Duchy of Milan

Politics and institutions

The Duchy of Milan was born in 1395, when Gian Galeazzo Visconti paid the German king Wenceslaus for the ducal title and fused the Visconti lordships — twenty-six towns from Asti to Bologna at their height — into a single territorial state, run by chancery secretaries rather than vassals. He died in 1402 with Florence in his sights, and the succession wars that followed nearly ended the state, until Filippo Maria Visconti rebuilt it and the condottiere Francesco Sforza, whose pay was never quite collected, married the old duke's daughter and took the city in 1450. The Ambrosian Republic between the two houses lasted barely three years. Sforza dukes ruled Milan until 1535, when the last of them died without heirs and the duchy became an imperial possession.

Economy and finance

Milan's wealth was agrarian first: the Po plain, watered by the Naviglio Grande and, from the 1450s, the Martesana canal, produced grain, fodder and — decisively — mulberries and silk. By the sixteenth century Milanese silk was the finest in Europe, thrown and woven in workshops the dukes taxed and protected; Milanese armor equipped armies from France to Persia. The city sat on the Alpine passes, banking for popes and kings; the ducal tax administration, with its cadastres and assessed levies, was among the most efficient in Italy and was kept, essentially unchanged, by Spanish and Austrian governors after 1535. Prosperity survived political decay — the province Napoleon overran in 1796 was still one of the richest in Europe.

Society and culture

Milan's court made it one of the capitals of the Renaissance. Gian Galeazzo founded the Certosa of Pavia in 1396 as the dynasty's mausoleum; the Visconti library at Pavia was the largest in Italy; humanists such as Filelfo served the chancery. Under Ludovico Sforza, called il Moro, the regime's money brought Leonardo da Vinci to Milan in 1482 — where he painted the Last Supper for Santa Maria delle Grazie between 1495 and 1498 — and Bramante to build for the same friars. Court festivals, ducal entries and the university of Pavia rounded out a culture whose patronage model — a prince, a payroll, and artists on it — became the template of the Renaissance.

Military and frontiers

Milan was the school of the condottieri: Carmagnola, Colleoni and Francesco Sforza all served or seized it, and the duchy's politics were conducted as much by contract as by battle. The city's workshops armed them — Milanese harness was the standard of the age — and the Visconti pioneered siege artillery that brought down rival towns' walls. But the condottiere state met the national monarchies and lost: French gendarmes and Spanish arquebusiers outmatched contract captains, and the battle of Pavia in 1525, fought on Milanese ground, announced the end of the Italian style of war. Thereafter Milan's soldiers served other masters, as garrison troops of Spain and then Austria.

Foreign relations

Milan's diplomacy aimed to survive as a third force between Venice and the giants. The Peace of Lodi in 1454, followed by the Italian League, froze the peninsula's five-power balance, with Milan and Florence allied against Venice — Francesco Sforza and Cosimo de' Medici set the pattern of resident diplomacy. Ludovico Sforza broke the system in 1494 by inviting Charles VIII of France into Italy, and sixty years of French–Habsburg war followed; the duchy was the battlefield and then the prize. Spanish Milan from 1556 and Austrian Milan from 1707 had no foreign policy of their own; in 1797 Austria ceded the duchy away to make room for Napoleon's Cisalpine Republic.

Legacy and influence

The duchy's afterlife is the prologue of Italian unification and the paymaster of the Renaissance. Its court model — permanent artist salaries, a library, a monument like the Last Supper — became the standard of European patronage; its canals and mulberry fields left Milan the industrial capital it still is; the Visconti serpent still coils on the city's arms and on Alfa Romeo's badge. Politically, Milan showed Europe both the strength of the tax-based territorial state and the fragility of a rich land without a great-power army. For four hundred years the duchy was among Europe's richest and most fought-over territories; in 1797 it disappeared from the map, and Lombardy's question — who rules the plain — passed to larger players.