That Ferdinand should, under any possible circumstances, have been found to spend the blood and treasure of Spain in assisting any neighbor, stranger, or ally, in any enterprise, without direct advantage to himself, was a supposition entirely extravagant. But that he should assist a feather-headed Frenchman to dispossess a son of Aragon of a kingdom from which his own ancestors had thrice driven a French pretender, and where, if any change were to be made in the sovereignty, his own rights of succession were far superior to the shadowy claims derived from the hated Angevins: this was a thing so grotesquely preposterous that it is hard to suppose that even Charles of France should have regarded it as being within the bounds of possibility. Ferdinand contented himself for the moment with expressions of astonishment and offers of good advice, while Charles pushed forward his preparations for the invasion of Italy. Don Alfonso de Silva, dispatched by the court of Spain as a special envoy, came up with the French army at Vienne, on the Rhone, toward the end of June, 1494. But he was instructed rather to seek, than to convey, intelligence of any sort; nor was it to be supposed that his grave remonstrances or his diplomatic warnings should have had much effect upon the movements of an army that was already on the march. In August, 1494, thirty thousand men, hastily equipped, yet well provided with the new and dreadful weapon that was then first spoken of as a cannon, crossed the Alps, and prepared to fight their way to Naples. But no enemy appeared to oppose their progress. The various States of Italy, jealous of one another, if not actually at war, were unable or unwilling to combine against the invader; the roads were undefended; the troops fled; the citizens of the isolated cities opened their gates, one after the other, at the approach of the strange and foreign invader. The French army, in fine, after a leisurely promenade militaire through the heart of Italy, marched unopposed into Rome on the last day of the year 1494. Ferdinand and Isabella had, in the first instance, offered no serious opposition to the French enterprise, which appeared to them to be completely impracticable; and they had awaited with diplomatic equanimity the apparently inevitable disaster, which, without the loss of a single Spanish soldier or the expenditure of a single maravedi, would at once have served all the purposes of Ferdinand, and permitted him to maintain his reputation for goodwill toward Charles, which might have been useful in future negotiations. The astonishing success of the French invasion took the Spanish sovereigns completely by surprise, and it became necessary for Ferdinand to adopt, without haste, but with prudent promptitude, a new policy at once toward France and toward the various parties in Italy.