innovations brought to Italy by Napoleon. French historian Hippolyte Taine stated: Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, by instinct, imagination, and souvenir, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net loss is for France and the net profit is for Italy. Early Modern Italy The Italian Wars saw 65 years of French attacks on the Italian states, starting with Charles VIII's invasion of Naples in 1494. However the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) saw large parts of Italy fall under the direct or indirect control of the Habsburgs. Two foreign councils controlled much of Italian affairs. The Council of Italy in Madrid controlled the Spanish viceroyalties in Italy, while a special section of the Aulic council in Vienna was sovereign over the Imperial fiefs in Italy. Italian troops served throughout Europe for the catholic side in the age of the European Wars of Religion. They fought in Germany, in France, in Italy, the Spanish Netherlands, in North Africa, on the fleet—on the Invincible Armada (1588), too—and in Central and South America, with very good results. The War of the Spanish Succession saw control of much of Naples and Sicily pass from Spain to Austria, with the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. However, the Spaniards regained Naples and Sicily following the Battle of Bitonto in 1738. Spanish and Austrian hegemony was not always based on direct rule; states such as Venice, Genoa, the Papal States, the duchies of Este, and Duchy of Savoy, were the only independent states, while a large part of the rest of Italy relied on the protection of Spain or Austria against external aggression. Furthermore, those areas under direct Spanish and (later) Austrian control were theoretically independent principalities bound to Spain and Austria through personal unions alone. Italy began to experience an economic and social decline as the 16th century progressed. The Age of Discovery had shifted the center of trade in Europe from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and so the Italian states lost much of their previous importance. Venice continued to fight bitterly with the Ottoman Empire for control of outposts in the eastern Mediterranean. It participated in the great naval Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and in the following century battled the Turks in the Cretan War, when it gained control of the Peloponnese in Greece but