- Italy in the early Middle Ages
- Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries
- Early modern Italy (16th to 18th century)
- Revolution, restoration, and unification
- Italy from 1870 to 1945
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Charles I, who was elected Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1519 upon the death of his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, aspired to universal monarchy over the far-flung territories he had inherited, from Germany, the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain to the New World. The Piedmontese humanist Mercurino de Gattinara, Charles’s chancellor from 1518 to 1530, fueled his ambitions, but the providential design for Charles to be a new Charlemagne collided with political realities. The revolt of the comuneros (1520–21), an uprising of a group of Spanish cities, was successfully quelled, securing Castile as the bedrock of his empire, but the opposition of Francis I of France, of Süleyman I (the Magnificent; ruled 1520–66) of the Ottoman Empire, and of the Lutheran princes in Germany proved more intractable.
Early success in Italy, nevertheless, provided Charles with the most important base outside Spain for exercising his power. Imperial troops forced the French to retreat from Milan and restored the Sforza in 1522. When a refitted French army of 30,000 men retook Milan in 1524, the new Medici pope, Clement VII (reigned 1523–34), changed sides to become a French ally. But, at the most important battle of the Italian wars, fought at Pavia on February 24, 1525, the French were defeated and Francis I was captured. Soon after his release, he abrogated the Treaty of Madrid (January 1526), in which he had been forced, among other concessions, to abandon his Italian claims. He headed a new anti-Spanish alliance, the Holy League of Cognac (May 1526), which united France with the papacy, Milan, Florence, and Venice. With no French forces in the field, some 12,000 of Charles’s imperial troops, largely unpaid Lutheran infantry, marched south to Rome. On May 6, 1527, they attacked and sacked the city, forcing the pope to take refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo. The repercussions of this chastisement of the corrupt church were heard throughout Europe, and some scholars still date the end of the Renaissance in Italy to this event.
New warfare
New military technologies in siegecraft (cannon and bastion) and new techniques in open-field engagements (mixing pike and harquebus) not only transformed the nature of warfare but also threatened the order of a society still dominated by an aristocratic military caste. In the course of the Italian wars, the non-noble infantry adopted tactical innovations that unseated the cavalry of heavily armoured nobility, which had dominated medieval warfare. Charles VIII’s invading army employed the Swiss pike phalanx, whose moving squares of 6,000 men had already developed the ability to engage in offensive as well as defensive maneuvers. In the fighting against France for the Kingdom of Naples, Fernández de Córdoba first developed the Spanish tercios, more-flexible units of 3,000 infantrymen using both pikes and harquebuses. Spanish military superiority eventually owed its success to the introduction in 1521 of the musket (an improved harquebus) and to the refinement of pike and musket tactics in the years preceding the Battle of Pavia. Such tactics dominated land warfare until the Battle of Rocroi in 1643.
The new social composition of the enlarged infantry, as well as the need for large quantities of metal and the financial requirements for equipping and launching an army, pushed military affairs further into royal hands, strengthening the growing power of the central monarchy at the expense of the aristocracy. Commoners could forge a new relationship directly with royal authority. They could also, as in the case of the republics, create new images of citizenly power. In 1503 the Florentine republic, for example, planned two monumental mural paintings for the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio (town hall) to be executed by two of the giants of High Renaissance art, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The former’s Battle of Anghiari and the latter’s Battle of Cascina, if completed, would have emphasized the strength and righteous rage of republican virtue and the necessity for citizens to be vigilant, challenging them to retake Pisa and subdue Tuscany during the republic’s ongoing wars. Ludovico Ariosto, singing his epic poetry at the chivalric pro-French court of Ferrara, lamented the loss of glory, honour, valour, and courage to the “wretched and foul invention” of firearms. Even 20 years after the fact, when the diplomat and writer Baldassare Castiglione nostalgically portrayed the graceful court of Urbino of 1508 in The Courtier (1528), he did so in order to instruct courtiers and court ladies on how to adapt their roles to the changing times.
Spanish victory in Italy
In the immediate wake of the sack of Rome and the consequent disgrace of the Medici papacy, the Florentines expelled their Medici overlords. A French army under General Odet de Foix Lautrec finally arrived in 1528, but Andrea Doria, a Genoese admiral and aristocrat whose galleys had formerly been in the service of the French, unexpectedly switched sides and became a staunch supporter of Charles V. Plague took Lautrec’s life and decimated the French army, and in 1529 the pope was forced to make peace with Charles in the Treaty of Barcelona—as did Francis I in the Treaty of Cambrai. After almost 40 years of war, Italy submitted to Spanish pacification. Francis I renounced his claims in Italy, as well as in Artois and Flanders. The last Sforza was restored in Milan with the provision that the duchy would pass to Spain upon his death. Venice lost its recent mainland conquests. The Papal States were restored, and in 1530 the pope crowned Charles V emperor and king of Italy and made vague promises to call a council to address the Protestant schism and reform the church. In exchange, Spanish forces reinstated the Medici in Florence.
Italy remained subject to sporadic French incursions into Savoy in 1536–38 and 1542–44 during a third and fourth Habsburg-Valois war, and Spain’s Italian possessions were increasingly taxed to support Charles’s continual campaigns; however, for the remainder of his reign, Charles’s armies fought the French, the Ottomans, and the Protestant princes outside Italy. Notable for Italy was Charles V’s capture of Tunis in 1535 and his glorious march up the Italian peninsula in 1536 to confirm his personal rule. But the Ottomans formally allied themselves with France against the Habsburgs thereafter, defeated an allied fleet at Prevesa, retook Tunis in 1538, and stepped up their assault on the Venetian empire in the Mediterranean. With the eventual failure of Charles’s attempts to secure Germany, his great continental empire was divided. Italy became a part of the Spanish Habsburg inheritance of his son, Philip II (ruled 1556–98), and, after the Spanish victory over the French at St. Quentin (1557), the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) officially confirmed the era of Spanish domination that had existed in Italy since 1530.