Battle of Fornovo, 1495: the battle both sides claimed

Background: a king who took Italy with chalk

Charles VIII had been king of France since 1483, when he was thirteen. As heir of the house of Anjou he claimed the Kingdom of Naples, and to free his hands for the venture he signed away French claims and paid off his neighbors in a string of treaties. The invitation came from Italy itself: Ludovico Sforza, regent of Milan, urged the king to enforce his rights in the south.²

The campaign that followed stunned Italy. Charles crossed the Alps in early September 1494, entered Florence in November and marched through Rome at the end of December. On 22 February 1495 he entered Naples in triumph. Pope Alexander VI remarked that the French had conquered Italy with chalk, the chalk their billeting officers used to mark the doors of the houses they took for quarters, and Machiavelli repeated the joke in The Prince.³

The ease of the conquest frightened the very powers that had let it happen. At the end of March 1495 Venice, Ludovico of Milan, Pope Alexander, Ferdinand of Aragon and the King of the Romans, Maximilian, joined in the League of Venice against France. Charles could not afford to be cut off at the far end of the peninsula. He left part of his army to hold Naples and in May turned north for home.⁴

Armies and commanders

The League raised its army in the north. Most of it was in Venetian pay and led by Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua. A Milanese contingent came under Giovanni Francesco Sanseverino, Count of Caiazzo, and a Bolognese one under Annibale Bentivoglio, son of the lord of Bologna. Alongside the Italian men-at-arms rode a strong force of stradiots, light horsemen whom Venice recruited in the Balkans, many of them in Albania.⁵

How big the League army was depends on whom you ask. Commynes, the French diplomat who rode with the king, says the Venetians had promised him 40,000 men and very nearly delivered: 35,000 effective troops, with some 2,600 armored men-at-arms and about 5,000 stradiots and other light horse. Gino Benzoni's biography of Gonzaga counts 2,500 lances, 8,000 foot and 2,000 stradiots, and the Machiavelli encyclopedia gives 26,000 men in all.⁶

Against them Charles brought a much smaller force. The Enciclopedia Italiana says only about 10,000 were left, and Commynes puts the whole army at no more than 9,000, of whom about 2,000 were servants and camp followers. What the French had was quality: nimble infantry, the Swiss above all, and a train of artillery that Taylor ranks as the best of its day.⁷

The battle in phases

Over the Apennines

Charles crossed the Apennines by way of Pontremoli and came down the valley of the Taro. Gonzaga waited for him in the lower valley, near Fornovo. Frederick Lewis Taylor, writing in 1921, faults the marquess for this choice: he could have stopped the French dead by holding the mountain defiles, and instead let them come down into open country and rest.⁸

On Sunday 5 July the king came down from the mountains and took up quarters in Fornovo, which its defenders had abandoned. Stradiots rode out to skirmish around the French columns. Both Commynes and Benzoni describe the French trying to negotiate a passage, and both describe the attempts going nowhere. In the night heavy rain fell in the mountains, and the Taro, usually fordable on foot, began to rise.⁹

The march past the League

On the morning of 6 July the French crossed the broad, stony bed of the Taro and began to file north along the hills on the far side, to slip past the League camp across the river. They marched in three divisions, a vanguard, the main body under the king and a rear guard. Charles put his greatest strength in the vanguard, including some 3,000 Swiss, expecting the hardest fighting there. Strung out along the valley, the divisions drifted apart as the morning went on.¹⁰

Gonzaga had worked out an elaborate plan. Taylor, reading the Italian and French accounts together, describes three mixed forces of horse and foot, each with its own reserve, that were to cross the river and strike the three French divisions at once, while the stradiots swung around behind the French rear to fall on their left flank. A large general reserve stayed in camp. Commynes, who later heard the plan from the League commanders themselves, adds that Gonzaga and his uncle Rodolfo led the strongest force against the French rear, the Count of Caiazzo the one against the vanguard.¹¹

The clash on the Taro

The flood broke the plan before the fighting began. Only part of the League army could get across, and only by fords farther upstream, so Gonzaga's attack struck not the center of the French column but its rear. Charles turned back with the main body to meet it. In Taylor's reading the attacking columns had waited too long and were broken up by the steep banks before they ever reached the enemy.¹²

The Italian men-at-arms rode straight at the king's own division, and the French met them head on. Picotti, in the Enciclopedia Italiana, calls Fornovo the fiercest battle fought in Italy in two centuries. The charge was thrown back, and the beaten horsemen were chased back to the ford.¹³

Turning point: the stradiots and the baggage

Everything hung on the stradiots. Their sweep around the French rear was meant to take the enemy in the flank at the height of the fight. Instead, when they came upon the French baggage train, they threw themselves on it to plunder, and the men-at-arms were left to fight alone. Taylor calls the stradiots' diversion the most promising part of the whole plan, ruined by indiscipline.¹⁴

Rodolfo Gonzaga, who was to send the order for the reserve to advance, was among the first to fall, and the order never came. The League's knights broke and streamed back across the Taro; Caiazzo's attack on the French vanguard lost heart and failed against the Swiss, and the reserve on the far bank never moved. For a few moments the king himself was in danger, and the Bastard of Bourbon, fighting at his side, was captured and carried off to the Italian camp.¹⁵

The hand-to-hand fighting, Commynes and Taylor agree, lasted only about a quarter of an hour, and neither side took prisoners, a break with the custom of Italian wars. The dead were counted in thousands, but the sources do not agree on whose they were. The Enciclopedia Italiana puts the dead at 3,000 to 4,000, two-thirds of them Italian, which would leave the French with well over a thousand. Commynes, who had his figures from League nobles, counts about 3,500 Italian dead but only around a hundred French, most of them servants killed with the baggage.¹⁶

Aftermath

The League did not renew the attack. The French moved on down the valley and reached their base at Asti. According to an EBSCO reference article by Charles H. O'Brien, Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard, who went on to become one of the most celebrated French soldiers of the age, was knighted for his valor at Fornovo.¹⁷

Fornovo saved the king but not his conquest. The Duke of Orléans, besieged in Novara, had to give the town up to the League, and Charles made peace with Ludovico Sforza and in the autumn went back across the Alps. Meanwhile the Aragonese king Ferdinand II returned to Naples, and with Spanish help won back his kingdom.¹⁸

He never came back. Charles VIII died at Amboise, the castle where he was born, on 7 April 1498, while preparing a new expedition to Italy. His successor, Louis XII, claimed Milan as heir of the Visconti, and in 1499 the French were back.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

In Mantua, Fornovo was a victory. Gonzaga, as Benzoni puts it, was convinced he had won and even more convinced of the value of being seen to have won. He ordered from Andrea Mantegna the Madonna of the Victory, which shows the marquess kneeling in armor under the Virgin's protecting hand.²⁰

Historians have been less kind. Taylor calls Fornovo not an indecisive action but a definite victory for France, since it let Charles reach his base at Asti and wrecked his enemies' plans. Giovanni Battista Picotti, in the Enciclopedia Italiana, drew the bitterest lesson: the one battle in which the Italian states seemed to stand together became a painful sign of Italian weakness and an encouragement to other foreigners to try again.²¹

That is how the Italian Wars unfolded. The Machiavelli encyclopedia calls Fornovo the first true battle of the wars, and the first fought by Charles in person. Taylor saw in it the end of an old style of war: the easy repulse of a larger Italian army by the French, he wrote, impressed on Italians a sense of their own military weakness, and Italian captains soon began to copy the Swiss pike. For the next half century French, Spanish, Swiss and German armies fought out their quarrels on Italian soil, at Ravenna, Marignano, Bicocca and Pavia, and Italy became the battlefield of foreign powers.²² › Battle of Pavia, 1525