BATTLE OF PAVIA
A.D. 1525
WILLIAM ROBERTSON
Close upon the election of Charles V as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire came the first of a series of wars between that sovereign and Francis I, King of France, who had been Charles's rival for the imperial crown. The Emperor was at this time, 1521, favored by Henry VIII of England, and a secret treaty with Charles was finally concluded by Pope Leo X, who from the first had hesitated between the two young rivals, and who had already treated with Francis. The papal support proved the foundation of future power for Charles in Italy. The Pope and the Emperor agreed to unite their forces for expulsion of the French from their seat in the duchy of Milan.
In 1521 hostilities broke out in Navarre and in the Netherlands, and finally in the Milanese, where the people were tired of French government. The various allies drove the French completely out of Italy, and Charles invaded France, but was there repulsed. King Francis, elated by this last success, determined upon another invasion of the Milanese. He went in person to Italy, leaving his mother as regent in France. With largely superior forces, he drove the imperialists before him.
Instead, however, of pursuing the enemy, whom he might have overtaken at an untenable position, Francis, against the almost unanimous advice of his generals, laid siege to the strongly fortified city of Pavia, only to meet before it the crushing defeat which for centuries settled the fate of Italy. Pavia was held by a strong imperialist force under Lannoy.
Francis prosecuted the siege with obstinacy equal to the rashness with which he had undertaken it. During three months everything known to the engineers of that age, or that could be effected by the valor of his troops, was attempted, in order to reduce the place; while Lannoy and Pescara, unable to obstruct his operations, were obliged to remain in such an ignominious state of inaction that a pasquinade was published at Rome offering a reward to any person who could find the imperial army, lost in the month of October in the mountains between France and Lombardy, and which had not been heard of since that time.
Leyva, well acquainted with the difficulties under which his countrymen labored, and the impossibility of their facing, in the field, such a powerful army as formed the siege of Pavia, placed his only hopes of safety in his own vigilance and valor. The efforts of both were extraordinary, and in proportion to the importance of the place with the defence of which he was intrusted. He interrupted the approaches of the French by frequent and furious sallies. Behind the breaches made by their artillery he erected new works, which appeared to be scarcely inferior in strength to the original fortifications. He repulsed the besiegers in all their assaults, and by his own example brought not only the garrison, but the inhabitants, to bear the most severe fatigues, and to encounter the greatest dangers, without murmuring. The rigor of the season conspired with his endeavors in retarding the progress of the French. Francis, attempting to become master of the town by diverting the course of the Tessino, which is its chief defence on one side, a sudden inundation of the river destroyed, in one day, the labor of many weeks, and swept away all the mounds which his army had raised with infinite toil as well as at great expense.
Notwithstanding the slow progress of the besiegers, and the glory which Leyva acquired by his gallant defence, it was not doubted but that the town would at last be obliged to surrender. Pope Clement, who already considered the French arms as superior in Italy, became impatient to disengage himself from his connections with the Emperor, of whose designs he was extremely jealous, and to enter into terms of friendship with Francis. As Clement's timid and cautious temper rendered him incapable of following the bold plan which Leo had formed of delivering Italy from the yoke of both the rivals, he returned to the more obvious and practicable scheme of employing the power of the one to balance and to restrain that of the other.
For this reason he did not dissemble his satisfaction at seeing the French King recover Milan, as he hoped that the dread of such a neighbor would be some check upon the Emperor's ambition, which no power in Italy was now able to control. He labored hard to bring about a peace that would secure Francis in the possession of his new conquests; and as Charles, who was always inflexible in the prosecution of his schemes, rejected the proposition with disdain, and with bitter exclamations against the Pope, by whose persuasions, while Cardinal di Medici, he had been induced to invade the Milanese, Clement immediately concluded a treaty of neutrality with the King of France, in which the republic of Florence was included.