Antony de Leyva was notified the same evening of their decision, and was invited to make, as soon as he heard two cannon-shots, a sortie which would place the French army between two fires.  Pescara, according to his custom, mustered the Spaniards; and, “My lads,” said he, “fortune has brought you to such extremity that on the soil of Italy you have for your own only that which is under your feet.  All the emperor’s might could not procure for you to-morrow morning one morsel of bread.  We know not where to get it, save in the Frenchman’s camp, which is before your eyes.  There they have abundance of everything, bread, meat, trout and carp from the Lake of Garda.  And so, my lads, if you are set upon having anything to eat tomorrow, march we down on the Frenchmen’s camp.”  Freundsberg spoke in the same style to the German lanzknechts.  And both were responded to with cheers.  Eloquence is mighty powerful when it speaks in the name of necessity.

The two armies were of pretty equal strength:  they had each from twenty to five and twenty thousand infantry, French, Germans, Spaniards, lanzknechts, and Swiss.  Francis I. had the advantage in artillery and in heavy cavalry, called at that time the gendarmerie, that is to say, the corps of men-at-arms in heavy armor with their servants; but his troops were inferior in effectives to the Imperialists, and Charles V.’s two generals, Bourbon and Pescara, were, as men of war, far superior to Francis I. and his favorite Bonnivet.  In the night between the 23d and 24th of February they opened a breach of forty or fifty fathoms in the wall around the park of Mirabello, where the French camp was situated; a corps immediately passed through it, marching on Pavia to re-enforce the garrison, and the main body of the imperial army entered the park to offer the French battle on that ground.  The king at once set his army in motion; and his well-posted artillery mowed down the corps of Germans and Spaniards who had entered the park.  “You could see nothing,” says a witness of the battle, “but heads and arms flying about.”  The action seemed to be going ill for the Imperialists; Pescara urged the Duke of Bourbon and Lannoy, the Viceroy of Naples, to make haste and come up; Lannoy made the sign of the cross, and said to his men, “There is no hope but in God; follow me and do every one as I do.”  Francis I., on his side, advanced with the pick of his men-at-arms, burst on the advance-guard of the enemy, broke it, killed with his own hand the Marquis of Civita-San-Angelo, and dispersed the various corps he found in his way.  In the confidence of his joy he thought the victory decided, and, turning to Marshal de Foix, who was with him, “M. de Lescun,” said he, “now am I fain to call myself Duke of Milan.”  But Bourbon and Pescara were not the men to accept a defeat so soon; they united all their forces, and resumed the offensive at all points; the French batteries, masked by an ill-considered movement on the part of their own troops,