Duchy of Milan

• 1. Introduction

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  The Duchy of Milan came into being on the 11th of May 1395, when a single document signed in Prague changed the shape of Northern Italy forever. Wenceslaus of Bohemia put his name to a diploma that handed Gian Galeazzo Visconti the title of Duke of Milan, formalizing what had already become an extraordinary concentration of power. The new duke ruled a territory that stretched from the Adda and Ticino rivers outward to 26 towns, reaching from Piedmont to Veneto and from the present-day Canton of Ticino all the way south to Umbria. Four months later, on the 5th of September 1395, Milan celebrated the ratification of that title in its own streets.

  What followed was four centuries of a state that stood at the crossroads of European ambition. The duchy sat wedged between Savoy to the west, the Republic of Venice to the east, the Swiss Confederacy to the north, and the Republic of Genoa cutting it off from the Mediterranean. Every major power on the continent eventually reached for it: French kings, Habsburg emperors, Swiss mercenaries, and finally Napoleon Bonaparte himself. How did a city-state born out of a family coup become one of the five major states of the Italian peninsula? And how did it hold on, change hands, and ultimately disappear into the map of modern Europe?

• 2. The Visconti Foundation

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  Ottone Visconti was elected archbishop of Milan in 1262, and his victory over the Della Torre family at the Battle of Desio in 1277 planted the seed of everything that followed. That battle handed the Visconti family control of the city, and they never let go. Over the next century, a succession of nephews and great-grandsons built outward from Milan in every direction, absorbing surrounding territories through a deliberate and relentless policy of expansion.

  Azzone Visconti set the pace in the first half of the 14th century. In 1331 alone his forces took Ossola in Piedmont. By 1337, within just six years, the list of conquered cities included Bergamo, Pavia, Novara, Pontremoli, Vercelli, Cremona, Como, Crema, Lodi, the Valtellina, Bormio, Piacenza, Brescia, and the Val Camonica. The brothers Luchino and Giovanni Visconti continued the push, adding Bellinzona in what is now Switzerland in 1342, Parma in 1346, and several towns in southwestern Piedmont in 1347.

  Bernabò took Reggio Emilia in 1371 and Riva del Garda in 1380. Then came Gian Galeazzo, who swept east toward the Venetian cities and south into Tuscany and Umbria. His treasury reflected the scale of his dominion: the territories under his control generated an ordinary annual income of 1,200,000 gold florins, with another 800,000 in extraordinary subsidies on top of that. He had reached that position by seizing power from his own uncle Bernabò in a coup in 1385, then knitting together the scattered Visconti lands into a single coherent state. The diploma of 1395 was the formal recognition of what Gian Galeazzo had already made real.

• 3. Silk, Prosperity, and the Sforza

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  Filippo Maria Visconti died in 1447 without a male heir, and for three years Milan tried something unusual. The city declared the Ambrosian Republic, a self-governing experiment named after its patron saint. It did not last. Revolts and attacks from neighboring powers made the republic unworkable, and in 1450 a mercenary captain named Francesco Sforza walked in and ended it.

  Francesco Sforza had a particular advantage: he had married Bianca Maria, the illegitimate daughter of Filippo Maria Visconti. That connection gave him a claim of sorts, and his military skill gave him the city. He founded the House of Sforza and restored the duchy, and what followed was a period that the source describes plainly as great prosperity. Under the Sforza, Milan developed the silk industry and became one of the wealthiest states during the Renaissance.

  The Peace of Lodi in 1454 set the diplomatic framework for this era. After four years of conflict with Venice, the peace treaty recognized Francesco Sforza as Duke of Milan and Alfonso of Aragon as King of Naples, while the Republic of Venice extended its borders to the Adda River. The treaty also produced the Holy Italian League against the Ottoman Turks, who had just taken Constantinople. That precarious balance held until the death of Lorenzo de' Medici and the arrival of King Charles VIII of France in Italy in 1494. Galeazzo Maria Sforza, son of Francesco, was murdered in a conspiracy during this period, leaving his young son Gian Galeazzo to rule under his mother's regency, until his uncle Ludovico il Moro outmaneuvered her and confined the boy to the Visconti Castle of Pavia, where Gian Galeazzo died under mysterious circumstances in 1494.

• 4. The French and Swiss Contest

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  Ludovico il Moro made a miscalculation that unraveled Sforza control. To pressure his rivals, he encouraged King Charles VIII of France to press the Capetian House of Anjou's claim on the Kingdom of Naples. Charles invaded in 1494 and conquered Naples, pulling the thread that unraveled the delicate balance between Italian states and starting what became known as the Italian Wars. Charles was expelled from the peninsula by 1495, but the door he had opened could not be closed.

  In 1498, the Duke of Orleans became King Louis XII of France and asserted an inherited claim on Milan. His ancestor Louis of Orleans had married Valentina Visconti, daughter of Duke Gian Galeazzo, in 1389. The marriage contract had specified that if the Visconti dynasty died out, the dukedom would pass to Valentina's descendants. Louis XII invaded in 1499 and drove out Ludovico il Moro. Ludovico tried to fight back and briefly retook the capital, but was defeated and taken prisoner at Novara in 1500. He was deported to the Castle of Loches in France, where he died on the 27th of May 1508.

  The Swiss army expelled the French in 1512 and placed Maximilian Sforza, son of Ludovico, on the throne. For roughly three years the Swiss cantons effectively controlled the duchy. In 1515, King Francis I of France defeated the Swiss at the Battle of Marignano, deposed Maximilian, and installed himself as duke. Despite losing that battle, the Swiss retained the territories along the road from the Gotthard Pass to the gates of Como, which today form the Canton of Ticino. The Treaty of Noyon in 1516 confirmed French possession. Francis I held the duchy until 1521, when Charles V took it back after the Battle of Vaprio d'Adda and installed Maximilian's younger brother Francesco II Sforza as duke.

• 5. The Habsburg Inheritance

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  The decisive moment for Habsburg control came on the 24th of February 1525 at the Battle of Pavia, where the forces of Emperor Charles V crushed the French and left Charles the dominant power in the Italian peninsula. Francesco II Sforza then joined the League of Cognac against Charles, along with Venice, Florence, Pope Clement VII, and France. The War of the League of Cognac brought Imperial forces under Antonio de Leyva, Alfonso del Guasto, and Charles III, Duke of Bourbon into Lombardy. The citadel of Milan fell to Imperial forces on the 24th of July 1526. Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino, attempted to besiege the city two months later, but Spanish and German reinforcements had strengthened Bourbon's army and Urbino was forced to withdraw.

  The Treaty of Cambrai settled the matter, with France officially abandoning its claims to Milan and Naples. Charles V agreed to reinstate Francesco II Sforza as duke until his death. When Francesco II died without heirs in 1535, Charles claimed the duchy as an imperial fief and installed his son Philip II with a diploma signed in Brussels on the 11th of October 1540. Philip's possession was finally recognized by King Henry II of France in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559.

  Spanish rule reshaped what Milan was for. Lombardy at the time had the most developed manufacturing and commercial economy anywhere in the world, and Spanish viceroys treated it as an armory and a treasury. During the Franco-Spanish War from 1635 to 1659, Milan sent an average of 4,000 soldiers per year to the Spanish crown, with over 100,000 men in total, many of them serving in the Low Countries against the Dutch. The duchy passed from Spain to Austria in 1707 under the Treaty of Baden, and the Austrian Habsburgs brought with them administrative reforms inspired by enlightened absolutism: reorganization of the land register, suppression of ecclesiastical censorship, and further development of the silk industry. In 1745, the Duchy of Mantua was unified with Milan, though Mantua retained strong autonomy.

• 6. Napoleon and the Final Years

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  In 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte led a French army through northern Italy and captured the duchy. The Habsburgs handed it over through an interim government junta and the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, when Austria ceded it formally to the new Cisalpine Republic. The French had already established a vassal state on Milanese territory in 1796 called the Transpadane Republic, which merged with the Cispadane Republic in 1797 to form the Cisalpine Republic. Milan became the capital of that republic.

  When Napoleon fell, the Congress of Vienna on the 9th of June 1815 made a deliberate choice not to restore the Duchy of Milan. The other Italian states dissolved under Napoleon were reconstituted, but Milan's former territory became the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia instead, with the Emperor of Austria as its king. In 1859, Lombardy was ceded to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, which then became the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The remaining portion of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia was annexed to Italy in 1866. The Duchy of Milan, which had started with 26 towns and Gian Galeazzo's golden florins, had dissolved into the architecture of the modern Italian state, leaving the silk industry and the city's position as a regional capital as its lasting traces.