ABSTRACT
Traditional historiography presents Charles VIII's expedition to Italy as the whim of a young King with rather vague ideas, haunted by the chivalrous visions inherited from the Middle Ages, intoxicated by the temptations of the Italian Renaissance, but incapable of understanding the true interests of France, which lay on her north-eastern borders. Such an interpretation is clearly anachronistic, dominated by the struggle which France had to sustain, first against the House of Habsburg, then against Germany, from the sixteenth century onwards. But the power of the Habsburgs was not so threatening during the reign of Charles VIII. As for the Mediterranean, it remained an important element, not only culturally and politically desirable, but also as the source of economic rivalry, even though the Portuguese were determined to find a new route to the Indies via the Atlantic, and the recent discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus aroused only the vaguest interest. I
On the other hand, the attention of the French princes was always focused on Italy, ever since the Crown Lands had acquired the Mediterranean through the incorporation of Languedoc, and since the younger brother of St Louis, Charles I of Anjou, had become count of Provence through marriage in 1246. From that point onwards, Italy was often to be a theatre for French intervention.
