Acting, then, from motives of personal ambition, not from any wide conception of statecraft, Ludovico persuaded Charles VIII of France, son of Louis XI, that honour and glory lay in his renewal of the old Angevin claims to Naples, and in 1494, with a great flourish of trumpets, the French expedition started across the Alps. ‘I will assist in making you greater than Charlemagne,’ Ludovico had boasted, when dangling his bait before the young French King’s eyes; but the results of what he had intended were so far beyond his real expectations as to give him new cause for ‘cringing and fear’. ‘The French,’ said Pope Alexander VI sarcastically, ‘needed only a child’s wooden spurs and chalk to mark up their lodgings for the night.’ [Sidenote: French Invasion of Italy] Almost without opposition, and where they encountered it achieving easy victories, the French marched through Italy from north to south, entering Florence, that had driven Piero and his brothers into exile, compelling the hasty submission of Rome, sweeping the Aragonese from Naples, whose fickle population came out with cheers to greet their new conquerors. Certainly the causes of this victory were not due to the young conqueror himself, with his ungainly body and over-developed head, with his swollen ambitions and feeble brain, with his pious talk of a crusade against the East, and the idle debauch for which he and his subjects earned unenviable notoriety. Commines, a Frenchman with a shrewd idea of his master’s incompetence, believed that God must have directed the conquering armies, since the wisdom of man had nothing to say to it; but Italian historians found the cause of their country’s humiliation in her political and military decadence. We have seen how ‘Companies’ of hired soldiers held Italy in thrall during the fourteenth century; but with the passing of years what was once a serious business had become a complicated kind of chess with mercenary levies for pawns. Fifteenth-century _condottieri_ were as great believers in war as ever Sir John Hawkwood; but, susceptible to the veneer of civilization that glosses the Renaissance, they had lost the mediaeval taste for bloodshed. What they retained was the desire to prolong indeterminate campaigns in order to draw their pay, while reducing the dangers and hardships involved to the least adequate pretence of real warfare. Here is Machiavelli’s sarcastic commentary: ‘They spared no effort,’ he says, ‘to relieve themselves and their men from fatigue and danger, not killing one another in battle but making prisoners ... they would attack no town by night nor would those within make sorties against their besieging foes. Their camps were without rampart or trench. They fought no winter campaigns.’