Wars in Lombardy

The wars in Lombardy were a series of conflicts fought in central-northern Italy between the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Milan, and their different allies. They lasted from 1425 until the signing of the Treaty of Lodi in 1454. During their course, the political structure of Italy was transformed: out of a competitive congeries of communes and city-states, emerged the five major Italian territorial powers that would make up the map of Italy until the Italian Wars. Important cultural centers of Tuscany and Northern Italy—Siena, Pisa, Urbino, Mantua, Ferrara—became politically marginalized. The wars, fought in four campaigns, were a struggle for hegemony in Northern Italy that ravaged the economy of Lombardy and weakened the power of Venice, whose leaders failed to heed the words of warning in doge Tommaso Mocenigo's famous farewell letter (1423):

"Beware of the desire to take what belongs to others, and of making unjust war, for God will destroy you."

The war, which was both a result and cause of Venetian involvement in the power politics of mainland Italy, found Venetian territory extended to the banks of the Adda and involved the rest of Italy in shifting alliances but only minor skirmishing. The shifting counterweight in the balance was the allegiance of Florence, at first allied with Venice against encroachments by Visconti Milan, then switching to ally with Francesco Sforza against the increasing territorial threat of Venice. The Peace of Lodi, concluded in 1454, brought forty years of comparative peace to Northern Italy, as Venetian conflicts focussed elsewhere.