His son Giovanni Mario commenced his reign by a parricide. The duchess, his mother, favoured the Guelph party. That of the Ghibellines, under the name and by the authority of the duke, then fifteen years of age, forced her to fly to Monza. Surprising her there, they dragged her back to the castle of Milan, and soon after murdered her within its walls. Giovanni Mario, by turns the instrument of Guelph and Ghibelline, lost his large possessions one by one, till only the town of Milan obeyed his sway, and even within the ducal city the sole prerogative he reserved to himself was the command of its executions.
From his childhood surrounded by crime, and inured to the sight of blood, he at last found pleasure only in witnessing a fellow creature’s agony as the sole excitement strong enough to rouse him. The slow forms of justice slurred over or put aside, the condemned were delivered to his power to be hunted to death by bull-dogs, whom his huntsman Gevanco had taught the taste of human flesh to accustom them to their fearful office. At last, when the measure of his crimes was overflowing, he was massacred by the Milanese nobles as he was about to enter the church of St. Gothard, the 16th of May, 1412, aged only twenty-two years. His brother Filippo Mario, on the news of his death, obliged the widow of Facino Cave, Giovanni’s trusted general, who had died of malady the same day as the duke by violence, to marry him ere she had laid her husband in his grave, and although she was twenty years his senior; she held at her disposal a brilliant army, the garrisons of various towns, and a fortune of four hundred thousand golden florins.
Taking instant possession of her riches, he purchased with their distribution the fidelity of Facino’s soldiers, and marched to Milan, of which they made him master. He undertook to reduce Lombardy to the obedience she had sworn to his father, but being cruel and crafty, and not brave, and seldom daring to leave the shelter of his fortified walls, he seemed little fitted to accomplish such an enterprise. It happened, however, on almost the only occasion in which Filippo Mario had been present in battle, that he distinguished among his soldiers one named Carmagnuola, who, born in the lowest grade of society, had been an officer’s servant, and now first enrolled himself in the ranks of the army. Apt to discern the military merit he could not imitate, he made Carmagnuola his officer, and the latter, rewarding his quicksightedness, and himself recompensed with the titles of count and the rank of general, reconquered all Lombardy. But Filippo Mario, in the caprice of tyranny, flung down the foundations of his fortune. Falsely accusing his wife Beatrice of being untrue to him, he sent her to perish on the scaffold; and suddenly taking umbrage at the power and distinction of Carmagnuola, he dismissed him from the command of his troops, denied him an interview, flung into prison his wife and daughters, and forced his general to fly for safety to Venice, whither he was followed by an assassin, who failed to accomplish his errand.
Treachery obliging Carmagnuola to treason against the state he had first served, he took the command of the armies of the two republics of Venice and Florence, and the duke of Milan found him a victorious enemy, though opposed to his son-in-law Francis Sforza. After a signal defeat of the Milanese the peace which ensued restored his wife and children to liberty, but Carmagnuola had roused Venetian suspicion by generously sending back all the prisoners he had made in battle, and when on the renewal of the war he met with unusual reverses, they called his ill fortune perfidy. The Council of Ten, in consequence, summoned him to Venice, there to advise the republic daring the negotiations for peace, received him with extraordinary pomp, the doge honouring him with a seat by his side, and expressing to him affection and gratitude as the voice of the republic; but hardly had his soldiers retired, leaving him unguarded in the senate, than Carmagnuola, destined to be the mark of ingratitude, was seized and heavily ironed, flung into a dungeon, and given to the torture. Twenty days after his arrest he was brought forth—gagged lest he should assert his innocence,—and beheaded. Of all his immense wealth which it confiscated, the republic only allowing a poor annuity to his daughters.
His death, in 1432, delivered Duke Filippo Mario from his most formidable foe, but ever pursuing the same wavering policy during his whole reign, he troubled and devastated Italy with an inconstancy of motive and action not to be comprehended. His natural daughter Blanche long promised and at last married to Francis Sforza, he by turns united his generals against his son-in-law, or sought his protection against them. He had once again had recourse to him, and peace between them was hardly ratified, when, as Francis and Blanche were on their way to join him at Milan, he was seized with fever, and died almost suddenly.
This Francis Sforza, who succeeded to the last Visconti, despite the right of the duke of Orleans, whose mother was Valentine of Milan, was the son of a brave man, himself the founder of his family. His name was Giaco Attendolo, and his father a labourer; and the young man, though, from feelings of duty to his family, he pursued the like toil, was often distracted from his occupation by a feeling which might be a presentiment of future fortunes, that his place of exertion was elsewhere. One day, while employed in cutting copsewood, he heard the sound of military music proceeding from a troop of soldiers advancing along the high road which bounded his father’s field, and his old longings and hesitation returned upon him. With something of the superstition of his time, he resolved that a presage should decide on his destiny, and turning his face towards an oak tree, which grew at no inconsiderable distance, and towered among the bushes old and mighty, he flung his hatchet against its trunk: “If it falls harmless,” he said, “my arm shall be that of a peasant still; if it pierces to the core, I am a soldier!” Hurled with his whole force, the axe cut through the bark, and sank deep into the tree, and Attendolo, casting one glance where it lay buried in the stem of the old oak, sprang from the place where he stood, and among the ranks of the soldiers: “My strength has decided my fate,” he exclaimed, “you may call me Sforza.”
Received as one of their band, his impetuosity and courage, which suffered no counsel, and was stopped by no resistance, soon confirmed a name which became that of his family. It was an epoch for military talent, and Sforza in a short time was of the chief of the condottieri who sold their service to those states whose gold was most plenty, and commanded a thousand horsemen.
In the year 1414, he conducted his army to Naples, and obtained honours and employment from Jane the Second, queen of Naples, but when James of Bourbon, comte de la Marche, her husband, less patient than she had expected, seized on her low-born lover Alopo, and condemned him to die in torments, Sforza was flung into a dungeon, where he remained a year, during which period the queen was captive also, and watched unceasingly by an old French knight, who was her gaoler.
A popular disturbance, occasioned by Neapolitan indignation, at length freed the sovereign. James, whose day of power was over, as he supported impatiently the influence of the queen’s new favourite Caraccioli, was arrested in turn, and though at the pope’s intercession he recovered his liberty, he thought fit to make his escape from the palace, and fly to Tarento, with the intent of stirring to insurrection the southern provinces. Besieged there, and losing all hopes of reigning at Naples, he returned to France and exchanged his kingly robes for the habit of St. Francis in the convent of Ste. Claire of Besançon, where he died.
Towns, fortresses, and fiefs of importance, rewarded Sforza’s fidelity; his soldiers were more devoted to him than ever before adventurers had been to a condottiere. He had summoned his relatives around him, men, like himself, reared in fatigues and hardships, and who made a ring of gallant and devoted followers about his person. His rival in the same career, one whose glory and genius equalled his own, was the condottiere Forte Braccio, and in almost every occasion in which their forces took different sides, Sforza’s had the disadvantage. When, after having long served Queen Jane, he was won over by Pope Martin the Fifth to quit her defence for that of Louis of Anjou, opposed to Braccio he lost almost the whole of his army. Throwing himself on his generosity, he rode to the camp with fifteen unarmed horsemen, and asked his interest with Queen Jane, whose soldier he was determined to be once more. Forgetting their long rivalry, the two captains repaired to her court, where Jane received Sforza and named him lord high constable. Soon after, she commanded him to oppose his forces to those of her adopted son, Alfonso of Arragon, to whose party Braccio had remained attached. Thus, though unwillingly, they became foes again; and Sforza, having forced Alfonso to abandon Naples, marched to deliver the town of Aquila, besieged by Braccio. The 4th of January, 1424, he arrived on the shores of the river Pescara. Braccio’s troops, which occupied the town of the same name, had defended its banks with palisades.