In Valencia, ships with sails hoisted like big fish cruising on the sea outside the harbor, and whenever a guide ship rings its bell and shuttles among them, and the people on board shout to inform a certain ship that it is ready to enter the port, it always causes a commotion.

"The port of Valencia is still too small." Standing on a high ground and looking down at the busy docks, Tiego couldn't help but sigh with feeling.

After the baptism of the trade alliance, Tiego is no longer the small merchant who makes money by trying his luck with goods, his vision and ideals have changed dramatically, especially when facing the Duchess of Gandino in front of him, he has become very handy.

"Ma'am, are you sure that what you hear is reliable?"

"Of course, who do you think I'm talking to about these things? The king's attendants always liked to prove their importance to the king by leaking some information. ”

Speaking of this, Maria de Luna looked at Tiego with some disgust.

In Maria de Luna's eyes, these people were far less terrible than the Moores, and he was not afraid to threaten her with her affair with Cadheron, and he was not even afraid that she would kill her in order to hide her secret.

But now she has no other way, she knows that if the king finds out that she is colluding with these people, she and her children will end badly, and what is even more terrible is that even if she is far away from the Vatican, once she hears that Giovanni's death is related to her, Maria de Luna believes that Alexander VI will take the most fierce revenge on her without mercy.

"The king has agreed to negotiate with the French, but since the news has been tightly sealed, his envoy should have left Zaragoza by the time we knew it."

At Maria de Luna's words of schadenfreude, Tiego frowned.

He knew that if Maria de Luna was right, then perhaps something drastic had happened on the Lombard side.

In April, the weather was slightly colder than usual, people were still a little uncomfortable, the flowers and plants on the roadside were wilting, and there was no spring vitality at all, and many places in the farmland in the distance were still earthy, and the crops were sparse, and it seemed that last year's scene was not very good.

A farmer stood at the end of the field and looked into the distance, and a little away from him, a pack horse flicked its tail to drive away the mosquitoes and flies that had been abundant at this time, but even the flying insects, which had been very annoying at this time in previous years, seemed to have no strength, so the tail of the pack horse drooped down boredly after moving.

The farmer sighed, this is already the best piece of land in his hands, I don't know why, the weather seems to be getting worse and worse in recent years, and even in April some places are surprisingly cold, a lot of the grain planted in the first year is because of the cold weather, the land has not thawed early and died in the ground, so for two consecutive years, many people have been forced to leave their hometowns because they can't pay the land tax and tithes.

A cloud of dust rose from the road in the distance, and the farmer looked at it with a brow on his face, and when he saw an army approaching slowly, he cursed in a low voice, and leaned towards the side of the road.

The team drew closer, and the farmer's doubts grew stronger.

Although he didn't have much knowledge, the peasant still knew that his former lord was the Sforza family of Milan, but the current lord was surnamed Roviere.

The reason why he knew this was that only two days ago, the village chief of the village accompanied the tax collector in the city to the field to announce that from now on, the old man named Constantine della Rovere was their lord, so he would give it to Dra; As for where the Duke of Sforza had gone, the tax collector didn't say, but the people in the village didn't care about it.

When announcing the change of lord, the tax collector once brought a banner of the new duke for the villagers to identify, so that people could recognize the tax collector and his men as soon as possible when collecting taxes, and also to prevent the new duke from being unreasonably offended by unknown lords when he inspected the territory.

The brand new flag still hangs on a wooden pillar next to the village's public well, so the farmer still remembers it vividly.

But this team is not playing the flag of the new duke, at least the colors and patterns on it are completely different, and this one is still recognizable.

The farmer immediately and cautiously retreated to the field, and now that there was a war going on everywhere in this place, many troops from far away who knew only from where God knew where they were fighting in this originally rich land centered on Milan, which made life even more difficult for the peasants, who were already living a bad life due to the weather.

As the procession approached, a soldier in markedly different clothes and brighter armor saw the farmer standing in the field suddenly come out of the procession, rode to the edge of the wheat field, and waved to the farmer with a whip in his hand: "Come, I have something to ask you." ”

Although the man's accent sounded strange, the farmer obediently leaned in.

"How far is it from here to Milan?" The soldier asked impatiently.

"It's still far away, I heard that you have to walk for two or three days."

The farmer looked into the distance, which was in the direction of the city of Milan, and had heard that the tax collector had come from that big city, but the farmer had not even been to a town a little further away, and he could not imagine what a city of Milan, as the tax collector had said, the size of a hundred towns.

"That's not far off," the soldier muttered to himself, taking the reins back to the ranks and reporting to a knight in armor, "my lord, we will soon be in Milan, and there will be about two days left." ”

The knight, who wore armor even on the march, nodded, he had a thin face, and if Alexander was here, he could recognize this person as the French Count of Proswan, Boweken.

Shaking his body to make his body a little more comfortable in the slightly heavy armor, Bowwicken nodded in satisfaction.

He liked to appear in front of people in armor to make him look more imposing, so he spent money to create a set of armor specially designed for pilgrimage wear, this armor was ornate and solemn in appearance, but it was useless when it came to defense, at least to reduce weight, the armor was said to be so thin that it could even float on water.

Bauwicken saw Charlain as an adversary, and he believed that the occupation commander must have thought of him as such, especially after he was appointed commander of the Second Army in the march to Milan by Louis XII, and Bauwicken thought that Scharlain would never give up so well.

So he decided that he had to take Milan before Charloon could once again convince the king to be the commander of the Milan occupation army, or at least to attack the king under the city of Milan first.

Bowicken knew that Louis XII had a deep taboo against the great nobles, and in this respect he was no different from the former king Charles VIII or the first king Louis XI, and the earlier French monarchs, but Louis XII was born in Valois, so he felt more insecure about his position, so he naturally felt more comfortable with ministers such as Charlon, who had their own domains, but remained in Paris for various reasons.

Boweken is not such a person, he is a typical French aristocratic lord, as the Earl of Proswan, he is the direct heir of the ancient Count of Proswan, this family can continue to be related to the Plantagenet family, which ruled England for nearly 3 centuries, and this is also the reason why the Earl of Proswang has always had an ambiguous attitude during the Hundred Years' War, and it was not until the last few years when the situation gradually became clear that it really joined the army camp of the King of France.

However, when the war ended, the situation of Provam became awkward, especially after the defeat and death of Charles the Darde, and the Count of Provanne, who saw that the situation was not right, had to send his eldest son, Boweken, to Paris as a hostage in exchange for the king's peace of mind

Now Borwicken has long since become the Count of Provão, and the son of the original Spider King Louis XI has been dead for a long time, but as their heir, Louis XII, like them, has always had a deep taboo against those French nobles.

Now, the only way for Bowicken to regain the king's trust was to build more feats in the war than anyone else, and it was a rare opportunity to lead another army of 32,000 men second only to the king.

At first, Boweken did not know why Louis XII had suddenly ordered his army of nearly 27,000 men to suddenly cross the border between Piedmond and Lombardy and venture to Milan, after all, the two years of Italian war had not been very smooth for the French.

In the whole year of last year 1500, the original plan to quickly take Lombardy, and then march to Romagna, and then enter Rome The plan has inexplicably hit a wall everywhere, after the Duke of Rometesia suddenly seized Pavia and Monza, the situation of the French army in Lombardy has become very unfavorable, in this case, the Duke of Rometesia, as if as a war mediator, proposed that Constantine della Rovere take over the title of Duke of Milan, who has already died Ludvico, Sforza, Although the proposal was immediately strongly opposed by Louis XII, with the support of Emperor Maximian, Louis XII was finally forced to accept the proposal in the hope of a sufficient delay in the face of a protracted and already vague situation in the country.

This result made many people unexpected, and it is even said that when the Pope heard the news, he accidentally knocked over the wine glass in front of him.

This result made Louis XII extremely angry, but the situation at home made it impossible for him to take care of Italy for a while, so in the previous months, the French army had to retreat to the western part of Piedmont, which was the demarcation, and Italy became much quieter for a while.

But no one could have imagined that, without warning, the French suddenly crossed the Piedmontese border and launched an attack on the Lombard hinterland.

At first, Bowicken was very suspicious of Louis XII's order, and if it were not for the fact that Louis XII had indeed put nearly half of his army under his command, he even thought that it might be the king's desire to use the enemy's hand to take advantage of him to eliminate him.

What Borwicken did not expect was that the Holy Alliance, organized by the Maximians, was slow to respond to the actions of the French, and could even be said to have achieved nothing.

Emperor Maximian, who had already been mostly dismissed, obviously did not expect that the French would suddenly tear up the agreement and invade Lombardy at this time, and the Austrian army stationed in Lombardy was not prepared at all, so when they saw the shadow of the French army, most of those troops fled, even if they insisted on resisting, they were defeated in a hurry to meet the battle, and the entire Lombard plain soon appeared in front of the French.

And it was only at this time that a piece of news came out that surprised everyone.

The French had made peace with Aragon.

This news undoubtedly explains why Louis XII made such a bold attack, as he was well aware that with the withdrawal of the Aragonese army from Italy, the situation of the war would change dramatically.

The French no longer needed to keep too many troops on the Genoese side to prevent the threat from the sea, which allowed the French to throw nearly 10,000 troops into other fronts that they could not easily mobilize, which was good news for the French army, which had always been inferior to the coalition forces.

At the same time, the retreat of the Aragonese army was a great blow to the Venetians, who had to withdraw their troops already on the Lombard border to defend against the threat from the Ottoman navy.

The shock caused by Aragon's separate peace with the French even spread to Naples.

When she heard the news, the Queen Regent of Naples immediately ordered the Neapolitan army to prepare for war with all its might.

While writing to Alexander to ask him what was really happening on the Iberian side, Jossa ordered all the ships of Naples to be ready for the enemy from the sea.

It was evident that the vigilance of Jossa was not superfluous, and after being assured that he would not have to guard against the threat from the Aragonese army, the situation quickly turned in favor of the French.

On 4 April, the 27,000 men of the French army under Borwicken pressed on Milan from the southwest with little or no major fighting, while his army established several makeshift fortresses on the border between Lombardy and Romagna.

This move immediately caught the attention of Gompati, commander of the Northern Legion of the Duchy of Romagna-Tuscany, who, although it was later determined that the French would not provoke an attack, immediately mobilized his troops into the fortified area on the Romagna border side.

For almost a year or so, Gompati, on Alexander's orders, built a loose line of defense on the border from La Spezia to Parma.

On their own side of this line, Alexander's army built a number of small but ready-to-use defensive fortifications, some of which relied on the terrain to form fortresses, and some of which simply tied up rows of sharpened stakes and dug deep ditches on some roads in the plains as a means of defending against future enemies.

In fact, Alexander envisioned that before he could fully control the Lombardy region, he was going to build a Great Wall of Alexandria on the Italian peninsula, with the aim of isolating Upper Italy from the rest of the peninsula.

It was only the sudden peace of the French Aragonese that made this plan that had just begun to be prepared come to naught in an instant.

Even so, Gompati believed that he could withstand the first attack of any enemy from the north when he had the upper hand in his defense.

As for after that year, it was the whole Duchy of Romagna-Tuscany.

And the reason why Gompati has so much confidence, and even thinks that he doesn't need to be timid even in the face of the French army, is that the current Duke of Milan is looking at Stantin de la Rovere.

This made Gompati even have a very crazy idea, he thought that once the war started, as long as he could hold on to the 'Alexander Wall' for a few days, he would be able to carry out a north-south flank attack on the enemy in the middle of the two sides, with the support of the other legions of the principality that arrived quickly and the cooperation of the army of northern Milan!

Perhaps a miracle that would have destroyed the French or any other enemy who had set foot in Lombardy, then, might have happened.

This bold idea was so unavoidable that Gompa could not throw it away, so much so that he finally wrote letters to Ofleil in Montina and Constantine in Milan, revealing his idea to them.

So when the French suddenly appeared on the Lombardy plain, Gompati, who had received the news, immediately became excited after the first nervousness.

The French had become much more cautious after the English attack on Genoa the previous year, fearing that the Aragonese army would also land from Genoa, and they had to keep enough troops in Genoa, which became the reason why Borwicken first approached Milan from the southwest in order to mobilize Genoese troops.

However, in this way, Borwicken's French army was in the middle of the net conceived by Gompati to flank the north and south.

Gompati immediately mobilized his army into the defensive line of the 'Alexander Wall', which had only just begun, and after receiving information that the French were approaching Milan with a two-way army, Gompati felt that it was a matter of course to defeat Borwicken first while the French army had not yet converged.

It's just that Gompati never thought that what was waiting for him was the unexpected news that Duke Constantine of Milan had abandoned the city and fled!

Worse news then came from the Lombard side, where, after Constantine fled without a fight, the two French legions, which had suffered almost no losses, quickly converged.

Then, after a little repair, the French army, totaling nearly 60,000 men, turned around and pressed from north to south, along the frontal line from Piacenza in the east to Machoraska Mountain in the west, towards the Romagna border.

The first great crisis since the establishment of the Duchy of Romagna-Tuscany struck suddenly and without warning.