iently important
to affect the balance of power, and to produce new combinations. For
the present purpose it is, however, enough to consider the five great
Powers.

After the peace of Constance, which freed the Lombard Communes from
Imperial interference in the year 1183, Milan, by her geographical
position, rose rapidly to be the first city of North Italy. Without
narrating the changes by which she lost her freedom as a Commune, it
is enough to state that, earliest of all Italian cities, Milan passed
into the hands of a single family. The Visconti managed to convert
this flourishing commonwealth, with all its dependencies, into their
private property, ruling it exclusively for their own profit, using
its municipal institutions as the machinery of administration, and
employing the taxes which they raised upon its wealth for purely
selfish ends. When the line of the Visconti ended in the year 1447,
their tyranny was continued by Francesco Sforza, the son of a poor
soldier of adventure, who had raised himself by his military genius,
and had married Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of the last
Visconti. On the death of Francesco Sforza in 1466, he left two sons,
Galeazzo Maria and Lodovico, surnamed Il Moro, both of whom were
destined to play a prominent part in history. Galeazzo Maria,
dissolute, vicious, and cruel to the core, was murdered by his injured
subjects in the year 1476. His son, Giovanni Galeazzo, aged eight,
would in course of time have succeeded to the Duchy, had it not been
for the ambition of his uncle Lodovico. Lodovico contrived to name
himself as Regent for his nephew, whom he kept, long after he had come
of age, in a kind of honourable prison. Virtual master in Milan, but
without a legal title to the throne, unrecognised in his authority by
the Italian powers, and holding it from day to day by craft and fraud,
Lodovico at last found his situation untenable; and it was this
difficulty of an usurper to maintain himself in his despotism which,
as we shall see, brought the French into Italy.

Venice, the neighbour and constant foe of Milan, had become a close
oligarchy by a process of gradual constitutional development, which
threw her government into the hands of a few nobles. She was
practically ruled by the hereditary members of the Grand Council. Ever
since the year 1453, when Constantinople fell beneath the Turk, the
Venetians had been more and more straitened in their Oriental
commerce, and were