A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 1 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

CHAPTER I.

Of Catherine's father, the Duke, and of his magnificent journey to Florence.

The latter years of the fifteenth century, up to 1494, were a time of unusual prosperity in Italy. Never since the fall of the Roman empire, one thousand years previously, says Guicciardini,[43] had she enjoyed a period so flourishing and happy. "Reposing in perfect peace and tranquillity," continues the great historian, "cultivated in the more sterile and mountainous regions, as well as in the plains and fertile districts, subject to none save her native rulers, she not only abounded with inhabitants, trade, and wealth, but was especially adorned by the magnificence of a great number of princes, by the splendour of many noble and beautiful cities, by the majesty of the supreme seat of religion, and by the excellence of her great men in every art, pursuit, and science."

Of these noble and wealthy cities, Milan was one of the noblest and wealthiest; and Galeazzo Maria Sforza, its Duke, was one of the princes who most notably "adorned Italy with his magnificence." The Visconti had reigned there from 1277, till the death of Filippo, the last Duke of that race, in 1447, without heirs male. He had, some years before his death, given his daughter Bianca, and the succession to his duchy, to the celebrated soldier of fortune Francesco Sforza. And the magnificent Galeazzo, whose lot fell on the halcyon times described by Guicciardini, was the son of Francesco and Bianca, and succeeded his father in 1466.

JOHN PETER LANDRIANO.

Now, in the smiling and happy city of Milan, in these merry days of the good old time, there lived, eating his polenta, paying church-dues and taxes, and so pursuing, as quietly as he might, his way to dusty death among a crowd bound for the same bourne, a citizen named John Peter Landriano. To this John Peter, also, it might have been permitted to sleep in tranquil oblivion together with the others of his probably polenta-eating, and certainly tax-paying, fellow-citizens, instead of being still, after now four hundred years, thus extant, despite his "fallentis semita vitæ," had not Mnemosyne marked him for her own, by right of one small fact. He was the husband of a remarkably beautiful wife, named somewhat unhappily Lucretia, on whom it pleased his magnificent Highness Galeazzo Maria to look with condescension in the year 1462. In a later part of that same year, the family of John Peter Landriano was increased by the birth of a female child, named Catherine, whom his Highness was so good as to consider and educate as his own.

This splendid prince, who was, as Catherine's priestly biographer,[44] Burriel, informs us, more bookishly inclined than could have been expected from a person of his exalted rank, took care that her education should be sedulously attended to by some of the learned persons who abounded in his court. And he had reason to be so well contented with the promise of her early years, that shortly after she had reached the age of eight, he caused her to be "legitimatised "—a curious process, which would seem to prove that, though not Jove himself has power o'er the past, Holy Mother Church possesses it.

Thenceforward Catherine's education was conducted under the superintendence of the Duchess Bona, a princess of the house of Savoy, whom Duke Galeazzo married in 1468 after the death of his first wife, Dorotea Gonzaga, by whom he had no child. It is to be supposed, probably, that the process of "legitimation," among its other mysterious virtues, had that of inspiring a good church-woman with maternal feelings for the offspring of another; for the Duchess Bona, who seems to have been a kind and gentle rather than a royal-souled lady, appears to have affectionately welcomed the little stranger as a princess of the noble house of Sforza, and to have done her best to prepare her duly for the high fortunes to which her father destined her, as a means of extending the connections and assuring the greatness of his house.

THE BALANCE OF POWER.

Such schemes, and others directed to the same end, formed the principal serious occupation of the Italian princes of that time, and were the fruitful source of atrocities and abominations innumerable, as the reader of Italian history well knows. To a certain degree such ambition found its excuse in the great law of self-preservation. For in the perpetually shifting scene produced by the alliances, jealousies, leagues, ruptures, friendships and treasons, of a crowd of petty potentates, it was well nigh impossible for any family of princely rank to hold its own, neither encroaching itself, nor encroached on by others. The fortunes of each were ever on the rise, or on the decline. And at the period of our heroine's appearance on the scene, the peace, which Italy was then enjoying, was preserved only by a careful maintenance of the balance of power between some four or five of the leading princes of the peninsula.