ABSTRACT
The Italian Wars lasted for over sixty years and it is inconceivable that such a dynamic society would have remained static for that length of time. As yet, there has been no focused historical debate about what the consequences of the Italian Wars may have been. Those who lived through them naturally lamented the destruction they brought, the ruined towns and devastated countryside that armies left in their wake, but economic historians have not made a concerted effort to assess what long-term damage or change may have been caused to the economy. It is significant that in discussions of long-term economic decline in the early modern era, the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century is generally identified as the period in which it became evident. Yet Italian ideas and innovations in the arts, especially the visual arts, architecture and music, would be more influential in the rest of Europe in the century after the wars than before.
