Francis around Italy. The Habsburg–Valois rivalry did not end so much as change subject: the same states, the same bankruptcies, the same mercenaries, now arguing about God.

Machiavelli spent fourteen years as a Florentine diplomat inside the catastrophe — envoy to Cesare Borgia, to Julius II, to the King of France — watching Italian states be dismantled by foreigners while their rulers made elegant arrangements that did not work. Sacked, tortured, and exiled, he wrote *The Prince* on a farm in 1513 and described politics as it is rather than as it ought to be, closing with a plea for someone to unite Italy and drive out the barbarians. Nobody did. The book is the single most durable thing these wars produced, and its author's name became a synonym for the conduct he had merely reported.

Encircled by Charles V and beaten repeatedly, Francis I allied with Suleiman the Magnificent against a fellow Christian monarch. Europe was scandalised and it worked, forcing Charles to fight in Hungary and the Mediterranean while France pressed him in Italy. In 1543 an Ottoman fleet wintered at Toulon, the townspeople were moved out, and the cathedral was given over for use as a mosque. The alliance lasted, on and off, for 250 years, and it demonstrated the thing Machiavelli had been arguing from a farm outside Florence: raison d'état had replaced Christendom, and no shared faith would restrain a king who saw an advantage.