by Vinicius
This is the first of a two-part part series on the Italian Wars. You can find the second part here.
The Renaissance is rightly considered the beginning of the end of the Christian West that had existed since the fourth century. The Renaissance tended to make civil society supreme, autonomous from universals like natural law and revelation.
Yet religion was considered useful, either as a private idea of God, or as an established social institution. This was a pagan mindset, promoted by authors like Niccolo Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, and by the philosophers Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino (thinkers like these revived the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, whose anti-Christian pagan “theurgy” and animism had inspired Julian the Apostate’s attempt to crush the early Church). It would become a hegemonic worldview in much of the West during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment triumph, and in the nineteenth-century Romanticism that continued in the same vein.
But there was a long “gap” of almost two centuries between the end of Renaissance hegemony and the Enlightenment’s victory; the Christian West had won the first battle of modernity, militarily defeating Renaissance-inspired political aspirations, renewing the Church, and expanding it across the globe. This renewed Christian West symbolised by Trent was the global hegemon of early modernity, until the late seventeenth century.
Italy saw the rise of the Renaissance but was also the place where it was defeated. Italian princes were in the forefront of political aggrandizement at the expense of the spiritual well-being of civil society. They began to entertain the idea of reviving pagan Rome (led by figures like Francesco Guiciardini and Machiavelli). These attempts failed. Renaissance Popes also began to behave like princely warlords, damaging the Church’s prestige.
The Wars of Italy, particularly the period between 1494 and 1530, became a battle involving the great powers of Europe, representing two different visions of the West – on one hand, the beginnings of exaggerated nationalism, verging on messianism, among Italian, French and German thinkers; for the first time, civil society was held to be supreme, and the Church as merely an aspect of it. On the other hand there was a renewed Christian West, advancing in strength and coherence.
The Italian Wars
Dreaming of establishing a vast Mediterranean empire, Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494, attempting to occupy Naples. Ferdinand II of Naples defeated Charles with the help of the Castilian general Gonzalo de Cordoba.
In 1499, the new French king, Louis XII, invaded Italy again, determined to occupy Milan as well as the Kingdom of Naples. His campaign was characterised by massacres of civilian populations of besieged cities, which succeeded in terrorising other cities to surrender.
War broke out between Louis and Spain, however, and he was expelled from Italy after a number of disastrous defeats. The Battle of Cerignola (1503) was short; it was the first time a pitched battle was decided by firearms, employed in this case by Spanish troops who were the prototype of the Tercio system (which dominated European battlefields for a century and a half).
Gonzalo de Cordoba, upon seeing the thousands of French dead on the field, ordered three long bugle blasts to summon survivors to pray for the dead on both sides. This became a tradition in the Tercios, which spread to other armies, giving rise to the Last Post of today.
Louis would be expelled from Italy, but not before organising the anti-Council of Pisa in 1511. This attempted to depose Pope Julius II and revive the Conciliarist heresy condemned after the Council of Constance in the fifteenth century (which had tried to change the Church into a parliamentary system led by synods of bishops heavily influenced by national civil societies). Only four cardinals attended this farce. Pope Julius called an Ecumenical Council in Rome which made reforms. The “Conciliabolo” of Pisa retired to France with Louis’ retreating troops and disbanded.
This attempt by civil society to subject and incorporate the Church would be repeated by Henry VIII of England, and by Enlightenment monarchies in the eighteenth century. Conciliarism was a dangerous heresy, much worse than the faults of the Renaissance papacy it was supposed to remedy because it sought to change the constitution of the Church as Our Lord established it. Conciliarism is making a comeback among some traditionalist authors in reaction to the worldly tendencies of the papacy over the last half century – but this is to act as if the Church were only a human institution.
Political and national self-interest threatens the Christian West
In 1521, Francis I of France, angry at losing his bid to become Holy Roman Emperor to Charles I of Castile (who became Emperor Charles V) found himself fighting for Milan, but he suffered a decisive defeat at Bicocca in 1522. Pope Clement VII (Giulio de Medici) changed sides, helping Francis to attack Milan again. But Francis suffered a devastating defeat at the battle of Pavia in 1525, was captured and imprisoned in Madrid for a year.
Francis made an alliance with the Ottoman Turks which encouraged them to invade Catholic Hungary, destroying its army at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526. Francis embodied the Renaissance worldview by placing civil society’s secular success before its own spiritual welfare and that of the Christian West. At the time, this was shocking to Westerners.
But the Islamic subjugation of Hungary did Francis little good. From this point matters came to a head in Italy and were resolved in Pope Clement’s change of heart, reform of the Church, and the definitive end of Renaissance aspirations in Italy. The dramatic events in Italy that led to this are discussed in the next article.
by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
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