Italian Wars

A series of conflicts from 1494 to 1559 between the leading European powers for control of the Italian states. The wars involved most of the Italian states, the papacy, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and Switzerland. Principally, the conflict was between France and Spain, with the changing allegiance of the rival Italian states and of the pope being determined by their own immediate interests. The final outcome was the victory of Spain. Culturally, the wars were significant for spreading the influence of the Italian Renaissance throughout Europe.

The Italian Wars began when the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy and seized Naples (to which he had a tenuous claim) 1494–95, and had himself crowned king of Naples. He was driven out by Spain and its Italian allies in 1496. In the second French invasion, in 1499, Louis XII, with the help of Venice, took Milan and Genoa, and tried to regain Naples. Initially he cooperated with Ferdinand of Aragon, but the Aragonese later expelled the French from southern Italy (1504). The conflict continued when in 1508 Emperor Maximilian I joined Pope Julius II, several other Italian states, France, and Spain in the League of Cambrai, which tried to dismember the mainland possessions of Venice. Quarrels over the spoils, however, led to the formation of the anti-French Holy League in 1511. The Swiss entered the wars and forced Louis XII out of Milan, which his successor, Francis I, regained after his victory at the battle of Marignano in 1515. In the relatively quiet period that followed, both Ferdinand (1516) and Maximilian (1519) died. War resumed in the 1520s in the wider context of the European struggle between the Habsburgs under Charles V and the Valois under Francis I. At the battle of Pavia in 1525 Charles V defeated and captured Francis I, who was made to renounce his Italian claims. In the anti-Habsburg reaction that followed, France, the papacy, and other Italian states formed the League of Cognac against Charles. The notorious sack of Rome (1527) by imperial troops followed as a consequence. By 1529 several setbacks compelled Francis I again to surrender his Italian claims in the treaties of Barcelona and Cambrai. The last phase of the wars, 1529–59, saw limited foreign involvement in Italy and ended with France's final renunciation of its Italian claims in the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559.