Charles VIII

King of France (r. 1483-1498)

• Born: June 30, 1470
• Birthplace: Royal Chateau Amboise, France
• Died: April 7, 1498
• Place of death: Amboise, France

Charles VIII continued Louis XI’s policy of increasing the power of the French monarchy over the nobility and continued the improvement and professionalization of the French army. He also launched the Italian Wars, the struggle between France and Spain for dominance in Renaissance Italy.

Early Life

Charles VIII of the House of Valois was the only son of King Louis XI, and Charlotte of Savoy. Though legally of age to rule after his father’s death in 1483, the thirteen-year-old Charles was weak and lacked intelligence. On his deathbed, Louis charged his eldest daughter, the twenty-two-year-old Anne and her husband Pierre de Bourbon, seigneur de Beaujeu, as unofficial regents for Charles.

The Beaujeus did an admirable job of dealing with the noble backlash that followed the authoritarian reign of Louis. They made concessions, which included reducing taxes and restoring rights to hostile nobles, especially to the twenty-one-year-old Louis, the duke of Orleans who was also Charles’s cousin and the new heir to the throne. The Beaujeus also agreed to a calling of the estates-general at Tours for 1484. When the estates sided with the Beaujeus in a dispute over control of the regency, however, the disaffected nobles led by Orleans eventually revolted and were supported by Duke Francis II of Brittany, the archduke Maximilian I of Austria (later Holy Roman Emperor), King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Henry VII of England.

The “mad war” that followed was won by the royal party at the decisive Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier that same year, though skirmishing continued until 1491. Duke Francis died in 1488, Brittany passed to his daughter Anne, and immediately there began a competition for her hand in marriage and thus control of the last major fief in France that was independent of the Crown. Duchess Anne, in an attempt to protect her birthright from French domination, married Maximilian by proxy on December 19, 1490, but her new husband was unable to come to her aid militarily, and besieged at Rennes in 1491, she was forced to annul her marriage and accept betrothal to Charles VIII.

Life’s Work

Charles’s marriage to the fifteen-year-old Anne seemed to give him a new independence, as he broke free from Beaujeus control. Filled with chivalric dreams, tempted by disaffected Italian nobles, and drawn, as many French monarchs before and after, to the riches of Italy, Charles proceeded to launch a “war of magnificence.” The first step in this great crusade against the Turks would be to seize Naples from Ferdinand as a staging area to take Constantinople or Jerusalem and win his place as emperor of the east. Many Italian leaders favored a French invasion, thinking that it would help them dominate parts of or all the peninsula, which included more than a dozen jealous states in the late fifteenth century.

To free himself for this great venture to the southeast, Charles proceeded to make a series of unwise treaties designed to secure France’s frontiers. He bought off Henry VII with the enormous sum of 750,000 gold crowns in the Treaty of Étaples (1492). To gain Brittany, Charles had to break his engagement to Margaret of Austria , daughter of Maximilian I, and forfeit Artois and Franche-Comté. He had attempted originally to hold these provinces, but he returned them by the Treaty of Senlis (1493) to stabilize his eastern border. Charles also pacified his frontier with Spain in 1493 by signing the Treaty of Barcelona; this foolish agreement gave 200,000 gold crowns and Roussillon and Cerdagne to Ferdinand of Aragon, thereby forfeiting the hard-won gains of his father’s reign.

Charles, with an army of more than twenty-five thousand, which included eight thousand Swiss mercenaries, the best infantry in Europe, crossed the Alps into Italy in September of 1494. Except for a bloody battle fought at Rapallo in September, the French moved through Lombardy easily. They were welcomed at Milan and Ferrara, forced their way into Florence, and then proceeded through Sienna to Rome. The new pope, Alexander VI, was forced to deal with Charles, quickly making concessions to facilitate his departure from papal lands. Charles entered Naples, which he called his kingdom, on February 22, 1495, and was crowned there on May 12.

The ruthlessness and efficiency of the French army had come as a shock to the Italians. The formalized warfare of late fifteenth century Italy revolved around captains known as condottieri, who raised large armies of mercenaries and sold their services to the highest bidder. Battles between these mercenary forces, who had little loyalty to anyone save themselves, were like great bloodless chess matches. Tens of thousands of men would fight all day and casualties might scarcely number in the hundreds. The French system spawned by the Hundred Years’ War and honed during the Franco-Austrian War of 1477 to 1493 was infused with a national spirit and was designed to kill. The French men-at-arms and Swiss infantry that formed the core of Charles’s army were vicious and unmerciful. The most devastating aspect of the French onslaught, however, was the new-style artillery arm. French guns were operated by disciplined professionals and were superior in quantity, quality, mobility, and caliber to any artillery in Europe. The proficiency of French guns dominated battlefields and reduced walled places within hours instead of weeks.

Charles was cheered by the people of Naples initially, but his policies soon alienated the Neapolitan nobility. Furthermore, his soldiers’ obvious contempt for the Italians, who they saw as decadent and inferior, made the French unpopular. The terrified leaders of Italy quickly put aside their quarrels and banded together to oust him. Pope Alexander VI organized the first Holy League, or League of Venice, which included the Papacy, Venice, England, the Holy Roman Empire, Ferdinand, and Charles’s former ally, Ludovico Sforza of Milan. In an attempt to dupe the French, the league was announced as a defensive alliance to protect Italy against the Turks.

Charles and his advisers, however, quickly recognized the threat that the Holy League’s army posed to his line of communications through Italy. Leaving a garrison in Naples, he marched north with forty-one hundred cavalry and seventy-five hundred infantry in May of 1495. The French encountered the condottiere Francesco II Gonzaga’s twenty thousand Italian mercenaries on July 6 at Fornovo. Gonzaga took up a strong defensive position in one of the defiles (narrow gorges) of the Appenines. As Charles’s army marched through the pass, Gonzaga launched a flank attack. The French artillery unlimbered and tore into the mercenaries, while their infantry launched a violent assault that cut down the Italians by the thousands.

Afterward, Charles marched leisurely back into France, vowing to return to Italy to seek more glory. He never got the chance because he hit his head on a doorpost at Amboise in April of 1498, went into a coma, and died soon thereafter. He had been in the process of raising new forces. The French hold on southern Italy also did not survive 1498. A Spanish army under Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba was sent to Naples in 1495, slowly pushed out the French, and reinstalled a member of the House of Aragon on the throne.

Significance

Charles’s reign marked the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance era. The incursion of his new-style army south of the Alps is considered by many to be the climax of the Italian Renaissance and the catalyst for spreading Renaissance ideas into northern Europe. Medieval forms and ideas, however, would die hard.

Charles, like many of his contemporaries, exhibited the style of a new monarch when he continued his father’s policy of breaking the power of the great nobles; yet, he neglected the real French national interests: the consolidation of recent gains in Burgundy and Brittany. Instead, he embarked on an adventure into exotic Italy and beyond that aroused the jealousies of his enemies. Crusades to acquire Jerusalem in search of glory were the dreams of a medieval monarch.

Charles’s successors continued to pursue control of Italy at great cost. The Italian Wars saw the Europeans selfishly fight over small pieces of Italy while the Turks pushed the banners of Islam up the Danube and into the Mediterranean. For all the men and treasure expended, France was finally forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis on April 3, 1559, which, after a sixty-five-year struggle, left Spain firmly in control of Italy.

Bibliography

Abulafia, David. The French Descent into Renaissance Italy, 1494-95: Antecedents and Effects. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1995. Questions whether the French invasion upset a relatively calm Italy and looks into political, military, diplomatic, and technological aspects of the occupation.

Bridge, John S. C. A History of France from the Death of Louis XI. Vol. 2. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1922-1924. A detailed account of Charles’s reign, the economic prosperity and political degeneracy of Italy, and the diplomatic and military history of the first phase of the Italian Wars.

Commines, Philippe de. Memoires. 2 vols. Translated by I. Cazeaux, edited by S. Kinser. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973. Contains autobiographical portraits of Louis XI and Charles VIII and analyzes leaders, purposes, and institutions.

Johnson, Arthur Henry. Europe in the Sixteenth Century, 1494-1598. London: Rivington’s, 1964. The first chapter offers a thorough description of the diplomacy and politics of the Italian Wars.

Nicolle, David, and Richard Hook. Fornovo, 1495. Oxford, England: Osprey, 1996. An excellent volume that provides an in-depth look into the background of the campaign, the fighting, and its consequences.

Taylor, Frederick Lewis. The Art of War in Italy, 1494 to 1529. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1921. An examination of the changes in warfare caused by the French invasion during the first half of the Italian Wars.