the two contracting powers, and it
provided for divers political incidents which might be entailed, and to
which the alliance thus concluded should or should not be applicable
according to the special stipulations which were drawn up with a view to
those very incidents.

In the month of August, 1499, the French army, with a strength of from
twenty to five and twenty thousand men, of whom five thousand were Swiss,
invaded Milaness. Duke Ludovic Sforza opposed to it a force pretty
nearly equal in number, but far less full of confidence and of far less
valor. In less than three weeks the duchy was conquered; in only two
cases was any assault necessary; all the other places were given up by
traitors or surrendered without a show of resistance. The Venetians had
the same success on the eastern frontier of the duchy. Milan and Cremona
alone remained to be occupied. Ludovic Sforza "appeared before his
troops and his people like the very spirit of lethargy," says a
contemporary unpublished chronicle, "with his head bent down to the
earth, and for a long while he remained thus pensive and without a single
word to say. Howbeit he was not so discomfited but that on that very
same day he could get his luggage packed, his transport-train under
orders, his horses shod, his ducats, with which he had more than thirty
mules laden, put by, and, in short, everything in readiness to decamp
next morning as early as possible." Just as he left Milan, he said to
the Venetian ambassadors, "You have brought the King of France to dinner
with me; I warn you that he will come to supper with you."

"Unless necessity constrain him thereto," says Machiavelli [treatise Du
Prince, ch. xxi.], "a prince ought never to form alliance with one
stronger than himself in order to attack others, for, the most powerful
being victor, thou remainest, thyself, at his discretion, and princes
ought to avoid, as much as ever they can, being at another's discretion.
The Venetians allied themselves with France against the Duke of Milan;
and yet they might have avoided this alliance, which entailed their
ruin." For all his great and profound intellect, Machiavelli was wrong
about this event and the actors in it. The Venetians did not deserve his
censure. By allying themselves, in 1499, with Louis XII. against the
Duke of Milan, they did not fall into Louis's hands, for, between 1499
and 1515, and many times over, they sided alternately with and against
him, a