The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic — Volume 3

by William Hickling Prescott

It was hardly to be expected that the partition treaty between France and Spain, made so manifestly in contempt of all good faith, would be maintained any longer than suited the convenience of the respective parties. The French monarch, indeed, seems to have prepared, from the first, to dispense with it, as soon as he had secured his own moiety of the kingdom; [1] and sagacious men at the Spanish court inferred that King Ferdinand would do as much, when he should be in a situation to assert his claims with success. [2]

It was altogether improbable, whatever might be the good faith of the parties, that an arrangement could long subsist, which so rudely rent asunder the members of this ancient monarchy; or that a thousand points of collision should not arise between rival hosts, lying as it were on their arms within bowshot of each other, and in view of the rich spoil which each regarded as its own. Such grounds for rupture did occur, sooner probably than either party had foreseen, and certainly before the king of Aragon was prepared to meet it.

The immediate cause was the extremely loose language of the partition treaty, which assumed such a geographical division of the kingdom into four provinces, as did not correspond with any ancient division, and still less with the modern, by which the number was multiplied to twelve. [3] The central portion, comprehending the Capitanate, the Basilicate, and the Principality, became debatable ground between the parties, each of whom insisted on these as forming an integral part of its own moiety. The French had no ground whatever for contesting the possession of the Capitanate, the first of these provinces, and by far the most important, on account of the tolls paid by the numerous flocks which descended every winter into its sheltered valleys from the snow-covered mountains of Abruzzo. [4] There was more uncertainty to which of the parties the two other provinces were meant to be assigned. It is scarcely possible that language so loose, in a matter requiring mathematical precision, should have been unintentional.

Before Gonsalvo de Cordova had completed the conquest of the southern moiety of the kingdom, and while lying before Tarento, he received intelligence of the occupation by the French of several places, both in the Capitanate and Basilicate. He detached a body of troops for the protection of these countries, and, after the surrender of Tarento, marched towards the north to cover them with his whole army. As he was not in a condition for immediate hostilities, however, he entered into negotiations, which, if attended with no other advantage, would at least gain him time. [5]

The pretensions of the two parties, as might have been expected, were too irreconcilable to admit of compromise; and a personal conference between the respective commanders-in-chief led to no better arrangement, than that each should retain his present acquisitions, till explicit instructions could be received from their respective courts.

But neither of the two monarchs had further instructions to give; and the Catholic king contented himself with admonishing his general to postpone an open rupture as long as possible, that the government might have time to provide more effectually for his support, and strengthen itself by alliance with other European powers. But, however pacific may have been the disposition of the generals, they had no power to control the passions of their soldiers, who, thus brought into immediate contact, glared on each other with the ferocity of bloodhounds, ready to slip the leash which held them in temporary check. Hostilities soon broke out along the lines of the two armies, the blame of which each nation charged on its opponent. There seems good ground, however, for imputing it to the French; since they were altogether better prepared for war than the Spaniards, and entered into it so heartily as not only to assail places in the debatable ground, but in Apulia, which had been unequivocally assigned to their rivals. [6]

In the mean while, the Spanish court fruitlessly endeavored to interest the other powers of Europe in its cause. The emperor Maximilian, although dissatisfied with the occupation of Milan by the French, appeared wholly engrossed with the frivolous ambition of a Roman coronation. The pontiff and his son, Caesar Borgia, were closely bound to King Louis by the assistance which he had rendered them in their marauding enterprises against the neighboring chiefs of Romagna. The other Italian princes, although deeply incensed and disgusted by this infamous alliance, stood too much in awe of the colossal power, which had planted its foot so firmly on their territory, to offer any resistance. Venice alone, surveying from her distant watch-tower, to borrow the words of Peter Martyr, the whole extent of the political horizon, appeared to hesitate. The French ambassadors loudly called on her to fulfil the terms of her late treaty with their master, and support him in his approaching quarrel; but that wily republic saw with distrust the encroaching ambition of her powerful neighbor, and secretly wished that a counterpoise might be found in the success of Aragon. Martyr, who stopped at Venice on his return from Egypt, appeared before the senate, and employed all his eloquence in supporting his master's cause in opposition to the French envoys; but his pressing entreaties to the Spanish sovereigns to send thither some competent person, as a resident minister, show his own conviction of the critical position in which their affairs stood. [7]

The letters of the same intelligent individual, during his journey through the Milanese, [8] are filled with the most gloomy forebodings of the termination of a contest for which the Spaniards were so indifferently provided; while the whole north of Italy was alive with the bustling preparations of the French, who loudly vaunted their intention of driving their enemy not merely out of Naples, but Sicily itself. [9]

Louis the Twelfth superintended these preparations in person, and, to be near the theatre of operations, crossed the Alps, and took up his quarters at Asti. At length, all being in readiness, he brought things to an immediate issue, by commanding his general to proclaim war at once against the Spaniards, unless they abandoned the Capitanate in four-and-twenty hours. [10]

The French forces in Naples amounted, according to their own statements, to one thousand men-at-arms, three thousand five hundred French and Lombard, and three thousand Swiss infantry, in addition to the Neapolitan levies raised by the Angevin lords throughout the kingdom. The command was intrusted to the duke of Nemours, a brave and chivalrous young nobleman of the ancient house of Armagnac, whom family connections more than talents had raised to the perilous post of viceroy over the head of the veteran D'Aubigny. The latter would have thrown up his commission in disgust, but for the remonstrances of his sovereign, who prevailed on him to remain where his counsels were more than ever necessary to supply the inexperience of the young commander. The jealousy and wilfulness of the latter, however, defeated these intentions; and the misunderstanding of the chiefs, extending to their followers, led to a fatal want of concert in their movements.