The Battle of Ravenna: The History of the Most Famous Battle of the Italian Wars

In 1494, there were five sovereign regional powers in Italy: Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal States and Naples. In 1536, only one remained: Venice. These decades of conflict precipitated great anxiety among Western thinkers, and Italians responded to the fragmentation of Latin Christendom, the end of self-governance for Italians, and the beginning of the early modern era in various ways. They were always heavily influenced by the lived experience of warfare between large Christian armies on the peninsula.

The diplomatic and military history of this 30-year period is a complex one that one eminent Renaissance historian, Lauro Martines, has described as "best told by a computer, so many and tangled are the treatises, negotiations and battles." At the same time, the fighting went in tandem with the Renaissance and was influenced by it. Most historians credit the city-state of Florence as the place that started and developed the Italian Renaissance, a process carried out through the patronage and commission of artists during the late 12th century. If Florence is receiving its due credit, much of it belongs to the Medicis, the family dynasty of Florence that ruled at the height of the Renaissance. The dynasty held such influence that some of its family members even became Pope.

Thanks to convoluted European politics, the foremost belligerent in the Italian Wars was France. French foreign policy had been entangled in Italy’s peninsular politics ever since Charlemagne's 774 intervention in the conflict between Pope Adrian I and the Lombards. The French king maintained a web of alliances with the Italian powers.[1] Whereas Louis XI had largely ignored any obligations stemming from his agreements with the individual Italian powers, Charles VIII, who acceded to the throne a young and inexperienced man, eagerly took up the opportunity to make good his claim to the Neapolitan throne. The House of Anjou had been invited to govern the kingdom of Naples in 1265 by Pope Clement IV, who sought the expulsion of the Hohenstaufen dynasty from Italy. Charles of Anjou, Louis IX's younger brother, was crowned in St. Peter's in 1266 by five cardinals and his descendants reigned in the kingdom of Naples until the childless Queen Joanna II of Naples in 1442 adopted Alfonso V, called “the Magnanimous,” of Aragon. When Ludovico Sforza, the de facto ruler of Milan, invited him to challenge Aragonese rule in southern Italy, Charles VIII saw an opportunity to demonstrate his military prowess to subsequent generations. His court greedily sought the spoils, both in glory and material wealth, likely to accrue from such a campaign.

The French campaign in Italy was almost immediately recognized as a watershed in Italian history, and the invasion ended a centuries-long practice of self-governance by the Italian city-states. The fury and cruelty of the French forces was shocking and unthinkable to Italian onlookers, who had grown accustomed to a more diplomacy-based warfare enacted by small mercenary forces with few pitched battles. Before 1494, death tolls were counted in hundreds rather than thousands, but that would change over the next generation, and among the many battles fought, few stood out like the Battle of Ravenna in 1512. Ravenna is an ancient city in northern Italy on the Adriatic Coast that replaced Rome as capital of the Western Roman Empire for much of the 5th century and continued to serve as a regional center for its successor states, including the Ostrogoths, Byzantines, and Papal States. On April 11 of that year, two great armies met near Ravenna, which had been the site of conflict at least six times before on account of its strategic importance. Over 44,000 troops gathered, a vast number for the time, to fight over Italy’s destiny, which had become important to France, Austria, and Spain, the great powers of the time.