Demon Knight

By the fall of 1524, Nevil had conquered all of Europe north of the Alps, but thirteen years of unbroken success had made him grievously overconfident. While he indulged himself in putting down rebellions with the extreme cruelty that had earned his name of the Fiend, he delegated the conquest of Italy to Varnius Schweitzer.

Schweitzer was a competent general and foresaw no difficulty in overcoming the Italian city-states, which had been fighting one another for centuries and seemed incapable of uniting for any reason. He crossed the Alps with about fifty thousand men and was opposed near the city of Trent by a hastily gathered coalition of Italians, Swiss, and Tyroleans. Facing a force less than half the size of his, led by a mercenary soldier he had never heard of, Schweitzer willingly accepted battle and thereupon suffered one of the bloodiest and most lopsided defeats in history. Within days all Europe rang with the name of the young man who had celebrated his own twenty-third birthday by overcoming seemingly impossible odds…

— Emil Marrat, Longdirk: The Fighting Years (Edinburgh University Press, 1967)