Meanwhile Lodovico il Moro flourished in Milan. Under his cultured and dignified rule it became a magical city, a capital of masterpieces. There in 1483, Leonardo da Vinci took up his abode, cast his bronze statue of Francesco Sforza, painted pictures, and founded a school of Lombard painters, little less exquisite, mysterious, and sensual than himself. The Choir of Singers, whom Galeazzo Maria Sforza had brought across the Alps, increased, and the singing and playing of Milan became a thing of note. Temples and palaces sprang up as by enchantment; and learned humanists—grave Romans, bearded Greeks, astute Orientals—from all the centres of knowledge in the world, came to lecture on law, science, and the classics, in brilliant Milan. Nor was the Court of Venus, says Corio, less distinguished than the Court of Minerva. “All were willing to concede their best and fairest to the Court of Cupid; fathers their daughters, husbands their wives, brothers their sisters.” And the laxity of Lombard manners which had scandalized the very Court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, in 1471, was not less abandoned, not less luxurious, although more natural and freer from cruelty under the sceptre of the Regent Lodovico who appears at the head of this princely retinue, a man majestic, suave, omniscient, as any Duke of Shakespeare’s plays.
And yet the real Duke was seldom seen, seldom heard. It was polite to suppose him still a child. None the less every one knew he had been born in the year 1469, amid incredible rejoicings; and many had seen the great Lorenzo de’ Medici when he came to the christening, and had looked on the magnificent necklace of diamonds which he had given the Duchess. “Ah, you shall be godfather to all my children!” the Duke Galeazzo Maria had cried with cordial naïveté. And now—ah, Time’s revenges!—the Duke was murdered, the Duchess in exile, and the babe whom all men had welcomed—a prisoner rather than a ward in the hands of the ambitious Regent!
Men began to murmur, and when Giangaleazzo was about eighteen his uncle found himself unable any longer to defer his marriage. Years ago the child had been betrothed to Isabel of Arragon, the granddaughter of the King of Naples. She came to Milan in 1487. A little later Lodovico himself married a young wife, Beatrice, daughter of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.
So long as there had been no woman at the head of the Court of Milan, there had been no discord. The young Duke, half a captive, had a doglike docile affection for his tyrant; he was content to yield his place and keep his title; and Lodovico was satisfied to have the place without the name. But Isabel of Arragon was a Neapolitan and a Spaniard—a nature passionate, arrogant, intense. In vain she urged her husband to assert his rights. He promised what she would, and then confessed their conversation to his uncle. When her child was born, and still the bride of Lodovico sat on the throne which should have been her throne—Isabel would no longer possess her soul in patience. This time she did not appeal to her husband—a beautiful youth, soft as silk, innocent as flowers, incapable of revenge or determination; she wrote to her father and her grandfather at Naples, men as different from him as men can be. She asserted her rights (“essendo giovane di grand’ animo”); she told them of the intolerable yoke of Lodovico—of her husband, a grown man and a father, yet kept in tutelage. She told them doubtless by her messenger (no word of personal complaint appears in her letter) what Corio tells us: that amid all the luxury of Milan, the Duke and the Duchess procured with difficulty the bare necessities of life. There was much indignation in her old home, and Alfonso wrote to Il Moro demanding the throne and government of Milan for his son-in-law. “You make a laughing-stock of my daughter—shall we endure to see our blood despised?”[[112]] Lodovico, as his manner was, returned a soft answer. And a year or two went by in procrastination and recrimination; but in 1493 the house of Naples, in defence of the young Duke, declared war upon the Regent of Milan.
In another place I have spoken of the dismay and terror of that hour; the still rage of Lodovico—a rage not unmixed with joy and with the presentiment of success; the anger of his young wife, determined not to quit her throne, determined to take at last from the detested Isabel that one fine thing which as yet she had not dared to take from her: the title of Duchess. My readers know how, on the one hand, Lodovico sent to the Emperor admitting the illegal nature of the Sforza claim, and entreating him (for a consideration) to bestow it on him anew; how, on the other hand, he sent into France reminding Charles VIII. of the French claim to Naples; and how the French crossed the Alps in September; and how, in September also, very secretly, the Emperor’s Investiture arrived in Milan; and how on the morrow after the French left Milan the young Duke died (Teodoro di Pavia discovering in his body the evident signs of poison); and how the people, overawed by the neighbourhood of the French, were taught to acclaim Lodovico, consecrated thus alike by Imperial privilege and popular voice; so that he ruled at last as Duke in Milan.
Meanwhile Isabel and her little son had wandered about in exile, vainly seeking supporters. Success smiled on her rival, Beatrice, the mother of two sons who each, after many adventures, should rule as Duke of Milan. In September, 1496, while Isabel, her child in her arms, was discovering the futility of resistance, Beatrice at Vigevano was entertaining Maximilian. The great Emperor was at that time a man of thirty-seven, with long whitening hair, dressed in a long black velvet coat, a black woollen French cap, black stockings and sleeves; he wore no ornament save a little gold chain with the order of the Golden Fleece. He was under a vow to wear nothing but black until he could boast a Turkish victory. But, melancholy and grizzled Don Quixote as he appeared, Maximilian was no less an Emperor; and the Diary of Marino Sanuto shows us the splendour with which the Duke and Duchess of Milan made him welcome.
That splendour was very costly. Not only did it compel the Duke to levy grievous taxes (grandissime exstrusione a li so populi) on his subjects, so that they were like desperate men, desiring any change. If the expense of this entertainment was paid in tears, no less a price should be exacted for its fatigue. In September the Duchess Beatrice was pregnant: Marino Sanuto will conclude the story.[[113]]
“News of the month of January, 1496 (Old Style).
“How at Milan, in the castle, on the third day of the month, the Duchess, wife of the reigning Duke Lodovico, Beatrice by name, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, was delivered of a still-born son; etiam she herself was dead five hours after the child. And the said death hath plunged the Duke in heavy sorrow, so that he keepeth his room, the shutters closed and candles lit in daytime. And ’tis also reported—as I saw it set down in another letter—that the said Duchess died on the second day of the month, at six o’clock after noon; and that very day she had gone riding in her carriage through the streets of Milan, and had held a ball at the castle until two o’clock after dinner. And she hath left only two children behind her, boys—the one, Maximilian, Count of Pavey; the other, Sforza, three years of age. And the Duke cannot suffer the sorrow of this loss, for the great love he bore to his wife; and he saith he hath no heart for his children, nor his State nor for aught under the sun; so that almost is he weary of his life.[life.] And, out of sadness, he keepeth his chamber, which is hung all in black; and there for a fortnight he hath shut himself in. And ’tis said that, in the selfsame night the Duchess died, the walls of her garden fell crashing to the ground, and yet was there neither tempest, wind nor earthquake; which thing was held by many for a sign of very evil omen.”