Francesco Guicciardini: The History of Italy: i; A Beginning of the French Invasion

At the very beginning of Guicciardini's massive History of Italy he says what he is going to do.

"I propose to relate what past in our memory in Italy,
since the French, invited by our own princes,
came with powerful armies, and interrupted her Repose...."

At first, he says, Italy had been placid and her prosperity by 1490 was greater than it had seen in over a thousand years. Industry and production and sale of goods in cities, and agricultural abundance in the valleys had made the whole region great, and for some while. Part of this, as he gently assures us was due to 'the Virtue and active Spirit' of Lorenzo de'Medici. He knew 'how destructive' it would be 'to himself and Florence' if any of the surrounding powers 'should increase their Dominion'. So he made pacts with the ones he could. There was one with Pope Innocent, and one with King Fernando/Ferrante in Naples. This king, he tells us, as a youth was 'formerly ambitious and turbulent', but by old age, found instead his son Alfonso 'instigating ... resentment' at the plight of Gian Galeazzo Sforza, of Milan.

All this is presented, for Guicciardini, as substrate, the background to the invasion of the French king, Charles VIII in 1494. The gist of this primary story that comes down to us, this resentment, is already here in the first five pages. But the reality and breadth of the story did become much broader and longer. Still, before the account, he says, before talking about the causes and actions of the invasion, first he reminds us how good things were when Lorenzo was the chief man in Florence. When Guicciardini was still a child, in Florence.

Quickly, our narrator then takes us down a long series of paths that fork this way and that across Italy, to France and Spain, giving (in eighty more pages) a wide-ranging catalog of the first persons and powers in Europe. Those with a perceived stake in Italy. The ones with motives.  It is remarkable Guicciardini went this far to develop a context, and for so many players, at least in those times. It was a new way to do history.

Quotes from The History of Italy, translated and printed by 1763 into English and found at the John Adams Library at the Boston Public Library, or online at archive.org.