The ongoing hostilities involving the French and their shifting alliances with Italian city-states often resembled pageantry and processionals more than war. “A march through Italy was an occasion for feasts, spectacles, firework displays, jousts, the expropriation of estates, and occasional massacres,” wrote Robert Payne. “The French aristocracy acquired new titles, new experiences, new mistresses, new diseases.”1.

Walter Isaacson Quotes

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