Pavia

History.

For earlier period see TICINUM. By the conquest of Pavia and the capture of Desiderius in 774 Charlemagne com pletely destroyed the Lombard supremacy. It was then the centre of the Carolingian power in Italy, and a royal residence was built in the neighbourhood (Corteolona on the Olona). It was in San Michele Maggiore that Berengar of Friuli, and his successors down to Berengar II. and Adalbert II., were crowned "kings of Italy." Under the reign of the first the city was sacked and burned by the Hungarians. At Pavia was celebrated in 951 the marriage of Otto I. and Adelheid (Adelaide}. Laid in ruins by Henry II., who was attacked by the citizens on the night after his coronation in 1004, it none the less closed its gates on Conrad the Salic in 1026.

The jealousy between Pavia and Milan having in 1056 broken out into open war, Pavia had recourse to the emperors, and for the most part she remained attached to the Ghibelline party till the latter part of the 14th century. From 1360, when Galeazzo was appointed imperial vicar by Charles IV., Pavia became prac tically a possession of the Visconti family and in due course formed part of the duchy of Milan. For its insurrection against the French garrison in 1499 it paid the penalty in 150o. Having been strongly fortified by Charles V., the city was in 1525 able to bid defiance to Francis I., but two years later the French under Lautrec sacked it. In 1655 Prince Thomas of Savoy vainly besieged Pavia with an army of 20,000 Frenchmen.

The Austrians under Prince Eugene occupied it in 1706, the French in 1733 and the French and Spaniards in and the Austrians were again in possession from 1746 till 1796, when it was seized by Napoleon. The revolutionary movement of Febru ary 1848 was crushed by the Austrians who held it until See C. Dell' Acqua, Guida illustrata di Pavia (Pavia, i9oo), and refs. there given ; L. Beltrami, La Chartreuse de Pavie (Milan, 1899) ; Storia documentata della Certosa di Pavia (Milan, 1896). (T. A.)

Battle of Pavia (l525).--In 1524 Francis I. of France, at the head of some 30,00o men, moved into Italy, took Milan and lay siege to Pavia. This city was hard-pressed when Lannoy, Charles V.'s viceroy of Naples, marched to its relief at the head of a numerically slightly inferior force. On Feb. 25, 1525, an attempt was made to join hands with the garrison, but Francis so skilfully deployed his artillery that he took the Spanish attacking column in flank, and drove it back in confusion. Imagin ing the victory to be his, he set out in pursuit, only to be met by an epoch-making tactical surprise which ended in the destruction of his army, and the capture of himself.

One of Lannoy's generals was the Marquis de Pescaire, a man of genius. He had under his command 1,500 Spanish arque busiers, and having grasped the true value of the fire-arm had instructed them "without word of command . . . to wheel round, to face about from this side to that, now here, now there, with the utmost rapidity" (Brantorne). When the French cavalry charged they were met by this novel system of defence which threw them into complete confusion. Meanwhile the advance of the French cavalry and infantry had masked their guns, and whilst Francis was held in front by the arquebusiers, Antonio de Leyva, at the head of his garrison, made a sortie from Pavia and fell on his rear. As the battle of Ravenna (1512) marks the advent of artillery as the weapon of demoralization, so does that of Pavia mark the superiority of hand firearms over lance and pike. In spite of the lessons of Alfonso d'Este at the first and of Pescaire at the second, it took many years of bloodshed before European armies grasped their meaning.

See Brantome, Hommes Illustres; J. F. C. Fuller, British Light In fantry in the Eighteenth Century; The Cambridge Modern History, vol. 1903. (J. F. C. F.)