Battle of Marignano (1515): Francis I Defeats the Swiss

The Battle of Marignano was fought on 13 and 14 September 1515 near Marignano, today Melegnano, south-east of Milan, between the army of the young King Francis I of France and the Swiss Confederates who controlled the Duchy of Milan. After nearly two days of fighting, part of it by night, the Swiss withdrew. The victory gave Milan to France and ended the period in which Swiss pikemen had seemed unbeatable on the battlefields of the Italian Wars.

Background: the struggle for Milan

From 1494 France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Venice, the papacy and the Swiss fought a long series of conflicts known as the Italian Wars. The rich Duchy of Milan was one of the main prizes. Louis XII of France had held it from 1499, but in 1512 the Swiss drove the French out and installed Massimiliano Sforza as duke under their protection. They beat a French army again at Novara in 1513.

Francis I became king on 1 January 1515, aged twenty, and immediately prepared to recover Milan, which he claimed through his great-grandmother Valentina Visconti. The Swiss guarded the usual Alpine passes, but in August the French army crossed by a little-used southern route over the Col de l’Argentière, dragging its artillery through the mountains, and emerged in Piedmont.

The Swiss were divided. On 8 September some of their leaders accepted a deal at Gallarate under which France would pay them to give up Milan, and the contingents of Bern, Fribourg and Solothurn went home. The remaining troops, urged on by the anti-French Cardinal Matthäus Schiner, decided to fight.

The battle

On the afternoon of 13 September a Swiss army of roughly 20,000 men marched out of Milan and attacked the French camp. Francis commanded perhaps 30,000 or more, including German landsknecht mercenaries, heavy cavalry and a strong train of artillery.

The Swiss advanced in their usual deep columns of pikemen and broke into the French positions, capturing some guns. Repeated charges by French heavy cavalry, led at times by the king in person, and artillery fire held them. The fighting went on after dark and stopped only late at night, with the two armies bivouacking close together.

At dawn on 14 September the Swiss attacked again. During the morning the Venetian commander Bartolomeo d’Alviano, allied to France, arrived with his vanguard, and the Swiss, exhausted and facing fresh troops, decided to withdraw. They retreated to Milan in good order, carrying their wounded, and then marched home.

Casualties

The losses were very heavy for the time and, as usual, are uncertain. Swiss dead are often estimated at about 10,000, and French losses at around 5,000 or more. Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, a veteran of many campaigns, is reported to have described Marignano as a battle of giants, beside which his earlier battles seemed like children’s games.

Consequences

Massimiliano Sforza surrendered Milan’s castle in October 1515 and retired to France on a pension. Francis met Pope Leo X at Bologna in December, which led to the Concordat of Bologna of 1516, giving the French crown wide powers over church appointments.

On 29 November 1516 France and the Swiss signed the Perpetual Peace of Fribourg. The Swiss kept most of their lands south of the Alps, roughly today’s canton of Ticino, and from then on supplied mercenaries to the French king rather than fighting in Italy on their own account. The young priest Huldrych Zwingli, who had served as chaplain to troops from Glarus in these campaigns, became a critic of the mercenary trade, a theme of his later Reformation in Zurich.

Francis’s triumph was short-lived. He lost the imperial election to Charles of Habsburg in 1519, and in 1525 he was defeated and captured at the Battle of Pavia, not far from Marignano.

Legacy and myths

French tradition holds that after the battle Francis asked the famous knight Bayard to knight him on the field. The story appears in sources written soon afterwards, but many historians think it was embellished to glorify the king.

In Switzerland, Marignano became a symbol of the end of expansion and, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, of the origins of neutrality. Historians stress that neutrality developed gradually and was formally recognised only in 1815. Ferdinand Hodler’s mural “Retreat from Marignano”, completed around 1900 for the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, shows the Swiss withdrawal.

Timeline

• 1512, December: Massimiliano Sforza is installed as Duke of Milan with Swiss support.
• 1513, 6 June: The Swiss defeat the French at Novara.
• 1515, 1 January: Francis I becomes King of France.
• 1515, August: The French army crosses the Alps by the Col de l’Argentière.
• 1515, 8 September: Agreement of Gallarate; several Swiss contingents leave.
• 1515, 13–14 September: Battle of Marignano.
• 1516, 29 November: Perpetual Peace of Fribourg between France and the Swiss.

Why it matters

Marignano made Francis I a celebrated warrior-king and gave France control of Milan for a decade. It showed that well-handled artillery and cavalry could defeat the Swiss pike columns, and it marked the end of the Swiss Confederation as an independent military power in Italy. Its rivalries fed directly into the Field of the Cloth of Gold diplomacy and the wars with Charles V.