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Updated: June 12, 2025
Then he rode on again, to the sound of trumpets and horns, and the royal guard of Gascon archers led the way up the well-known street, with the frescoed palaces and goldsmiths and armourers' shops, to the gates of the famous Castello, where the victor entered and took up his abode in this proud citadel of the Sforzas, the core and centre of the Milanese.
Those who are most familiar with the histories of other nations, Madame de Stael and, after her, Stendhal, go back to the right sources to comprehend him, to the "petty Italian tyrants of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries," to Castruccio-Castracani, to the Braccio of Mantua, to the Piccinino, the Malatestas of Rimini, and the Sforzas of Milan.
'A prince, therefore, should have but one object, one thought, one art the art of war. Those who have followed this rule have attained to sovereignty, like Francesco Sforza, who became Duke of Milan; those who have neglected it have lost even hereditary kingdoms, like the last Sforzas, who sank from dukedom into private life.
He reduced the heavy imposts established by the Sforzas, revoked the vexatious game-laws, instituted at Milan a court of justice analogous to the French parliaments, loaded with favors the scholars and artists who were the honor of Lombardy, and recrossed the Alps at the end of some weeks, leaving as governor of Milaness John James Trivulzio, the valiant Condottiere, who, four years before, had quitted the service of Ferdinand II., King of Naples, for that of Charles VIII. Unfortunately Trivulzio was himself a Milanese and of the faction of the Guelphs.
All unconscious of their existence, the young bride of the powerful regent rode at her lord's side and entered the wide courtyard through the great gateway, under the lofty towers of the famous Castello which for over a hundred and fifty years had been the home of Viscontis and Sforzas.
The Pope, long the Moro's firm ally, had turned against him since the dissolution of his daughter Lucrezia's marriage to Giovanni Sforza in 1497, and the presence of Cardinal della Rovere, who returned to Rome towards the end of 1498, increased his hatred of the Sforzas.
The Eastern District Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, standing at Fairmount Avenue and Twenty-first Street in Philadelphia, where Cowperwood was now to serve his sentence of four years and three months, was a large, gray-stone structure, solemn and momentous in its mien, not at all unlike the palace of Sforzas at Milan, although not so distinguished.
It was, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a chivalric town of Ariostesque chivalry: feudalism turned courtly and elegant, and moreover, very liberal and comfortable by preponderance of democratic and industrial habits; a military court, of brave mercenary captains full of dash and adventure, not mere brigands and marauders having studied strategy, like the little Umbrian chieftains; a court orderly, elegant, and brilliant: a prince not risen from behind a counter like Medicis and Petruccis, nor out of blood like Baglionis and Sforzas, but of a noble old house whose beginnings are lost in the mist of real chivalry and real paladinism; a duke with a pretence of feudal honour and decorum, at whose court men were all brave and ladies all chaste with the little licenses of baseness and gallantry admitted by Renaissance chivalry.
But he retained his hold on the Trepievi, occupied the Valsassina, took Porlezza, and established himself still more strongly in Musso as the corsair monarch of the lake. The tyranny of the Sforzas in Milan was fast going to pieces between France and Spain; and in 1526 the Marquis of Pescara occupied the capital in the name of Charles V. The Duke, meanwhile, remained a prisoner in his Castello.
His brother Francesco was a far more spirited and courageous prince, who might have proved an admirable ruler in less troublous times, but was doomed to experience the strangest vicissitudes of fortune. After the second conquest of Milan by the French, he retired to Tyrol, until, in 1521, Pope Leo X. combined with Charles V. to oppose Francis I., and restore the Sforzas.
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