Galeazzo Maria Sforza

Galeazzo Maria Sforza

Galeazzo Maria Sforza, by Piero Benci, Uffizi Gallery
Spouse(s) Dorotea Gonzaga
Bona of Savoy
Noble family House of Sforza
Father Francesco Sforza
Mother Bianca Maria Visconti
Born 24 January 1444
Fermo
Died 26 December 1476 (aged 32)
Milan

Galeazzo Maria Sforza (24 January 1444 – assassinated, 26 December 1476) was Duke of Milan from 1466 until his death. He was famous for being lustful, cruel and tyrannical.

He was born to Francesco Sforza, a popular condottiero and ally of Cosimo de' Medici who would gain the Duchy of Milan in 1450, and Bianca Maria Visconti. He married into the Gonzaga family; on the death of his first wife Dorotea Gonzaga, he married Bona of Savoy.

Life

Galeazzo Maria Sforza was born in Fermo, near the family's castle of Girifalco, the first son of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti. At the death of his father (8 March 1466), Galeazzo was in France at the head of a military expedition to help King Louis XI of France against Charles I of Burgundy. Called back home by his mother, Galeazzo returned to Italy by an adventurous trip under a false name. The false identity was necessary as he had to pass by the territories of the family enemy, the Duke of Savoy, who made an unsuccessful attempt on Galeazzo's life. He entered Milan on 20 March, acclaimed by the populace.

In his first years Galeazzo and his mother ruled jointly, but later his ruthless character pushed him to oust Bianca Maria from Milan.

Patronage

Sforza was famous as a patron of music. Under his direction, financial backing and encouragement, his chapel grew into one of the most famous and historically significant musical ensembles in Europe. Composers from the north, especially the Franco-Flemish composers from the present-day Low Countries, came to sing in his chapel and write masses, motets and secular music for him. Some of the figures associated with the Sforza chapel include Alexander Agricola, Johannes Martini, Loyset Compère, and Gaspar van Weerbeke. However, most of the singers at the Sforza chapel fled after Galeazzo's murder and took positions elsewhere; as a result, there was soon a rise in musical standards in other cities such as Ferrara.

Reputation

Galeazzo Sforza is also known to have had a cruel streak. He was a notorious womanizer who often passed his women on to his courtiers once he was tired of them. Sforza once had a poacher executed by forcing him to swallow an entire hare (with fur intact), and had another man nailed alive to his coffin. He also had a priest who predicted a short reign for Sforza punished by being starved to death. This made him many enemies in Milan. It was also said of Galeazzo Sforza that he had raped the wives and daughters of numerous Milanese nobles, that he took sadistic pleasure in devising tortures for men who had offended him, and that he enjoyed pulling apart the limbs of his enemies with his own hands.

Assassination

Lament of the duke Galeazzo Maria (1476).

There were three principal assassins involved in Sforza's death: Carlo Visconti, Gerolamo Olgiati and Giovanni Andrea Lampugnani, all fairly high-ranking officials at the Milanese court.

Lampugnani, descended from Milanese nobility, is recognized as the leader of the conspiracy. His motives were based primarily on a land dispute, in which Galeazzo had failed to intervene in a matter which saw the Lampugnani family lose considerable properties. Visconti and Olgiati also bore the duke enmity - Olgiati was a Republican idealist, whereas Visconti believed Sforza to have taken his sister's virginity.

After carefully studying Sforza's movements, the conspirators made their move on the day after Christmas, 1476, the official day of Santo Stefano, the namesake of the church where the deed was to be committed. Supported by about thirty friends, the three men waited in the church for the duke to arrive for mass. When Galeazzo Sforza arrived, Lampugnani knelt before him; after some words were exchanged, Lampugnani rose suddenly and stabbed Sforza in the groin and breast. Olgiati and Visconti soon joined in, as did a servant of Lampugnani's.

Sforza was dead within a matter of seconds. All the assassins quickly escaped in the ensuing mayhem save for Lampugnani, who became entangled in some of the church's cloth and was killed by a guard. His body soon fell into the hands of a mob, which dragged the corpse through the streets, slashing and beating at it; finally, they hung the body upside-down outside Lampugnani's house. The beheaded corpse was cut down the next day and, in an act of symbolism, the "sinning" right hand was removed, burnt and put on display.

Aftermath of the assassination

Despite the initial public reaction, the government brought swift justice, soon encouraged by the public as well.

The conspirators had given little thought to the repercussions of their crime, and were apprehended within days. Visconti and Olgiati were soon found and executed, as was the servant of Lampugnani who had participated in the slaying. The executions took place in a public ceremony that culminated in the display of their corpses as a warning to others.

Evidence from the conspirators' confessions indicated that the assassins had been encouraged by the humanist Cola Montano, who had left Milan some months before, and who bore malice against the duke for a public whipping some years before. While being tortured, Olgiati also uttered the famous words, "Mors acerba, fama perpetua, stabit vetus memoria facti" (Death is bitter, but glory is eternal, the memory of my deed will endure).[1]

Similar elements indicate that this assassination was likely influential in the Pazzi Conspiracy, a subsequent attempt to dethrone the Medici family in Florence and to replace them with Girolamo Riario.

Children

With his second wife, Bona of Savoy, Sforza had four children:

With his mistress Lucrezia Landriani, he had at least one illegitimate daughter:

References

  1. ↑ Niccolò Machiavelli's Florentine Histories, Book VII Chapter VI

Popular culture

In the short film series, Assassin's Creed: Lineage (a live-action short film set in the Assassin's Creed videogame franchise), the Duke's assassination is depicted with some liberties, with the protagonist Giovanni Auditore arriving only in time to see Lampugnani stab Sforza in the abdomen. Lampugnani would be cornered and killed by one of Sforza's guards, but Auditore found a Venetian coin on the body prompting him to continue an investigation. Neither Sforza nor his assassins were identified by name in Lineage, Sforza only referred to as the Duca di Milano.

In the Assassin's Creed II video game, a letter from Giovanni Auditore to Lorenzo de' Medici mentions the assassination, and both Lineage and Assassin's Creed II attribute it to Rodrigo Borgia, who would also mastermind the Pazzi Conspiracy.

"The Scarlet Contessa" (Jeanne Kalogridis, 2010) is a historical fiction novel that follows a girl in the household of Galeazzo, serving as a lady-in-waiting to his second wife Bona.

In The Borgias television series, Caterina Sforza tells Cesare Borgia that her father lost one eye in battle and afterwards his nose occluded his vision, so he sliced it off. While there is no record of this happening to Galeazzo Maria Sforza in real life, this was presumably based on what happened to Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.

The Duke's assassination is the catalyst for the action in the Da Vinci's Demons television series, where he is depicted to be in his late 40s (while Sforza was actually 32 when he was killed), played by Hugh Bonneville. He is depicted as having had spent the night with a boy. His assassination erroneously takes place on Palm Sunday of 1477, which, on that year, fell on 30 March, about three months after his real-life death on 26 December 1476.

External links

Galeazzo Maria Sforza
Born: 24 January 1444 Died: 26 December 1476
Preceded by
Francesco I Sforza		 Duke of Milan
1466–1476 		Succeeded by
Gian Galeazzo Sforza