Ferrante of Naples the Statecraft of a Renaissance Prince
David Abulafia reassesses the life and motives of a notorious ruler and the complex web of Renaissance diplomacy involving him which led up to the Italian wars.
The invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France in 1494-95 has acquired a special reputation as the start of a new era in Italian politics after the forty-year settlement between Milan, Venice, Florence, the papacy and Naples that supposedly followed the Peace of Lodi in 1454. For the great sixteenth-century Florentine historian, Francesco Guicciardini, the French invasion marked the beginning of an unending Italian tragedy, continuing through the reigns of Louis XII and Francis I of France and of Ferdinand II and Charles I of Spain; 1494 was:
... a most unhappy year for Italy, truly the beginning of the pears of wretchedness, because it opened the way for innumerable horrible calamities which later for various reasons afflicted a great part of the rest of the world.
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