Italian Wars

3 Key excerpts on "Italian Wars"

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  Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy

  The Grand Tour of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse

  • G. Alfani(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This European involvement prevented any easy or quick solution to the Italian dynastic and diplomatic problems and resulted in an unusually intricate and harsh series of wars, which are impossible here to trace in detail. Only the first campaign (Charles VIII’s) has been reconstructed with some precision to provide contextualization and as an example of the complexity of both the military events of the period and of the Italian diplomatic affairs. The developments of the rest of the Italian Wars will now be described only briefly, although specific episodes will be detailed in the following sections when they are relevant to the analysis of the economic, social and demographic consequences of war. In particular, it is important to distinguish the six phases into which the wars of 1494–1529 can be divided, marked by a continual shift in alliances: 6 1 1494–95 : Charles VIII’s campaign, as detailed above. 2 1499–1504 : The French return to Italy to conquer the Duchy of Milan, over which the new king Louis XII has dynastic claims. 7 Between 1499 and 1500, the duchy changes hands on various occasions, despite the help given to Ludovico il Moro by Emperor Maximilian. The French and Spanish agree to divide between them the Kingdom of Naples, which is obliged to surrender (1501), and war breaks out between the two victorious nations over the division of the territory (1502–04). The Spanish prevail and gain control of the whole of southern Italy

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  Interpreting Early Modern Europe

  • C. Scott Dixon, Beat Kümin(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Art of War (1520) which is too often overshadowed by his other political works, war was – and had to be – a key concern of the prince, or sovereign (Machiavelli 2005).

  It is this importance of war, its changing character, and its demands on state and society which led to the formulation more than half a century ago of the concept or thesis of the ‘Military Revolution’, and to its continued influence. This thesis is important not just because of the centrality of war to the early modern experience but because of its claims about the broader development of state and society in early modern Europe; and – perhaps more importantly still – the suggestion of reasons for the global triumph of Europe (and more broadly of the ‘West’ conceived as not only a geographical sphere but also as an economic, military, political and social culture). That triumph may now seem, at the start of the twenty-first century, more contingent and temporary as power shifts away from Europe and the ‘West’ but the claims made for the ‘Military Revolution’ in this respect are further reason to look more closely at it. The debate, as we shall see, also poses fundamental questions about the relationship between armies – war – and political authority and social stability, and the extent to which one of these two factors – arms or authority and stability – precedes, prepares the way for and underpins the other. Indeed, it is arguable that the original formulation of the concept of the military revolution was a very self-conscious and deliberate attempt to re-connect the history of war to the broader history of state and society, since it is all too easy to separate the two and to understand and write the history of war in a rather hermetically sealed way, and as what is sometimes rather disparagingly termed ‘drums and trumpets’ history.

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  A History of Europe

  From 1378 to 1494

  • W.T. Waugh(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER XIX

  ITALIAN POLITICS

  I T has been customary for writers on the last centuries of the Middle Ages to devote a very large share of their space to the political history of Italy. As long as it was still believed by scholars that the Middle Ages were a howling wilderness of brutality, lust, and superstition, and that manners, virtue, and learning were restored by the Humanists of the fifteenth century, it was natural that historians should be strongly attracted towards all that was then happening in Italy, especially as information about it was abundant, accessible” and written in Ciceronian, not “monkish” Latin. But now that our knowledge of European history is better adjusted, there seems little reason for lingering over the abortive squabbles and intrigues with which the political history of fifteenth-century Italy abounds. It is well to see something of the background to the intellectual and artistic activity of the country, and to know something of the conditions under which Italy became the battlefield of foreign powers. But in themselves the bickerings between, say, Florence and Milan are no more important than those between Saxe-Wittenberg and Saxe-Lauenburg.

  The political history of Italy in the thirteenth and four-teenth centuries is comparatively interesting because of the vigorous life of the cities. Their rejection of aristocratic control, their defiance of imperial authority, their experiments in constitution-making, their ferocious party struggles (ridiculous as they often were), their progress in commerce and industry—in fact, every manifestation of their restless throbbing energy—cannot but appeal strongly to all with a sympathetic feeling for the strivings of medieval man to better his environnant. But by the beginning of the period which concerns us the Italian cities had passed their best days. Nearly all of them had succumbed to the usurpations of tyrants, or dictators. Nor could many of these tyrants maintain their independence for long. Already most of them could only survive by playing off one of the greater states against another. In 1878 the “Great Powers” of Italy numbered four—the republics of Venice and Florence, Milan —nominally ruled by an imperial vicar, actually under the despotism of the Visconti-and the kingdom of Naples. They were to be joined by the Papal States before long, but at the time the future of the Papacy was dark and uncertain, and its temporal authority at a very low ebb. The political history of Italy in the ensuing century consists in the attempts of these Powers to get the better of one another and to gobble up such of their weaker neighbours as had hitherto escaped. In this struggle for aggrandisement, no great principle was even advanced as a pretext. The very names of Guelph and Ghibelline, which had at least a venerable etymology, were scarcely used as labels any more. In fifteenth-century Italy it was every state for itself, and devil take the honest or weak. The strife was carried on mainly by Italians and interested few outside Italy. Not for many generations had Italy been so free from foreign interference, and until the nineteenth century she was never to be so free again. No Emperor ever seriously threatened to lay his yoke upon her. Rupert’s invasion was ignominiously fruitless; Sigismund’s war with Venice concerned the possession of Dalmatia, not any part of Italy. During their visits to Italy to receive the imperial crown both Sigismund and Frederick III refrained as far as possible from doing anything that might offend anyone. It is true that from time to time Angevin or Aragonese princes sought by armed force to give effect to their claims to Naples; but Naples had been contested by foreigners since the time of the Hohenstaufen. Further, whereas in the fourteenth century the wars of Italy had been conducted mainly by foreign mercenaries, towards its close these began to be replaced by native condottieri

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