The Treaty of Lyons

The political kaleidoscope of Italy in 1500 involved shifting combinations of alliance and hostility among the city states of Venice, Milan and Florence, the Papal States under the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, and his son Cesare, and the kingdom of Naples under a branch of the Spanish royal house of Aragon, while Sicily was ruled by Ferdinand II of Aragon himself (the husband of Isabella of Castile, Columbus’s backer). Others with their fingers in the pie were the Habsburg Emperor, Maximilian I, and Louis XII of France, who had succeeded to the Italian policy of his predecessor, Charles VIII, and had his eye on Naples.

Naples and Sicily had been ruled as one kingdom in the thirteenth century by Charles of Anjou, younger brother of Louis IX and titular King of Jerusalem, and his descendants after him. The kings of Aragon seized Sicily before long and in the 1440s they took Naples too, but the French monarchy claimed the kingdom in right of the house of Anjou and Charles VIII styled himself King of Naples and Jerusalem.

When the Aragonese king of Naples died in 1494 and Pope Alexander VI invested his son as his successor, against the demands of the French, Charles VIII led an army to Naples. The King departed hastily for Sicily, but the French triumph roused against them an alliance of the Emperor, the Pope, Milan, Venice and Ferdinand of Aragon, and a competent Spanish general, Gonsalvo Fernandez de Cordoba, recovered Naples for King Federigo, though French garrisons were left in place.

Succeeding Charles VIII, his cousin, in 1499 and declaring himself King of France, Sicily and Jerusalem, Louis XII invaded Italy, with support from Venice and Florence and in alliance with the Borgias, to seize not only Naples but also Milan, which he claimed through his Visconti grandmother. He took Milan and he and Ferdinand of Aragon agreed to carve up Naples between them. Macchiavelli, who thought the French did not understand politics, pointed out that Louis was encouraging into the game a player stronger than himself. In 1501 the French entered Rome and the Pope declared Federigo deposed and ordered Cesare to join the invaders. The French went on to sack Capua, and Cesare was reported to have packed a consignment of the best-looking Capuan women off to Rome.

The French army entered Naples itself unopposed in May and the Spaniards took Taranto in 1502, but the two allies quarrelled over the division of the spoils and were soon at each other’s throats. In April 1503 de Cordoba defeated the French at Cerignola in what is considered the first battle in history in which firearms were decisive. He won another victory at the Garigliano River in December, despite the heroics of the famous Chevalier Bayard, acme of chivalry, and on January 1st, 1504, forced the surrender of the last French stronghold, at Gaeta on the Mediterranean coast. The French had lost the south. Louis XII fell ill, perhaps with malaria, and at the end of January he signed a treaty at Lyons, confirmed two months later, which conceded Naples to Ferdinand. There was plenty more fighting and political maneouvring in Italy still to come, but the French never made good their claim to Naples. At fifty-two in 1514 Louis took as his third wife, the eighteen-year-old Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, but he died in Paris the following year. The kingdom of the Two Sicilies remained in existence until 1860.