The Battle of Marignano, (or bataille de Marignan in French) which took place on 13–14 September 1515, near the town now called Melegnano, 16 km southeast of Milan, was the last major engagement of the War of the League of Cambrai. It pitted the French army, led by Francis I, newly crowned King of France, against the Old Swiss Confederacy. With the French were German landsknechts, and their late-arriving Venetian allies.
The battle resulted in a decisive French victory and the signing of the Treaty of Fribourg, known as the "Perpetual Peace" (Ewiger Frieden, Paix perpétuelle).
Background
The campaign of Marignano followed years of Swiss successes, during which French fortunes in northern Italy had suffered greatly. The Swiss had taken control of Milan (for France the gateway to Italy) after their victory at the Battle of Novara (1513), and returned to its ducal throne Maximilian Sforza, son of Ludovico Sforza, to make Milan a protectorate of Switzerland.
The prologue to the battle was an Alpine passage, in which Francis hauled pieces of artillery (72 huge cannons) over new-made roads over the Col d'Argentière, a previously unknown route. At Villafranca the French, led by Jacques de la Palice, surprised and captured the Papal commander, Prospero Colonna, in a daring cavalry raid deep behind the allied lines (the Chevalier Bayard providing the impetus and expertise). Colonna and his staff aside, the French seized a great deal of booty on the raid, including 600 horses.
The capture of Colonna, along with the startling appearance of the French army on the plains of Piedmont, stunned the allies. The Pope and the Swiss both sought terms with Francis, while the Spanish allies en route from Naples halted to await developments. The main Swiss army retreated to Milan, while a large faction, tired of the war and eager to return home with the booty of years of successful campaigning, urged terms with the French.
Though the parties reached a peace agreement that gave Milan back to the French, leading large portions of the Swiss army to return home, fresh troops also arrived from the Swiss cantons who refused to abide by the treaty. Discord swept through the Swiss forces until Matthäus Schiner, cardinal of Sion and an arch-enemy of King Francis, tricked the Swiss into doing battle with a far superior force by exaggerating the extent of a minor skirmish. The Swiss issued forth from Milan in disciplined columns, numbering around 22,000.
Battle
The Swiss encountered Francis's forces at the little burnt-out village of Marignano on a plain dotted with vineyards, farm fields, small orchards, and pastures. A treaty signed, the French were not expecting battle. Francis was in his tent, trying on a new suit of armor, when scouts reported the coming of the Swiss. The French army quickly sprang into action, forming up in three divisions. The French vanguard, under the joint command of Charles III, Duke of Bourbon and the Marshal Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, took possession of two shallow rises near San Giuliano. This formation consisted of crossbowmen (protected by earthworks and pavise shields) on the left, a large square of Landsknecht infantry at the center, and arquebusiers on the right, covering the artillery, which was arrayed in a crescent shape along the south-eastern and eastern edges of the formation. Two kilometers to their rear, Francis I of France personally led a force of cavalry and 6,000 Landsknechts recruited from the Netherlands known as the Black Band of Gueldern. Finally, the rearguard, a further kilometer to the center's rear, was led by the King's brother-in-law, Charles IV, Duke of Alençon. Unlike the French force, which had a good mix of pikemen, arquebuses, and cavalry, the Swiss force consisted almost entirely of pike infantry and only fielded less than a dozen artillery pieces.
Close to sunset, the Swiss approached the French in three divisions of their own, each a dense mass of pikemen. They had no artillery or cavalry, and had learned in past actions that a rapid advance into the enemy would sweep all before them. At Marignano, the battle began with a “forlorn hope” detaching from the Swiss vanguard phalanx, and charging the grand battery in front of the King’s position in the center with lowered pikes. Their intent, justified by experience in other battles, was to quickly overrun the French cannon and then turn them upon their owners.
At first the Swiss attack succeeded in driving back the landsknecht defenders and capturing a few of the guns, the speed of the Swiss advance rendering their fire ineffective. But Bourbon’s cavalry from the French right counter-attacked their flank, driving the forlorn hope back to the shelter of the Swiss vanguard. The pursuing French horse were themselves forced to retreat back a full kilometer after taking heavy losses.
Smoke and the coming of night obscured the battle; in the moonlight and confusion, the outcome hung in the balance. Furious French cavalry charges, often led by the king himself, with Bayard at his side, succeeded time and again in throwing back temporary Swiss gains. Many of the foremost French commanders were wounded or killed in the desperate night fighting, including the Prince of Tallemont, son of Louis II de la Trémoille, who died with sixty-two wounds on his body. The Black Legion counter-attacked and threw back the Swiss, only to be repulsed in turn. Bayard had to cut his way through the Swiss phalanx to rescue the Duke of Lorraine, stranded in the dark amongst his enemies. In the darkest hours, the fighting stopped, and both armies extracted themselves and reorganized. During the night, some of the Swiss soldiers, and even entire units, slipped away from the battlefield rather than fight another day. Those that remained were determined and the battle commenced again the following morning.
In the French center, the grand battery had been reassembled. Opposing them, the Swiss had reformed their largest phalanx. Encouraged by the evening before, the Swiss once again lowered pikes and charged the French guns. This time the grand battery was ready for them. Massed cannon fire tore bloody furrows deep in their ranks, slowing the advance. But the undaunted Swiss continually closed ranks and pushed forward. Again, the defending German landsknechts were driven back; but the massed fire of the guns at point blank range prevented the Swiss from pushing farther forward. Still another French cavalry charge, this time led by Bayard, forced the attacking Swiss to give ground.
Baffled by the artillery but as yet undaunted, the Swiss refocused their assault against Alençon’s left-wing division. After making some headway, this attack too was thrown back. In his report later to his mother, King Francis would boast that “thirty brave charges” were hurled by the French gendarmerie against the stubborn Swiss.
Only the mid-morning arrival of allied Venetian forces commanded by the condottiero Bartolomeo d'Alviano turned the tide against the Swiss. Their attacks repulsed everywhere, their ranks in bloody shambles, they grudgingly gave ground and withdrew by forming a single gigantic open square, maintaining extraordinary discipline in their retreat.
The battle was a decisive victory for Francis. This could be considered the expected outcome, seeing as the Swiss were heavily outnumbered and outgunned. But the Swiss during the preceding decades had almost habitually emerged victorious from such disadvantageous situations, and the French victory by no means came easily, the battle hanging in the balance until the arrival of the Venetian reinforcements.
The immediate causes of the Swiss defeat were their failure to capture the enemy artillery during the early phase of the battle and the arrival of the Venetians. But also contributing to the Swiss defeat were their lack of discipline and their ineffective command structure. Earlier in the same year of 1515, the Swiss diet had granted to each captain the authority to decide whether their company would continue their campaign or retreat. This made it impossible for the Swiss forces to act as a unit. The system of command consisted of two captains elected as commanders-in-chief, besides the captains of the individual companies, as well as one representative elected by the men-at-arms of each canton. These commanders would vote on the policy of the Swiss army. In practice, this system broke down as soon as it was put to the test: the captains decided to honour the agreement not to attack, while the representatives of the troops, especially those of Uri, Schwyz, and Glarus, decided to attack regardless, motivated by the prospect of rich spoils.
Results
French side
“I have vanquished those whom only Caesar vanquished” was printed on the medal King Francis ordered struck to commemorate the victory. Considering the battle his most cherished triumph, Francis requested that he be knighted on the battlefield, in the ancient style, by the Chevalier Bayard. Marshal Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, veteran of every war for the previous 40 years, praised Marignano as the “battle of giants” and stated that compared to it, all previous battles in his lifetime had been “child’s sport”.
French success at Marignano, however, eventually galvanized opposition in the divided peninsula and turned the European balance of power against Francis I. In the meantime, however, Francis gained the city of Milan, and more importantly, the Castello Sforzesco within it, the strategic key to control of Lombardy. There Maximilian Sforza and his Swiss mercenaries and the cardinal-bishop of Sion retreated, only submitting when French sappers had placed mines under the foundations. The French regained Milan, and Maximilian went into luxurious exile with a French purse of 100,000 écus.
Swiss side
The retreating Swiss army retained control of their upper-Lombardy provinces of Bellinzona and adjacent valleys, leaving a rearguard to preside over them.
The battle ended all Swiss aspirations in Milan; never again did the Swiss Confederacy fight against France or Milan.
The Confederacy did not go to war against anyone after 1525, and (apart from the conquest of Vaud by the canton of Bern acting on its own in 1536) there was never another Swiss military offensive against an external enemy. Swiss historiography has tended to attribute this to the "lesson learned" at Marignano, but at least as effective was the division created by the Swiss Reformation in the 1520s, dividing the Confederacy into two factions which would be occupied with internal hostilities throughout the period of the European Wars of Religion, as well as a number of painful defeats of Swiss mercenary regiments in the decade between 1515 and 1525 (at Bicocca, Sesia and Pavia).
Perpetual Peace
After lengthy negotiations, a peace treaty between the Thirteen Cantons and their allies (abbot and city of St. Gallen, Three Leagues, Valais, Mulhouse) on one hand and Francis as both King of France and Duke of Milan on the other was signed in Fribourg on 29 November 1516. In the treaty of Fribourg, known as "Perpetual Peace" (Ewiger Frieden, Paix perpétuelle), the Swiss Confederacy renounced all claims to the protectorate of Milan. In return, France paid 700,000 gold crowns in compensation to the Confederacy. Both parties agreed to abstain from giving any support to enemies of the other party (with the exception of pre-existing treaties) and agreed on an arrangement of arbitration in the case of future disputes. France offered another 300,000 crowns if the Swiss were willing to yield their transmontane territories (except for Bellinzona), but this offer was declined. The treaty furthermore granted trade privileges to the Swiss, both in Milan and in Lyon. Only the Ossola valley was passed back to Milan, while the other transmontane bailiwicks of the Swiss Confederacy remain part of Switzerland to this day, since 1803 as the canton Ticino (while the Three Leagues lost control of the Valtellina in 1797).