he
direction in which we must use all our exertions rather than against a
state, the possession of which, so far from being advantageous to us,
could not but weaken us." "Unhappily," says the latest, learned
historian of Charles VIII. [_Histoire de Charles VIII._, by the late M.
de Cherrier, t. i. p. 393], "the veteran marshal died on the 22d of
April, 1494, in a small town some few leagues from Lyons, and thenceforth
all hope of checking the current became visionary. . . . On the 8th
of September, 1494, Charles VIII. started from Grenoble, crossed Mount
Genevre, and went and slept at Oulx, which was territory of Piedmont. In
the evening a peasant who was accused of being a master of Vaudery
[i.e. one of the Vaudois, a small population of reformers in the Alps,
between Piedmont and Dauphiny] was brought before him; the king gave him
audience, and then handed him over to the provost, who had him hanged on
a tree." By such an act of severity, perpetrated in a foreign country
and on the person of one who was not his own subject, did Charles VIII.
distinguish his first entry into Italy.

[Illustration: Charles VIII. crossing the Alps----285]

It were out of place to follow out here in all its details a war which
belongs to the history of Italy far more than to that of France; it will
suffice to point out with precision the positions of the principal
Italian states at this period, and the different shares of influence they
exercised on the fate of the French expedition.

Six principal states, Piedmont, the kingdom of the Dukes of Savoy; the
duchy of Milan; the republic of Venice; the republic of Florence; Rome
and the pope; and the kingdom of Naples, co-existed in Italy at the end
of the fifteenth century. In August, 1494, when Charles VIII. started
from Lyons on his Italian expedition, Piedmout was governed by Blanche of
Montferrat, widow of Charles the 'Warrior,' Duke of Savoy, in the name of
her son Charles John Amadeo, a child only six years old. In the duchy of
Milan the power was in the hands of Ludovic Sforza, called the Moor, who,
being ambitious, faithless, lawless, unscrupulous, employed it in
banishing to Pavia the lawful duke, his own nephew, John Galeas Mario
Sforza, of whom the Florentine ambassador said to Ludovic himself, "This
young man seems to me a good young man and animated by good sentiments,
but very deficient in wits." He was destined to die ere long, probably
by poison. The republic of