Who won the Battle of Pavia?
The Imperial and Spanish army of Charles V won a crushing victory at Pavia on 24 February 1525. After a night march into the walled park where the French were camped, arquebusiers and landsknechts destroyed the French army, killed many great nobles and captured King Francis I, who was freed only after the Treaty of Madrid in 1526.1
On 24 February 1525, in a walled hunting park north of Pavia in Lombardy, the French army of Francis I was destroyed by the Imperial and Spanish army of Charles V, and the king himself was taken prisoner. It was the decisive clash of the Italian War of 1521 to 1526, and one of the first great battles settled by handheld firearms.2
Why Pavia? A siege in winter
The prize was the Duchy of Milan, richest stake in the Italian Wars between Valois France and the Habsburgs. In October 1524 Francis crossed the Alps with an army that modern accounts put at about 29,000 to 30,000 French, Swiss, Italian and German soldiers. Rather than chase the demoralized Imperial field army, he chose to besiege Pavia, the second city of the duchy, and by 28 October the town was surrounded. Its garrison of about 6,000 men was led by the Spanish veteran Antonio de Leyva.3 › Battle of Bicocca, 1522
The French settled down to starve the town out, and the siege dragged on through the winter. Francis then weakened himself: he sent a large detachment south under the Duke of Albany to threaten Naples, put at 10,000 by one account and 15,000 by another, and he lost several thousand Swiss to departures and desertion before the battle.4
The armies and their commanders
By late January 1525 an Imperial relief army of more than 20,000 men had gathered. Its official commander was Charles de Lannoy, viceroy of Naples, but much real power lay with Fernando Francesco d'Ávalos, marquis of Pescara. Beside them rode Charles de Bourbon, a French prince who had gone over to the emperor in 1523 after Francis tried to seize most of his inheritance, and Georg von Frundsberg, who brought fresh landsknechts from Germany. The French had famous names of their own: the veteran commanders La Palice and La Trémoille, Admiral Bonnivet, and the Black Band, German landsknechts in French pay.5
On the day the two armies were probably of similar size, each roughly 20,000 to 28,000 counting Leyva's garrison, though totals differ.6
The night march into the park
Much of the French army was camped inside the Visconti park, a hunting reserve whose high wall sources measure at about 15 to 21 kilometers around, with the fortified lodge of Mirabello at its heart. On the night of 23 to 24 February the Imperials marched around the outside of the wall while their guns bombarded the French siege lines to cover the noise. Engineers then broke through the wall near San Genesio, a task that took longer than planned, so troops were still pouring in at dawn.7
Dawn: guns, gendarmes and arquebusiers
At first the French artillery under Galiot de Genouillac caught the Imperial infantry in the open and did real damage. Then Francis gathered his heavy cavalry, the armored gendarmes, and charged the Imperial horse in person. The charge scattered the enemy cavalry, but it carried the king across the line of fire of his own cannon, which fell silent.8
In the woods and broken ground of the park the gendarmes now met Spanish arquebusiers, who fired from cover and brought down horses and riders. The contemporary chronicler Joseph ben Joshua ben Meir says Imperial captains placed gunmen among their cavalry. Pinned, unable to wheel and surrounded by pikes and guns, the flower of the French nobility was cut down.9
Why did Francis I lose the Battle of Pavia?
Francis lost because the Imperials surprised him by breaking into the park at night, and because his own charge masked his cannon and led his gendarmes into woodland where Spanish arquebusiers shot them down. His Swiss broke, Frundsberg destroyed the Black Band, Leyva's garrison sortied, and the French rearguard left the field.
Collapse and capture
Frundsberg's landsknechts defeated the Black Band, the Germans in French service. Leyva marched out of Pavia and fell on the siege lines, and the Swiss there broke; many fled to a broken bridge over the Ticino, and hundreds drowned in the river. The Duke of Alençon withdrew with the rearguard, about a third of the army, without engaging.10
Francis fought on until his horse was killed under him; he fell and was taken. Paolo Giovio later named three Spanish soldiers as his captors, and the king was handed over to the viceroy Lannoy. Bonnivet, La Palice and La Trémoille were among the dead, with Richard de la Pole, the last Yorkist claimant to the English crown, and François of Lorraine, a leader of the Black Band. Anne de Montmorency and many others were captured. The battle was over by the end of the morning. It was Charles V's 25th birthday: the emperor had been born on 24 February 1500.11
How many died at Pavia?
No figure is certain. Joseph ben Joshua ben Meir put the dead at about 8,000, against about 800 Imperials. The Swiss Historical Lexicon estimates about 10,000 French dead, half of them Swiss, and about as many captured, against about 1,000 Imperial losses; the Pavia city libraries also give 10,000 French dead.12
The French side
For France, Pavia was a catastrophe of the nobility. Francis had chosen a winter siege rather than a pursuit of the beaten enemy, split his army and then trusted to a chivalric charge. The Duke of Alençon, who had saved a third of the army, was later made a scapegoat, as J. Rickard notes. Yet French memory also turned the defeat into a story of courage, built around the captive king's letter to his mother.13
The Imperial and Spanish side
For the Imperials, Pavia was the reward for a bold gamble: a night march across the enemy's front and an attack through a wall. Leyva's months of resistance had bought the time for it. In 1531 the Estates of Brabant gave the emperor seven tapestries of the battle, designed by Bernard van Orley and woven by the Dermoyen workshop in Brussels. In Spanish and Italian memory Pavia became proof that disciplined infantry with firearms could beat the best heavy cavalry in Europe.14
"All is lost save honor": what Francis really wrote
The famous line "Tout est perdu, fors l'honneur" is not what Francis wrote. In a letter to his mother, Louise of Savoy, who governed France in his absence, he said that of all things only his honor and his life remained to him. Writing in Conflits, Pierre Royer notes that the king never wrote the short form; a condensed version appeared in a 17th century life of Charles V, and the familiar wording is traced to the writer Legrand d'Aussy in 1779.15
Aftermath: the Treaty of Madrid
Francis was taken to Spain and held in Madrid. To win his freedom he signed the Treaty of Madrid in 1526, giving up his claims in Italy and ceding Burgundy. He was released in March 1526, leaving his two eldest sons in Spain as hostages. Once home he repudiated the treaty and joined the League of Cognac against Charles. In August 1526 Hungary fell to the Ottomans at Mohács; more than a century later Spanish infantry met its own reverse at Rocroi.16
The battlefield today
The ground of the old park north of the city now includes the Vernavola park around Mirabello. The castle of Mirabello still stands, but according to FAI most of it was demolished in 1857, only one wing remains, and the building is abandoned and decaying. Local tradition, recorded by the Pavia city libraries, holds that Francis was first held at the Cascina Repentina near San Genesio, where a plaque marks the event. Pavia ranks among the greatest battles of the early modern age and France's greatest battles, and the gendarmes' ride is a warning among the great cavalry charges of history.17
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