In January 1515, at just twenty years of age, Francis I became the King of France, and, like his predecessor Louis XII, almost immediately turned his attention to the Italian peninsula. He wanted to reclaim Milan for the French after the Swiss had routed Louis's armies at the Battle of Novara (1513). Competitive and impatient, the young monarch led his men over a secret Alpine passage and surprised the papal commander, Prospero Colonna, behind enemy lines. Although the Swiss almost immediately surrendered Milan and the incumbent duke, Massimiliano Sforza, one commander compelled his troops to resist the French and the two armies clashed at the burnt-out village of Marignano on the outskirts of Milan. Francis emerged victorious, and the decisive Gallic victory affirmed the arrival of a talented new warrior king and the decline of the famed Swiss infantry. Yet, the Battle of Marignano was more than a military encounter; it was a clash of cultures, a clash of ideologies, and a clash of generations.

Marignano marked a changing of the guard in the Italian Wars. The new King of France was only two when the Wars began, and he brought a new style of rulership to the battlefield and to the Valois court. Meanwhile, many of the Wars’ original combatants were either dead or in decline, either as a result of the pox, like Francesco Gonzaga, or devastation to formerly rich agricultural lands, like the March of Monferrat, trampled by cavalry, infantry, and carts laden with heavy artillery.