umane indulgence to his men.
His company was popular, and he could always bring capital troops into
the field.

In the year 1443 Colleoni quitted the Venetian service on account of a
quarrel with Gherardo Dandolo, the Provoditore of the Republic. He
now took a commission from Filippo Maria Visconti, who received him at
Milan with great honour, bestowed on him the Castello Adorno at Pavia,
and sent him into the March of Ancona upon a military expedition. Of
all Italian tyrants this Visconti was the most difficult to serve.
Constitutionally timid, surrounded with a crowd of spies and base
informers, shrinking from the sight of men in the recesses of his
palace, and controlling the complicated affairs of his Duchy by means
of correspondents and intelligencers, this last scion of the Milanese
despots lived like a spider in an inscrutable network of suspicion
and intrigue. His policy was one of endless plot and counterplot. He
trusted no man; his servants were paid to act as spies on one another;
his bodyguard consisted of mutually hostile mercenaries; his captains
in the field were watched and thwarted by commissioners appointed to
check them at the point of successful ambition or magnificent victory.
The historian has a hard task when he tries to fathom the Visconti's
schemes, or to understand his motives. Half the Duke's time seems to
have been spent in unravelling the webs that he had woven, in undoing
his own work, and weakening the hands of his chosen ministers.
Conscious that his power was artificial, that the least breath might
blow him back into the nothingness from which he had arisen on the
wrecks of his father's tyranny, he dreaded the personal eminence of
his generals above all things. His chief object was to establish a
system of checks, by means of which no one whom he employed should
at any moment be great enough to threaten him. The most formidable
of these military adventurers, Francesco Sforza, had been secured by
marriage with Bianca Maria Visconti, his master's only daughter, in
1441; but the Duke did not even trust his son-in-law. The last six
years of his life were spent in scheming to deprive Sforza of his
lordships; and the war in the March, on which he employed Colleoni,
had the object of ruining the principality acquired by this daring
captain from Pope Eugenius IV. in 1443.

Colleoni was by no means deficient in those foxlike qualities which
were necessary to save the lion from the toils spread