Visit
the Niderost Genealogy Store for Books, Music, Software, etc. |
||
|
0ne
March day in 1515, ambassadors from the Republic of Venice sought
audience with King Francis I of France. At the time, Venice, nicknamed “la
Serenissima,” was anything but calm or serene, since Italy was not
yet a nation, but only a patchwork of warring principalities, a fact
that aroused the greed of outside powers. Wily King Ferdinand of Spanish Aragon
controlled much of Southern Italy, and Leo X’s papacy straddled the
central peninsula. Both were enemies of Venice. And next door to the
“Queen of the Adriatic,” in the Duchy of Milan, foreign Swiss
mercenaries played puppet masters to a figurehead Sforza duke. Venice urgently needed an ally and was
seeking one in the French king. Ushered into his presence shortly after
their arrival in Paris, the ambassadors no doubt took stock of their
royal host and had good reason to like what they saw. To begin with, Francis was young – barely
20 – and the mask of majesty often slipped to reveal the boyish
exuberance with-in. He had hooded brown eyes, light-brown hair fashioned
in a “pageboy” cut, and thick lips that gave a sensual, slightly
worldly cast to his features. The young king was clean-shaven (a beard
would not sprout until 1519), and his nose was so monumental he would
later be dubbed “le Roy Grand Nez.” King for a scant three
months, the newly minted monarch won hearts by his impulsive generosity,
keen spirit and athletic prowess. Muscular and well-proportioned, at 6
feet, he towered over most contemporaries. The Venetians now laid their case before the
king, but in fact they were preaching to the converted. Le Roy Grand
Nez indeed was about to stick his pointed proboscis into Italian
affairs. And there were precedents, not that King Francis really needed
any. France periodically had invaded Italy over the last 20 years,
though under the late King Louis XII, the Gauls had met bitter defeat at
the hands of the Swiss at Novara. Such defeats notwithstanding, Italy –
especially the Duchy of Milan, with its fertile Lombard plains and
magnificent Po River – was still an irresistible lure to the French. In the audience granted to the Venetian
emissaries, Francis declared he would not abandon their Venetian
republic in its hour of need. “Very shortly,” he solemnly assured
them, “I will come in person with a powerful army into Italy.” True to his word, in the next few months
Francis made preparations for war, with Swiss-controlled Milan to be the
primary target. As later years would amply demonstrate, the
French king was a patron of the Renaissance, a man who loved art as much
as he loved women, yet part of him was medieval, too. Al-most from birth
his mother, Louise of Savoy, had filled his head with dreams of kingly
conquest and knightly honor. Grooming him for greatness, Louise called
her son “my Caesar,” and Francis was determined to live up to the
pet name. The French army reflected the semi feudal
nature of the country itself. Heavily armored cavalrymen – men-at-arms
from the so-called “companies of array” – provided the backbone of
the king’s forces. There were great magnates like Duke Charles of
Bourbon, with his 1,000 personal retainers, and impoverished lords with
scarcely more than a sword and a pedigree. The king could also rely on his bodyguard,
composed of gentlemen “pensioners” and archers. The latter title was
a courtesy, since these formidable warriors – a famous Scots
contingent among them – had discarded their bows long since. For
infantry, Francis relied heavily on some 9,000 German Landsknechte, mercenaries
who fought as long as the gold and silver flowed. Tough professionals,
they wore little armor but wielded formidable 18-foot pikes. The
king’s native French infantry numbered about 10,000, of which 6,000
were Gascon and Basque crossbowmen. On the whole, the French infantry
had become a by-word for undependability, always ready to fight or flee
as the mood struck them. Though the French army was a mixed bag, the
French artillery was perhaps the best in Europe. Cast in bronze,
boasting the latest designs, the French fieldpieces were drawn by horse
teams and fired real cannonballs, not stones. French gunners were
experts who were known – and feared – for their rapid reloading. The
royal artillery train featured 70 huge guns, seconded by 300 smaller
pieces of ordnance. Francis and his hot-blooded nobility were
spoiling for a fight, but before they could come to grips with the Swiss
enemy, the towering ramparts of the Alps would have to be crossed. Only
a few well-worn passes – some hardly more than goat trails – cut
through the precipitous cliffs. Back in Lombardy, the Swiss were well aware
of French preparations and were moving to checkmate the Gallic king. The
two main passes into Italy were sealed by Swiss troops, who effectively
blocked all land entry into the Italian peninsula as a result. Anticipating
such Swiss moves, Marshal Gian Giacomo Trivulzo (an Italian in French
service) and Odet de Foix, vicomte de Lautrec, scoured the
foothills on the French side to find a new way across the mountains.
Local shepherds and chamois hunters revealed a series of passes through
the Alps generally unknown to the out-side world. Better still, these
“unknown” passes would enable the French to outflank the Swiss and
make their defensive lines untenable. Based upon this new information, the French
army was divided into three sections for the perilous crossing. The
first, under the king, would traverse the Col d’Argentiere; the
second, consisting of the artillery, would proceed over Mount Genevre,
and the third, a force of picked cavalry, would journey over the Col
d’Angello. About 1,000 brawny sappers were sent ahead to try and widen
the craggy goat trails into some-thing approximating roads. Boulders
were heaved aside or blasted out of the way with liberal doses of
gunpowder. The French passage through the Alps must
rank as one of the supreme epics of military history, if also one of the
least known. In spite of the sappers’ best efforts, the "roads”
they created were hardly more than narrow pathways perched on the edge
of yawning chasms. Units marched single file, the cavalrymen dismounted
and leading their mounts by their bridles. If and when a horse grew
skittish and made a misstep, the animal fell, as one chronicler put it,
“a half a league” onto the sharp rocks below. At 6,545 feet above sea level, the thin
mountain air of the Cor d’Argentiere taxed the lungs of the hardiest
and made them gasp for air. Incredibly, the men-at-arms were marching on
foot in full armor, a task that was nothing short of Herculean at that
altitude. The artillerymen, too, faced a challenging task, manhandling
their burdensome charges over treacherous ravines and deep gullies. At
the peak of the ordeal, Francis wrote his mother a report of the
passage, while noting, “Those who do not see it will not believe that
anyone could bring over horses and heavy artillery the way we are
doing....” Five days later – it must have seemed five
centuries – the French completed their journey and debauched onto the
fertile Italian plain. Some 1,700 years be-fore, Hannibal had crossed
the Alps with his elephants and his army and won immortality. A young
French king, shepherding bronze behemoths instead of ponderous
pachyderms, had duplicated the Carthaginian’s feat. In a surprise coup, the French advance guard
seized the town of Villafranca and most of the enemy cavalry,
Swiss-allied papal horsemen under the command of the elderly Prospero
Colonna. Around 300 prisoners were taken; old Colonna was grabbed just
as he was about to sit down to dinner. Realizing they were out-flanked
and – at least momentarily – out-witted, the Swiss troops pulled
back to their main base at Milan, the French following in respectful
pursuit. They had to be respectful because, in 1515, the Swiss were the
most powerful military machine in Europe. Switzerland
was a collection of largely German-speaking states called can-tons.
Though each canton jealously guarded its independence, the Swiss formed
a confederation of the cantons for mutual support and defense. Tough and
hearty, loving freedom as much as they loved their Alpine valleys, the
Swiss amazed Europe when they defeated the army of the encroaching Duke
Charles "the Bold” of Burgundy at Grandson. This victory in 1476
inaugurated a half-century of Swiss military prowess. It was ironic that Swiss military greatness
was founded on an anachronism. In an era when those harbingers of modern
war, guns and gunpowder, were coming into general use, the Swiss revived
the ancient Greek phalanx, large columns of men in serried ranks, each
man armed with a pike 21 feet long – an 18-foot wooden shaft,
surmounted by a 3-foot iron point. When the pike points were lowered,
few if any armored knights could make headway against such a prickly
“hedgehog.” The Swiss were fiercely brave and highly
disciplined, often marching in cadence to the sound of fifes and drums
– the first army to parade in step since the Romans. But victory after
victory made the sturdy mountaineers overconfident and at times somewhat
greedy. Swiss pikemen were in high demand throughout Europe, so
companies of “Alpine cowherds” hired themselves out as mercenaries.
In time, gold, not liberty, animated the Swiss – and if pay were not
forthcoming, strikes were not unknown. In 16th-century Milan, though, the Swiss
were only the nominal employees of Duke Maximillian Sforza. Switzerland
had recently annexed part of the duchy (today’s Canton Tincino), and
heavy Swiss taxes were imposed on the helpless Lombard peasantry. As
much as they hated foreign invaders, most northern Italians probably
viewed Francis as a liberator from Swiss oppression. With the main Swiss army ensconced at Milan,
Francis’ footsore and saddlesore legions halted a short distance from
the city. The vanguard of the French army, led by Duke Charles of
Bourbon, camped at the town of Marignano, but the bulk of the troops
were with the king at Santa Brigeta. For
the next few weeks there was a curious lull while Francis tried to bribe
the Swiss to go home. Among other inducements, the young monarch offered
700,000 gold crowns and an annual subsidy
to each canton. Francis had judged the Swiss well. Though
warlike, they found peace acceptable if tied to profit. Unfortunately
for the Swiss, however, their democratic instincts, so admirable at
home, made for anarchy while on campaign. Major decisions were made by a
fractious council of captains. More debating society than general staff,
the council in this instance analyzed, scrutinized and endlessly
discussed the French offer. One of their number, Albrecht van Stein, was
secretly on the French payroll and used all his powers of persuasion to
clinch the deal. Thanks in part to van Stein’s eloquence,
the captains of Berne, Fribourg and Valais agreed to accept the French
bounty and go home. On September 8, they signed a treaty with Francis
and led their 12,000 men back to Switzerland. The rest of the Swiss –
perhaps as many as 20,000 troops – refused to budge, their resolve
strengthened by Cardinal Matthaus Schinner, a poisonous prelate who
called for the spilling of French blood in the most graphic terms. On the morning of September 13, 1515,
thousands upon thousands of Swiss pikemen poured out of Milan’s Roman
Gate, rank after rank, but marching without the customary beat of drums.
The march was to be conducted in relative silence, because it was hoped
the French might be surprised in their encampments. The heat was intense, and as the long files
of men tramped down the road, their marching feet kicked up plumes of
dust. Their very dust then proved their undoing, because the tell-tale
clouds betrayed the Swiss’ movement. French lookouts noted the
enemy’s approach and alerted their army that an attack was imminent. At that moment King Francis was in his
chamber trying on some new armor. German-made, as were all the best
suits of the period, it was tastefully decorated with blue enamel
devices and fit the king like a second skin. The metallic rig allegedly
was so closely fitted that no weapon could pierce it. While servants
scurried about, adjusting the suit for his royal comfort, Francis no
doubt took pride in his martial bearing and majestic poise. But then came a boyhood friend, Robert de la
March, Seigneur de Fleurange. Fleurange had urgent news – even as they
spoke, the Swiss were falling upon the French vanguard at Marignano, 10
miles to the southeast of Milan. French trumpeters raised instruments to
their lips and shattered the muggy air with high-flown notes of alarm as
the French camp roused itself to action. And indeed, a few scant miles
away, their comrades in the vanguard were engaged in a desperate battle
for survival. Three Swiss phalanx formations of 7,000 or 8,000 men each
were barreling down on their outnumbered Gallic foes. The men in the
first three ranks of each phalanx lowered their weapons shoulder-high
and moved off in a disciplined trot. Phalanx frontage rarely exceeded 30
men, but the Phalanx often was 150 men deep. The tactic was of a simple
bludgeon to punch a hole in the enemy line by
sheer momentum and weight of numbers. As the Swiss attacked, they would have
presented a colorful if frightening sight to their hard-pressed foes.
Wearing striped hose of various hues, puffed sleeve jerkins and jaunty
bonnets, their martial air was only slightly dimmed by the patina of
dust that covered them. Few wore any kind of armor, as if they despised
such “cowardly” protection. Here and there, bright canton flags
blossomed in the pike “groves,” rallying points in the heat of
battle. The flags also
marked the Swiss dispositions. As befitted their seniority in the
confederation, the old cantons – Uri, Unterwalden and Schwyz – made
up the Swiss center, while the Swiss left was anchored by troops from
Basle, Schaffhausen and Lucerne. The Swiss left was held by men from
Glaurus, Appenzel, St. Gall and Zurich. A young chaplain named Zwingli
marched with his fellow Zurichers, scarcely imagining that in a few
short years he would be a major figure in the Protestant Reformation. The terrain around Marignano favored the
defense. Much of the ground was a treeless plain, true, but its flat
surface was broken by canals and rice fields. Still silent, grim-faced,
the Swiss at first drove the French light cavalry before them. Their
forward momentum was broken by a ditch, but even so they slammed into
the German Landsknechte with the force of a pile driver. Teutons
fell in heaps, and the survivors began to give way. In the first rush,
the Swiss captured 15 of Francis’ precious artillery pieces. But the Landsknechte had pikes, too,
and rallied to give the Swiss a taste of their own spiky medicine. The
two sides collided in a jumble of pikes, transforming the contest into a
brutal and bloody tug of war. Putting their backs into it, the Germans
would force the Swiss back a few yards, only to have their positions
reversed a few moments later. Then, suddenly, King Francis arrived with
his cavalry, bursting on the scene as the answer to a Gallic prayer.
Like his companions, the king was covered in armor from head to foot.
His long-nosed features were hidden by a plumed helmet and closed visor,
but few could fail to recognize the king as he galloped boldly forward,
lance couched under his arm. He was mounted on a huge war horse that was
covered with a blue velvet "trapper” festooned with crowned F’s
and spangled with golden fleurs-de-lis.
The king and his companions mounted a flank attack against the
Swiss host, checking though not stopping their steamrolling advance. The
battle soon degenerated into a bloody bludgeoning match, with little
quarter asked or given. In fact, the Swiss had mutually pledged to spare
no Frenchman except the king himself. It was to be a war of total
extermination. The battle seesawed back and forth, now the
Swiss seemingly on the verge of victory, a moment later fortune smiling
on the Gauls. Francis personally led charge after charge – some said
as many as 30 separate advances – and, as he fought, the royal warrior
and his men were like woodcutters paring down the pike “forest,”
tree by tree. In the meantime the young monarch’s new Venetian allies
had yet to put in their appearance. During brief lulls in the fray, when
opposing sides parted to regroup or rally, French artillery opened up on
the stubbornly brave Swiss, plowing great gory lanes into their packed
ranks. Cannonballs lopped off limbs, beheaded and disemboweled with
horrifying ease, but the mountaineers refused to break off the battle.
And since the Swiss had few guns of their own, the artillery barrage
provided a one-sided slaughter. Lengthening shadows combined with coils of
dust to create a true “fog of war.” In a battle of sheer butchery,
the French and the Swiss were literally blind gladiators as they groped
for a vital spot. Few won any laurels in this pounding match, save
perhaps for Pierre du Terrail, seigneur de Bayard. Bayard was a
magnificent anachronism in a Machiavellian age. Courtly and chivalrous,
handy with a sword or a lance, Bayard was Sir Lancelot “reborn,”
though without the latter’s roving eye for married ladies. As
time wore on, even Bayard, the knight of knights, “sans peur et
sans reproache,” was having a hard time. When unchivalrous Swiss
pikes cut his horse’s bridle, he was forced to dismount near some
grapevine stakes. All the dust, combined with black powder smoke, had
cut visibility to almost zero by this point. Lost in the gloom, but
knowing the enemy was all around, Bayard cast off his helmet to see
better. He also discarded his leg armor for better mobility. The French knight crawled on all fours
through the muck of drainage ditches (so much for knightly romance!),
probably expecting a lethal pike thrust at any moment. Finally, shouts
of “France! France!” through the choking darkness guided him to his
own lines. The dull ring of steel against steel, the
screams of the wound-ed, and the basso profundo bellowing of the
cannons created a fearful din, mixed with the rattle of drums and squeal
of fifes calling attack or retreat. At one point, Francis made a
desperate charge with only 25 men, but he emerged unscathed. When the sun finally sank into a cushion of
smoke and dust, and night fell, the battle simply raged on under the
moon’s impassive eye. Men-at-arms abandoned their mounts to fight on
foot with sword and axe, hacking, stabbing, thrusting at their stubborn
opponents. Toward midnight, though, the battle finally slowed and
stopped, due to the sheer exhaustion of the participants. The moon must
have set because, according to chronicles of the event, the troops
didn’t know where they were as they groped and stumbled through the
inky void. The debris of battle, the dead and wounded, men and animals,
made a horrific obstacle course for the weary soldiers feeling their way
in the dark. Numb with fatigue, battered and disoriented,
it is recorded, too, numbers of Swiss and Frenchmen actually bedded down
with each other when they couldn’t find their own lines. In the midst
of the carnage, Francis leaned heavily against a gun carriage. Just
yesterday – or was it a century ago’.– the king had turned 21. The
Swiss had certainly provided him quite a “coming-of-age” party! Still in armor, his body had been pummeled
by many blows and, dehydrated from fighting in a metal suit all day
under a blazing sun, the king cried for water to slake a burning thirst.
Hearing his request, his trumpeter went to a nearby
irrigation ditch and filled a helmet with water in the darkness.
The king gratefully accepted the brimming helmet and took a large
swallow – only to spew the contents out with disgust. The water, it
seemed, was heavy with mud and blood.
When dawn broke, both sides prepared to renew the conflict French
trumpets played shrill martial tunes, accompanied by the mournful
bellowing of the “Bull of Uri" and the “Cow of Unterualden,”
two great Swiss Alphorns that rallied the mountaineers. It was now
Friday, September 14, the Feast of the Holy
Cross, normally a
day for quiet prayer... but
not here. Francis
drew up his bloodied legions into three divisions: the left was
commanded by the Duke of Bourbon, the center bv the king, and the right
by the Duke of Alencon. The Swiss massed a human “battering ram” of
8,000 pikemen against the French center, supported by two cannons. The
Swiss also hail a few arquebusiers – matchlock musketeers – but, as
always they chiefly relied
on the pike. The
Swiss attacked with their customary fierceness, but were unable to break
through the French lines. French cannon flamed and recoiled, and the air
was filled with French crossbow bolts as the Swiss masses drew near. The
Swiss reaped nothing but casualties in the center, but their supporting
plalanxes made some headway against the French right under Alencon. As
the mountaineers pressed forward, they pushed Alencon's' troops back to
Marignano and sowed the seeds of panic. Afraid and
confused, French soldiers of the right began shouting "All is
lost!" as they withdrew. The
crisis of the battle was near at hand. Victory hung in the balance, and
fortune could smile on either side. The Then, about 8 o’clock in the morning,
shouts of “Marco! Marco!” could be heard above the clamor of battle
– Francis’ Venetian allies at last had arrived! And, in the end, the
infusion of 12,000 fresh Venetians would tip the scales in favor of the
French. The Battle of Marignano now lost, 28 hours after it had begun,
the Swiss disengaged and withdrew to Milan. Four hundred Zurichers, left
as a rear guard, repulsed a body of Venetian cavalry before being shot
to pieces by Francis’ ravenous cannons. The invincible Swiss had been defeated,
vanquished by a combination of hard fighting, artillery and just plain
good luck – many people could scarcely believe the terrors of Europe
had been destroyed. But there, on the grisly battlefield, was the proof
– between 16,000 and 17,000 corpses littered the ground under a
broiling sun, and the wounded seemed numberless. Perhaps 5,000 had
fallen on the French side. The remainder – more than 10,000 – were
Swiss.
Francis had won a remarkable victory over the premiere fighting
force of Europe, and in spite of the carnage all around him, the
king’s basically romantic nature reasserted itself. He had almost been
killed – a deep rent in his visor bore mute testimony to that.
Still, he had triumphed, and he was determined to celebrate the
event. Summoning the legendary Bayard to his side,
the king asked the chevalier to knight him on the battlefield. Francis
must have felt he won his spurs, and was determined to mark his passage
into manhood. Bayard protested, since, as king, Francis already was
considered the font of chivalry, but the young monarch insisted. The
chevalier complied with the request and tapped his blade lightly on the
kneeling king’s shoulders. As Francis rose, Bayard declared that a
sword that performed such a ceremony was no ordinary weapon. Henceforth,
Bayard explained, he would use this sword only against Turk, Saracen, or
Moor – that is, on a holy crusade. The French victory was complete.
Acknowledging the outcome, Switzerland evacuated Lombardy and signed a
“perpetual peace” with the northern kingdom, a pact that was to last
until the French Revolution more than 300 years later. Milan –
together with Lombardy – was annexed to the French crown. For 10 more years Francis’ star was high,
but in the long run, French hegemony in Italy was as ephemeral as
Marignano’s dust clouds. Embroiled in a war with the Hapsburg Emperor
Charles V, Francis lost a decisive battle and was himself captured at
Pavia in 1525. Marignano, meanwhile, would remain a
historic milestone, because it helped to give birth to modern warfare,
because it was a place where guns and powder supplanted the pike and the
sword. No longer could men rely on medieval – even ancient –
techniques of war to achieve victory. The Age of Ordnance had begun. Author
Eric Niderost's ancestor Martin Niderist (as the name
was then spelled) of Canton Schwyz fell at Marignano. For further
reading, please try Desmond Seward’s Prince of the Renaissance:
The Golden Life of Francis I, (Macmillan, New York, 1973) with its
excellent account of the Battle of Marignano. Another
book by the Eric Niderost: Reprinted
with permission by the Author. |
||
|
|
