Dynastic war and personal rivalry

François de Rochechouart, present on the field of Marignano, reported to his brother that he had not had the slightest hope ‘that we would be duke of Milan’ until the great victory that had just been won. The sentiments are echoed by Brantôme at the end of the century, when he described Milan as ‘our heritage.’ Many contemporaries saw the making of war in terms of the vindication of royal rights and those rights were seen, in some inchoate way, to embody those of the state. Erasmus told Francis I in 1523 that kings ‘have the sword to defend the tranquility of the common weal, not to foster their own ambitions’. The year before, he wrote to Charles V that no reasons for war justified the sufferings that it inflicted. Both Erasmus and Thomas More, though, assumed that princes waged war in the defence of their rights and reputations. The works of 1516–17, which in the case of More satirised French debates about war for dynastic rights or, in the case of Erasmus, systematically undermined the case for dynastic war, make this quite clear. For Claude Collet in his Erasmian tract against the war of 1544, one argument for war was ‘for each to maintain his right’. The same idea was expressed ironically by the voice of Mars in Claude Chappuys's 1540 celebration of peace: ‘What's a king worth who does not strive,/ his lands and kingdoms to make wide ?’ The rules that governed international relations were expressed in terms of the rights of princes. No just war could be embarked upon without the vindication of such ‘rights’ and they, in a sense, provided a framework through which kings and princes could understand their role.

The historiographer Jean d’Auton began his narrative of Louis XII's campaign to conquer Milan with a detailed exposé of the King's ‘right and title’ with ‘a little genealogy.’ This derived from the marriage of Duke Louis of Orléans to Valentina Visconti, a right ‘usurped’ by the Sforzas. Though the vindication of this had been impeded by the wars with the English, Louis XII on his accession logically and immediately took it up.