Duchy of Milan

“ He had returned to find his duchy as to all moral intents he had left and could have wished to recover it. The fashion of Nature had shed its petals with the summer brocades, and Milan was itself again. ”

“ At Piacenza, the King of Spain, out of his abundant caution, still maintained a Spanish garrison in the castle, "badly paid as they told me." Thence they proceeded into the duchy of Milan.
At Pavia Montaigne remarks, that from Rome northward the best inn he had lodged at was the Post at Piacenza, and the worst the Falcon at Pavia: "You pay extra for wood, and there are no mattresses on the beds." Milan was the largest city in Italy, not unlike Paris, full of merchandise and craftsmen; it lacked the palaces of other cities, but in size excelled them all, and in throng of people rivalled Venice. ”

“ Lombardy has ever been considered the real paradise and land of riches of all Italy, and even now, in a certain luxuriousness of attitude towards life, it lives up to its repudiation of the days of the dominating Visconti and Sforza.
Milan is to-day the luxurious capital of Lombardy, as was Pavia in the past. At one time, be it recalled, Milan was a Duchy in its own right. Years of despotism at the hands of a man of genius made Milan a great city and the intellectual capital of Italy. Milanese art and architecture of the fifteenth century reached a great height. ”

“ The office has become hereditary, and we have the beginnings of the future duchy of Milan. The pope, jealous of the Della Torre’s growing power, appoints Otto Visconti, of a powerful local family, archbishop of Milan. The people refuse to receive him and are excommunicated by the pope. Beginning of the Della Torre-Visconti feud. The Pelavicini are now predominant in the valley of the Po and the Della Scala in the Veronese March.
1266 After Charles of Anjou’s victories in the south, the Florentines destroy their Ghibelline government. ”

“ Those who had really pure motives were drawn hopelessly into the whirlpool, and the Defenders of Liberty oppressed each other, and the citizens generally, with every cruelty and injustice.
Meanwhile the Duchy was claimed by the Guelf party for Alfonso of Aragon, on the strength of a will which his supporters had extracted from the dying Filippo. A pretension—first threat of the misfortune that was to fall later on Milan—was also advanced by the Duke of Orleans, son of Filippo’s sister, Valentina Visconte. The Emperor claimed the Duchy as a vacant fief. ”

“ It lacks their spontaneity and daring, their lofty imagination and idealism, has little of their sense of beauty, falls short in sheer ability. But it is distinguished by sincerity, a love of realism, a humble and zealous industry, and also by certain marked and inveterate mannerisms. And though the Milanese, or rather the 209Lombards who peopled the wide Duchy of the Visconti and Sforza, remained always very receptive, looking for a lead, and owing their strongest artistic impulses to some genius from abroad, their work keeps always its strong native character. ”

“ They were enormously wealthy. The resources of the papal treasury, the private fortunes of the Florentine bankers, the riches of the Venetian merchants might have purchased all that France or Germany possessed of value. The single duchy of Milan yielded to its masters seven hundred thousand golden florins of revenue, according to the computation of De Comines. In default of a confederative system, the several states were held in equilibrium by diplomacy. By far the most important people, next to the despots and the captains of adventure, were ambassadors and orators. ”

“ The Sforzas, the successful usurpers, claimed possession as nine points of the law, and Maximilian the Emperor demanded Milan by right of his overlordship. Each was equally resolved to possess in that city the key of Italy. But these words, Milan, Italy, meant more to Francis than a mere political position. To his intensely artistic temperament, a corner of Italy was more precious than the whole of France. Milan to him meant beauty, poetry; gardened villas in which to pass a soft abandoned leisure; women more fair than those of his kingdom ”

“ In 1392 the walls had reached the full height of the side aisles, and all the pillars of the interior were already standing. That forest of lofty shafts soaring to dim heights, in which we wander to-day, astonished and awed, must once have enclosed the puny mortal form and the immeasurable spirit of the first and greatest Duke of Milan. His death in 1402 robbed the great enterprise of vitality and inspiration. In the misfortunes of Giovanmaria’s reign, both funds and encouragement lacked, and the general mediocrity of the builders was equally blighting to the progress of the work. ”

“ The stranger from Florence and Venice might well admire the duke's knowledge and taste, and wonder at the splendid results which his enlightened patronage of art and learning had produced. For they saw his great city of Milan as it has never been seen again, before the savage invader had spoiled its charm and defaced its loveliness; when Bramante's churches and porticoes rose in perfect symmetry against the sky, and the glowing tints of Leonardo's frescoes were yet fresh upon the walls. ”

“ Under Charlemagne, who conquered Desiderio in 774, and created a so-called Kingdom of Italy, Milan held only the third place among the metropolitan Sees, yielding precedence after Rome to Ravenna. The Frankish king, whose great scheme of a restored Roman Empire included a united Latin Church under the Pope as supreme head, not only exalted the spiritual authority of Rome over the other Sees, but even endeavoured to suppress the peculiarities of the Ambrosian liturgy and force Milan into uniformity with the rest of the Latin Church. ”

“ The terror of the Hunnish invasion, in 899, further assisted the people in their progress towards freedom, for it compelled them to take arms and to fortify their city, rendering Milan more than ever independent of the feudal lords who lived in their castles in the country. The tyranny of these nobles drove the peasantry and smaller vassals to seek the protection for life and property, the equality of taxation and of justice, which could be found only inside the walled city and under the rule of the archbishop. Thus Milan grew populous, and learned to govern itself. ”

“ Pressing upwards through the continual struggles, amid the phantoms and shadows of the earlier centuries, the chosen spirits of humanity had at last emerged upon a height, where, as in the light of unclouded morning, the whole world seemed spread out before and behind them, heaven itself within their reach, the gods themselves their fellows. In the general material prosperity out of which the fine flower of Italian civilisation in the Quattrocento had sprung, as in the cultured and artistic joy of life which was its highest expression, Milan, led by Lodovico Sforza, held a foremost place. ”

“ The brethren acquired in time great wealth from the woollen industry, which they continued to pursue, and later on they were largely employed in the public offices of the city, and especially in its financial concerns. Thus they gradually became very powerful, and under the tyrannies of the Visconti and Sforza, provided Milan with many great statesmen. In the sixteenth century the vast possessions of the order, in the form of commendas and prebends, etc., were practically owned by a few great families, and the actual number of the brethren had fallen to less than a hundred. ”

“ Milan, unaffected by the quarrels of her sovereigns, was now the richest, most populous and luxurious city of Italy. The capitals of the great European kingdoms had no such splendid palaces, such comely-paved streets, such fair-fountained gardens and pleasaunces trodden by beautiful exotic beasts and birds, as this seat of citizen princes. The Visconti assumed the dignity and state of royalty. Galeazzo was himself married to a princess of the ancient House of Savoy, and both brothers pursued the sagacious policy of making alliances for their children with the sovereign Houses of Europe. ”

“ We see her holding her court in the famous Castello of Porta Giovia or in the summer palaces of Vigevano and Cussago, in these golden days when Milan was called the new Athens, when Leonardo and Bramante decorated palaces or arranged masquerades at the duke's bidding, when Gaspare Visconti wrote sonnets in illuminated books, and Lorenzo da Pavia constructed organs or viols as perfect and beautiful to see as to hear, for the pleasure of the youthful duchess. ”

“ He died in 1354, leaving his dominions to Matteo, Bernabò and Galeazzo II., to the entire exclusion of Luchino’s sons.
The new sovereigns had much ado at first to preserve their great heritage. Many cities, patient under the Archbishop’s yoke, rebelled against his successors, including Bologna. The Guelf enemies of Milan tried to enlist the new Emperor Charles of Bohemia against the Visconti ”

“ For the three preceding centuries, Milan, the oldest archbishopric of Lombardy, had been the central point at which the collision between the secular and ecclesiastical power took place in Europe. The Guelph and Ghibelline naturally met and warred throughout the plain of Lombardy; but the intense civic stubbornness and courage of the Milanese population formed a kind of rock in their tide-way, where the quarrel of burgher with noble confused itself with, embittered, and brought again and again to trial by battle, that of pope with emperor. ”

“ The one stable power, that of the Church, based on an inextinguishable tradition, became paramount in the city, and in virtue of its vast possessions assumed the temporal as well as the spiritual dominion. By the tenth century the Archbishops of Milan appear as great feudal princes, the most powerful in North Italy, and practically independent of the Emperor. ”

“ This blow seems to have crushed the vitality of Milan. For centuries she remained in a weak and depressed condition. During the Lombard domination, which swept away the brief authority of the Eastern Empire established by the arms of Narses, her pre-eminence in North Italy was usurped by Pavia, which Alboin and his successors chose as the capital of their new realm, now first called Lombardy. The broken palaces of the once imperial metropolis no longer sheltered sovereigns. ”

“ He leagued with Venice and Florence against the new Republic, defeated the Duke of Savoy, whom Filippo’s widow, Maria of Savoy, had enlisted against him, and cutting Milan off from all friends or help, laid siege to the capital itself.
Yet still the citizens clung to their illusion of liberty, and obstinately refused to submit to a new master. Amid fierce tumult they appointed fresh magistrates from the lowest ranks, persecuted and proscribed the nobles, and put an enormous price on the head of the ‘perfidious’ Francesco Sforza, decreeing death to any who breathed his name without a curse. ”

“ The balance of power in Italy, deprived of the weight of Milan, wavered in consequence, and Sixtus IV., Naples and Venice did their utmost to swallow up Florence. The safety of the great Tuscan Republic, secured partly by the courage and address of Lorenzo de’ Medici, but more by the timely knock of the Turk at the door of Italy, at Otranto, was further assured by the fast-rising power of the new ruler of Milan, who by uniting his State in 1484, in a fresh alliance with Florence 154and Naples, restored to Italy that equilibrium which had been first established by his great father, Francesco. ”

“ The extinction of the throne, the flight of a dynasty, the sovereignty of the mob, and the universal frenzy of a nation, were bold sports, of which Italian souls knew nothing. But their effect was soon perilously felt; the populace of Milan determined to rival the populace of Paris—had an emeute of their own, built barricades, fought the Austrian garrison, and made themselves masters of the capital of Lombardy.
But the Italian is essentially a dramatist without the power of tragedy; he turns by nature to farce, and in his boldest affairs does nothing without burlesque. ”

“ Gradually the inland cities took courage from their sea-board neighbors. Florence became the centre of reviving art, her citizens the chief bankers for all Europe. Milan became chief of the Lombard cities, leading them against Barbarossa. And when he captured and destroyed the metropolis in 1161, the burghers of the surrounding lesser towns rallied to her help. No sooner was the Emperor out of reach than walls and houses rose again with the speed of magic, till Milan stood reincarnate, fairer and stronger than before. ”

“ To satisfy rapacious allies and favourites, he flung away his fiefs, seeming, as a chronicler says, to follow the proverb—The fewer possessions, the fewer cares. While the light-minded youth forgot all duties and cares of State, in feasting, jousting and the dance, the resentment of the people was rising against him, his ministers and captains were intriguing with his foes, and the roar of the great guns at intervals from the Castello might have reminded him that the key of Milan was still held by the enemy, and that Louis in France was quickly preparing an expedition to reconquer Lombardy. ”

“ A proud old city was Milan, heavy with its weight of years, rich and powerful, arrogant and independent, the capital of Lombardy and the lord of many of the Lombard cities. For some twenty centuries it had existed, and now had so grown in population, wealth, and importance, that it could almost lay claim to be the Rome of northern Italy. But its day of pride preceded not long that of its downfall, for a new emperor had come to the German throne, Frederick the Red-bearded, one of the ablest, noblest, and greatest of all that have filled the imperial chair. ”