[6]. July 17, 1376.
[7]. Pastor, “Geschichte der Päpste,” i. 63, after Gregorovius.
[8]. Creighton, “History of the Papacy,” vol. i. p. 64.
[9]. Especially in Germany—Mayence, Breslau, Constance, Metz, Loire, Breslau, Lübeck, &c. See Pastor., op. cit., book ii. p. 108, et seq.
[10]. Sept. 6, 1382. Vide Pastor., p. 108.
Valentine Visconti.
I.
Valentine Visconti, greater than Helen as the cause of battles, was born in the Abbey of Pavia, in the year 1366. Her grandfather, Galeazzo Visconti, had left Milan rather suddenly, being ill with gout and “temendo la severità” of one so skilled in the use of succession-powders as Bernabò his brother, co-tyrant with him of Lombardy. He had designed a safe and splendid castle for himself in Pavia. While it was still unfinished Valentine was born in the hospitable old Certosa there.[[11]]
Galeazzo Visconti had taken with him from Milan his wife, Blanche of Savoy, his little daughter Iolanthe, and his married son Giangaleazzo, with his wife Isabelle. These last were the parents of Valentine. When she was born her mother was sixteen and her father fifteen years of age.[[12]] At her nativity there were, we are told, incredible rejoicings; for the pride of Galeazzo Visconti was gratified by the birth of a grandchild who was no less the grand-daughter of a King of France.
The mother of Valentine was that little French princess who, six years ago, had been sold into Lombardy to help to raise the golden millions of her father’s ransom. John the Good had received for his daughter the sum of five hundred thousand golden florins, a sort of inverse marriage portion, the price of a royal alliance. But Galeazzo had not paid for barren honour only: Isabelle had brought her husband the county and the title of Vertus in Champagne. Though the little girl had gone weeping into Italy, her tears were soon dried. She had left a devastated and ruined country; she came into a land of sumptuous tyranny, of riches and magnificence. Life was easy at Milan and at Pavia, where Galeazzo was busied with his new university, where Giangaleazzo—a timid, intellectual, orderly creature—spent day after day in his study full of enormous parchment ledgers, directing the staff of secretaries who copied into them his accounts, his memoranda, and duplicates of his correspondence. Priests and friars from the old Certosa, professors of law and learning from the new college, poets also—the English poet, Master Geoffrey Chaucer, and the prince of poets himself, Messer Francesco Petrarca,—learned men like Philippe de Mézières, visitors from so far away as England, France, or Cyprus—these were the guests of the palace. Gradually the stately home echoed with children’s voices. Valentine was born in 1366. One brother grew strong and playful at her side; another died in babyhood. When the third was born, in 1373, Isabelle died, and a few months afterwards her baby followed her.