Chapter XX
The Military Strategies of the Italian Wars
After the victories off the coast of Crete and the Venetian-occupied Greek isles, Emperor John began his careful assembly of the Roman fleet, and army, to begin his trek up the Adriatic toward Venice. However, before he would be able to achieve this fabled “Sailing to the City of Canals,” a Franco-Venetian expedition that had invaded Albania had to be immediately confronted. For, in the early invasions of the Venetian-occupied Greek isles, and during the battle off of Crete, a Franco-Venetian army invaded Southern Italy and Albania in the midst of confusion and the inability of the Roman army, shuttling itself from Constantinople to mainland Greece and the Venetian-occupied islands.
Thus, a force of about 10,000 French and Venetian soldiers had landed in Albania, an army that included a force of some 3,000 musketeers. The Roman army, spread out across the dominions of the empire—had little ability to overturn the invading forces. The Duke of Valentinois, the Franco-Venetian commander, had quickly destroyed the Roman garrison in Albania, a force of some 3,000 soldiers and citizen-militia. Likewise, a French army invading Southern Italy had quickly seized Salento. However, even though the initial invasions had gone against the Romans, the Roman victory off the coast of Crete gave the Romans an advantage upon the seas. After the crushing defeat of the Latin fleet, John re-assembled the Roman army, an army that had been modernized with muskets and artillery, trained in the new styles of Ottoman and European warfare, assembled outside of Athens to repel the Franco-Venetian invaders in preparation for his journey up the Adriatic Sea.
The Imperial Court in Constantinople receives news of the Franco-Italian Invasion of Greece.
The Roman army, much maligned in its degradation from 1071 through the early fifteenth century, was almost unrecognizable to its tradition form by the onset of the Italian Wars. After all, the Roman army now comprised of citizen-soldiers, armed with pikes, muskets, and artillery; modelled, and looking like, any of the modern armies of Europe. In their wars against the Turks, they had adopted the fire en-masse technique to musketry, what modern European armies would call “volley firing.”[1]
In terms of Renaissance warfare and tactics, while the revolution of modern warfare was being foundationally laid, little had changed in terms of an outright overhauling of the basic superstructures of military tactics and strategy. It would be wrong to think of the musketry and artillery that featured a prominent place in the Italian Wars as being reflective of the manners of fighting of the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. A majority of the soldiers-at-arms still wielded swords, pikes, and other hand-held, close-quarters weapons—and thus, they naturally performed the most crucial tasks on the battlefield. Large cavalry charges were still often seen, although, unlike the knights of the Middle Ages, they were featured less prominently with the rise of the pike-and-shot formation, intended to ward off such powerful assaults. Artillery, while primitive, and not as accurate as one might think in terms of the artillery used in Napoleon’s armies, were fairly reliable by the Italian Wars.
Unlike the fast-paced warfare of our contemporary period, warfare during the Italian Wars was still, generally speaking, slow, cumbersome, and monolithic. It was dangerous for armies to separate, and there was no understanding of corps or divisions, even a basic systemization of military organization. Rather, armies were often headed by noblemen, or the king—units were formed in basic feudal traditions, the “regiments” of their days—only to be assembled together in large formations to form the armies of the High Renaissance. On the battlefield, it was commonplace, at least before the revolution of linear tactics of the Late Renaissance and early modern period, that units were so tied down and hard to move, that they would isolated in the midst of battle as neighboring units were defeated. Chaos reigned supreme.
Yet, not to downplay the important significance of the military revolution of the Italian Wars, which did see the first widespread implementation of firearms, artillery, massed-formations, and the gradual decline of knights and thunderous cavalry charges to win the day—the foundation of the revolutions of the seventeenth century were created in the first half of the sixteenth century. The Romans, in this respect, were pioneers of the emerging military revolution. While pike-and-shot was the preferred tactic of the Europeans, and while the Romans themselves, would often adopt this strategy, ad-hoc musket units in the Roman armies adopted a massed formation to both ward off oncoming cavalry and fire in the aforementioned volley-system, with the first of three ranks firing their weapons en-masse to cause as much effective damage as possible. This tactic, although sparingly used, would be used to devastating effects at the Battle of Bari in 1523.
The Albanian Campaigns
By the summer of 1521, with the eastern Mediterranean secure, and the Roman army of 12,000 men assembled outside of Athens, Emperor John began his “March up the Adriatic.” At Epirus, in the first major battle where two opposing armies deployed over 50 cannons a piece, the Romans scored a decisive victory losing under 450 men compared to over 4,000 French and Italians. The battle, which resulted in the mass disintegration of the Duke of Valentinois’ army, opened the Straight of Otranto to the Roman navy and army, cutting off the isolated forces that remained.
The victory in Epirus was followed up by a swift series of battles in Northern Greece, culminating in the Battle of Thessaloniki. The Franco-Italian army, about 6,000 strong, positioned itself to sack the great Greek city, in part, because of the necessity of supplies on part of the French and Italian forces. Emperor John, moving east to stop them, brought a force of slightly over 10,000 soldiers to the battlefield. The French attempted to assault the numerically superior Roman army to prevent their surrounding—and to this respect, they were successful. The early engagement prohibited the numerical advantage of Emperor John from surrounding the enemy force, but in the early engagement, ensured that with the battle made, the Romans would accept nothing less than the destruction of the invading army.
In the middle of the battle, John’s brother, the Great Domestic of the Morea—Manuel—unleashed one of the last great charge of horse of the day. Some 2,000 Roman horsemen thundered between the gaps created in the Franco-Italian lines, captured the French artillery, including the Duke of Valentinois himself, creating a spirit of chaos and confusion in the ranks of the infantry. Then, John rallied home the exploitation, and in isolating the left-wing of the French army, forced its hand into surrender. In just 7 hours, the Franco-Italian army had completely disintegrated.
A depiction of Roman soldiers during the Italian Wars. This particular image is either showing one of the battles in Greece, or a later engagement in Italy. Note, the importance of artillery in the image.
The great victory won against the invading Franco-Italian armies in Greece was marred, however, by the loss of Southern Italy. In addition, the small besieging forces left in Crete, Naxos, and Corfu had their supplies diverted to the main theater of campaigning, thus, had largely been unable to force the surrender of all Venetian forts and garrisons in a more timely fashion, as I mentioned earlier, prolonging the sieges through the summer. While Naxos had fallen relatively early, Corfu was resiliently holding off the Roman attackers, as was the Venetian defense of Crete as the main Roman armies were campaigning in mainland Greece. Even so, the defeat of the Franco-Italian invasion of Greece was a celebratory cause for the Roman and Habsburg armies, for, in the spring of 1522, a French army penetrated the Upper Rhine and descended into the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, thus diverting Habsburg attention away from Italy.
Naturally, the Habsburgs, headed by Emperor Philip I, called upon his Roman allies to aid in containing the Venetians from an invasion of Lower Austria. It is ironic to think of the two men claiming to be the emperor of the Romans seeking each other’s’ aid, let alone being in a formal alliance in the midst of etymological and imperial struggles between the two supposed claimants of the Augustan legacy. But answer this call John did. Assembling off the coasts of Epirus, a Roman army of 20,000 and fleet of over 50 warships and hundreds of smaller vessels was a spectacular sight to behold, especially given the dire circumstances of the sons of Constantine less than 100 years earlier. The March up the Adriatic was about to begin, and cement the legacy of John as the “New Alexander” in the process.
[1]Volley firing was originally started by the Ottoman armies. After battling the Turks, the Austrians adopted it later, and transmitting it to the rest of Europe. In this re-writing of history, the Byzantines, in fighting the Ottomans, adopt this style of firing, and transfer it to Western European armies as a result of the Italian Wars.
