"Lord! The King of France is leading a forty-thousand-strong army to invade northern Italy?!..."
"Correct! The King of France claims an army of fifty thousand, while the scouts estimate forty thousand. As for a more precise number, though we still do not know... in his previous large-scale mobilization, the King of France did indeed gather a knightly order of over a thousand men! And those knights, together with the squires who follow them, can likely make up three thousand elite cavalry... As for infantry, probably ten or twenty thousand levied foot soldiers, plus another ten or twenty thousand mercenary corps..."
"To gather an army of thirty or forty thousand so easily, including three thousand elite cavalry—the mighty Kingdom of France truly makes one envious!..."
Speaking of the Italian Wars that had already begun, and of the strength the Kingdom of France had displayed, Nuno, the palace steward and a confidant of King John II, truly felt envy from the bottom of his heart!
The Kingdom of France, like the Kingdom of Portugal, possessed a powerful centralized royal authority. But relying on its powerful national strength, the confidants around the King of France, the court nobles of the Kingdom of France, were clearly more influential and far wealthier than the Portuguese court nobles...
"Bruno, in the world of the Lord, it is still the force and courage of knights that decide the ownership of land and wealth in the end! Take those commercial city-states of northern Italy—these past years, they came up with some 'humanist art,' some 'Renaissance,' changing their tricks to flaunt the wealth they had gathered..."
"But now, once they encounter true knights and armies, these Italian city-states will not be able to hold on to their wealth at all! What use is this so-called art in the face