What happened at the Battle of Pavia?
On 24 February 1525 the Imperial and Spanish army of Charles V broke into the walled hunting park north of Pavia, where the French army of Francis I was besieging the town, and destroyed it in a single morning. Spanish arquebusiers and German landsknechts shot down the French gendarmes, the Swiss fled and King Francis I was taken prisoner.1
On 24 February 1525, in a walled hunting park north of Pavia in Lombardy, the French army of King Francis I was destroyed by the Imperial and Spanish army of the Emperor Charles V, and the king himself was taken prisoner. Fought for control of the Duchy of Milan, it became one of the first great battles decided by handheld firearms: Spanish arquebusiers working with pikemen and cavalry overwhelmed the heavy horsemen who had dominated European battlefields for centuries.2
Who won the Battle of Pavia and why?
The Imperial and Spanish army of Charles V won. Its commanders broke into the park by night and forced a battle on ground the French had not prepared for; Francis I then charged with his gendarmes in front of his own guns, and Spanish arquebusiers and German landsknechts destroyed his army piece by piece and captured the king.3
Why Pavia? A siege in winter
In October 1524 Francis crossed the Alps with an army of about 29,000 men by the Swiss Historical Lexicon's count, 30,000 by EBSCO's, French, Swiss, Italian and German soldiers, among them some 8,000 Swiss. He retook Milan, weakened by plague, without a fight. Instead of pursuing the beaten Imperial army to its camp at Lodi, he turned on Pavia, a strongly fortified town on the Ticino, and by the end of October the town was surrounded. Taylor judges that by this choice the king threw away every advantage he held, letting the enemy refuse battle while his own men froze in the trenches.4 › Battle of Bicocca, 1522
Pavia was held by the Spanish veteran Antonio de Leyva with about 6,000 men; Hare lists 5,000 German landsknechts, 500 Spanish arquebusiers and some 500 horse, and both Hare and EBSCO say Leyva also trained the townsmen as a militia. In November the French battered breaches in the walls, but their assaults were thrown back with heavy losses, and Francis settled down to starve the town out.5
The winter was hard on both sides. Inside the walls food and fuel ran short; EBSCO says houses and churches were pulled down for firewood, and Francis himself wrote to his mother in early February that the defenders had tasted neither wine, meat nor cheese for a month. Outside, the French camp in the park of Mirabello was so well supplied that both Hare and EBSCO compare it to an immense market. Francis then weakened his own army by sending a detachment south to invade the kingdom of Naples.6
The armies and their commanders
The Imperial army was rebuilt over the winter. Its nominal commander was Charles de Lannoy, viceroy of Naples; much of the real direction lay with Fernando Francesco d'Ávalos, marquis of Pescara, commander of the Spanish infantry. Beside them rode Charles, duke of Bourbon, a French prince who had gone over to the emperor in 1523, and it was Bourbon who came back across the Alps in midwinter with fresh landsknechts from Germany under Georg von Frundsberg.7
In late January 1525 the relief army left Lodi. Hare puts it at more than 20,000 foot, EBSCO at more than 20,000 men, and the Swiss Historical Lexicon at about 20,000 men, 18,000 of them landsknechts; it was weaker than the French in cavalry and artillery. With Leyva's garrison the two armies were probably of similar size. The French could call on famous names of their own: Marshal La Palice, La Trémoille and Admiral Bonnivet, Swiss infantry under Jean de Diesbach, and the Black Bands, German landsknechts in French pay.8
The commanders' decisions
For three weeks the armies lay so close that each could hear the other's sentries. Francis could have waited behind his siege lines for hunger to finish Leyva and pay to finish the Imperial army. According to both Hare and Royer, the more experienced captains advised exactly that, but Admiral Bonnivet persuaded the king that a French king did not refuse battle, and Francis stayed to fight in the park.9
The Imperial commanders had less choice. In Hare's account their unpaid soldiers were demanding either battle or wages. On 23 February they decided to attack that night: to break through the north wall of the park and take the lodge of Mirabello, where they could either force the French to fight or join hands with Leyva's garrison. Taylor stresses that the plan meant marching across the front of the French army, a gamble that only worked because the king played into Pescara's hands.10
The night march into the park
The park of Mirabello was a Visconti hunting reserve enclosed by a high, thick wall, with the fortified hunting lodge at its center, about two miles inside. On the night of 23 to 24 February Imperial pioneers began to breach the wall. The masonry was so massive that most of the night had passed before the gaps were wide enough, and dawn was breaking as the troops poured through.11
The marquis del Vasto led the advance guard to Mirabello and took it almost without resistance. The rest of the army had to march across the park, parallel to the French front, and the French artillery under the grand master opened a violent fire on its flank. The Imperial columns, dragging their few guns over rough ground, fell into disorder and took shelter in a hollow.12
Dawn: the king's charge
Francis now left his entrenched camp, kept a force back to watch Pavia, and advanced with his infantry and cavalry in one line, his guns in front. The Imperial army faced left to meet him. Then the king put himself at the head of his gendarmes and charged. The heavy horsemen scattered the Imperial light cavalry and drove back Lannoy's men-at-arms; Joseph ben Joshua ben Meir, writing a few years later, describes the king's cavalry riding out and the Spaniards falling back.13
The charge was the turning point, because it carried the gendarmes across the line of fire of their own cannon, which fell silent. Taylor, EBSCO and Hare agree that the king's eagerness masked his guns and cut his cavalry off from the infantry, and that the French army, instead of fighting as one, was beaten in pieces.14
Arquebusiers among the trees
Pescara now threw his Spanish arquebusiers against the isolated gendarmes. Fighting in small groups among the trees and broken ground of the park, they fired at close range, brought down horses and riders and slipped away before the horsemen could reach them. The chronicler Joseph says the Imperial captains had placed footmen with guns among their own cavalry, and Taylor describes the same partnership of horse, pike and shot. Hare writes that the knights were shot through the joints of their armor and lay helpless on the ground.15
Collapse and capture
Elsewhere the French army came apart. Bourbon led the landsknechts against the Black Bands and almost wiped them out. The Swiss, left without cavalry support and under fire from the arquebusiers, broke and fled, and del Vasto came down from Mirabello against the French left. At that moment Leyva marched out of Pavia, overran the troops left to watch the town and fell on the fugitives, many of whom drowned in the Ticino. The Duke of Alençon left the field with several hundred horsemen and part of the army without fighting.16
Francis fought on, wounded in the face and hand, until his horse was killed under him and he fell. He was taken and handed over to the viceroy Lannoy. Around him lay many of the greatest names of France, among them Admiral Bonnivet, Marshal La Palice and the grand equerry Galeazzo Sanseverino; the king of Navarre was among the prisoners.17
How many died at Pavia?
No count is certain, and the sources differ. Joseph ben Joshua ben Meir put the French dead at 8,000, among them 1,500 Swiss and 500 drowned in the Ticino, against 800 Imperial dead. The Swiss Historical Lexicon gives about 10,000 French dead, half of them Swiss, and about as many prisoners, against about 1,000 Imperial losses, and Hare also writes of more than 10,000 French dead on the field or in the river. Oman gives the French loss in action as 8,000 and notes that the Imperialists reported only 700 men lost. The French losses thus range from about 8,000 to more than 10,000 dead; the Imperial losses from 700 to about 1,000.18
The French side
For France Pavia was a disaster of the nobility. A whole generation of commanders was killed or captured, and the kingdom found itself without its king and without an army fit to fight. EBSCO judges that the battle reduced France to a secondary place in Europe for a long time, and Hare describes the panic that spread through Milan as the survivors fled across the Alps.19
Taylor's verdict on Francis is severe: he had held the advantage in numbers, cavalry and artillery and threw it away, first in a winter siege and then in a charge that silenced his own guns. French memory, by contrast, turned the defeat into a tale of courage, built around the captive king's letter to his mother.20
The Imperial and Spanish side
For Charles V the victory delivered Italy. Milan and other states fell under Habsburg control, and Pope Clement VII abandoned his French alliance. Taylor argues that Pescara won not by consummate generalship but by audacity and by his new weapon, the close combination of musketeers, pikemen and cavalry, which he compares to the advantage the needle gun gave the Prussians at Sadowa. Hare gives much of the credit to Bourbon's attack on the Black Bands. The gendarmes' ride ranks among the great cavalry charges of history, but as a warning.21
"All is lost save honor": what Francis really wrote
The famous line "Tout est perdu, fors l'honneur" is not what Francis wrote. In his letter to his mother, Louise of Savoy, who governed France in his absence, written after he had been taken to the fortress of Pizzighettone, he said that of all things only his honor and his life, which was safe, remained to him. Hare prints the original wording, and Pierre Royer, writing in Conflits, notes that the king never wrote the short form.22
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 within months he was at war with Charles again as part of the League of Cognac. In August 1526 Hungary fell to the Ottomans at Mohács; more than a century later Spanish infantry met its own reverse at Rocroi. Pavia ranks among the greatest battles of the early modern age and France's greatest battles.23
_-_Birmingham_Museum_of_Art,_Birmingham,_Alabama_(Samuel_H._Kress_Collection).jpg){kind=link}