The Story of Milan

by Ella Noyes

The Duke’s appetite for blood was rewarded with Dantesque fitness. He died in 1412, suffocated in his own blood in the precincts of the palace, under the daggers of three Milanese nobles, who had sworn to rid the world of a monster, and his body, lying in its blood in the Cathedral, whither it had been carried and left alone by the general horror, had for its only pall blood-red roses strewn upon it by a harlot.

At the moment of Giovanmaria’s murder, Facino Cane, who for some years had dominated Milan, lay on his death-bed. Filippo Maria Visconte, whose youth had passed in confinement at Pavia, now found himself at one stroke free, and in nominal possession at least of the Dukedom. He was twenty years old. The astute young man’s first step was to marry Beatrice Tenda, Facino’s widow, through whom he became at once master of Pavia and the State which the Condottiere had conquered for himself, and of Facino’s fine army and immense treasure. He then led his troops to Milan, where his entry was opposed by Estorre Visconte and a strong faction. The great stronghold of Porta Giovia was, however, held for the legitimate prince by the Castellan, Vincenzo Marliano, who roused the citizens against Estorre. That brave soldier, the Hector of his race, was overthrown, and he and his nephew Giovanni Carlo, with all their supporters, were compelled to fly after a few days. The young Duke marched in without opposition and was received with enthusiasm by the people.

The city felt at once the presence of a master. Order was restored, factions calmed, peaceful industry protected, and punishment inflicted on Giovanmaria’s murderers. Filippo proceeded to engage the most successful Condottieri of the day to defend and restore his State, seconding their valour and generalship in the field by the most careful and industrious diplomacy in every Court of Italy and the principal European kingdoms. The rebel Visconti were subdued by the death of Estorre and the surrender of Monza (1412), which the brave Valentina relinquished, making honourable terms for herself and the remaining descendants of Bernabò. Lodi, Como, Piacenza and Brescia were recovered in the course of a few years, and in 1422 Genoa was won. Filippo’s rapid progress awakened the old terror of the Snake once again in Italy. The third Duke of Milan had indeed many of the successful qualities of his race, the craft, the patience, the untiring industry. But they were vitiated by his timidity of mind and body, which made him both suspicious and superstitious. Supremely perfidious himself, he dared trust no man, and constantly laid snares for his own agents, and ended by falling into them himself. Thus in 1424, fearful of the glory of his great general, Carmagnola, who had been the chief means of restoring his fortunes, he offended and alienated the Condottiere, with disastrous consequences. In his fear and dislike of all men he shut himself up in the innermost recesses of the Castle of Porta Giovia, and maintained as many precautions as if he dwelt in a city of traitors. He tolerated few persons around him, except his astrologers, who ruled him through his fears. He dared take no step without consulting them. He was never seen by his subjects except upon some rare State occasion, surrounded by guards, or when some peasant, working in the solitary fields, spied him slipping hastily in his barge along the canals between Milan and his favourite country palace of Abbiategrasso.

This dark habit of life made him odious to the sunny-tempered Milanese. They shuddered at this pale fat man, who increased their horror by condemning his own wife to death in 1418. To Beatrice Tenda and her vast dowry Filippo owed almost entirely his possession of the Dukedom. Her years much exceeded her second husband’s, though the Duke, like his father, had never been young. Because he was tired of her, or because she was cross and avaricious, as the chroniclers variously aver, or more probably because she had served her purpose and was no longer of any use to him, Filippo accused her of infidelity. She was arrested and carried to the Castle of Binasco, together with her supposed lover, a handsome young knight, Michele Orombello, who had solaced her dreary existence with his skill upon the lute, and after having resisted torture inflicted to make her confess herself guilty, she was beheaded. Orombello and two of her ladies shared her fate. Ten years later the Duke married, for political reasons, the Princess Maria of Savoy. This poor lady was hardly less to be pitied than Beatrice. The Duke neglected her himself, yet jealously kept her secluded from all but her own women, allowing no man to appear in her presence. Meanwhile Agnese del Maino, the lady who had secured the tyrant’s affections, reigned in the Castle as his wife in all but name. Filippo’s love for Agnese, a woman of spirit and culture, and his devotion to the daughter she bore him, his only child, Bianca Maria, were human traits in his otherwise unamiable character. Though no lover of learning, Filippo continued, as much as circumstances allowed, the Viscontean patronage of culture and letters, the tradition that had descended from his ancestors, the hosts of Petrarca. He kept up the University of Pavia and called great scholars to its chairs. The celebrated humanist, Pier Candido Decembrio, was for many years his secretary. He employed artists of renown, including Brunelleschi and Pisanello, in various works. To his daughter the Duke was careful to give the scholarly training which with the revival of learning had become a necessary ornament for the women as well as the men of the great Italian Houses, and Bianca Maria added the accomplishments of Latin and Greek to the beauty and spirit with which nature had endowed her.

But the Duke had neither means nor leisure amid the struggles of his ambition and the pressure of his fears for much attention to the peaceful arts. He was entirely occupied in redeeming his heritage and preserving it from the greed of Venice, the inveterate hate of Florence, the envy of the smaller States, and, from what he feared most of all, the ambition and intrigues of the Condottieri in his own employ. The fortunes of Italy were now, in fact, in the hands of the great military adventurers. After a century and a half of physical lassitude, during which her wars had been carried on by foreign mercenaries, she had bred a race of warriors who had learnt their craft so well in the camps of the German and English Condottieri that they had now superseded the foreigners. With hosts of trained and disciplined soldiers at their command, who knew no faith except to their leader, they took service now with one sovereign, now with another, and with their fickle arms and policy made and unmade States at their will. Facino Cane and Jacopo dal Verme had already played their parts, to the disruption of the Milanese State. Carmagnolo, after serving Duke Filippo for many years, went over to Venice, and for long balanced the two States one against the other, by his crafty conduct of the war, till he fell a victim to the superior cunning of the Doge and his councillors in 1432. And now, in the midst of the noise of battle and the ferment of intrigue, in which all the years of Duke Filippo were wrapped, the great name of Sforza is first heard in Milanese story.

With the first Sforza and his son Francesco on the one side, and Braccio Montone and Niccolò Piccinino on the other, the age of the Condottieri culminated. The whole of Italy was plunged into strife by these great leaders, in whom the old faction divisions of the country were revived, and cities and States split up once again into hostile parties, Guelfs and Ghibellines reappearing under the new names of Sforzeschi and Bracceschi. These rival forces were at once the salvation and the torment of Duke Filippo. The hope of succeeding to the heirless man’s dominions—an elevation not beyond the attainment of an obscurely born individual, in an age and country in which men made themselves, and everything was possible to strength and ability—was a bait which drew them to his service; and with all his cunning and perfidious diplomacy he manipulated them for his own advantage, pitting them against each other, now encouraging one, now compassing his downfall by means of another. But they, too, were cunning. It was a game of wits, and Filippo often found himself outdone. Yet to the very end, though plagued, cajoled and defeated on all sides, he succeeded in circumventing all the efforts of either party to seat itself securely in Milan, preferring, with his strange spite towards mankind, to leave his kingdom to anarchy rather than adopt an heir.

In spite of him, however, destiny had raised up in a rustic race hailing from Cotignola, in the Romagna, a regenerator for the worn-out tyranny of the Visconti. Muzio Attendolo, the founder of the Sforza family, is pictured by legend as a peasant boy, who, when twelve years old, flung his woodman’s axe into a tree, and ran away to the wars. He appears to have been really the son of a small landowner, rich only in the possession of a progeny mighty in number and in strength. The name of Sforza is said to have attached itself to him, in consequence of some signal effort of his extraordinary strength and will. These qualities, joined to his great energy, raised him to the highest military fame. His life was chiefly spent in the wars of Naples and the Church, but he had just accepted service with the Duke of Milan, when one day he plunged into a swollen river, under the arrows of the enemy, to save a drowning boy, and sank beneath the weight of his armour (1424).

His son, Francesco, though only twenty-two, took command of his army, and soon showed equal valour and much greater ability. Engaged, in 1425, by Duke Filippo, he rapidly became a power in Milan, where he struggled with the rival Condottiere, Niccolò Piccinino, for supremacy in the councils of the Prince, and in the favour of the people. In 1432, Filippo gave him the highest mark of favour by promising him the hand of Bianca Maria, and with all solemnity the little girl of eight years old was betrothed to the great general. But no sooner had the Duke thus exalted Sforza, than he hastened to depress and humiliate him in every way. Niccolò Piccinino was given the chief command of the Visconte’s forces, and Francesco was fain at the time to abandon Milan, and his hopes of eventually possessing the Dukedom in his promised wife’s right, and to accept the standard of Pope Eugenius IV., Filippo’s bitter enemy. For many years the brilliant genius of Piccinino and the subtlety of the Duke were victorious over all enemies, and baffled every effort of Sforza to obtain his little princess and regain his footing in Milan. The climax of Filippo’s success came in 1435, when his Genoese fleet defeated the Neapolitans at Gaeta, and brought back captive the Kings of Naples and Navarre and a great company of lords and gentlemen. The Duke on this occasion completely belied his usual character and astonished the whole world by his kingly spirit. He received the two monarchs with the utmost honour, and immediately granted them their freedom. Moreover, he entertained them and their trains for a whole month, with great splendour and a joyous festivity, rare indeed in Milan during his reign. His generosity was doubtless calculated; in Alfonso of Naples he disarmed an enemy and made a lasting friend, and by cunningly rousing in that monarch a hope of succeeding to the Milanese state, he raised up an aspirant who might be useful as a weapon against the conflicting pretensions of Piccinino and Sforza.

Before long, however, fortune turned against the Duke. Sforza, at the head of the League of Venice, Florence and the Church, routed his generals and captured his provinces and cities. In this predicament, Filippo appealed to the great Condottiere’s ambition, and allured him once more by offering him his bride at last with a rich dowry of territory and gold. Francesco thereupon ceased to press the attack upon him, and the war became little more than a languid pretence. Having thus nonplussed his foes, who were completely dependent on the caprice of their general, the Duke, with his interminable negotiations, continually delayed the accomplishment of his promise, and meanwhile secretly endeavoured in every way to entangle and overthrow Francesco. In this he was only baffled by the almost equal craft and caution of his would-be son-in-law.

But as time went on, the Duke began to grow old and to weary of the eternal struggle. He was oppressed with languor and excessive fat. The fear of total blindness came upon him. Nearly all Italy was armed against him. The parties in the State grew ever more clamorous, his captains more unmanageable. Each of the latter seized upon one of his cities and domineered over it as its Lord. Disasters accumulated upon him in the field. Piccinino’s daring raid into Florentine territory, in 1439-40, ended in the great defeat of Anghiari, and Sforza, enraged by the Duke’s duplicity, was capturing his cities for the League and devastating his territories far and wide. Meanwhile, the peace which all Italy sighed for was delayed by the great Condottiere, who, having triumphed over all his rivals, would not sheath his sword till he had secured Bianca Maria and the enormous dowry which he demanded with her. At last, yielding to the persuasion of his only friend, Niccolò III. of Ferrara, the general peacemaker, Filippo agreed to the marriage, and the maiden of seventeen was conducted to the city of Cremona, which was to be her rich portion, by the fatherly Marquis Niccolò, and there wedded to her mature bridegroom.