Two terrible calamities warned the Italians with what new enemies they had to deal.  Twice at the commencement of the invasion did the French use the sword which they had drawn to intimidate the sorceress.  These terror-striking examples were the massacres of the inhabitants of Rapallo on the Genoese Riviera, and of Fivizzano in Lunigiana.  Soldiers and burghers, even prisoners and wounded men in the hospitals, were butchered, first by the Swiss and German guards, and afterwards by the French, who would not be outdone by them in energy.  It was thus that the Italians, after a century of bloodless battles and parade campaigning, learned a new art of war, and witnessed the first act of those Apocalyptic tragedies which were destined to drown the peninsula with French, Spanish, German, Swiss, and native blood.

Meanwhile the French host had reached Parma, traversing, all through the golden autumn weather, those plains where mulberry and elm are married by festoons of vines above a billowy expanse of maize and corn.  From Parma, placed beneath the northern spurs of the Apennines, to Sarzana, on the western coast of Italy, where the marbles of Carrara build their barrier against the Tyrrhene Sea, there leads a winding barren mountain pass.  Charles took this route with his army, and arrived in the beginning of November before the walls of Sarzana.  Meanwhile we may well ask what Piero de’ Medici had been doing, and how he had fulfilled his engagement with Alfonso.  He had undertaken, it will be remembered, to hold the passes of the Apennines upon this side.  To have embarrassed the French troops among those limestone mountains, thinly forested with pine and chestnut-trees, and guarded here and there with ancient fortresses, would have been a matter of no difficulty.  With like advantages 2,000 Swiss troops during their wars of independence would have laughed to scorn the whole forces of Burgundy and Austria.  But Piero, a feeble and false tyrant, preoccupied with Florentine factions, afraid of Lucca, and disinclined to push forward into the territory of the Sforza, had as yet done nothing when the news arrived that Sarzana was on the point of capitulation.  In this moment of peril he rode as fast as horses could carry him to the French camp, besought an interview with Charles, and then and there delivered up to him the keys of Sarzana and its citadel, together with those of Pietra Santa, Librafratta, Pisa, and Leghorn.  Any one who has followed the sea-coast between Pisa and Sarzana can appreciate the enormous value of these concessions to the invader.  They relieved him of the difficulty of forcing his way along a narrow belt of land, which is hemmed in on one side by the sea and on the other by the highest and most abrupt mountain range in Italy.  To have done this in the teeth of a resisting army and beneath the walls of hostile castles would have been all but impossible.  As it was, Piero cut the Gordian knot by his incredible cowardice, and for himself gained only ruin and dishonor.