636 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE peninsula began to assume a dangerous aspect, and the doors which had swung open so readily before him now seemed about to be bolted behind him. Ferdinand and Maximilian had united with Milan, Venice, and the pope in the League of Venice against him. He left half his army, which a winter of dissipation had somewhat enervated, to hold Naples and hurried home with the rest before Ferdinand and Maximilian could stop him. Venice and Milan, however, nearly did so in the indecisive battle of Fornovo. The French troops who had been left behind in Naples were soon expelled and the Aragonese line returned in the person of its fourth ruler within two years, Federigo. The only one in Italy who remained true to the French was Savonarola, and his government in Florence ended with Fate of his burning at the stake on the charge of heresy Savonarola j n ^g. He had tried to effect a puritanical re- form in the manners and morals of the Florentines, and had induced them to destroy a great pile of "vanities" in the enthusiasm of the moment; but they soon tired of his strictness. His unfavorable attitude drove many artists away from Florence to other centers. The Medici and the pope were of course both bitterly opposed to him. A final reason for his fall was that he was, as Machiavelli remarked, "a weaponless prophet." In the same year that Savonarola was executed, Charles VIII died childless and Louis XII of the Orleans line came to Italian the throne. Through his grandmother, Valentine policy of Visconti, he had a claim to Milan, which he proceeded to occupy, imprisoning Lodovico. As for Naples, Louis made the mistake of arranging with Fer- dinand that they should conquer it together and divide it equally. Ferdinand soon occupied it all and forced Louis to sell out his rights. This brought a third of the peninsula directly under Spanish rule: the recent Aragonese rulers of Naples had not been Kings of Aragon, still less of a united Spain as Ferdinand was. In 1503 Alexander VI died and a fiery native of Genoa took the papal title of Julius II. When Michelangelo, who
