barely read, was soon dealing with a rebel-
lion of his cousin Louis of Orléans and
France’s powerful nobles, who were at-
tempting to stymie the authority of the
king in their lands. One revolt of the duke
of Brittany endured for four years before
Charles finally defeated it in 1488. Al-
though he had been betrothed to the
daughter of Emperor Maximilian I, Charles
believed it wiser to marry the duke’s
daughter Anne, and in this way bring Brit-
tany at last under royal control.
Looking for further conquests, Charles
turned to the wealthy kingdom of Naples,
for which the rulers of the French Angevin
dynasty had a long-standing claim. In
1494, he made an alliance with Ludovico
Sforza of Milan and led a French army
into northern Italy. With a powerful force
of Swiss mercenaries and seventy cannons
at their disposal, the French marched
through Tuscany, defeating Florence, and
by February 1495 had reached Naples,
where Charles deposed the Neapolitan
king Alfonso and had himself crowned
king. Soon afterward Milan, Venice, the
Spanish king Ferdinand of Aragon, the
pope, and the Holy Roman Emperor
joined forces and defeated the French at
the Battle of Fornovo. Charles was driven
out of Italy, but the fight for power and
influence in Italy among France, Spain,
and the Holy Roman Empire lasted well
into the sixteenth century. In the mean-
time, the chaotic condition of the Italian
city-states encouraged many prominent
Italian artists and writers to leave their
homes and seek protection and patronage,
a movement that had the effect of spread-
ing humanism and the classical ideals of
the Renaissance up and down the Italian
peninsula.
SEEALSO: Ferdinand II of Aragon; France;
Italy; Naples
cities ..................................................
Europe during the Renaissance developed
a thriving urban society. In this era, city
life made a break with that of the coun-
tryside; the peasants and townspeople had
less in common and were less dependent
on each other for food, trade, and defense.
Renaissance cities served as economic as
well as cultural centers, where the new
scholarship, art, and literature thrived. The
most densely urbanized parts of the conti-
nent were northern Italy, the Low Coun-
tries (modern Belgium and the
Netherlands), southern England, northern
France, and southern Germany. The
continent’s largest urban centers were Ven-
ice, Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and Lon-
don. All of these cities had diverse social
groups, including a merchant class, a
wealthy aristocracy, skilled artisans, and
the poor, a class that included migrants
from the countryside.
The physical appearance and layout of
cities varied greatly from one region to the
next. Most had fortifications, such as tow-
ers and walls, and gates that were used to
control the flow of traffic and closed at
night. Within the walls, palaces, cathedrals,
and town halls rose highest above the
streets and squares. Cities were divided
into neighborhoods, most of them identi-
fied with a particular economic activity.
Some cities had a large population of
farmers, who lived within the walls but
worked in fields just outside, or else held
plots of open, cultivable land at the city’s
edge.
Within the walls, a broad range of so-
cial classes met on the streets. Dress dis-
tinguished the rich from the poor, the
working class from the men and women
of leisure and those connected with the
courts. The crowds included itinerant ped-
dlers, foreign merchants and, in universitycities