The End of the Middle Ages: Essays and Questions in History

Meanwhile, incautious, believing that he could compass heaven and earth between his courage and his perfidy, Sigismond earned yet more of the traitor’s wages. Scarcely was the p...

Ghinzone, in the “Archivio Storico Lombardo,” Anno ix, Fasc. 2, 1882, quotes the original documents from the Milanese Archives, Reg. Miss. N. 12, foglio 40. The letters are all...

It was Christmas-time and cold; with difficulty I roused myself to visit the Certosa. It is six miles, I suppose, from Pavia. The wretched carriage slowly dragged along through...

Perhaps, as Guicciardini suggests, love of his people induced the dying Duke to leave his city to a distant tyrant; perhaps, in his suspicion of his present friends, his fancy t...

Many reasons have been given for the assumption of this surname. As a fact it appears to have been a baptismal name. In February, 1461, Bianca Maria Sforza sent to the shrine of...

As an island is surrounded by water, as night surrounds the stars, and air the globe, so beyond the region of the known there stretches an illimitable space of darkness and of s...

The King was mad again; he had fallen into the first of innumerable relapses. Henceforth, for thirty years, any moment of too poignant feeling would throw him back in agony and...

It was not until nine years after the bestowal of the “singular grace of divine familiarity,” says the _Vita_ that Gertrude wrote down the description of her visions. But the vi...

The jealousy and suspicion of the Queen must have been the earliest greeting of Valentine at Melun. Queen Isabel was the idol of the Court. Radiantly beautiful, eighteen years o...

Thus the machinations of Milan served to exasperate the French. And the indignity and insult offered to Valentine were as great a cause of irritation to Visconti. He and his dau...

Driven by a momentary resentment, a gust of pity and remembrance, into Pisa, Charles was no sooner in the city than the King resumed his empire over the Man. He sent, as I have...

Of the two legitimate sons of the great Duke of Milan—one was a handsome young Nero, blood-mad, inept, given over to passion and cruelty; the other an astute child, timid, unscr...

Yet claiming and acting upon his own authority to dispose of Milan, Giangaleazzo Visconti involved his testament in the same web of intrigue and counter-intrigue which character...

At first the external position of the Beguines and the Beghards appeared in no danger and no disadvantage. Their fraternity had always been a secular fraternity; their condition...

This alliance, as before, was merely an occasion for the resumption of intrigues. Arragon and Savoy, Savoy and Venice, Venice and Milan were secretly determining an arrangement...

Venice for a brief moment had sunk into the shade. She, who had manœuvred so deeply to unseat Arragon and Sforza by the help of France, beheld, to her immense chagrin, Charles V...

In this apotheosis of ecstasy, this contagion of love, the feminine element naturally predominated. The movement, which the gracious and pathetic figure of Elizabeth of Hungary...

Florence in 1405 was in the very hey-day of her wool trade, but she had no outlet for her tides of commerce, no port from which to ship her goods to Provence or to Barbary. It w...

Galeotto was scarcely buried when new troubles burst upon the city. Urbino and Pesaro laid siege to Lungarino, one of the fiefs of the Riminese. Grief and fear again awoke in th...

This one phrase caught, repeated, whispered, half understood, misunderstood, often not understood at all, spread with the swiftness and authority of gospel among the Beghards an...

These children, so different in character and destiny, were the dearer to their mother that she felt she had not long to love them. Valentine was dying of a broken heart, “of an...

A little more than a year after this the King would gladly have sent his cousin of Orleans to conquer Milan: it was the Duke who made excuses and would not go. For soon after th...

The great Visconti died in September, 1402; and in the same year Marshal Boucicaut was sent as Governor to Genoa. Boucicaut was an enemy of Milan,[118] a hater of the Turk, a ma...

He was rich; he was a great lord; he lived luxuriously within those frowning gates. His rooms were full of money-brokers, weighing and counting out their heaps of gold; and ther...

The immense castle of Pavia was very quiet now. Iolanthe, the girl-widow of the Duke of Clarence, had married, in 1372, the Marquis of Monferrat. There were only the old Viscont...

“Comfort, dear Bibbiena, my little household troop till I return; and, above all things, be good to Alfonsina and to poor little Lorenzio[116] who has none of the blame to bear....

The King agrees and signs a treaty to that effect; yet in 365 the next year he declares Burgundy and Orleans Lords of Pisa, and bids Boucicaut help them against the Florentines....

This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects. Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_. Superscripts, e.g. the abbreviation for ‘folio...

Hyphenation of compound words can be variable. Where it occurs on a line break, the most commonly used form is assumed. Many footnotes contain extended transcriptions in 14th or...