Hitherto Charles had met with no serious obstacle.  His invasion had fallen like the rain from heaven, and like rain, as far as he was concerned, it ran away to waste.  Lombardy and Tuscany, the two first scenes in the pageant displayed by Italy before the French army, had been left behind.  Rome now lay before them, magnificent in desolation; not the Rome which the Farnesi and Chigi and Barberini have built up from the quarried ruins of amphitheaters and baths, but the Rome of the Middle Ages, the city crowned with relics of a pagan past, herself still pagan, and holding in her midst the modern Antichrist.  The progress of the French was a continued triumph.  They reached Siena on the second of December.  The Duke of Urbino and the lords of Pesaro and Bologna laid down their arms at their approach.  The Orsini opened their castles:  Virginio, the captain-general of the Aragonese army and grand constable of the kingdom of Naples, hastened to win for himself favorable terms from the French sovereign.  The Baglioni betook themselves to their own rancors in Perugia.  The Duke of Calabria retreated.  Italy seemed bent on proving that cowardice and selfishness and incapacity had conquered her.  Viterbo was gained:  the Ciminian heights were traversed:  the Campagna, bounded by the Alban and the Sabine hills, with Rome, a bluish cloud upon the lowlands of the Tiber, spread its solemn breadth of beauty at the invader’s feet.  Not a blow had been struck, when he reached the Porta del Popolo upon the 31st of December 1494.  At three o’clock in the afternoon began the entry of the French army.  It was nine at night before the last soldiers, under the flaring light of torches and flambeaux, defiled through the gates, and took their quarters in the streets of the Eternal City.  The gigantic barbarians of the cantons, flaunting with plumes and emblazoned surcoats, the chivalry of France, splendid with silk mantles and gilded corselets, the Scotch guard in their wild costume of kilt and philibeg, the scythe-like halberds of the German lanz-knechts, the tangled elf-locks of stern-featured Bretons, stamped an ineffaceable impression on the people of the South.  On this memorable occasion, as in a show upon some holiday, marched past before them specimens and vanguards of all those legioned races which were soon to be too well at home in every fair Italian dwelling-place.  Nothing was wanting to complete the symbol of the coming doom but a representative of the grim, black, wiry infantry of Spain.

[1] The want of money determined all Charles’s operations in this expedition.  Borrowing from Lodovico, laying requisitions on Piero and the Florentines, pawning the jewels of the Savoy princesses, he passed from place to place, bargaining and contracting debts instead of dictating laws and founding constitutions. La carestia dei danari is a phrase continually recurring in Guicciardini.  Speaking of the jewels lent to Charles by the royal families of Savoy and Montferrat