The Scramble for Italy

Continuity and Change in the Italian Wars, 1494-1559

Idan Sherer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351208857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The Scramble for Italy offers fresh insights on the set of conflicts known as the Italian Wars of 1494-1559. The aim of this book is to explore the trends of continuity and change that characterized the sixteenth century in order to demonstrate the significance of the Italian Wars as an especially intense period of warfare that drove forward several important social, political, and especially military developments. Employing a myriad of primary and secondary sources, this book illustrates how the European nobility, still very much steeped in knightly and chivalric ideals, was fashioning the Italian Wars into an essentially traditional aristocratic war, while the rise of military professionalization and privatization, accompanied by the processes of centralization and consolidation of political power, were rapidly changing their world. Moreover, the book attempts to demonstrate that although the debate on a supposed military revolution in late medieval and early modern Europe still rages, sixteenth-century soldiers and intellectuals were quite certain, and anxious, about the potential effects of gunpowder weapons and novel tactics and strategy on their world. Scholars and general readers who are interested in the political and military history of late medieval and early modern Europe should find this study especially instructive.

1 Knighthood and chivalry transformed?

One of the most dramatic images in Bernard van Orley’s magnificent tapestry of the Battle of Pavia in 1525 is that of King Francis I of France falling from his horse into the hands of his captors (see Fig 1.1). The king, like most knights portrayed in the tapestry, is covered in heavy armor from head to toe and can barely move after falling, injured, from his horse. The arquebus, depicted in the bottom left of the scene, may have been added to convey the sad state of affairs in which a proud knight, heavily armored and riding his warhorse to battle, was beaten to the ground by a devastating and relatively novel technology. About a century later, another warrior prince, King Gustav Adolph of Sweden, was depicted by the German painter Johann Walter with the image of his incredible triumph in Breitenfeld in 1631 behind him (see Fig 1.2). Compared to Francis, the Swedish king is, as most of the cavalrymen behind him are, lightly armored and mainly protected by a flexible cuirass and leather clothes. While both artworks may have exaggerated their tone for dramatic effect, the change is nevertheless apparent: during the hundred years or so between the battles of Pavia and Breitenfeld, the heavy knight had all but disappeared from the battlefields of Europe.

Yet the apparent change went even deeper than tactics and armor, and throughout the second half of the sixteenth century contemporaries were very aware of the fact that the link between nobility, knighthood, and the chivalric ethos was at stake. Experienced soldiers were especially furious. A famous quote often used by historians is that of the maréchal de France Blaise de Monluc (d. 1577), who lamented about “so many brave and valiant men” who died “for the most part by the most cowardly and pitiful [men], who wouldn’t dare to look at the face of the one who from far away they knock to the ground with their miserable bullets.”¹ The Italian condottiere Paolo Vitelli (d. 1499) was known to mutilate gunners and arquebusiers for the damage done to honorable knights from a cowardly distance.² Both intellectuals and soldiers were not only dismayed and somewhat discouraged by the tactical and technological changes that were obviously occurring in sixteenth-century battlefields, but also deeply lamented what they saw as a swift decline in the significance of the same men who still attempted to embed chivalric ideals in sixteenth-century warfare. Ludovico Ariosto bemoans these changes with fiercer animosity in his Orlando Furioso, when he excitedly mentions gunpowder weapons:

And what this means is that anyone, high or low, is the equal of anyone else. It has done away with rank and order, and honor, and valor, too, and the rabble are just the same as me and you. The bad are on an equal footing with the good, and the raw recruit is a match in skill to the best of the maîtres d’armes. All those things that you’d expect to be rewarded in a test of chivalry are fallen in desuetude. Many brave lords and knights will find their rest in the wholesale carnage of this new era in fighting, so bloody and disgusting, but not exciting.³

Figure 1.1 Francis I captured in the Battle of Pavia in 1525 in a tapestry by Bernard van Orley. The king and other knights around him are heavily armored and resemble their medieval predecessors.

Source: Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Campania, Italy/Bridgeman Images.

It seems that the very essence of nobility, knighthood, and chivalry was at stake and many contemporaries were still unwilling to allow further tremors in the foundations.

Knighthood and the chivalric ethos in the sixteenth century

The chivalric ethos appeared somewhat established during the eleventh century. Nobles throughout Europe preferred to present themselves as “knights” (or chevaliers and caballeros) riding a warhorse and armed with heavy armor and a lance, sword, and shield. The knight was a fighting man, and, beginning in infancy, his life was dedicated to deeds of arms, unless other circumstances drove him to ecclesiastical or intellectual pursuits. Throughout Western Europe, knighthood and chivalry went hand in hand. Having been knighted by an already established knight, one should have adhered to a chivalric way of life: protecting the poor and helpless; maintaining oneself ready for war at all times; and serving one’s lord loyally and, most importantly, honorably. The chivalric ethos and the knights that made it their way of life remain some of the most famous legacies of medieval Europe. The vast chasm that separated ideals from reality will be discussed later. First, one must stress that both medieval and sixteenth-century knights maintained one basic and deeply influential obsession: the augmentation of their honor and reputation by the exhibition of their prowess and martial abilities, preferably on the battlefield.⁴

Figure 1.2 Gustav II Adolf, King of Sweden, in the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 by Johann Walter, painted 1632. The king and the cavalry in the background are better equipped and armored to perform more swiftly and dynamically in a battlefield characterized by the widespread use of gunpowder weapons and tight infantry formations.

Source: Musées de la ville de Strasbourg.

This obsession was deeply entrenched in the chivalric ethos, and the ideals were often presented and discussed by some of the most central historical figures of medieval Europe. A young would-be or even an accomplished knight could not possibly brush aside the instructions of such figures as the reputable French knight Geoffroi de Charny (d. 1356), who wrote in his Livre de chevalerie that “you should love, value, praise and honor all those whom God by his grace had granted several good days on the battlefield, when they win great credit and renown for their exploits; for it is from good battles that great honors arise and are increased, for good fighting men prove themselves in good battles.”⁵ If battlefields are nowhere to be found, tournaments can be as instrumental since “they earn men praise and esteem, for they require a great deal of wealth, equipment and expenditure, physical hardship, crushing and wounding, and sometimes danger of death.”⁶ One cannot exaggerate the importance of honneur and renommée for these men; much more than another paragraph in a person’s curriculum vitae, they perceived honor and reputation as crucial, significant, and inseparable parts of their social, cultural, and political identity.

Honor and reputation were to be accumulated by exhibiting prowess in feats of arms, and young knights and aspirants were seeking them everywhere. With feats of arms came the accompanying brutality and violence. Throughout the heyday of chivalric literary production, readers encountered a straightforward and intense depiction of the potential horrors of the battlefield. In La Chanson de Roland, perhaps the earliest serious example of a chanson de geste from the twelfth century, when Roland and his men were fighting the Saracen King Marsil, “Roland went back to the field, and holding [his sword] Durendal as a true warrior, he cut Faldrun de Pui at his waist and with him twenty-four of his noble men.”⁷ Oliver, Roland’s companion and brother-in-arms, was injured during the fight: “And Oliver knew that he was mortally wounded, and his will for revenge was insatiable. He charges and smashes into the great mob, breaking spears and slashes shields, cutting hands and legs, spines and saddles. Whoever watches him dismember the Saracens, creating a heap of the dead, may be able to remember that good knight.”⁸

In the Iberian Peninsula, the Reconquista produced similar undisguised depictions of these potential feats of arms. In El Cantar de mio Cid, the famous early Castilian poem from around the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the renowned and fearsome El Cid, the Castilian Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (d. 1099), assaults Alcozer, “You saw so many lances, raised and lowered, so many shields pierced and torn, so many cuirasses torn and slashed, so many standards painted in red … And [El Cid’s knight] Minaya Albar Fañez rode well and killed thirty-four of the Moors; he chops with the blade of his sword, blood trickles down his arm, drops falling from his elbow to the ground.”⁹

Stressing the prowess of knights through realistic depictions of violence was also customary and prevalent in memoirs and biographies, many of which were steeped with chivalric ideals. That was the case with the Castilian knight Pero Niño (d. 1453), who, fighting alongside King Enrique III of Castile against the incursions of King Joao I of Portugal during the closing years of the fourteenth century, fought almost alone against a host of enemy soldiers in Pontevedra, Galicia, in 1397. Withstanding the onslaught of the enemy on the bridge leading to the castle, Niño “was hit by an arrow in the neck. But this wound he received in the beginning of the battle, and the arrow sewed his gorget to his neck. And his will to finish what he started was so great, that he felt little or no pain from the wound, although it did hinder him from moving his neck.”¹⁰ It seems, then, that whether in the lists or in actual battlefields, violence and the blood, gore, and pain that came with it were not to be feared but rather sought after and tested.

As is often the case, a great chasm separated the ideals from the true nature of warfare, as the knight Jean de Beaumont states in The Vows of the Heron in the middle of the fourteenth century:

When we are in the tavern drinking strong wines, and the ladies pass and look at us with those white throats and tight bodices, those sparkling eyes resplendent with smiling beauty: then nature urges us to have a desiring heart. Then we could overcome Yaumont and Agolant, and the others could conquer Oliver and Roland. But when we are on campaign on our trotting chargers, our bucklers round our necks and our lances lowered, and the great cold is congealing us together, and our limbs are crushed before and behind and our enemies are approaching us, then we would wish to be in a cellar so large that we might never be seen by any means.¹¹

However, this fear and potential mental exhaustion, as presented here, usually remain hidden behind a deep admiration of violence and its immediate repercussions. This was still not the time for soldiers to inspect their inner experiences and enlightenments produced by the horrors of war.

This stress of violence was not only intended for purposes of entertainment, although readers and listeners were overjoyed by these exciting and often highly exaggerated bouts of action, very much like consumers of entertainment throughout history. To the knights and many other warriors who were affected by the chivalric ethos, however, this violent action was also an extravagant and blunt reminder of their role in society, namely, the legitimacy, right, and duty to carry arms and use them in certain circumstances. This was what they should have expected to encounter in the field of battle, and, therefore, the exposure of young and inexperienced potential warriors to both literary and visual depictions of battle was almost natural considering their way of life. War and suffering were very rarely presented as anything but the culmination of a true (i.e., noble) warrior who knew very well that his social and political status might be at stake in a complex social system that was highly dependent on visibility in certain, and mostly military, contexts.¹²

While changes in the political and military conventions of Western Europe were brewing by the beginning of the sixteenth century, nevertheless it is apparent from the literary production by and about many sixteenth-century knights and soldiers that the perception of war and knighthood through the prism of the chivalric ethos was alive and well. Countless knights from all over Europe were flocking to tournaments and battlefields to acquire honor and reputation, with the Italian Wars offering an e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction: Continuity and change in the Italian Wars
• 1. Knighthood and chivalry transformed?
• 2. Professional soldiers, unprofessional institutions
• 3. “When war comes, they want to flee”: Was Machiavelli right?
• 4. New weapons in a zealously traditional world
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index