Lodovico Sforza's great (and incredibly stupid and short-sighted for himself and the other Italian states) idea of inviting the French to intervene in Italian affairs was, as already Macchiavelli and other Italian personalities of the era realized, akin to let the fox into the chickens' coop.
Not sure what you mean. It worked out quite well for Sforza. He was about to be deposed by the Neapolitans in 1494. His days were numbered. The French intervention stopped that. Neapolitan forces crumbled, Naples's allies (Florence & the Pope) got punished, he gets his duchy and the French leave. Worked out fine.
It also turned out well enough for Venice. She got several ports in Apulia out of it (Brindisi, Otranto, etc.) She was more keen on destroying Naples, the perennial ringleader against Venice in Italy. If anything, the Venetians felt Charles hadn't gone far enough - e.g. they had also hoped Florence would be dismembered permanently - they were disappointed Charles let them off so easily. The only thing that worried Venice was Charles's proposed Crusade - east Mediterranean was their turf. But the French were kicked out, so that was not a problem.
Sforza short-sightedness was not realizing that he was always next on Venice's target list, that the alliance of 1494 was one of convenience so long as Naples was an enemy to both. Now that Naples was dealt with, Venice had no reason for Sforza anymore. So they brought the French king for round deux in 1499, drove Sforza out, and took the eastern half of his duchy. Worked out fine for them then too.
French kings played their condottiere roles according to script.
What Sforza didn't expect was the Venetians double-crossing him. They were the ones who really did him in (although the Venetians blame Sforza for double-crossing them first, when he agreed to peace with France in 1495).
And it was so disastrous because he thought in exactly the same terms that you are using here: that he could play games with the French as he could do with a common condottiero or with a band of Swiss mercenaries, which ultimately shows how extremely Italo-centric and limited in scope his knowledge of European affairs was. A condottiero or a band of mercenaries would be pretty powerless to act against him if he decided to betray them, but the French did not depend on him for anything (except maybe for moral support and to supply the French king with gardeners, cooks and artists to embellish his châteaus) and would be perfectly capable of exacting revenge on him.
Er...Charles depended quite a bit on him in 1494. Sforza was quite active with cash, men, strategy and positions. Sforza lost interest in the French expedition after Gian Galeazzo died. The casus belli was gone, and as far as he was concerned, he didn't need the French anymore.
And the army of Louis XII in 1499 was 100% dependent on Venetian cash and their own simultaneous military invasion from the east.
Don't dismiss it that lightly.
Well, it turned out that he couldn't, and that he'd bitten far more that he could chew. The 1494 French invasion shocked everybody, including Sforza and the Serenissima, by how easily the French army walked across the peninsula, taking possession of Naples after crushing all attempts of the Neapolitan king of resisting and cowering the Republic of Florence and Pope Alexander VI to allow his army free access theough their dominions.
Overstatement. The initial battle of Rappallo - the only confrontation - was a little eyebrow-raising. Although the atrocities there were carried out primarily by Swiss mercenaries, a well-known item in Italy. But, yes, Orleans did put his ugly personal touch by massacring the POWs.
Charles's French army - that is, the one from the demesnes you are hailing - didn't do jack. Yes, it was a large army - estimated to be the largest French army assembled since the 7th Crusade of 1250s - so the size was a little frightening. But it didn't actually
do anything.
The crumbling of Neapolitan army was primarily due to Sforza's strategy. It was he who had Charles take an unusual early crossing of the Apennines and follow the westerly route through Tuscany, rather than the expected one down the Aemilian Way, where the bulk of the Neapolitan-Florentine army was ready and waiting for him. It was his sister that closed the passes to trap them in Romagna while Charles crossed over and traipsed through empty Tuscany. They side-stepped them entirely and made their retreat back to Naples impossible. Outflanked and their retreat cut, the Neapolitan army panicked and crumbled. It was this strategic stroke, Sforza's strategy, not the king of France's non-existent reputation, that did them in.
(And it was Sforza's brother, of course, that had done the bulk of the work in Rome. He deployed the Colonna to take all the strongpoints in Rome (pope was reduced to Sant' Angelo), well before the French got there. And then sent the Colonna invading the Neapolitan Abruzzi while Charles was still cooling his heels in Rome.)
So Sforza had no reason to be at all impressed with the French. They were just dumb oxen he was steering. He knew who was the actual author of the victory. They had shown nothing that would make him fear taking them on.
The only surprising thing maybe was the magnitude of the Neapolitan panic. It wasn't really expected to be that dramatic. But hey, it occasionally happens. Just ask the French army in 1940.
There was admittedly a second French atrocity after entering Naples - the massacre of Monte San Giovanni - which was shocking and led to the desertion of what remained of the Neapolitan army. But most of it had already evaporated before that. There was little point in continuing. The Colonna blitz through the Abruzzi was already set to outflank them, so they had already lost the strategic initiative. Any resistance would be just be heroics for heroics sake.
French reputation was not as soldiers but as plunderers and massacrers. They had not actually shown anything in the field or done any fighting. The only confrontation was at the outset at Rappallo (which was mainly Swiss mercs plus Genoese militia anyway). It was otherwise a big vacation for the French rank-and-file. They got to visit Renaissance Italy, plunder villages and taste the local cuisine and rape local women and do next-to-no fighting. Usual mercenary stuff.
Now, Renaissance writers of Florence may babble at a "disaster" - for them, maybe, as they temporarily lost Pisa and had to go through the purges of Savonarola. But for the rest of Italy, things were almost exactly as they were before. Sforza was still in Milan, the Aragonese back in Naples, Pope was still there, and Venice was stronger than ever. Nothing much changed.
The adventures of the king of France was a saturday morning children's picnic compared to the descents of the kings of Germany in prior centuries. Admittedly it had been over a century since the last foreign monarch set foot in Italy, so they might have forgotten how such things usually played out. But there was more apprehension
before the expedition than regret after it.
What had begun as one of many machiavellan politic power games between Italian dynasts and Charles VIII's outdated dreams of crusade degenerated into a long series of esxtremely destructive wars that devastated Italy turning it into a battleground for the two most powerful monarchies in western Europe, and all because that Sforza (and to a lesse degree the Venetians) did not realize that times had changed and that now they had to act carefully when dealing with the big players. This doesn't show either shewdness nor far-sightedness on Sforza and the Venetians' side, what it shows is provincialism and lack of contact with reality.
Not until later. 16th C. was indeed destructive to Italy. But 15th C. was splendid, and the 1490s French adventures were largely ignorable.
Venice's heyday was over by the time the foreign monarchs got seriously involved in Italy. The Ottomans had broken her naval power, the Portuguese siphoned her cash flows. Those were the real blows, those reduced her. But the French expeditions of the 1490s did not affect that. Indeed, it helped Venice, compensating their naval losses with territorial gains.
The 15th C. was Venice's century. Not the 16th. She had lost her naval supremacy and was waning.
But viewed in the 1490s, looked at from everywhere, Venice was a power whereas France was not a power. France had not been a power for the past two centuries. She had barely been a country, dismembered and occupied as she was through much of it. The king of France was a joke inside his country, and outside it. France was regarded throughout Europe - not merely Italy - as a mere source of mercenaries. So there's nothing really off-script.
The muscular 16th C. Renaissance monarchies of France (and Spain and England, etc.) were novelties, complete breaks with the past. Don't confuse Francis I with Charles VIII. They inhabited different eras.
(And this 16th C. muscle, let us note, depended primarily on cash - much of it Italian cash.)
Nope. If I can coerce in some way a bunch of guys to have the house built, I'll have it with zero cash money spent.
Coerce? Coerce me? You and what army? Oh, that's right.
I'm your army. Ha, ha ha.
Or how do you think the Egyptians managed to build their pyramids and temples without cash? According to that theory, there must have been no architectural works before the invention of cash money.
They were free laborers, not coerced. They were paid wages - albeit wages in kind, in commodity or credit form.
That said, even if you
could coerce them, that won't get you far. Soldiers need to eat to remain alive. Either you pay them cash wages, so they can procure their own food, or you feed them yourself. If the latter, then you have to carry around grain stores with you - grain which has to be bought and paid for from merchants, moved by ships, carts and laborers. And they need be paid. Or are you going to coerce them too?
Granted, Medieval monarchs could get some credit-in-advance from their soldiers by promises of plunder where they roamed. But promises don't feed bellies. And at the first bite of hunger, the army will start dissolving.
Cash was very important in late medieval and early modern Europe; as you've written it was an important tool to help centralize power, but as cash was tied to the physical availability of gold and silver, which were in extremely low supply in Europe until the discovery of America, getting enough of it was always a headache.
Actually, silver was in OK supply. Had its ups and downs, and 15th C. was a bit of a down (hadn't had a silver strike in a while). But remember most of the global silver supply came from Europe - it's where most silver mines were located. Problem is much of it was usually siphoned abroad by trade (heh-heh Venetians again; Asians didn't buy western European goods; they wanted cash on the nail, silver at a premium. Venetians were experts at tracking down every loose silver coin in Europe and shipping it east.)
But I repeat: then as now, cash is not all. It's not even the most important factor. The Republics of Venice, Genoa and Florence rolled in cash, and especially the Papacy also rolled in it, but neither of them was a really big player in European power politics (well, maybe the Pope was, but not because of the cash). Probably the most productive thing that they could do with it when dealing with European politics was use it for bribes, as paying protection money, as the Venetians discovered in their deals with the Ottomans, is not an advisable long-term solution.
Disagree. Cash buys everything. It buys armies, it buys supplies, it buys loyalties. Without it, you have a much, much harder time mobilizing. As every military historian, ancient or modern, will tell you, success in war usually boils down to who had more cash.
I don't know how you're defining "big players", but in the 14th-15th C., they were pretty darn big players. Having a hard time thinking of anybody else who could really be called that.
During the first decades of the XIV century, France was the strongest kingdom of Europe, thanks to a succession of strong, able rulers by direct male line (a biological rarity) that culminated in the person of king Philip IV of France.
French monarchy had a good 13th C. on account of a lot of new royal demesne land recovered from the English Plantagenets, which they could distribute to loyalists. By early 1300s, that had run out, although I will credit (or discredit) French kings of this time, esp. Phillip IV, for coming up with some very innovative ways of raising cash - inventing taxes (most ancien regime taxes come from this era), expropriating Templars and Jews, selling freedom to the serfs, titles to nobles, stealing church monies, etc. And, of course, debasement after debasement after debasement.
Mr. Philip IV Was very good at squeezing gold out of unusual places. A master alchemist.
Still, for all that, the merchants of Flemish towns still kicked his royal army's ass. If you are putting him as an example of a "strong king", you can imagine how poor "weak kings" would have fared.
Blaming the decline of the French monarchy on scandalous daughters-in-law makes for a good novel. But the real story is simply that they were broke.
They'd get an occasional boomlet when some great lord's line died out and his land reverted to the crown, giving him a new chunk of new land to distribute (Salic Law was invented for a reason). But these were intermittent and not predictable.
But feudal and monarchical systems are personal per se, on an intrinsical level. Simply put, any autocratic system can only be as good as the person who's at its head. With a good leader, the system can be expected to work reasonably well, but if biological lottery fails, everything goes down the drain.
In autocratic systems of a decentralized nature like medieval feudal states were, that was even more true, because kingdoms were in essence divided into many "mini-kingdoms" each of them with an autocrat at its head. And all the relations between them and with the king worked on a personal level: a feudal lord was loyal to the person of the king, not to the monarchy itself (those folks were quite bad with abstract conceptualizations like that), and thus what kind of a ruler a king was, on a personal level, was absolutely essential for the whole system.
In the Middle Ages? Heck no. Maybe after the Renaissance, when kings acquired some sort of royal majesty, above the nobility. But in the Middle Ages, king was just one of their own. Feudal lords disobeyed and rebelled at the drop of a hat.
Nobles were managed by bribes or threats. Bribes in the form of new lands, extra powers, royal property (tolls, castles, etc.), tax exemptions. Threats in the form of inquiries into landholdings, inheritances, town charters and urban militias, supervision by relatives, transfer of powers to royal bailiffs & judges, and other royal tricks to undermine them.
the Great Interregnum of the Holy Roman Empire in the XIII century is also a good example of what happened when feudal kingdoms were left rudderless.
They weren't "rudderless". The helmsmen sold the oars. The conflict between Hohenstaufen and Welf was extraordinarily expensive. Each rival king distributed land from the royal demesne and their home duchies to acquire loyalists for their cause. The Welf power base in the Duchy of Saxony crumbled into pieces, and the Duchies of Franconia and Swabia dissolved entirely and were given away acre by acre. After a half-century of this give-away bonanza, German kings didn't have a royal bucket left to piss in.
What existed in western Europe during a substantial part of the XIV and XV centuries was a power vacuum that would not last forever, as the Republic of Venice and Lodovico Sforza apparently thought, although the rise of the Ottoman empire in the east should have at least given the Venetians food for thought.
Things weren't very different 11th, 12th and 13th. There's always been a power vaccum. Hinterland kingdoms were always pretty limited - spending most of the time fighting inside themselves, in squabbles between nobles, or over some minor border bishopric or other.
The only powers who had any projection outside themselves have always tended to be naval/cash powers. Italian maritime republics, little more than fishing villages at the start, had been aggressively active since the 11-12th C., clawing back the sea from the Saracens; and Normans, and before them Vikings and Varangians, as small as they were, nonetheless trampled over land powers, carving out kingdoms and empires of their own where they pleased.
The only land-based kingdom with "outside" influence was arguably the Holy Roman Empire - but even that was very limited; he spent most of his time fighting internal wars; Italy, ostensibly his own kingdom, was effectively beyond his grasp.)
And don't bother citing the Crusades. Make no mistake: they were an Italian enterprise - with dumb ultramontane muscle, but mainly serving their goals. European kingdoms didn't stay involved in the overseas Levantine Crusader states, they were independent, too distant to communicate with, much less manage. But the Italian consuls and colonies were always there, in continuous close communication and coordination with home ports. and managing everything.
Fact is, the history of Medieval European kingdoms are mostly internal histories. Unless you're dealing directly with the history of France, or the history of Spain, or whatever, you don't have to pay attention to any of them. They simply didn't matter much to anyone outside them. Anyone who studies French history may be confused at the proposition that French king wasn't a power. But anyone who doesn't focus on that, anyone who studies Medieval German history or Italian history or Spanish history, would hardly notice France existed at all.
And to all the other feudal territories that would quickly (and effectively did) return to acknowledging the French king as soon as he (Charles VII) decided to get his act together and start acting as such. And by the way, the French crown also controlled substantial territories in the south of France, the old lands of the counts of Toulouse and viscounts of Carcassone, which had been direct royal dominions since the XIII century. And the duchy of Bourbon acknowledged Charles as king. And he also controlled the Dauphiné as a personal fiefdom. And the powerful Anjous also acknowledged him as such (he was married to an Anjou wife after all), which means that he also controlled Provence and the Anjou. Oh, and the counts of Foix and Armagnac also acknowledged him. Turns out that he was actually in direct or indirect control of half of France.
Acknowledging someone as French king is a minor matter. He can change his mind tomorrow.
Point is his lands aren't royal lands. King can't raise armies there, can't distribute it, etc. Only the duke can. And if the bulk of your army depends on the will of the Duke of Bourbon, then Bourbon can name his price. That makes you a
weak king, no matter what your personality type.
Charles VIII can give thanks to a several very lucky deaths of big magnates without heirs. And, no less importantly, to his big sister for having a kingdom to inherit. If Orleans had his way, France would have been dismembered again before he came of age.
More evidence of that terrifying naval power the Italian merchant republics commanded.
*shrug*. Sforza was elected.
Genoese were having the usual family squabble, Adorno vs. Fregosi (various branches) and couldn't decide among themselves. Preferred to elect an impartial outsider rather than a biased insider. Pretty customary in most Italian republics. Of course, Sforza was a bigger bunny than the usual outsider. But the running alternative was a Fregosi archbishop, and he was much too powerful even for his own family members to swallow. (his branch, BTW, ran the Neapolitan navy and were the ones that got massacred at Rappallo).
