It seemed to Ludovico, assailed by secret visions of Naples allying herself with Milan’s most dreaded enemy Venice, or even with Florence and Rome to secure revenge and his own downfall, that he must hastily give up the idea that Lorenzo had advocated of a balance of power within the peninsula itself, and look instead beyond the mountains for help and support. Mediaeval annals could give many instances of Popes and former rulers of Milan who had taken this same unpatriotic step, while a ready excuse could be found for invoking the aid of France, on account of the French King’s descent from the Second House of Anjou, that Alfonso V, Ferrante’s father, had driven from Naples.[52]
Acting, then, from motives of personal ambition, not from any wide conception of statecraft, Ludovico persuaded Charles VIII of France, son of Louis XI, that honour and glory lay in his renewal of the old Angevin claims to Naples, and in 1494, with a great flourish of trumpets, the French expedition started across the Alps. ‘I will assist in making you greater than Charlemagne,’ Ludovico had boasted, when dangling his bait before the young French King’s eyes; but the results of what he had intended were so far beyond his real expectations as to give him new cause for ‘cringing and fear’. ‘The French,’ said Pope Alexander VI sarcastically, ‘needed only a child’s wooden spurs and chalk to mark up their lodgings for the night.’
French Invasion of Italy
Almost without opposition, and where they encountered it achieving easy victories, the French marched through Italy from north to south, entering Florence, that had driven Piero and his brothers into exile, compelling the hasty submission of Rome, sweeping the Aragonese from Naples, whose fickle population came out with cheers to greet their new conquerors.
Certainly the causes of this victory were not due to the young conqueror himself, with his ungainly body and over-developed head, with his swollen ambitions and feeble brain, with his pious talk of a crusade against the East, and the idle debauch for which he and his subjects earned unenviable notoriety. Commines, a Frenchman with a shrewd idea of his master’s incompetence, believed that God must have directed the conquering armies, since the wisdom of man had nothing to say to it; but Italian historians found the cause of their country’s humiliation in her political and military decadence.
We have seen how ‘Companies’ of hired soldiers held Italy in thrall during the fourteenth century; but with the passing of years what was once a serious business had become a complicated kind of chess with mercenary levies for pawns. Fifteenth-century condottieri were as great believers in war as ever Sir John Hawkwood; but, susceptible to the veneer of civilization that glosses the Renaissance, they had lost the mediaeval taste for bloodshed. What they retained was the desire to prolong indeterminate campaigns in order to draw their pay, while reducing the dangers and hardships involved to the least adequate pretence of real warfare. Here is Machiavelli’s sarcastic commentary:
‘They spared no effort,’ he says, ‘to relieve themselves and their men from fatigue and danger, not killing one another in battle but making prisoners ... they would attack no town by night nor would those within make sorties against their besieging foes. Their camps were without rampart or trench. They fought no winter campaigns.’
Before the national levies of France, rough campaigners with no taste for military chess but only determined on as speedy a victory as possible, the make-believe armies of Italy were mown down like ninepins or ran away. Thus clashed two opposing systems—one real, the other by this time almost wholly artificial—and because of its noise and stir, 1494, the year of Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy, is often taken as the boundary-line between mediaeval and modern times, just as the year 476, when Romulus Augustulus gave up his crown, is accepted as the beginning of the Middle Ages. In both cases it is not the events of the actual year that can be said to have created the change. They are merely the culminating evidence of the end of an old order of things and the beginning of a new.
End of the Middle Ages
By 1494 Constantinople was in the hands of the Turks: Columbus had discovered America: John Gutenburg had invented his printing-press: Vasco da Gama was meditating his voyage to India. All these things were witness of ‘a new birth’, the infancy of a modern world; but the year 1494 stands also as evidence of the death of an old, the mediaeval.