ABSTRACT
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 signifi cant that in discussions of long-term economic decline in the early modern era, the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century is generally identifi ed as the period in which it became evident, not the period of the wars: this points to a swift recovery, when peace was established. Cultural historians have noted how the wars provoked a crisis of confi dence among educated Italians, making them question whether the intellectual life as well as the political institutions and traditions of which they had been so proud might not have contributed to the disasters they suffered, might not have made Italians vulnerable to conquest by less sophisticated, more martial peoples from across the Alps. Yet Italian ideas and innovations in the arts, especially the visual arts, architecture and music, would be more infl uential in the rest of Europe in the century after the wars than before. The clearest long-term changes caused by the wars were political. Two of the major Italian states had become part of the dominions of the king of Spain, and the political role of the others had been fundamentally altered; the state system of Italy was very different after Cateau-Cambrésis from what it had been before Charles VIII’s invasion of Naples in 1494.
