ABSTRACT
Organisers of curricula and authors of textbooks have usually fixed and accepted a date at the end of the fifteenth century as the arbitrary dividing line between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ European history, the most conventional of such dates being that of the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France in 1494. The very idea of such a disjunction has itself a long history, and ultimately goes back, as does the concept of ‘the Renaissance’, to the opinions of contemporary writers. One of the most influential works in formulating this view of 1494 as a dividing line is Francesco Guicciardini's Storia d'Italia, written in about 1536–9 and published in 1561. Guicciardini begins his history of Italy with the year 1494 and his principal theme is the ‘calamities’ inflicted on a previously tranquil and wealthy peninsula by this and subsequent invasions.
