Of all the pointless, useless, ruinous wars ever fought in Europe (and they were legion), some of the most expensive and the most ineffectual were the Italian Wars, which leagued Francis I of France and Ottoman sultan Suleiman I against the combined team of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Henry VIII of England. The wars stripped the coffers of every country that fought in it, and made no real difference. It would have been just as effective to simply have stayed home and murdered a few hundred soldiers and innocent civilians a day.
Within that cluster of insane and inane wars, the Italian War of 1542-1546 stands out as particularly idiotic. It would have been comic if so much human life hadn’t been lost. It didn’t even end coherently. Half of each faction made peace with half of the other faction by the Treaty of Crépy on 14 September 1544 while the respective allies fought one another and each other.
The Treaty of Crépy was negotiated between by Francis I and Charles V without the agreement or input of Suleiman and Henry VIII. Francis promised to turn against Suleiman in exchange for a rich bride for his second son and Charles V promised to stop fighting France and just attack the Ottomans. Just a dozen years prior Henry VIII had been at loggerheads with Charles over the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Charles’s aunt Katherine of Aragon, but Henry’s hatred of the French had induced him to become a political bedfellow with Charles again. Now Charles casually kicked Henry out of the bed again and the English king was livid to find himself on the cold floor once more while Charles and Francis cuddled.
Henry, who had crossed the Rubicon of rationality a decade before, decided that he was by gum going to keep on fighting France with or without his turncoat ex-nephew-in-law Charles. Henry became fixated on the one prize he had managed to capture during this boggy war – the city of Boulogne.
Having won the city, the king discovered he had no money left to fight a war with, so he returned to England, ordering the Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Suffolk to defend what was left standing of Boulogne from any counterattacks. Both dukes were unhappy with this command, and rather than stay and eat rats in Boulogne they scarpered off to Calais … along with most of the English army. France, no longer having to fight the Holy Roman Empire, could now focus on their British enemy, and the French army quickly pinned down the English troops in Calais.
The Treaty of Crépy had fallen flat, and it went stone cold when Francis’s second son, the one who was supposed to be awarded the rich bride to seal the deal, died a few months later. England was in shambles because Henry VIII had devalued his own coinage to pay for for the war effort, which had gained him only one smallish city of only medium strategic importance. France wasn’t in much better shape, and in no position to keep fighting. Henry and Francis therefore reluctantly made peace at Ardes in the summer of 1546 (Henry got to keep Boulogne), but the political conflict between France and England would continue even after both monarchs died in early 1548. After Henry’s death Boulogne went back to the French.
Seriously, the Italian War of 1542-1546 accomplished diddly squat and the Treaty of Crépy accomplished even less than that.