The Story of Milan

by Ella Noyes

During the last century of the Viscontean domination, Milan, which had suffered little herself from the wars of Gian Galeazzo and Filippo Maria, and had never been taxed beyond her strength by those able tyrants, had grown into an enormous centre of trade. The rich produce of the East, transmitted from Venice and the other Italian ports, and the exports of the country itself, passed through the Milanese warehouses to the marts of the North. The Milanese woollen fabrics clothed all well-to-do Europe, and her smiths forged the panoply of the knights and men-at-arms on every battlefield and in every jousting-list of Christendom and of civilised Heathenesse as well. So great were the workshops of the master armourers that two of them alone are said to have armed on one occasion four thousand horsemen and two thousand foot soldiers for Duke Filippo in the space of a few days. The abundant products of the fertile plains around flowed into the capital, and with increasing population and wealth new industries arose, adding to the general prosperity, so that this city could with ease keep up an army which would have beggared Venice or Florence. In her almost inexhaustible resources lay the secret of her power in Italy, and of her great influence even in the Councils of Europe.

The new Duke laboured to breed, by all the arts of peace, yet greater wealth, and to secure its full advantage for the State. Especially he desired that Milan should have a due share in that splendid patrimony of light and learning which Italy was now inheriting across the chasm of the Middle Ages from her rediscovered Past. This man of war, bred up from childhood in the camp, entertained all the liberal ideals of the day. He particularly honoured virtuous and learned men, Corio tells us, and to his encouragement of art the city owed many beautiful buildings. In his patronage of the humanities, as in all his affairs, the Duke was nobly supported by his wife, Bianca Maria Visconte. This lady—donna d’animo virile—had been from their marriage-day the prop of his ambition and resolve. Her invincible spirit had never allowed him to flinch a moment from his task of conquest, had restored his courage under misfortune, and had even inspired him by donning helmet and cuirass, and herself leading troops to his succour on the battlefield. Aided by her clever mother, Agnese del Maino, Bianca Maria had acted for him in critical moments in his absence, with invariable constancy and promptitude, so that he was wont to declare that he had more confidence in her than in his whole army. In the acquisition of Milan she was his chief councillor, and now that the throne of her ancestors was won, she claimed her full share of it. One may suspect that this conqueror of men—not alone in history—was somewhat mastered by the young woman at his side. Bianca Maria is celebrated by the chroniclers for her goodness. ‘This lady,’ says Cagnola, ‘in piety, compassion, charity, and beauty of person, as well as every other virtue, surpassed all the women of our age, and was the splendour and mirror of all Italian women.’

Francesco left the government of his sons entirely to this notable lady. She herself superintended their Greek and Latin studies. But instruction in the art of ruling was the chief feature of her training, and that famous pedant, Filelfo, the Florentine, who was one of their tutors, had to remember that his task was to form princes, not merely men of letters. She was careful to have them taught chivalrous exercises, habits of courtesy, and the good manners proper to princes; and so rigorous was her discipline that no boys were ever better behaved than the ‘fantastick’ of after days, Galeazzo Maria, and he who was to betray Italy, Lodovico il Moro.

With the change from the worn-out domination of the Visconti, rooted in the Middle Ages, to the rule of the soldier of fortune, who owed his success to personal genius and character, the Renaissance era, that opportunity of individual talent, may be said to have opened in Milan. The aspect of the city soon showed the operation of a new vitality and enthusiasm, in the splendid buildings which now arose, and in the activity of all artistic and industrial employments. But Duke Francesco’s designs for the improvement of his State were hampered by the last convulsive struggles of the long-continued wars of North Italy. It was some years before Venice, Savoy, and the rest of Milan’s enemies were quieted and propitiated by the arms and the prudent diplomacy of the new ruler, who with time found means of overcoming all the dangers which threatened him. An alliance with Louis XI. of France protected the Duke from the pretensions of Orleans. With Cosimo de’ Medici he maintained a loyal friendship, and thus disarmed Florence, and with Naples he concluded a treaty of peace, which was sealed by the marriage of his daughter Ippolita to King Ferdinand’s son, Alfonso of Calabria. Francesco was well aware, however, of the secret hostility harboured against him by a strong party in the city, and was ever on his guard. The death of Jacopo Piccinino, in 1465, rid him of the last survivor of the great family of Condottieri, who had been his most formidable foes and rivals. Historians have charged Francesco with a share in the horrid deception by which this brilliant captain was decoyed to his destruction at the hands of Ferdinand of Naples.

A year later (1466), when the Duke himself died, his dynasty seemed to be securely founded in Milan. Yet, in the absence of the heir, the Duchess and her councillors hastened to put the Castle into a state of defence, and to take every precaution against rebellion. Galeazzo Maria, was hurriedly summoned from France, where he was fighting for Louis XI. in the Barons’ War. His return was accomplished with the utmost speed and secrecy, and the story of his passage through the dominions of Savoy, disguised as the servant of a travelling merchant, the attempt to capture him as he passed by a certain castle in the mountains, his escape into sanctuary, and thence, after three days’ concealment, into the fastnesses of the hills, where by difficult ways he was conducted into his own territory, strikes at once that note of romance and extravagance which accompanies the strange personality of Galeazzo Maria Sforza throughout his short course to the grave.

Once in his own dominions the new duke had nothing to fear. The habit of servitude had become only too confirmed in the Milanese, and they sealed their submission to the House of Sforza by accepting Francesco’s son without protest as their Lord. Galeazzo, born too late to remember aught but the triumphant days of his House, or to have known any interruption in the flattery, servility and fear which waited on princes in the fifteenth century, found himself at twenty-two monarch of a great State and vast riches, lord of the lives and destinies of large populations, and master, in all the vigour and freshness of his youth and of the unexhausted Sforza blood, of that incomparable treasure of delight and varied human experience which the Renaissance of learning, of knowledge, of beauty, had added to the heritage of power bequeathed to the Italian tyrants by their immediate ancestors. Is it a wonder that the princes of that bright new day, in all the pride of the restored faith in human greatness and possibility, should have believed themselves more than men, and like the old Roman emperors, whose histories they read and whose heirs they considered themselves, should have assumed the proud appellation of Divi—Gods? These favourites of Time and Fortune lacked, however, one thing: that discipline of the will—more rigorous than the self-mortification of the apostles of asceticism—which the religion of beauty and joy requires in its followers.

In Galeazzo Maria Sforza the characters of a Renaissance tyrant appear in an exaggerated light. A strain of the bizarre, inherited from his Visconte ancestors, working in the strong new blood of the Sforza, produced in him an extravagance of temperament which ruled all his thoughts and acts. He had been instructed in the new learning by Filelfo and other humanists of repute; but from the classic example and precept thus set before him by men who themselves often abused the ideals which they taught his unbalanced nature had learnt only licence. His hot passions, romantically shown in youth by his love for Lucrezia Landriani, and his adoration of the child she bore him, that famous Caterina, afterwards Lady of Forlì, developed rapidly into unbridled lust. His vanity was nothing less than preposterous, and his care for his tall and splendid person, and in especial for his beautiful white hands, was a sort of idolatry. His insatiable appetite for gorgeous surroundings and rich display glutted itself with an orgy of colour and ornamentation, rioted in costly fabrics and priceless gems and gaudy equipages. Never before in Italy had such pomp been seen as accompanied his journey, in 1471, to visit Lorenzo de’ Medici, who, as head of the Florentine Republic, had been entertained a short time before in Milan. With him went his consort, the beautiful Bona of Savoy, the princess who was to have married Edward IV. of England, had not her fickle suitor fallen in love with Elisabeth Woodville instead. Bona became Galeazzo’s wife in 1467.

Besides his Duchess, all the great feudatories and ministers of State, arrayed in cloth of gold and silver, accompanied the Duke, himself a magnificent figure in royal crimson. The courtiers wore velvet and finest silk, the dresses of the chamberlains and pages were exquisite with needlework, the lackeys were in silk and cloth of silver, and the very cooks and scullions in velvet and satin. An immense train of horses, with trappings of silver and gold, carried grooms in silken liveries of the Sforza colours, purple and white. Mules, with housings of white and purple damask embroidered with the devices of the Sforza in silver, bore litters hung with gorgeous stuffs, and containing beds of cloth of gold. Huntsmen leading five hundred couple of dogs, falconers with highly trained hawks upon their wrists followed, and a host of trumpeters, pipers, musicians and jesters played their lively part in the procession. The description of this gallant train, winding out in all its fresh new bravery into the green Lombard plain from the serrated walls and gates of the mediæval city, in the radiance of a May morning, suggests something of what Milan once was and of the lost beauty of Renaissance pageantry. The luxury and extravagance of the Milanese visitors greatly impressed the Florentines, and, according to Macchiavelli, helped to corrupt them and induce them to abandon their sober habits for pleasures and vanities.

Galeazzo’s love of decoration vented itself in the adornment of his palaces with paintings and works of art. He employed a host of artists, and in his impatience and excitement demanded miracles of them. He would have marble palaces and painted chambers rise as at the stroke of a magician’s wand; and an oft-told tale relates how he commanded a certain artist to decorate a whole wall with portraits of the ducal family in a single night. And woe to those who displeased him. The glittering, gaudy figure of this prince, with the great black eyes and hawk nose, and the white effeminate hands, dressed in the motley parti-coloured dress, red and white, used by the Dukes of Milan, moves through the pages of history in an alternation of black shadow and garish light. He was pointed out in whispers as the murderer of his own mother. It is true that his imperious temper had quickly resented Bianca Maria’s attempt to share in the government and to retain the power which her influence on her husband had given her. A short struggle had ensued between the mother and son, and ended by the defeated Duchess resolving to withdraw to her dower city of Cremona and there exercise her lawful authority. But neither did this division of the State suit the new Duke, and he detained her in the Castle of Melegnano, where, devoured by anger and grief, she fell sick after a few months and died, poisoned, according to common belief. But the accusation appears to rest only on Galeazzo’s general reputation for wickedness, and the ingratitude and want of filial piety which he had already shown himself capable of towards his mother. He is not a singular instance, however, of a young sovereign disagreeing with a dominant queen-mother. With as scant evidence, the death of his first betrothed, Dorotea Gonzaga, which freed him to make the more advantageous alliance with Bona, is laid to Galeazzo’s charge.