The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

The mercenary wars of the Swiss upon foreign battle-fields were not wars for liberty or for honor; but these hirelings of princes maintained their reputation for valor even there. With the aid of several thousand Confederates, the King of France subjected the whole of Lombardy in the space of twenty days. But the expelled Duke of the country soon returned with five thousand Swiss, whom he had enlisted contrary to the will of the magistracy, to drive out the French. Then the King of France received twenty thousand men from the cantons with whom he was allied; maintained himself in Italy, and gave to the three cantons, Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, 1502-1503, the districts of Palenza, Riviera, and Bellenz. But, as soon as the King thought he could do without the Swiss, he paid them badly and irregularly. Cardinal Schinner, pleased at this, immediately shook a bag of gold, with fifty-three thousand guilders, in favor of the Pope and of Venice. At once, 1512, twenty thousand Swiss and Grisons crossed the high Alps and joined the Venetians against the French. The Grisons took possession of Valtelina, Chiavenna, and Bormio. They asserted that, a century before, an ejected duke of Milan had ceded these valleys to the bishopric of Coire. The Confederates of the twelve cantons subjected Lugano, Locarno, and Valmaggia. The French were driven out of Lombardy, and the young duke Maximilian Sforza, son of him who had been dispossessed by them, was reinstated in his father's inheritance at Milan. Victorious for him, the Confederates beat the French near Novara, June 6, 1513; two thousand Swiss fell, it is true, but ten thousand of the enemy. Still more murderous was the two-days' battle of Melegnano, September 14, 1515, in which barely ten thousand Swiss fought against fifty thousand French. They lost the battle-field, indeed, but not their honor. They sadly retreated to Milan, with their field-pieces on their backs, their wounded in the centre of their army. The enemy lost the flower of their troops, and called this action the "Battle of the Giants."

Then the King of France, Francis I, terrified by a victory which resembled a defeat, made, in the next year, a perpetual peace with the Confederates, and, by money and promises, persuaded some to furnish him with troops; the others, that they would allow no enrolling by his enemies. Thus the Confederates once more helped him against the Emperor and Pope and against Milan, and the King concluded a friendly alliance with them in 1521. During many years they shed their blood for him on the battle-fields of Italy, without good result, without advantage, except that the Confederacy stood godmother to his new-born son. Each canton sent to Paris, for the fête, a deputy with a baptismal present of fifty ducats. More agreeable to the King than this present was the promptitude with which the Swiss sent sixteen thousand of their troops to his assistance in Italy. However, as they had lost, April 20, 1522, three thousand men near Bicocca; as of nearly fifteen thousand who entered Lombardy, 1524, hardly four thousand came back; as, finally, in the battle near Pajia, February 24, 1525, in which the King himself became prisoner to the Emperor, the Swiss experienced a fresh loss of seven thousand men, they by degrees lost all taste for Italian wars.