Before the national levies of France, rough campaigners with no taste for military chess but only determined on as speedy a victory as possible, the make-believe armies of Italy were mown down like ninepins or ran away. Thus clashed two opposing systems--one real, the other by this time almost wholly artificial--and because of its noise and stir, 1494, the year of Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy, is often taken as the boundary-line between mediaeval and modern times, just as the year 476, when Romulus Augustulus gave up his crown, is accepted as the beginning of the Middle Ages. In both cases it is not the events of the actual year that can be said to have created the change. They are merely the culminating evidence of the end of an old order of things and the beginning of a new. [Sidenote: End of the Middle Ages] By 1494 Constantinople was in the hands of the Turks: Columbus had discovered America: John Gutenburg had invented his printing-press: Vasco da Gama was meditating his voyage to India. All these things were witness of ‘a new birth’, the infancy of a modern world; but the year 1494 stands also as evidence of the death of an old, the mediaeval. Stung by the oppression and insolence of their conquerors, Italian armies and intrigue were to drive the French in the years to come temporarily out of Naples; but in spite of this success the effect of Charles VIII’s military ‘walk-over’ was never to be effaced. Italy, in Roman times the centre of Europe from which all law and order had radiated, had clung to a fiction of this power and glory through mediaeval days. Now at last the sham was exposed, and before the forces of nationality her boasted supremacy collapsed. The centre of political gravity had changed, and with it the traditions and ideals for which the supremacy of Italy had stood. _Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73_. Invention of Printing 1435 Caxton’s Press 1474 The Aldine Press 1494 Duns Scotus (died) 1308 Petrarch 1304-74 Giotto 1276-1337 Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519 Ferrante I of Naples (died) 1494 French Invasion of Italy 1494 SOME AUTHORITIES ON MEDIAEVAL HISTORY PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. _The Dark Ages._  C. W. Oman. _The Empire and Papacy._  T. F. Tout. _The Close of the Middle Ages._  R. Lodge. TEXT-BOOKS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. _Mediaeval Europe._  K. Bell. _The Renaissance and the Reformation._  E. M. Tanner. EPOCHS OF MODERN HISTORY. _The Beginning of the Middle Ages._  R. Church. _The Normans in Europe._  A. H. Johnson. _The Crusades._  G. W. Cox. _Edward III._  W. Warburton. HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. _Mohammedanism._  D. S. Margoliouth. _Mediaeval Europe._  H. W. Davis. _The Renaissance._  E. Sichel.