ne 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 honorable
prison. Virtual master in Milan, but without a legal title to the
throne, unrecognized 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 a usurper to
maintain himself in his despotism which, as we shall see, brought the
French into Italy.

Venice, the neighbor 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
thrown back upon the policy of territorial aggrandisement in Italy, from
which they had hitherto refrained as alien to the temperament of the
republic. At the end of the fifteenth century Venice, therefore, became
an object of envy and terror to the Italian States. They envied her
because she alone was tranquil, wealthy, powerful, and free. They feared
her because they had good reason to suspect her of encroachment; and it
was foreseen that if she got the upper hand in Italy, all Italy would be
the property of the families inscribed upon the Golden Book. It was thus
alone that the Italians comprehended government. The principle of
representation being utterly unknown, and the privileged burghers in
each city being regarded as absolute and lawful owners of the city and
of everything belonging to it, the conquest of a town by a republic
implied the political ext