INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of the modern age, the Po Valley was an area in which the fragmentation of power typical of the late Middle Ages coexisted with a progressive consolidation of power in more or less stable forms. In this area of densely concentrated powers, populated by towns, signorie and ecclesiastical orders, the Estensi and the Gonzaga, in Ferrara and Mantua respectively, brought into being a form of power management and a model of government that traditional historiography has summed up in the expression ‘Renaissance state’. And it was in this area that Cesare Borgia, whom Machiavelli later cited as an example of the ‘new prince’, prosecuted his political and military ventures at the beginning f the sixteenth century. In this territory, papal nepotism achieved a further significant success with the creation of the Farnese Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. And it was here, finally, that the process of crisis and decline of the Italian principalities got prematurely under way, foreshadowed in 159by the devolution of Ferrara to the Papacy.

Amid the political equilibria of the late fifteenth century and the wars of the early sixteenth century, the Gonzaga and Estensi played a pivotal role in Italian politics. In their numerous and shifting alliances with the French and the Spanish, the two dynasties displayed consummate diplomatic skill as they responded to the alternating fortunes of armies by rapidly switching sides. But with the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) and with the consolidation of Spanish dominion over a large part of the Peninsula their protagonism in foreign affairs seemingly ceased.