II

1524] Siege of Marseilles.

In July the first point of this agreement was carried into effect. The Duke of Bourbon crossed the Alps in company with Pescara and invaded France (July 1). His artillery joined him by sea at Monaco. Provence offered little resistance. The Duke entered Aix on August 9. But the other movements were delayed, and it was thought dangerous to advance on Lyons without this support. Accordingly it was determined to lay siege to Marseilles, which was surrounded on August 19. Francis had here shown unusual foresight, and the town was prepared for defence under the command of the Orsini captain, Renzo da Ceri, who had shown himself throughout a passionate friend of France. The breaches in the walls were immediately protected by earthworks, and the besiegers could not venture an assault. The French navy, reinforced by Andrea Doria with his galleys, was superior to the invaders on the sea. Meanwhile Francis was collecting with great energy an army of relief at Avignon. Unexampled tailles were imposed; the clergy were taxed, the cities gave subsidies, and the nobles forced loans. Time pressed and the assault of Marseilles was ordered for September 4, but the troops recoiled before the danger; the Marquis of Pescara, hostile throughout to the enterprise and its leader, did not conceal his disapproval; and the project was abandoned. The promised aid from Roussillon was not sent, and the diversion in Picardy was not made. On September 29, much against his will, the Duke of Bourbon ordered the retreat. The troops, ill-clothed, ill-provided, ill-shod, made their way across the mountains, closely pursued by Montmorency. Francis followed with his whole army and reached Vercelli on the same day that the retreating army arrived at Alba, about sixteen miles S.S.W. of Asti.

With troops humiliated, discontented, exhausted, resistance in the field was impossible. The imperialists adopted the same strategy that had succeeded so well against Bonnivet. They determined to hold Alessandria, Pavia, Lodi, Pizzighettone, Cremona. The citadel of Milan was garrisoned, and it was hoped that the city might be held; but it had suffered terribly from the plague, and on the approach of Francis with his whole army, the attempt was given up. Bourbon, Lannoy, and Pescara retired to Lodi; and the defence of Pavia was entrusted to Antonio de Leyva. Instead of following up the remnants of the imperial army to Lodi, and crushing them or driving them east into the arms of their uncertain Venetian allies, Francis turned aside to make himself master of Pavia. The siege artillery opened fire on November 6. An early assault having failed, Francis attempted to divert the course of the Ticino, and by this means to obtain access to the south side of the town, which relied mainly on the protection of the river. But the winter rains rendered the work impossible. Francis determined to reduce the city by blockade. Meanwhile he called up reinforcements from the Swiss, and took Giovanni de’ Medici into his pay.

Campaign of Pavia. [1524-5

Italy prepared to take the side which appeared for the moment stronger. Venice hesitated in her alliance. Clement, while endeavoring to reassure the Emperor as to his fidelity, and ostensibly negotiating for an impossible peace, concluded, on December 12, 1524, a secret treaty with France, in which Florence and Venice were included. This treaty led both Clement and Francis to their ruin. Clement paid for his cowardly betrayal at the Sack of Rome, and Francis was encouraged to detach a part of his army under the Duke of Albany to invade Naples, an enterprise which weakened his main force without securing any corresponding advantage. The Duke, after holding to ransom the towns of Italy through which he passed, reached the south of the papal territory, where he was attacked by the Colonna and driven back to Rome. It was hoped however that this diversion would induce the imperial generals to leave Lombardy to its fate and hurry to the protection of Naples. But reinforcements were coming in from Germany under Frundsberg, and it was Naples that was left to fortune. On January 24, 1525, the imperial forces moved from Lodi. After a feint on Milan, they approached Pavia, and encamped towards the east to wait their opportunity. Thence they succeeded in introducing powder and other most necessary supplies into the famished city. The seizure of Chiavenna on behalf of Charles recalled the Grisons levies to the defence of their own territory. Reinforcements coming to Francis from the Alps were cut off and destroyed. Giovanni de' Medici was incapacitated by a wound. But the condition of the beleaguered city and lack of pay and provisions did not permit of further delay. It was decided to attack Francis in his camp and risk the issue.

1525-6] Battle of Pavia. Treaty of Madrid.

On the night of February 24-25 the imperial army broke into the walled enclosure of the park of Mirabello. Delays were caused by the solid walls and day broke before the actual encounter. The news of the attack induced Francis to leave his entrenchments and to muster his army, which consisted of 8000 Swiss, 5000 Germans, 7000 French infantry, and 6000 Italians. He was not much superior in actual numbers, but stronger in artillery and cavalry. An attempt of the imperialists to join hands with the garrison of Pavia, by marching past the French army, which had had time to adopt a perfect order of battle in the park, proved impossible under a flanking artillery fire. Nor was it possible to throw up earthworks and await assault, as Lannoy had hoped. A direct attack upon the French army was necessary. In the mêlée which ensued it is almost impossible to disentangle the several causes of the issue, but it seems clear that the complete victory of the imperialists was due to the admirable fire-discipline and tactics of the veteran Spanish arquebusiers, to the attack of Antonio de Leyva with his garrison from the rear, to an inopportune movement of the German troops of the French which masked their artillery fire, and perhaps in some measure to the cowardly example of flight set by the Duke of Alençon. The French army was destroyed, the French King was captured, and all his most illustrious commanders were taken prisoners or killed. As Ravenna marks the advent of artillery as a deciding factor in great battles, so perhaps Pavia may be said to mark the superiority attained by hand firearms over the pike. The Swiss pike-men were unable to stand against the Spanish bullets.

Once more the duchy had been reconquered, and it seemed lost forever to France. Francis was sent as a prisoner first to Pizzighettone and then to Spain. Here the unwonted restraint acting on a man so passionately devoted to field-sports shook his health; he thought at one time of resigning the crown of France in favor of the Dauphin, in order to discount the advantage possessed by Charles in the custody of his royal person; but he was at length constrained to accept the Emperor’s terms. The result was the treaty of Madrid, signed by Francis on January 14, 1526, and confirmed by the most solemn oaths, and by the pledge of the King’s knightly honor, but with the deliberate and secretly expressed intention of repudiating its obligations. Francis was to marry Eleonora, the Emperor’s sister and the widow of the King of Portugal. He renounced all his rights over Milan, Naples, Genoa, Asti, together with the suzerainty of Flanders, Artois, and Tournay. He ceded to Charles the duchy of Burgundy, in which however the traditional dependencies of the duchy were not included. The Duke of Bourbon was to be pardoned and restored to his hereditary possessions. Francis abandoned the Duke of Gelders, and gave up all claims of d'Albret to Navarre. As a guarantee for the execution of the treaty the King’s two eldest sons were to be surrendered to the Emperor’s keeping; and Francis was to return as a prisoner in the event of non-fulfillment.

In spite of the outcries of historians, the terms of this treaty must be regarded as moderate. Charles exacted nothing, after his extraordinary success, except what he must have considered to be his own by right. But how far his moderation was dictated by policy, and how far by natural feelings of justice, may remain undecided. The Duke of Bourbon and Henry VIII had pressed upon him the pursuit of the war, the invasion and dismemberment of France. Had Charles really aimed at European supremacy this course was open to him. But he did not take it, whether from a prudent distrust of his English ally, or from an honest dislike for unjust and perilous schemes of aggrandizement. That he took no pains to use his own victory for the furtherance of the ends of England, may appear at first sight surprising. But Henry VIII had had no part in the victory of Pavia, and almost none in any of Charles’ successes. English subsidies had been a factor, though not a decisive factor, in the war, but English armed assistance had been uniformly ineffective. Even before the battle of Pavia Charles had known of Henry’s contemplated change of side. Moreover, since the rejection of Henry’s plans for the dismemberment of France, the English King had concluded an alliance with Louise of Savoy, the regent of France, and profited by his desertion to the extent of two millions of crowns. Charles owed nothing to Henry at the time of the treaty of Madrid.