Duchy of Mantua

The Duchy of Mantua was a duchy in Lombardy, northern Italy, whose first duke was Federico II Gonzaga of the House of Gonzaga that had ruled Mantua since 1328. Federico II acquired the ducal title from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1530, and the following year the family acquired the March of Montferrat through the marriage between Gonzaga and Margaret Paleologa, Marchioness of Montferrat. Federico commissioned Giulio Romano to build the famous Palazzo Te at the edge of the city and profoundly improved Mantua itself, whose court was among the most splendid of Italy and Europe through the fifteenth, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — the decades shown on the map, when the duchy's courtly brilliance and its music, art and statecraft radiated from the city on the Mincio. In 1708, after the death of Ferdinando Carlo Gonzaga, the last heir of the Gonzaga family, the duchy was partitioned: the domains were divided between the House of Savoy, which obtained the remaining half of Montferrat, and the House of Habsburg, which took Mantua itself. Under Austrian rule the city remained a stronghold of the Po valley until the duchy's recorded history closes in 1797, in the upheaval of the French revolutionary wars.