Notes From Burckhardt: On French Invasion, 1494

Lecture notes of Jacob Burckhardt, history professor at the University of Basel were collected from the years 1865-85. Emil Dürr edited and assembled these and they were published under the title of Historiche Fragmente as volume seven of Burckhardt's Collected Works in 1929. The translation of this by Harry Zohn that I have is from 1958 and was a find of pure luck. Burckhardt is a favorite historian, still widely admired for his conclusions, deep understanding and passion for history. He has a reputation for clarity and even almost a  kind of certainty, that stems from his works, but a position in his own world as a kind of outsider, not unlike Alexis de Tocqueville or even Frederich Nietzsche. He also may have shared certain aristocratic sensibilities or judgements from his upbringing, but there is where similarities with de Tocqueville probably end. A biographic sketch of him and his times will come later.

In the broadest section of the book are notes from the period 1450-1589. Big sections on the French Invasion of 1494 follow.

"Basically, this campaign was pure folly. It would have been to the real French interest, at any rate, that Naples should belong to an Aragonese bastard line rather than to that Aragonese who already possessed Sicily. The greatest significance of these lands was to be the vanguard against Islam, a very difficult honorary privilege! ... On the other hand, Naples was at best a valueless possession for France, and Charles VIII would not have set out merely for the sake of Naples; could designs on Constantinople and Jerusalem have been the decisive factor?"

 Some today say this was the young king's big motivation, to take Naples and start a crusade.

"Could this whole swindle with Constantinople and Jesrusalem have been only a mask -- to lend a campaign of conquest the character of a crusade? Considering the Turkish menace at that time, a mere campaign of conquest against Naples was an enormous scandal; [pope] Alexander VI (in February of 1494?) reminds Charles that such a campaign could really not be undertaken importuniori tempore [at a less favorable time]; Ferrante might  in utter despair throw himself into the arms of the Turks. Then, too, 30,000 men were quite insufficient for a crusade. But the main consideration is one that is hardly ever brought up: through her invading zeal France incited the Spanish power, which was bent on increasing its might anyway, to apply itself likewise to further occupation of outside areas." 

Burckhardt starts his denouncement of this adventure simply as "... grand politics directed toward the outside."

"It was as though France wanted to compensate for the austere prose of Louis XI. Romanticism burgeons on every side. To the realist... it had to happen that his so well guarded son must become a visionary (the daughter, Anne de Beaujeu, was a realist)."

"The other side of the French mind, the imaginative, comes brilliantly to the fore. It was in this light that the Italians regarded Charles VIII. To Savonarola he is the great, exalted head of the Guelphs; to Pisa he is a liberator; to Naples a ...[sacred crown]; to all a great new chance in that land of chances, Italy."

Burckhardt then quotes contemporary French historian Henri Martin for the effects of this newfound belligerence. In translation:

"The revolutionary and warlike element in the French population retained, after the campaign of Naples, a blind passion for remote conquests, a deadly infatuation with its military superiority...".

It was these advances and trials that would awaken Spain. It was the abandonment he says, of Artois and Franche-Comte in 1493 by the French in favor of Italian prospects that kept France from advancing into Flanders. This would create a vacuum there that the later Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V would exploit and his son Phillip II would claim to crush the Reformation in Holland. It would also throw Italy into war for sixty years.
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from pp 87-90 of Jacob Burckhardt: Judgments on History and Historians translated by Harry Zohn, Beacon Press, Boston, 1958