What happened at the Battle of Fornovo?
On 6 July 1495 King Charles VIII of France, marching home from his conquest of Naples, met the army of the League of Venice under Francesco Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, on the river Taro near Fornovo. The League tried to destroy the much smaller French army as it passed, but its attack crossed the swollen river piecemeal, and its light cavalry turned aside to loot the French baggage. In savage fighting the French held, and Charles marched on to safety in Asti. The Italians kept the field and the booty, so both sides claimed victory.1
In 1494 Charles VIII invaded Italy to claim the Kingdom of Naples, which his family had inherited as heirs of the house of Anjou. The campaign was startlingly easy. The Treccani encyclopedia of Machiavelli puts his army at probably just under 30,000 men; Florence opened its gates in November, the French marched through Rome in December, and at the end of February 1495 the king entered Naples in triumph. Pope Alexander VI's quip, repeated by Machiavelli, was that Italy had been conquered with chalk, the chalk used to mark the doors of houses requisitioned for French officers.2
The League of Venice
The speed of the French alarmed the rest of Italy. On 31 March 1495 Venice, Ludovico Sforza of Milan, the pope, Spain and the King of the Romans, Maximilian, formed a league against the French. The League quickly raised an army in the north. Most of it was paid by Venice and commanded by Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, with a Milanese contingent under the Count of Caiazzo, a Bolognese one under Annibale Bentivoglio and a strong force of stradiots, light cavalry from Albania.3
To avoid being trapped in the south, Charles left a garrison in Naples and turned north in May. John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org lists 7,200 French cavalry, 4,000 Swiss pikemen and 2,000 Gascon crossbowmen; the Enciclopedia Italiana says the French were reduced to about 10,000, but with nimble infantry and powerful artillery. The king crossed the Apennines by Pontremoli into the valley of the Taro, which would lead him down to the Po plain between Parma and Cremona. Gonzaga waited for him in the lower valley, camped across the usual road near Fornovo.4
A battle on a flooded river
On 5 July the stradiots drove back the French vanguard, but the king entered Fornovo, which its defenders had abandoned, and tried in vain to negotiate his way past. The next morning the French army crossed the broad, stony bed of the Taro and began to file north along the hills, to slip past the League camp on the other bank. Rickard notes that Charles put 3,000 Swiss and much of his strength in the vanguard, expecting the hardest fighting there.5
Gonzaga planned to fall on the French flank as they passed. But the river was in flood. Only part of his army could cross, and then only by fords further upstream, so his attack struck not the center of the French column but its rear guard, under Louis de la Trémoille, and Charles turned back with the main body to support it. The fighting that followed was, in the words of the Enciclopedia Italiana, the fiercest fought in two centuries.6
The baggage and the battle
What decided it was discipline. The stradiots were supposed to charge down from the hillside into the French flank. Instead, seeing the precious baggage train pass, they threw themselves on it to plunder. Left alone, the Italian men-at-arms could not hold. Rodolfo Gonzaga, the marquess's uncle, was killed, and the League's knights fell back across the Taro; Caiazzo's attack on the French vanguard failed, and the reserve on the far bank never moved. An Italian cavalry charge against the king's own division was thrown back to the ford, and confusion spread through the League army.7
By the reckoning of the Enciclopedia Italiana, between 3,000 and 4,000 men had fallen, two-thirds of them Italian. Charles asked in vain for a truce, then moved off on 8 July, weakly pursued, and reached Asti, where other French troops waited, on 15 July. Among the men he knighted after the battle, Rickard notes, was Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard, who became one of the most famous French commanders of the period.8
Who won?
The question has never been settled. The League held the field and a booty valued at the time at 300,000 ducats: the king's helmet and sword, his seals, part of the royal archive, a portrait of the dauphin, his portable altar and his relics. The Italians believed they had won. In Mantua Gonzaga built a chapel of victory, had a medal struck in honor of the restored liberty of Italy and commissioned Andrea Mantegna's Madonna della Vittoria, now in the Louvre.9
The French had the better claim, Rickard argues, because they had escaped the trap with an army far smaller than the League's. Machiavelli, in his first Decennale, treats Fornovo as a French victory for the same reason. The Enciclopedia Italiana draws a harder lesson: the one battle in which the forces of the Italian states seemed to stand together became a painful sign of Italian weakness and an encouragement to other foreigners to try again. The Machiavelli encyclopedia calls Fornovo the first true battle of the Italian Wars, and it would not be the last fought by foreign kings on Italian soil.10
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- Giovanni Battista Picotti, “Fornovo di Taro”; Enciclopedia machiavelliana, “Carlo VIII”; John Rickard, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”; Enciclopedia machiavelliana, “Carlo VIII”. ↩
- Giovanni Battista Picotti, “Fornovo di Taro”; John Rickard, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”. ↩
- Giovanni Battista Picotti, “Fornovo di Taro”; John Rickard, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”. ↩
- Giovanni Battista Picotti, “Fornovo di Taro”; John Rickard, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”. ↩
- Giovanni Battista Picotti, “Fornovo di Taro”; John Rickard, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”. ↩
- Giovanni Battista Picotti, “Fornovo di Taro”; John Rickard, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”. ↩
- Giovanni Battista Picotti, “Fornovo di Taro”; John Rickard, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”. ↩
- Enciclopedia machiavelliana, “Carlo VIII”; Giovanni Battista Picotti, “Fornovo di Taro”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”; Enciclopedia machiavelliana, “Carlo VIII”; Giovanni Battista Picotti, “Fornovo di Taro”. ↩
Sources
- Giovanni Battista Picotti, Enciclopedia Italiana (Treccani), 1932, “Fornovo di Taro”
- Enciclopedia machiavelliana (Treccani), “Carlo VIII”
- John Rickard, HistoryOfWar.org, “Battle of Fornovo, 6 July 1495”
