War

Abstract

For Italy the sixteenth century was certainly one spent under the sign of Mars. War had descended on the Peninsula at the end of the previous century and raged for many decades. Plague and Famine were quick to follow. Even though the interaction between the Horsemen was complex,¹ indisputably it was War that acted as a kind of link between the various types of calamitous events that tormented Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century. There is a belief among many historians and also among many chroniclers of the time that it was the passage of armies that caused the devastations that led to famine and that the troops were the carriers of contagious diseases, facilitating the spread of epidemics. This view seems essentially correct, although hardly sufficient to understand fully events whose complexity will be unravelled in the following chapters. Now though it is worth covering the main events of the wars, setting them in the intricate political, diplomatic and institutional context of the time in order to provide an essential frame of reference for the analyses that will be proposed later. It will also be an opportunity to appraise the economic-demographic consequences of the wars themselves, which are usually (but not always rightly) considered secondary to the famine and the epidemics associated with them.²