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The rumble of thousands of booted feet, hooves, and the wheels of cannons and supply wagons shook the pavement.

Metal sword hills clang against steel rust plates.

The clamor of a half dozen noisy varieties of French and German mixed and melded above the racquet.

The stink of thousands of unwashed bodies sweating even in the winter chill permeated the air.

This was an army on the moon, an army led by the French king Charles VIII.

A new era of European power politics was about to begin.

It was December of the year 1494.

Charles VIII had invaded Italy with a cutting-edge army of professional cavalrymen and shining plate armor, an advanced artillery capable of blasting holes in the wall of any medieval castle.

There were 8,000 stone-faced Swiss mercenaries.

Their hedgehog formations bristling with 15 foot pipes could roll through any opposition.

This was the most advanced army money could buy.

What paid for that army was a professional bureaucracy that assessed and collected taxes on an industrial scale.

The Tuscan peasants who watched the soldiers pass by had never seen anything like this.

Now they weren't strangers to war. The city-states of Italy fought each other constantly.

But they'd never seen so many cannons. They'd never seen the tough, hard-bitten Swiss professionals.

Most of all, they'd never seen so many soldiers all at once.

Italy was about to become a battlefield for states whose resources and destructive capabilities were miles beyond anything these peasants had ever seen or could even comprehend.

There was something new, something truly frightening happening here.

From this vantage point, standing here by this ancient road, we can see the roots of a world that's recognizably our own.

The Great Wall of Italy

From Wondery, this is Tides of History. I'm Patrick Weiman.

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