College of Kings

Even though I am working on my modern game for Historicon 2024, I am still also working on Pavia for Historicon 2025. The terrain mats are something that I plan to have custom made, as I just do not have either the time or the space to make them myself. Also, I would prefer to work on the figures, buildings and other terrain rather than spend too much time on the mats. As custom mats are a long-lead item, I need to get them ordered.

Type of terrain mat.

For the Italian Wars games that I have previously put on at the club or conventions (Garigliano, Novaro, Bicocca and Ravenna), I have used the teddy bear fur mats by Killing Fields Terrain. These have served me very well and have even helped me win Best of Show and Best of Theme awards. However, for Pavia I want to use something different.

For my recent modern Afghanistan game I used a custom mat from Warsigil.com. I was very pleased with how this mat turned out. So much so, that I have ordered another custom mat for my modern Historicon game for 2024. The new mat should arrive in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I have been working with Warsigil to produce mats for Pavia – I expect them to delivered by the end of the year.

The reason that I chose Warsigil is the high quality of their work. Also, the Battle of Pavia was severely influenced by both the terrain and the weather. There were extensive wooded areas and the ground was very wet and muddy. The last thing that I wanted was a lush, bright green terrain mat. Below is a picture of a wooded mat that Warsigil custom made for another customer. This surface is the type of thing that I am looking at for Pavia.

I will use the brown areas for the woods and the greenish areas for the grass of the park.

Design of terrain mats

At the moment I have ordered five mats, each of 4′ x 6′. These are intended to represent the park. Later I may order two additional mats to represent the walls of Pavia and the area around the Five Chapels.

Without going into too many details in this post, the five terrain mats will go in a “U” shaped design. The area between the two sides represents the course of the Vernovola stream as it proceeds through the southern end of the park. In this area it was impassable due to marshy ground on each side of the stream. Also there were raised roadways on each side of the stream, so firing was impossible from one side to the other. The only area where the Vernavola could be crossed was near Mirabello and further north. This meant that a “U” shape could be used, which would allow players to reach troops in the middle of the park. They would in effect be able to stand in the middle of the park.

The following is the image that I sent to Warsigil and the key below is my details that refer to the wooded Warsigil mat photo above.

The brown areas will be the wooded areas and the green areas will be the grass areas of the park. The stream at the top is the northern part of the Vernovola. Mirabello will be located at the southern part of the mat with the stream on.

This layout will give a lot of room for fighting, but have the constraints of both the wood and the stream.

Upcoming work on the terrain.

The next thing that I will need to consider is the large amount of deciduous trees with no foliage. The Battle was fought in February and I want this to be represented. I still have to figure out how to make these trees as they are not readily available on the market. I will keep on working on Pavia for Historicon 2025 despite still having a lot to do for Historicon 2024.

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This week the subject of my blog post is Pavia a project update. I have been working on both the park gates and the Spanish light Cavalry.

Park gates.

The only park gate that is somewhat intact is the gate at Certosa di Pavia. This gate is in the New park. I have not found much information about the design of the gates around the old park. I am going to assume that all of the gates, around both parks were of the same design. This assumption will have the added benefit that they will be easier to mass produce. As I am going to need six to eight gates for the old park, that is an important decision. Here are some images of the actual gate courtesy of Google Street View.

Making the park gates

I contacted a couple of terrain building manufacturers to see what was possible. However, I eventually came to the conclusion that I was going to have to scratch build these gates. Foam was selected as the base material. I decided to buy a decent foam cutter to make the job easier. I will also be building many of the five chapel churches and the Castle Mirabello. With all of these buildings the cutter should be a good investment.

Here is my second attempt at cutting some of the front facade of the gates. The first attempt is in the bin. The cut facades are sitting on the foam cutter. This is my first attempt to make a foam building. The process is interesting. Don’t be too critical of my first attempts.

Here is my first attempt to carve the brick and paint the walls. I still need to weather and dull down the brick. As you will notice the bricks are larger than those in the original. This is because the required skill level to make smaller bricks is beyond my current ability. With eight gates and fifty feet of wall, I think that the overall impression will be good. It is a compromise that I am prepared to make.

Over the coming weeks I plan to finish two or three gatehouses. There is still a lot of work to do, I need to make the sides, back, roof and details at the top and then glue everything together. I also plan to use some pigments to improve the bricks. They will be minus some wooden arched doors in the centre at the moment. The company “Things from the Basement” are selling me some custom doors. These will be made from laser cut wood and they will be bringing them to Historicon for me in July.

Spanish light cavalry

I had 32 Spanish Jinetes and for Pavia I need 62. Over the last few weeks I painted up the remainder. I still need to touch up the flag edges of the new figures, but other than that, they are done. The first picture shows the Jinetes and the second picture includes a few mounted arquebusiers in support.

These Jinetes complete the dedicated Spanish Light Cavalry command. I always love playing with Jinetes in the Pike and Shotte rules. They use the fire and evade rule, which works really well for them.

Hopefully next time I will have more work to show you on the gates. I also will have 60-70 Italian foot arquebusiers that I am working on. They are beautiful sculpts from SteelFist Miniatures. I am also expecting another 80 heavy cavalry in the post soon and I am looking forward to painting them. That is all for this blog post, Pavia a project update.

In some of the texts about the Battle of Pavia there is discussion about how the terrain influenced the battle. It is important in the recreation to understand the topography of Pavia.

Where are the hills?

Some of the battle descriptions talk about hills used as vantage points and troops taking protection in valleys from artillery fire. The writings of Colonel Hardy de Perini are particularly notable in this regard. The book that I have even has a map with contours showing the church of San Paulo on a hill dominating the centre of the park. To the new comer to the Battle of Pavia, this contoured map is convincing. The problem is that there is no actual hill in the park and San Paulo is not even in the park.

Without visiting the battlefield (which I have not done yet), how can I be so sure of the topography of Pavia? This is where Google Maps and their street view feature comes in. Google allows people to use these images on non commercial blogs as long as full credit is given. All of the pictures in this next section are thanks to Google Maps.

Photos of the terrain.

The above images together view almost every part of the battlefield. They give views from each side of the park looking into the park and views from the center of the park. One thing that is notable is that the park area is as flat as a snooker table (or a billiard table for our US friends).

What is also notable from the images is that both the park walls and many of the woods are no longer there. The flatness of the ground does make it easier to put together from a modeling perspective. I feel that these images have helped me get a feel of the topography of Pavia

What about the five chapels?

The Swiss mercenaries of the French were housed in the area known as the five Chapels. These Chapels were San Paolo, San Spirito and San Giacomo which were close to the walls of the park. San Pietro and San Lazzaro which were a little further out to the East of Pavia. I will probably only include the first three on the table as they have the most influence.

In looking at modern day photos of the area, I imagined that these five chapels were located in small villages. However, I found an excellent website which totally changed my views. I would encourage you to visit this website as the site has some images put together by the author. In respecting the intellectual property of the author I do not want to copy these images. However, there are some images of old art-work which I am free to use. Here are some interesting images of the San Paulo, San Spirito, San Giacomo area.

Images of the five chapels.

One thing that these images make clear is that the chapels were not surrounding by other buildings. They were almost like a monastery complex. Also it appears that San Paulo was on a small mound. So Perini, when he refers to San Paulo being on a hill, was not completely wrong. He just got the location and its role in the battle wrong. The rest of the terrain around the five chapels is also completely flat, just like the terrain inside the park.

This finding about the five chapels has changed my entire view on what role they took in the battle. I will now be re-reading many of the texts with this new understanding.

The roads from Pavia to Mirabello.

There are two roads from Pavia to the Mirabello area. One runs to the east of the Vernavola river and one runs to the west.

I have found quite a lot of information about the road to the East. Many accounts comment on this being a raised road, almost a dyke, to prevent flooding of the park to near Torre del Gallo. With such agreement between sources on this road, this is how I will model it.

The road to the West of the Vernavola is more complicated. There are accounts that say that this road was a huge tree lined avenue used for horse races. The road ran from Pavia to the Castello Mirabello. Other sources claim that this road was also partially raised to prevent flooding. I need to do more work on researching this road. The idea of a tree lined road does appeal to me as it will look good on the table.

Conclusion

Hopefully some of the information of the topography of Pavia will be useful to those trying to recreate this interesting battle.

I apologize that there are no pictures of figures in this post, but I wanted to get some of the information about the battlefield documented. I should have some photos of new Italian Wars figures to post soon.

I don’t like to claim that I am doing research on the Battle of Pavia 1525 as I am not going back to primary sources. However, I am doing a lot of reading about Pavia from various authors of different nationalities. In this post I hope to discuss how I plan to reconcile different accounts of the battle to create a table top event.

Books on Pavia

The following is a list of the main books that I am reading, I will list them in the order of importance to my recreation of the Battle:

• The Battle of Pavia, 24th February 1525 by Jean Giono. Translated from the French Le Desastre de Pavia.
• Da Marignano A Pavia. Le guerre italiane de Francesco 1 (1515-1525) by Luigi Casali and Marco Galandra (written in Italian)
• The Art of War in Italy 1494-1529. Taylor, F.L.
• History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century. Sir Charles Oman
• The Italian Wars. Volume 3. Francis I and the Battle of Pavia 1525. Massimo Predonzani and Vincenzo Alberici
• French Military Campaigns 1214 to 1542. By Colonel Hardy de Perini. Translated by G.F.Nafziger.

Problems with the books on Pavia 1525.

I have six books that form the bulk of my reading on Pavia 1525. The problem is that they give six substantially different accounts of the Battle of Pavia. The summary of what they all agree on is essentially the French were surrounding Pavia, the Imperials arrived and got into the park, the French gendarmes were killed by arquebusiers, the French King was captured and the imperials won. Details of the battlefield, initial deployments, strengths, movements and combats all vary. To recreate the battle by reconciling these accounts is all but impossible.

Some of these inconsistencies come from interpreting some of the source documents differently and from some of the writers of the source documents only having a limited understanding of what was going on around them. Others come from poor research and accepting long held false views of the battle.

Some of the accounts just don’t make sense when I read them. I can’t reconcile what they say with the actual layout of the battlefield and basic military tactics. I have spent many hours trying to resolve the accounts and recreate the battle on a map.

How to resolve the inconsistencies.

I had a moment of inspiration the other night when I was trying to resolve what happened at Pavia 1525 so that I can recreate the battle as a war-game on the table top. The inspiration was that I am not trying to recreate exactly what happened. All I need to do is have a good estimate of the main elements of each force, their abilities and their locations at the start of the Battle. Then I need to have a good understanding of the constraints of both the battlefield and the weather.

If I have a good understanding of these items, then the players are free to move their troops and fight in any way that they want. They can create their own Battle of Pavia. I don’t need to understand exactly when and where each unit moved in the real battle. I am not forcing players to move in a pre-ordained way. This methodology is consistent with the way that I run all of my games. I never force players to act in a certain way; they are the commanders.

The constraints of the battlefield terrain

In a previous post I discussed the location and the type of woods in the park. These woods and how I represent them are key to the flow of the battle.

The next key item is the walls of the park and their limitations. I accept the premise that the gates in the wall were not sufficiently large enough to allow an entire army to pass through, a breach had to be made. There is some discussion of this being in the North wall between Due Porte and Porta Pescarina. Others suggest that it is in the East Wall between Torre del Gallo and Due Porte.

I was originally of the opinion that the breach must have been in the North Wall near Porta Pescarina due to the restrictions of the woods. However, if we believe this view, we must also explain how the troops got outside the park near Porta Pescarina. To get there they must have also breached the wall near Due Porte to get into Parco Nuovo to the north. Due Porte means two doors – one entered the Parco Vecchio to the South and one entered the Parco Nuovo to the North.

I did not show the wall extending North from Due Porte to surround the Parco Nuovo on the above map. This omission was because I did not think that this wall was relevant at the time. I now believe that it was very important. There is no mention of this second breach in any of the texts so I do not believe that there were two breaches.

Instead I believe that the main Imperial army breached the park wall somewhere close to Due Porte to avoid the problems with the woods nearer Torre del Gallo. I also believe that the light arquebusiers initially heading rapidly to Castello Mirabello probably passed through Due Porte into Parco Nuovo and then entered Parco Vecchio through Porta Pescarina. As these troops were fewer and lighter, they could have gone through the gates and not required the wall to be breached.

The other main constraint is the Vernavola. Due to the wet weather this river was not passible in the Southern half of the park except around Torretta where there was a raised road. The river was only again passible at Castello Mirabello due to a road bridge. It was also passible further north between Cascina Repentita and Porta Pescarina. The other item of note around the river was the raised road running along the East of the river from Pavia to San Genesio. This road allowed travel through the marsh area and also provided a barrier for protection against artillery. Other than this raised road the battlefield was essentially flat.

The Vernavola is important to the recreation of the Battle as it provides an impassible barrier between the troops deployed to the East and those deployed to the West. Once the French troops are committed to one side of the river, they cannot influence the battle on the other side of the river. This terrain feature is also important when considered with the morning fog. Different elements of the French army are out of communication with each other. This means in the recreation of the battle it is important to not allow them to communicate with each other if they are not in contact.

Constraints of the weather.

The weather also provides a number of constraints. In addition to the morning fog, the late winter weather was cold and wet. Not only does it influence movement through the woods and prevent crossing the river, but it also impacts the ability of the pike blocks and heavy cavalry. The ground was wet and muddy. This prevented the pike blocks getting a grip and being as effective as usual. For the heavy cavalry, while it would not prevent an initial charge, the ground would tire the horses and prevent multiple devastating charges.

The initial locations of troops at Pavia 1525.

As I mentioned, the initial locations of troops is going to be key in setting up the game. Once we have decided where the Imperial troops can enter the park, which I discussed above, the French troop starting locations are the main issue.

Now many of the sources agree where the Swiss, Landsknechts, Black Band and Light Cavalry were located. So none of these are too much of a problem. The main issue is where the King and the Gendarmes were located at the start of the Battle. Jean Giono believes that they were near the Cascina Repentita and others believe that they were further South. I will discuss the locations of both sides in the next post.

Conclusion on gaming Pavia 1525.

Deciding on the battlefield and weather constraints, as well as starting positions of the troops allows a game to be played without a full understanding of the actual movements of all units in the battle. With the diverse accounts of the battle, this may be the best that is possible. There is plenty of scope for different war-games to interpret the vast amount of information available very differently. As a result I expect many different representations of Pavia by war-gamers in 2025.

An update to the painting, I am working on about 100 arquebusiers (Landsknecht and Italian) and 30 Spanish Jinetes. These are all additional troops and will be added to my collection.