The Door Opens

Italy in 1494 was the richest place in Europe and the least able to defend itself. Five major states — Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papacy, Naples — had spent a century balancing each other through diplomacy and hired condottieri, and the arrangement had worked so well that it had hollowed out. Italian warfare had become a professional business conducted by contractors who had no incentive to win decisively or die trying, and campaigns often ended with more negotiation than killing.

Then Milan, in a dispute with Naples, invited Charles VIII of France to come and press his family's old claim to the Neapolitan throne. He came with 25,000 men and something Italy had never seen: forty bronze cannon on horse-drawn carriages, cast to fire iron shot, that could travel with the army instead of being dragged behind it for weeks. Italian fortresses had high stone walls built to withstand a long medieval siege. The French guns knocked them down in hours.

He walked to Naples in four months. Fortresses that had been thought impregnable surrendered on sight of the guns being unlimbered; at Monte San Giovanni a place that had once held out for seven years fell in eight hours. There was almost no fighting because there was almost no point in fighting.

The Italians, thoroughly alarmed, formed a league and caught him crossing the Apennines on his way home at Fornovo. It was over in an hour and it killed some 4,000 men — appalling by Italian standards, routine by the standards of what was coming. Both sides claimed victory: the League held the field, the French got through with their baggage. Charles went home with nothing at all to show for it.

Nothing except the discovery. Every power in Europe now knew that Italy was rich, divided, and defenceless, and that a determined army could take whatever it wanted there. Guicciardini, writing a generation later amid the wreckage, dated everything that followed to 1494 — and for sixty-five years foreign armies fought over the peninsula, and for three hundred, Italians were ruled by other people.