THE TRIUMPH OF PRINCELY GOVERNMENT

Francesco Guicciardini, writing his History of Italy at the end of the 1530s, divided the later Renaissance into two distinct and tragically opposed periods of political development. As the opening of the History explains, the line of demarcation falls in 1494, the year in which ‘French troops, summoned by our own princes, began to stir up very great dissensions here’ (p. 3). Before this fatal moment ‘Italy had never enjoyed such prosperity, or known so favourable a situation’ (p. 4). The long years of conflict between Florence and Milan had finally come to an end in 1454, after which ‘the greatest peace and tranquillity reigned everywhere’ (p. 4). With the coming of the French, however, Italy began to suffer ‘all those calamities with which miserable mortals are usually afflicted’ (p. 3). When Charles VIII invaded in 1494, he forced Florence and Rome into submission, fought his way as far south as Naples and allowed his vast armies to pillage the countryside. His successor Louis XII mounted three further invasions, repeatedly attacking Milan and generating endemic warfare throughout Italy. Finally, the greatest disaster of all came when the Emperor Charles V decided in the early 1520s to contest the French control of Milan, a decision which converted the whole of the Regnum Italicum into a battlefield for the next thirty years (Green, 1964, pp. 94–9).