• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

In his personal habits Bernabò was dedicated “to an astonishing degree to the vice of lust, so that his household appeared to be more the seraglio of a sultan than the habitation of a Christian prince.” He fathered seventeen children by his wife, Regina, said to be the only person who could approach him in his mad moods, and more than that number of illegitimate children by various mistresses. When Bernabò rode through the streets, all citizens were obliged to bend the knee; he would frequently say he was God on earth, Pope and Emperor in his own domain.

Bernabò ruled in Milan, his brother Galeazzo in the ancient city of Pavia twenty miles away. More than 100 towers darkening Pavia’s narrow streets testified to the incessant strife of Italian towns. Galeazzo’s great square castle, just completed in 1365, was built into the northern wall of the town, overlooking gardens and fruitful countryside. Called by the chronicler Corio with patriotic pride “the first palace of the universe,” and by a later admirer “the finest dwelling place in Europe,” it was built of rose-red brick baked from Lombard clay, and boasted 100 windows surrounding a magnificent courtyard. Petrarch, who for eight years was an ornament of the Visconti court, described its crown of towers “rising to the clouds,” where “in one direction could be seen the snowy crest of the Alps and in the other the wooded Apennines.” On a balcony overlooking the moat, the family could dine in summer, refreshed by the sight of water and a view of gardens and forested park rich in game.

A less melodramatic tyrant than his brother, Galeazzo was sober in personal habits and devoted to his wife, the “good and gentle” Blanche of Savoy. He wore his red-gold hair long, in braids or loose, or “sometimes resting on his shoulders in a silken net or garlanded with flowers,” and he suffered grievously from gout—“the malady of the rich,” as it was called by the Count of Flanders, who suffered from it too.

The wedding of Lionel of England and Violante Visconti was to be held in Milan, leading city of Lombardy and inland rival of Venice and Genoa. As the center for trade below the Alps, it had dominated northern Italy for a thousand years. Its marvels, recorded by a friar of the previous century, included 6,000 fountains for drinking water, 300 public ovens, ten hospitals of which the largest accommodated 1,000 patients two to a bed, 1,500 lawyers, forty copyists of documents, 10,000 monks of all orders, and 100 armorers manufacturing the famous Milanese armor. By mid-14th century it was subject to the general habit of deploring decadence in comparison with the good simple days of yore. Men were reproved for extravagant fashions, especially if foreign—tight garments “in the Spanish manner,” monstrous spurs like the Tatars’, adornment with pearls after the French fashion. Women were reproved for frizzled hair and gowns that bared their breasts. Milan had so many prostitutes, it was said, that Bernabò taxed them for revenue to maintain the city walls.

On arrival in Milan, Lionel was accompanied, in addition to his own suite, by 1,500 mercenaries of the White Company, which had switched from the Pope’s service to that of the Visconti. Eighty ladies all dressed alike—as was customary to enhance the pageantry of great occasions—in gold-embroidered scarlet gowns with white sleeves and gold belts, and sixty mounted knights and squires also uniformly dressed came in the train of Galeazzo to greet him. In addition to a dowry for his daughter so extensive that it took two years to negotiate, Galeazzo paid expenses of 10,000 florins a month for five and a half months for the bridegroom and his retinue.

The stupendous wedding banquet, held outdoors in June, left all accounts gasping. Its obvious purpose was to testify to “the Largeness of Duke Galeas his soul, the full satisfaction he had in this match and the abundance of his coffers.” Thirty double courses of meat and fish alternated with presentation of gifts after each course. Under