Battle of Bicocca, 1522: the sunken road that broke the Swiss pike

For half a century Swiss pikemen had been the most feared infantry in Europe. At Bicocca, outside Milan, they were stopped by a farm lane, a wall of earth and four ranks of Spanish arquebusiers. One historian has called it the birth of modern infantry firepower.²

Milan between France and the emperor

Francis I of France had won the Duchy of Milan at Marignano in 1515, and with it the upper hand in Italy. Charles V, elected emperor in 1519 and already King of Spain, was determined to take it back. When war broke out again in 1521, a papal and imperial army under the veteran condottiere Prospero Colonna drove on Milan, and in November 1521 the French commander, Odet de Foix, Vicomte de Lautrec, gave up the city.³ › Battle of Fornovo, 1495

Lautrec's problem was money. In Milan he had 10,000 Swiss mercenaries but funds for only 6,000, and according to the Swiss National Museum he sold his own belongings, including his collar of the Order of Saint Michael, to meet their demands. Over the winter Francis hired 16,000 more Swiss, from every canton except Zürich, which under the preacher Huldrych Zwingli had turned against the mercenary trade. With Giovanni de' Medici's Black Bands, French gendarmes and the Venetians, Lautrec could put about 25,000 men in the field against Colonna's 18,000.⁴

Colonna digs in

Lautrec did not want to attack. He tried to cut Colonna's communications and force him out, first at the monastery of the Certosa on the Pavia road and then by marching toward Monza. Colonna moved into the park of Bicocca, a working farm about four miles north of Milan; its house still stands inside the city as the Villa Arcimboldi. Marshes covered his left, a deep irrigation ditch and a narrow stone bridge his right, and across his front ran an east-west lane worn several feet below the fields by years of wagons.⁵

Colonna's sappers deepened the lane and piled the earth into a steep rampart on its southern bank, with guns at intervals. Behind the rampart stood the Spanish arquebusiers of the Marquess of Pescara, four deep, and behind them Spanish pikemen and German landsknechts under Georg von Frundsberg. The cavalry waited at the rear. The front was about 600 yards long.⁶

Pay, leave or battle

The Swiss had not been paid since the beginning of the year. When the armies faced each other on 26 April they gave Lautrec an ultimatum: pay at once, let them go home, or attack the next morning. Their chief, the Bernese captain Albert vom Stein, insisted on battle. Lautrec, who had planned to starve Colonna out, could not afford to lose half his infantry, and agreed. Lockhart quotes the Swiss leaders recalling that they had stormed the French at Novara in 1513 against hopeless odds and would storm this position too.⁷

Half an hour at the sunken road

At dawn on 27 April the Black Bands cleared the Spanish skirmishers from the ground in front. Then 8,000 Swiss in two blocks of 4,000 advanced, nominally under the command of the young Anne de Montmorency. He ordered them to halt and let the French guns come up. They refused and quickened their pace, the two columns racing each other to be first into the enemy line.⁸

Colonna's gunners had set range markers the evening before. Round shot tore through the packed ranks, and by Lockhart's count at least a thousand Swiss were dead or dying before they reached the lane. At the sunken road the front ranks stopped short, astonished at its depth and at the height of the rampart beyond. As they jumped down into it, the first rank of arquebusiers fired a volley into the crowd below, then a second, a third and a fourth, each rank stepping forward in turn. The few who climbed the rampart met the landsknechts, old enemies who gave no quarter.⁹

After about thirty minutes the Swiss gave up and fell back. Meanwhile Lautrec's brother, Thomas de Foix, Lord of Lescun, led 400 gendarmes down the Milan road around the imperial right, but Colonna's cavalry was waiting at the stone bridge, and after a sharp fight the French withdrew.¹⁰

Counting the dead

Lockhart counts 3,000 Swiss bodies in and around the sunken road; the Swiss National Museum gives 3,000 to 4,000 dead, including 22 captains, among them Albert vom Stein and Arnold Winkelried of Unterwalden. Montmorency was badly wounded. Legend said the imperial army lost one man, kicked by a mule or donkey; in fact its losses were around 200. Colonna's officers urged a pursuit, but he declined, since most of Lautrec's army had not fought and was still dangerous. Within days the Swiss solved his problem for him: on 30 April they left for home.¹¹

What Bicocca changed

Bicocca did not end the war. France's decisive defeat in Italy came three years later at Pavia. But it ended the age in which Swiss pike columns could hope to sweep an enemy line by sheer weight and courage, and it showed what massed firearms behind field fortifications could do. Lockhart sees in it the first form of an equation better known from the American Civil War and the Western Front: trench plus firepower. In Switzerland, the Swiss National Museum notes, the defeat sharpened the bitter quarrel over the mercenary trade, and veterans of Bicocca fought in the Catholic army that beat Zürich at Kappel in 1531.¹²