This piece focuses on several key battles during the Italian Wars. For more on the broader tactical developments and general history of the period, I recommend Frederick Taylor’s The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529, which paid Dispatch subscribers receive free.
Beginning around the year 1500, Europe underwent two distinct military revolutions. The first was the ascendance of infantry formations that combined the staying power of Swiss pike battalions with the offensive power of new handheld gunpowder weapons. Pike-and-shot warfare, as this was called, dominated battlefields for the next two centuries. The second was precipitated by the proliferation of high-quality siege cannons. These sparked an evolutionary race between the offense and defense, resulting in the distinctive star-shaped fortresses and new siege techniques.
These twin shifts were birthed in the hothouse of the Italian Wars, in which French, Spanish, and Imperial armies descended on Italy in a series of conflicts from 1494 to 1559. A combination of new weapons, sustained warfare, and increasing military budgets forced intense experimentation and innovation. By the mid-16th century these new tactics were firmly entrenched, even if they continued to be refined over the following decades.
At the juncture of these developments stood a third, less celebrated revolution: the integration of artillery into field armies. Cannons first appeared on European battlefields in the early 14th century, and were used in pitched battles by the mid-15th. These early pieces were neither easy to use nor especially accurate, and their overall effect on battles is open to debate. In the following century, Italy served as an important incubator for artillery tactics. It was the battlefield of Western Europe for the first third of the 16th century, during which time new guns proliferated in unprecedented variety and quantity. By the end of the Italian Wars, field guns were still nowhere as decisive as the new infantry or siege tactics—it would be nearly a century before they became truly dominant—but they had become an essential part of any field army.
As such, the period provides an interesting look at how armies experimented with an immature technology. In contrast to modern artillery doctrine, which was worked out within the span of World War I, it took generals many decades to figure out how to use direct-fire cannons effectively. Not only was the technology itself continuously evolving, but so too was the broader tactical landscape in which it was employed: infantry and cavalry were themselves undergoing great changes, making the lessons from individual battles far more ambiguous.
An apt comparison can be made to contemporary UAV employment. Not only are the drones flown in Ukraine today more advanced than the ones used in Nagorno-Karabakh and Syria, but the scale and complexity of operations is also far greater—affecting how they are used. Future conflicts will see still more advanced models, yet will not necessarily face the same saturation of air defenses or EW that exists in the Donbas, with inevitable doctrinal consequences. The mutual evolution of air, ground, missile, and electronic arms makes the future obscure. In the face of such uncertainty, we find echoes of the long wars between the Valois kings of France and the Habsburg monarchies.
Gunpowder Enters the Stage
The first period of artillery development in Europe was the opening phase of the Hundred Years’ War, when both France and England used siege cannons with mixed results. Demand spurred innovation, however, and their quality steadily improved. The French invested especially heavily in the last decades of the war under the direction of the brothers Gaspard and Jean Bureau, who developed better casting techniques and amassed a large artillery park of improved weapons. With these guns in tow, the French army swept through Normandy between 1449 and 1450, reducing a number of English-held fortresses.
The last years of the war also saw new roles for artillery. The great siege weapons were bombards and mortars cast from iron, which fired massive stone balls. Smaller weapons, such as bronze culverins, often had much longer barrels but fired balls less than 10 kg in weight. These were used to punch through high castle walls, but could also be used against troops in the field. At Formigny in 1450, the outnumbered French pushed two culverins forward to fire against the English from outside the range of their longbowmen. This apparently inflicted modest casualties, but not enough to prevent the opposing infantry from rushing forward and capturing the unprotected guns. The guns’ report had in the meantime alerted a nearby detachment of French cavalry which rushed to the field of battle, where it not only equalized the balance of forces but was able to ride over their dispersed infantry.
A more effective use of artillery was found at Castillon in 1453, the final battle of the Hundred Years’ War. The English were trying to head off an invasion of Gascony, the last of their major possessions in France, and launched a desperate attack against a strong French position containing hundreds of gunpowder weapons and surrounded by strong fieldworks on all sides. Masses of shot ripped through the closely-packed English ranks, and those that made it to the ramparts were cut down by the defending infantry; a well-timed cavalry charge on their flanks sealed the French victory. Although it is possible that the artillery caused most of the casualties at Castillon, its real role was disrupting the English columns at the point of attack.
Innovation and Proliferation
Formigny and Castillon showed that artillery could play a major role in open battle, but it was not yet clear what that was. Its effect at Formigny was indirect, while the casualties it inflicted at Castillon depended on the enemy’s willing to frontally assault an extensively-prepared position. There was as yet no reliable way a general could put his cannons to good use.
Manufacturing techniques meanwhile continued to improve in the following decades, with lighter cannons and carriages that made guns more maneuverable in battle. During this time, the dukes of Burgundy—the semi-independent vassals of the French Crown—developed a powerful artillery arm of their own, which they used in wars against their sovereign and the Swiss Confederacy. Here too, the effectiveness of field artillery was ambiguous.
The Battle of Montlhéry, fought between France and Burgundy in 1465, typified the use of artillery in the later 15th century. Both sides brought cannons, but Duke Charles the Bold had them in much greater numbers. The initial bombardment inflicted some casualties and spurred the French knights into action. The rest of the battle was a cavalry and infantry engagement, although the Burgundians kept up the cannonade on the rear lines throughout. It is impossible to say precisely how much of a role the artillery played at Montlhéry, but it was a decidedly subordinate role in what was otherwise a typical late-medieval battle.
More interesting was his war with the Swiss in the 1470s. In three pitched battles, he fought not against a robust cavalry-centric army but large squares of pikemen—ideal for use against Charles’ knights, but also vulnerable targets for his cannons. In the first of these, at Grandson, a Swiss column charged as he was deploying his army and overran his artillery before it could have any effect. His next two defeats owed as much to maneuver as to speed: on both occasions, the Burgundians formed up in a strong position protected by artillery, but the Swiss outflanked these and managed to entrap the entire army. All three were heavy defeats for the Burgundians, the last of which was fatal for Charles.
The Duke’s losses to the Swiss owed more to larger tactical mistakes than anything else, but they illustrate the problems of artillery in open-field battle. It was difficult to deploy them rapidly enough to be effective, but it was also hard to bait the enemy into battle against a prepared position. Great gunpowder victories like Castillon appeared to depend more on enemy recklessness than anything.
Major battles featuring large numbers of guns were few and far between for the rest of the century, but the new weapons were in high demand. France (including Burgundy) remained the most advanced manufacturer, although its guns and casting techniques rapidly proliferated to other parts of Europe. Already by the 1480s, Ferrara—an important French ally in the later Italian Wars—was a major center of production and innovation.
One last innovation of the 15th century was in operational mobility. During the reconquest of Normandy in the final years of the Hundred Years’ War, taking one stronghold after another in quick succession, the French siege train only had to march a short distance from Paris, and often could rely on the Seine for transport. But French artillerists continued to make gun carts and carriages stronger and lighter, and the monarchy invested in teams of draft horses to pull them vast distances.
Charles VIII’s Invasion and the Battle of Fornovo
So when Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494 to make good his claim on the Kingdom of Naples, he brought along a massive artillery train. The heaviest guns were sent ahead by ship to avoid the barriers of the Alps and Apennines, then dragged more than 700 km from La Spezia to Naples. These proved their worth in several sieges along the way, where medieval town walls proved no match for the gargantuan cannons.
News of their power preceded the French advance, prompting many towns and fortresses to surrender without a fight—including Naples itself, which capitulated in February 1495. Charles spent several months there arranging his affairs, then left a strong garrison behind when he took the rest of his army back to France. This time, his gunners dragged many of the large-caliber pieces over the Apennines, recruiting local mule teams to assist.
In the meantime a coalition of Italian states, alarmed at the ease with which Charles had marched across the peninsula, was gathering to block his return to France. As he descended the far side of the Apennines, he found their much larger army blocking his path. They had formed up on the opposite bank of a small river near the village of Fornovo, where the narrow valley forced the French to march directly across its front. Charles drew his army up in three bodies, each with a line of cavalry backed by a line of infantry, and placed his artillery in front of the center.
A small Italian battery opened the battle as the French were moving into position. Charles’ guns replied, but the previous night’s rain had gotten the powder damp and slowed their rate of fire. Many of the Italians were nevertheless convinced that the large battery would sweep them from the field, however, and the few initial casualties prompted their cavalry to charge. The horses struggled up the steep and muddy embankment, allowing the French to easily drive them back. Charles’ guns kept up their fire on the retreating Italians as the rest of the army continued safely down the valley, although some light cavalry did manage to loot the baggage train.
The Battle of Fornovo was one of just a handful of pitched battles during the first Italian War, and the only one to see the use of artillery. It was mere accident that the French guns did not get to truly prove themselves in the field—they were ideally positioned to tear apart dense formations at close range. Instead, the battle fit the mold of other late medieval battles: a short exchange followed by a cavalry and infantry fight. Subsequent battles of the Italian Wars would look much different.
Negligence at Cerignola
The next significant battle of the Italian Wars was similarly marked by the failure of the artillery to make an impact. France lost Naples soon after Charles VIII’s departure, but in 1500 his successor Louis XII made an agreement with Ferdinand of Aragon to partition the kingdom between them. This condominium quickly broke down over the division of territory and honors, and the two monarchs went to war in southern Italy. In April 1503, a French army attacked a somewhat smaller Spanish force near the Apulian town of Cerignola.
The Spanish commander was Gonsalvo de Córdoba. He had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a weak French force in 1495, when their heavy cavalry and Swiss mercenaries drove his infantry off the field. Thereafter, he took measures to improve his infantry’s staying power, training them in the use of the pike and replacing the crossbow with the arquebus (a forerunner of the musket). At Cerignola, he positioned his men on a slope behind the additional protection of a deep ditch and rampart: a line of arquebusiers to the front, backed by landsknecht pikemen in the center and cavalry on the wings, with a small battery near the crest.
The French army approached late in the day and decided to attack immediately, forming up in echelon in the order they arrived: heavy cavalry forward on the right, Swiss pikemen in the center, French infantry on the left rear, with the majority of the artillery trailing behind. A few guns were placed in front of the center to support an initial attack by the right, but these had little effect; the Spanish guns replied, but these too were rendered ineffective when the powder magazine exploded. The Spanish arquebuses, on the other hand, were extremely effective, firing volleys into the cavalry struggling to cross the ditch and sending them staggering back in confusion. The French infantry attempted another charge, but they too were shredded by a mass of gunfire as they foundered in the ditch. Seeing their enemy reeling, the rest of the Spanish army advanced out their positions, driving the adversary off the field in a terrible slaughter.
Cerignola is justly famous as the first great triumph of the Spanish infantry, the magic formula of massed handheld firepower backed by sturdy pike blocks that would dominate Europe for the next century. Less noted was the negative lesson of the battle, the failure to properly employ field guns as a supporting arm. In their haste to attack, the French did not allow time for their dozens of guns to properly bombard the enemy. They put great faith in their heavy cavalry and Swiss infantry, and most of their artillery did not even reach the field before the battle was over. It would take some time for other armies to fully adopt the Spanish infantry system, but their actions at Cerignola did establish one important precedent: henceforth, weaker armies almost always dug in before an engagement.
Fixing Fires at Agnadello
The Spanish got the better of the rest of the war, and the two monarchs made peace in 1505: Louis would keep Milan (which he had previously conquered), Ferdinand would keep Naples. This arrangement proved stable until an unrelated conflict broke out several years later. The War of the League of Cambrai was one of the most convoluted of the period, really several consecutive wars that fed one into another. It started off with a rare moment of European unity in which the great monarchs (French, Spanish, Imperial) and the Pope teamed up against Venice to dismember her land empire. In 1509 an Imperial army besieged cities in the northern Veneto, Papal troops invaded from the southwest, the Spanish occupied Venetian ports in southeastern Italy, and the French drove east from Milan.
The Venetians recognized the massive French army as their greatest threat: 21,500 infantry, 2,300 men-at-arms, about twice that number of light cavalry, and many guns. To counter this, Venice fielded a strong army of her own, composed of 22,000 infantry, 1,650 men-at-arms, and 2,500 light cavalry. Although the two sides had rough parity in numbers, the disparity in strength was much greater: the French infantry was built around a core of 7,500 Swiss pikemen and the French heavy cavalry was the best in Europe, whereas over half the Venetian foot were poorly-trained militia.
The northern Italian plain is ideal defensive ground for a weak but nimble army. Several rivers flow south from the Alps into the Po, forming a series of defensive obstacles, and the ground between them is cut through with streams, canals, and irrigation ditches. The Venetian Senate ordered its generals to harass and delay the French but avoid open battle, using the terrain to its advantage.
The Venetians missed their first opportunity to bloody the enemy on 9 May when the French crossed the Adda unopposed, the first major river east of Milan. The two armies remained encamped for several days within a couple kilometers of each other, skirmishing and trading sporadic cannon fire. The French were led by Louis XII in person, who was eager to bring about a great battle, but the Venetian encampment was too strong for a direct assault. So on 14 May he moved southeast toward Crema, which secured the Venetians’ supply lines over the next river. The latter tried to cut the enemy off at Pandino, a fortified town on the road to Crema, figuring they could get there first along a shorter route.
This proved a miscalculation. Even as the head of the Venetian column entered Pandino, the rest of the army stretched several kilometers back along the road. Overgrown vegetation prevented their cavalry from scouting the flanks and prevented them from seeing that their route nearly converged with the road Louis was taking. Early that afternoon, the French vanguard practically ran into the Venetian rearguard south of the village of Agnadello and immediately opened fire with light artillery, pinning them down. The commander of the rearguard infantry directed his men to makeshift cover under a nearby embankment, and brought up six light pieces of his own to return fire. After beating back French infantry and cavalry attacks he attempted to storm their guns, but got mauled by their cavalry in the open.
Alviano, the Venetian second-in-command, had meanwhile gone to Pandino to request help from the commanding general, who instead ordered him to break contact immediately. Things were not so simple. The two armies had been marching parallel, so escape required marching across the French front: the infantry needed reinforcements to allow an orderly withdrawal. On the other hand, that risked drawing the entire army into the battle. Alviano rode back with some of the heavy cavalry and charged the vanguard’s flank, driving them back.
If at that point Alviano had taken swift action to disengage, he might have saved the day. But the rest of the French army was just arriving on the battlefield, and the cream of their cavalry charged his men. The tide inexorably turned: if the commanding general at Pandino was inclined to send help, he was either discouraged or unable by the flood of soldiers fleeing south. The battle ended with the slaughter of a third of the entire Venetian infantry and the capture of most of their artillery, which had been inactive some distance away. Alviano himself was made prisoner. So demoralized were the Venetians that much of their army melted away during the subsequent retreat, leaving their lands open to the League of Cambrai.
The Battle of Agnadello was yet another cavalry and infantry fight. The effect of the guns was mostly indirect, first fixing the Venetian rearguard and then forcing it out of its makeshift cover—there is something almost Napoleonic in the way that the cannons aggressively initiated the action and drew the rest of the army to their sound. In Venice, Alviano was bitterly blamed for the defeat, but it is difficult to tell whether he was taking desperate measures to save the rearguard, or whether he rashly overcommitted to the battle. Whatever the case, swift actions by the French vanguard—including its artillery—had put him in an unenviable position.
Maneuvering Fires at Ravenna
The next several months were a series of disasters for Venice. The French overran Venetian possessions in Lombardy while the Imperial army captured most of the northern Veneto, including a line of cities from the mouth of the Brenner Pass to Venice itself. The Duke of Ferrara used his excellent artillery to destroy a flotilla on the Po River preparing to attack his city.
But there were some patches of blue sky. They managed to retake most of the Imperial-held cities and hold them against a counterattack; by the end of the year, the Imperial army was forced to withdraw over pay issues. The Spanish, after capturing the Venetian-held ports in the south, made no further moves. The dominant French position in northern Italy had meanwhile raised the hackles of the other powers, and the Pope was alarmed by the growing strength of neighboring Ferrara. In February 1510 he dissolved the League of Cambrai and reconciled with Venice, redirecting his energies against those two erstwhile allies.
The fighting mostly took place in and around Ferrarese territory. Venice and Rome, for so long rivals for control of the region, teamed up to invade the Duchy which stood between them. By the end of 1511, Spain, the Swiss, and England had joined the anti-French coalition, dubbed the Holy League. In response, Louis XII sent a powerful army to Italy under Gaston de Foix, who swept down the Po valley and by April 1512 linked up with the Ferrarese to besiege Ravenna, a Papal possession on the Adriatic coast.
A Papal-Spanish marched north to relieve the city and encamped just across a river from the besiegers. They were outnumbered over 3-to-2, and so decided to assume a defensive posture, constructing a ditch and rampart around their position. Inside the camp they drew up in three deep columns parallel to the river, with the entrenchments covering their front and right flank: heavy cavalry on the left, infantry in the center, light cavalry on the right.
The Franco-Ferrarese army crossed the river on the morning of 11 April, emplacing a battery opposite the Spanish left to cover their deployment. Their dispositions mirrored the enemy: heavy cavalry on the right, infantry in the center backed by a large squadron of cavalry, and a left wing of light cavalry and archers that wrapped around the enemy’s flank. Seeing the good effect the artillery was having, de Foix sent a battery of Ferrarese guns around the enemy’s right flank and pushed two guns back across the river to hit their left, establishing a deadly cross-fire. The Spanish replied with their own guns—mostly lighter pieces, about half the number—which caused substantial casualties among the French infantry.
This initial exchange lasted over two hours and heavily favored the French. The Spanish infantry lay down in a low-lying area and avoided the worst of it, but the cavalry had no such escape and suffered terrific casualties. Eventually the latter could bear it no more and launched a series of uncoordinated attacks: first by the light cavalry and cavalry rearguard, then by the center, and finally by the vanguard. The first was easily driven off, but the rest of the cavalry fight was extremely difficult, only decided when a rearguard posted at the river-crossing joined in to turn the tide for the French.
The Franco-Ferrarese infantry had meanwhile begun their assault. A large body of landsknechts assaulted the center as a body of French troops tried to enter the camp along the river, but the Holy League infantry manning the ramparts repelled several bloody attempts. The infantry remained in a stalemate until the victorious French cavalry returned from their pursuit and shattered the enemy infantry formations with charges on the flanks and rear. De Foix himself was killed during this final phase of vicious fighting, but most of the opposing infantry were killed, captured, or routed.
The Battle of Ravenna was unprecedented for its duration and intensity. The fighting lasted about 8 hours and losses on both sides were very high: about 3,000 for the French and Ferrarese, about triple that for the Holy League. It was also a rare instance of the attacker emerging victorious against a strongly-entrenched enemy. This owed, in contrast to other battles before and after, to the careful employment of artillery in the opening stages—the French had absorbed the painful lesson of Cerignola.
Artillery did not decide the battle, or even cause a great part of the casualties (although the Spanish guns were said to have killed 2,000 French infantry). But unlike previous battles, its effects were much more than psychological: the bombardment imposed a true dilemma on the defenders. For the first time, a general demonstrated a combined-arms understanding of artillery on the offensive and had the tactical patience to make it effective.
And in the broader context of the siege, the artillery was indeed decisive. De Foix had been running short on supplies, and could not afford a drawn-out dance which would cede the initiative to the enemy, possibly allowing them to coordinate with the garrison of Ravenna. His guns allowed him to choose not just how, but when the battle would be fought.
Defending a Fortified Position: Novara and Marignano
Ravenna was a crushing victory for the French, but it proved pyrrhic. The Holy League was already raising a large army in northern Italy which threatened their line of communications, obliging them to withdrew to Lombardy. Gaston de Foix’s death left the army without strong leadership, and several contingents disbanded along the way; combined with the casualties suffered at Ravenna, the army was in no state to fight. In July, it abandoned Italy altogether, allowing the Holy League to reduce their scattered garrisons one by one—the citadel of Milan itself was one of the few to hold out.
Once more, however, a too-thorough victory caused a reshuffling of alliances. The Venetians were dissatisfied with the division of northern Italy after the expulsion of the French, and feared the growing power of both Pope and Emperor. In March 1513 they turned around and made an alliance with their former enemy, encouraging Louis XII to attempt to recover Milan. That spring, he sent a new army to invade Lombardy from the west and as the Venetians invaded from the east. The allies made good progress at first, but in early June a Swiss army approached the French army as it besieged the town of Novara. The French withdrew their camp a short distance, expecting a major engagement in a few days after the relief force recuperated from the long march; instead, the Swiss attacked early the next morning.
The Battle of Novara was the first of three major battles over the course of a decade in which the Swiss launched impetuous attacks into the teeth of artillery. On this occasion, some 12,000 infantry attacked in three columns. The first of these, about a thousand infantry escorted by a few hundred cavalry, slipped around the flank and hit the French baggage train, driving off the light cavalry assigned to guard it. The main column, which constituted the majority of the army, attacked the front of the camp. This section was protected by a substantial battery, but it was not well entrenched and the fields of fire were obscured by a wheatfield. The Swiss endured fire as they rushed through the field and overran the guns, then engaged in a fierce fight with a large body of landsknechts.
A third column slipped around the main column’s right and took up a position in a wood. Finding themselves near the main body of French cavalry, the arquebusiers fired from the edge of the treeline, driving them off. The Swiss pikemen then charged the flank of the remaining French infantry, which was just getting formed up, and drove it off the field. Once the extent of the victory became clear, the Swiss pursued their broken opponents hundreds of kilometers into France and besieged Dijon, even as an English-Imperial army made incursions into northern France. Negotiations soon after brought an effective end to the Holy League’s war against France, leaving Venice alone to fight on in Italy.
The Battle of Novara appeared to vindicate the lessons the Swiss had learned fighting the Burgundians decades earlier. A bold assault could beat an enemy strong in artillery by overwhelming it before it was ready, especially when complemented by a flanking attack. Yet they learned these lessons too well and neglected others: the real cause of Swiss success was their enemies’ poorly-sited camp and complete unpreparedness. They were not so lucky on their second attempt.
Louis XII died on the first day of 1515, and his successor Francis I made another attempt to recover Milan that year. In May, he led a great army trailed by a long siege train over the Alps, and quickly overran much of Lombardy. The Venetians, who had spent the past two years skirmishing with the Spanish and Imperials in the Veneto, were much relieved at the news, and sent a small army to assist. The members of the Holy League were alarmed by this development, but could not assemble their forces in time to contest it, leaving the Swiss contingent defending Milan to fight alone. Their somewhat smaller army, almost entirely composed of pikemen, marched out on 13 September and approached the French camp late in the day.
The French had learned from their mistakes at Novara. They pushed a vanguard forward along the road from Milan, where it dug in about ten kilometers southeast of the city: a large battery of guns backed by a block of landsknecht pikemen, with crossbowmen and arquebusiers on the wings and a reserve of heavy cavalry. Despite the late hour, the Swiss vanguard attacked immediately with customary furor. They suffered some thousand casualties from missiles of all varieties but managed to overrun the guns, whereupon they were met by the defending pikemen. The landsknechts were slowly pushed back, and the French cavalry was forced to charge the Swiss flanks to arrest their momentum.
The two armies separated after darkness fell. Skirmishing continued through the night as Francis brought up the rest of his army, and the other two battles entrenched themselves on line with the vanguard. When the fighting resumed the next morning, the Swiss attacked in two columns, placing the greater part of their strength in the center, while a smaller column attacked the French left. Francis’ great 72-gun battery opened up in the center and tore through Swiss ranks; not only did it inflict heavy casualties, but slowed the attackers’ momentum as it knocked down swaths of men and forced them to constantly redress ranks. This time the landsknechts charged out before the oncoming column could reach the guns, and cavalry charges on the flanks stopped it dead in its tracks as the Swiss had to lower their pikes in multiple directions. The battery opened up again at close range and shattered the formation, forcing it to withdraw.
The fighting was much harder on the left. The French had many fewer cannons there, and the Swiss were able to push through the entrenchments and drive the defending pikemen back—the cavalry again had to repeatedly charge the flanks just to avert a rout. Both sides were nearing exhaustion when Venetian reinforcements arrived on the field in the late morning and struck the attackers’ flank. At this, the Swiss formed up into a single massive square and conducted a fighting march back to Milan. The French entered the city a few days later, and spent much of the following year helping Venice recover her lost possessions. By the end of 1516, all the major belligerents were at peace, with their original territories largely intact.
Marignano was the longest and bloodiest battle of the Italian Wars, leaving an estimated 16,500 dead on the field. It is noteworthy for being the first battle since Castillon, 60 years earlier, in which artillery was the decisive arm. This was only possible because of the careful employment of combined arms, including tactically suboptimal cavalry charges against pike squares, and—as at Castillon—the enemy’s suicidal willingness to charge headlong towards a defensive position that maintained clear fields of fire. Nor did the French necessarily learn the lessons of their own victory as well as they should have: the presence of the king on the battlefield, who personally led several charges, led Marignano to be celebrated more as a triumph of French chivalry over Swiss infantry.
Bicocca: Triumph of the Combined-Arms Defense
The Swiss repeated this rash maneuver once more in 1522, this time fighting for the French in an army well equipped with artillery. In the years after the League of Cambrai, Charles of Habsburg succeeded his maternal grandparents as King of Castile and Aragon, and was elected by the German princes to succeed his father as Holy Roman Emperor. Conjoining two monarchies which had previously been mere allies predictably destabilized Western Europe. Francis, fearing encirclement, attacked the Low Countries and Spain; Charles retaliated by sending an army into northern France, and England soon joined the fray with incursions of its own. As with the previous war, which also saw fighting in these theaters, the Italian Wars were transforming into a Western European conflict.
But Italy remained the focus of the action. A Habsburg army captured Milan in 1521, and Francis hired a large contingent of Swiss mercenaries to help recover it the following year. The French army met the Spanish-Imperial army just north of Milan, where it was firmly entrenched at the manor house of Bicocca. The Habsburg commander had lined up his arquebusiers behind a deep ditch and rampart, backed by a mass of pikemen and a cavalry reserve. The position was bracketed by gun-mounted platforms, and watercourses protected either flank.
The French arrayed their army in three echelons of infantry flanked by cavalry. They intended to bombard the camp with their superior artillery before the first echelon of 10,000 Swiss infantry attacked. A cavalry force was then to sweep around the enemy’s right flank and seize a bridge to their rear, taking them by surprise. The plan was solid and everything appeared favorable to the French cause. But as the Swiss marched forward to accompany the guns into firing range, they insisted on attacking immediately—having whipped up their spirits for the hazardous charge ahead, any delay must have been agonizing.
As at Cerignola, the infantry attacked before their own guns could be brought into action; unlike Cerignola, the defenders’ artillery was very effective, tearing through Swiss ranks as they charged across the open field. When they leapt into the ditch, they found the rampart too high to climb, and were cut down by volleys of arquebus fire; those few that made it to the top were pushed back by the pikemen. The entire Swiss column dissolved, leaving 3,000 dead on the field. Although the cavalry’s flanking attack had achieved some initial success in the meantime, the complete failure of the frontal attack left the reserves free to repulse it. Left with insufficient infantry to make another attempt, the French were forced to retire.
Bicocca was definitive proof that even the best infantry could not overwhelm a carefully-prepared defense employing the full array of combined arms. Artillery played less of a role than at Marignano, where a large French battery compensated for weaker fortifications, but its importance was highlighted by its absence on the attacking side. As Ravenna had already demonstrated, a preliminary bombardment was absolutely necessary before assaulting a well-emplaced defender. This was of course a lesson that the French commander understood well—it was only the unruliness of Renaissance armies that foiled his design.
Pavia and the End of French Presence in Italy
The Battle of Bicocca spelled the end of the campaign, and another French invasion was repulsed the following year. In late 1524, Francis I himself marched into Italy at the head of a large army. He swiftly recovered Milan then advanced on Pavia, the second city of Lombardy, besieging over the winter. A Spanish-Imperial relief army arrived in February 1525 and attacked the French on the 24th.
The Battle of Pavia was fought over a wide area by several disparate elements. The details of this complicated engagement are not worth recounting here at length, but a brief outline is instructive. The bulk of the French army was positioned in a large walled park north of Pavia, with detachments deployed around the rest of the city. Inside the park, a strong covering force manned entrenchments facing the relief army to the east, while Francis had his main camp in the northwest corner.
Early on the morning of the 24th, the Spanish-Imperial army made a breach in the north wall of the park. The vanguard rushed in to occupy the Mirabello, a small castle that stood between the two parts of the French army. They were followed by a troop of light cavalry reconnoitering the eastern half of the park, and a dozen or so light field pieces. The morning was foggy, obscuring the Habsburg movements, but a French cavalry patrol discovered the Imperial scouts and drove them off, while a Swiss pike battalion overran and captured the artillery. The Swiss then deployed their own guns and formed up to meet whatever else emerged from the mist.
By this point it was around 7:30 in the morning, and the main Spanish-Imperial army entered the park in two columns. The left consisted of 8,000 landsknechts, who soon engaged and drove back the Swiss. The right was composed of 8,000 Spanish and German infantry, who rushed south through a wood to the Mirabello, screened on their right flank by a squadron of men-at-arms. The artillerists in Francis’ camp were the first to spot this column marching across their front through the gloom; although their gunfire did not inflict many casualties, it did alert the king to the enemy’s presence. He formed up his cavalry and infantry then charged, sweeping the Spanish horse back into the woods.
Francis had gotten far ahead of his infantry and was blocking his own artillery. He now came upon the column of infantry: arquebusiers interspersed between groups of pikemen, firing from the protection of the treeline. Their commander was able to pull reinforcements from the vanguard at Mirabello and from the landsknechts to their left, who by this point were beating their Swiss adversaries. They enveloped the French cavalry on three sides, slaughtering most of them and capturing the king himself. When the French infantry finally came up, the rearguard of Spanish cavalry struck them in the flank, clinching the victory for the Habsburgs.
The Battle of Pavia sealed the reputation of the Spanish infantry—thereafter, the French made great efforts to raise arquebusiers for their own armies, as pike-and-shot stood dominant over European battlefields. Yet Pavia was a highly unusual battle: not quite a set-piece confrontation, in which two sides drew up their forces in a careful tactical arrangement, but rather a series of smaller engagements over a wide area (including several actions not mentioned here).
Open-field artillery battles such as Fornovo were comparatively rare, as most large-scale battles were precipitated by an attack on a prepared position—even Agnadello ended with an assault on improvised earthworks.1 By this point, both sides of the Valois-Habsburg conflict had learned how to integrate artillery into a combined-arms attack and defense, which resembled nothing so much as the numerous sieges of the period.
Yet Pavia also showed that they had developed no such instinct on open ground. Neither side used their artillery particularly well: the Spanish battery was not properly protected and was quickly captured, while Francis neutralized his own guns by charging across their field of fire. This partly owed to the confused fighting and foggy battlefield, which blinded the Spanish gunners to the nearby Swiss, and Francis to the main body of Habsburg infantry. Yet the essence of combined-arms battle is caution in the face of uncertainty, an unwillingness to overcommit one arm. Only the Swiss, who had learned such a painful lesson from their unsupported infantry charges at Marignano and Bicocca, deployed a small battery as they peered ahead into the swirling fog.
The Later Wars
Unfortunately for Francis, he did not benefit from any lessons from his defeats. After thirteen months in captivity, he was released on the promise to surrender extensive lands to Charles. He promptly broke his word and joined a coalition of Italian states forming against the Empire—the League of Cognac—but failed to give them adequate support. The Habsburgs rapidly defeated the League’s armies and went on to sack Rome in 1527. This compelled Francis to send an army to besiege Naples the following year, but disease and defections caused this to fail. He sent another army to Italy in 1529, but this was surprised and defeated at Landriano. Later that year the two monarchs signed a treaty: it stipulated that Francis must pay an indemnity and abandon his claims to Milan and a few fortresses on his northern border, but it otherwise restored the status quo ante bellum.
The Habsburg-Valois wars stretched on for another thirty years after Landriano, at the rate of one per decade. Italy was no longer the center of gravity of the conflict as it metastasized into a decidedly European affair. Fighting occurred in France’s northern frontier, the Low Countries, Lorraine, Spain, the English coast, and across the Mediterranean. There were fewer major pitched battles in these later wars, as the wide geographic scope forced monarchs to rely more on fortresses and sieges to protect and hold their conquests. The French made some lasting gains in the north but failed to reestablish a foothold in Italy, where the Spanish retained Milan and Naples.
In 1544, a French and a Spanish-Imperial army met in a rare open-field battle near the northern Italian town of Ceresole. The two sides lined up on opposing ridgelines and opened the action with a mutual bombardment. When some raw troops began to panic and wanted to charge, the more experienced veterans taught them to find cover and lie down flat on the ground. This allowed for only tentative skirmishing on the flanks, which after several hours escalated into a general engagement decided by the usual infantry and cavalry tactics of the day. Although the particular topography at Ceresole prevented field artillery from playing much of a role, it inspired a healthy respect that could still indirectly shape the course of battle.
Marciano and the End of the Italian Wars
Artillery played a much more direct role in one particularly interesting, yet overlooked, battle during the final war of 1551-59. The old Valois-Habsburg rivalry for Italy became entangled with an attempt by the city-state of Siena to free itself from Florentine rule. Henry II of France sent an army of French, Swiss, and German troops to support the Sienese, while Florence was supported by Spanish and Imperial soldiers. The Sienese army arrived outside the town of Marciano to raise a siege by the Florentines, whereupon the latter withdrew a short distance and the two sides entrenched no more than 200 meters apart. They were closely matched in infantry—14,000 for Siena against 16,200 for Florence—but neither side dared abandon the protection of their ramparts, and over the next several days combat was limited to skirmishing between their lines.
Even in stalemate, the Sienese suffered two disadvantages. The first was in artillery: the Florentine general had mounted their guns on three small hills behind their lines, which gave them excellent fields of fire on the no-man’s-land. These inflicted greater casualties on Sienese skirmishers than even the Florentine arquebusiers, and slowly sapped the other side’s morale. The second, much graver, disadvantage was in provisions. They possessed only a single spring which was covered by the Florentine guns, forcing them to collect water at night; more critically, they lacked food, which eventually forced them to withdraw altogether.
Piero Strozzi, the Sienese general, sent his cannons away under the cover of darkness, but waited until daylight to withdraw the rest of his army for fear of getting his columns jumbled. This gave the enemy a good opportunity to pursue, and they caught up with him just 4 km south of Marciano, where the two sides deployed for battle on either side of a shallow streambed. In open field, the Medici-Habsburgs had the advantage: they had 1200 light cavalry and 300 heavy men-at-arms on their left, against just 1000 light cavalry directly opposite. They also emplaced a battery of four artillery pieces on the ridge behind their left infantry wing.
The battle opened with a cavalry action in which the heavier and more numerous Florentines swept their opponents off the field. As they pursued, the artillery opened fire on the great mass of enemy infantry. Already on his back foot and not wanting to endure a prolonged bombardment, Strozzi decided to seize the initiative by ordering the battalion of German landsknechts on his right to advance against the Spanish infantry. This had some initial success, but was soon flanked by the battalion of Imperial landsknechts in the center.
As the rest of the infantry charged, the artillery concentrated its fire on a Swiss battalion coming to the landsknechts’ aid. The Swiss began to waver and slow, while the rest of the two lines met in a terrific clash. As the Sienese struggled uphill from the streambed, the men-at-arms returned from the pursuit and scattered the Swiss, at which the rest of the line buckled. By the end of the day, over a third of the Sienese army was killed or captured and many more wounded.
Artillery played an important role in this crushing victory, both in the skirmishing at Marciano and in the battle itself. It exerted indirect influence by compelling the Sienese to commit to a disadvantageous uphill attack, but also appeared to cause severe casualties to the Swiss and disrupted their formation, making them a prime target for Florence’s cavalry—it is hard to imagine an undisturbed Swiss battalion some 3000 strong succumbing to just 300 heavy cavalry. Their rout took over a fifth of Siena’s infantry out of play, rendering a difficult situation hopeless. The narrowly-focused cooperation of cannon and horse amidst a broader infantry fight showed field artillery had truly come into its own, an integral part of the combined-arms battle.
Conclusion
The Italian Wars drew to a close with the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, but that did not bring peace to Western Europe: there soon followed the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt against Spain, and countless smaller intertwined conflicts. Monarchs found it worth the great expense to equip their armies with field pieces, and continually invest in their improvement. Over the course of the 16th century they standardized calibers, developed limbers to make guns more easily deployable, and improved casting techniques.
As the quality of weapons improved, so too did their employment. Generals were more diligent about using them in the opening phases of a battle, and had learned to avoid needlessly exposing their troops to fire; over time, they got better at employing and maneuvering guns at a smaller unit level. Tactics, which had undergone swift changes in the early decades of the century, became more settled, making it easier to plan effects from gunfire. By the time of Marciano, a small battery of four guns could accomplish more than the dozens of guns on either side of Fornovo and Cerignola.
There was no singular victory in which field artillery resoundingly demonstrated its worth, as did Charles VIII’s siege guns in the campaign of 1494 or the Spanish infantry at Cerignola and Pavia. Yet by the end of the Thirty Years’ War, it was the unquestioned king of the battlefield, an exalted position it retains today. It is possible that pervasive drones are just now beginning to displace it; if so, their development will be similarly convoluted, as technical improvements and broader tactical changes make the process uncertain and haphazard, with many blind alleys along the way. This makes studying the precedent well worth the effort.
There were several pitched battles during the Italian Wars that did not involve artillery, but these were smaller—usually fewer than 10,000 men a side—and often even the infantry lacked gunpowder weapons. One major exception was the Battle of the Garigliano, fought late in 1503, in which artillery exerted an indirect influence. A French army held the high ground on the western side of the Garigliano River, facing a Spanish army under Gonzalo de Córdoba on the opposite shore. Under the cover of cannon fire, the French constructed a pontoon bridge to the far side, where the Spanish managed to keep them contained to a small bridgehead. After a deadlock of several weeks, Córdoba left a rearguard to cover the bridgehead and crossed with the rest of his army further upstream, then turned to attack the French flank. This took them completely by surprise and prompted a hasty retreat, during which the Spanish rearguard forced a crossing and captured the guns. Artillery thus shaped Córdoba’s scheme of maneuver, but did not play a role in the battle itself.
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