Charles VIII (Hist.)

The French king, who enters Florence in 1494. If the young monarch under the canopy, seated on his charger with his lance upon his thight, had looked more like a Charlemagne and less like a hastily modelled grotesque, the imagination of his admirers would have been much assisted. It might have been wished that the scourge of Italian wickedness and 'Champion of the honour of women' had had a less miserable leg, and only the normal sum of toes; that his mouth had been of a less reptilian width of slit, his nose and head of a less exorbitant outline." Charle VIII (1470-98), king of France 1483-98. In 1494 Lodovico Il Moro asked Charles for help against Naples, and Charles went to Italy and conquered Naples. George Eliot's account of the events of his entry into Florence follows history closely.

<em>Romola</em>

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