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[[File: Charles VIII Ecole Francaise 16th century Musee de Conde Chantilly.jpg|thumbnail|left|200px|Portrait of Charles VIII]]
The French invasion of Italy in 1494 is widely seen as the beginning of the end of the Italian Renaissance. Charles VIII invaded Italy to lay claim to the Kingdom of Naples, which composed most of southern Italy. The French army marched through Italy with only minimal resistance. The invasion had a profound impact on Italian society and politics. The invasion of Charles VII changed the development of Italy and can be considered one of the primary reasons the Renaissance ended. The French Invasion was to lead to a series of wars that greatly weakened the Italian City-States, prompted a greater role for Spain in the peninsula and eventually led to the domination of Italy by the Spanish Monarchy.
==Background==
Pope Innocent VIII, had fought with King Ferdinand I of Naples over his refusal to pay feudal dues to the papacy. The Pope has long claimed that Naples was a fiefdom of the Papacy. Ferdinand was an unusually cruel and brutal prince even for the times, refused and this led to a conflict with the Papacy. The Pope excommunicated Ferdinand and thus he effectively stated that Ferdinand was no longer the legitimate ruler. Pope Innocent who had a good relationship with the French asked their king to intervene and he offered the throne of Naples to Charles VIII. The French monarch had a weak claim to the throne through his grandfather, who had married a member of the Angevin Dynasty, the ruling family in Naples. Later Innocent was reconciled with Ferdinand but the French monarch now believed that he was the legitimate king of Naples.<ref>Lopez, Robert Sabatino, <i>The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance</i> (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), p. 89</ref>
Following the Wars in Lombardy between Venice and Milan, which ended in 1454, warfare had declined considerably and there was a prolonged period of peace in Italy.<ref> Sabatino, p. 99</ref> The De Medici had helped to establish a balance of power in Italy and this brought a large measure of stability to the region. By the 1490s, the situation in Italy was relatively peaceful and it had not been invaded by a foreign army for several decades. In the Fall of 1494, Ludovico Sforza became the Duke of Milan but the new king of Naples, Alfonso II claimed the Duchy for himself, although his claim was rather weak. The new Duke of Milan entered into an alliance with the French king. This finally persuaded Charles VIII to invade the peninsula with an army of 20,000 men.
