The greatest of Italian printers were the Venetians, whose famous Aldine press produced volumes that are still the admiration of the world as well as treasure trove for book-collectors. In modern times the desire for knowledge, or rather for information, has become a scramble, and printing has degenerated into a trade. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was regarded as an art, and Aldus Manutius, the Roman who established his press at Venice, intending to reproduce an edition of all the Greek authors then known, was a great scholar, who modelled his letters on the handwriting of the Italian poet Petrarch, and gathered around him the most intellectual and enterprising minds of his day to advise and help him. It was at the Aldine press that one of the leaders of the Dutch Renaissance, Erasmus, had several of his books printed, and Venice at this time became a centre for scholars, and for all whose minds were alive with a thirst for new impressions. Fifteenth-century Italy was not, on the surface, so very different from Italy in the fourteenth. The complete domination of the five Powers, foreshadowed in the earlier century, had become fixed, and three of them--Milan, Florence, and Naples--had succeeded in forming an alliance to preserve the balance of power in the peninsula, and to keep at bay the ambitions of Venice, whose empire was still spreading over the mainland. In Naples ruled Ferrante I, an illegitimate son of Alfonso V of Aragon, a typical despot like the Angevins his father had replaced. In Milan the Visconti had merged themselves in the House of Sforza, through a clever ruse of one of the most famous of mediaeval _condottieri_, Francesco Sforza, who, besieging his master, Filippo Maria Visconti, in Milan in 1441, had forced him to give him his only daughter and heiress Bianca in marriage, and then to acknowledge him as his successor. [Sidenote: ‘Il Moro’] The grim traditions established by the Visconti continued under this new family, christened with their very names. Francesco’s son, Galeazzo Maria, whose life was spent in debauch, is said to have poisoned his mother and buried his subjects alive. When he was assassinated, his brother, Ludovico, called from his swarthy complexion _Il Moro_, or ‘the Moor’, seized the reins of government, and proceeded to act on behalf of his young nephew, Gian Galeazzo, whom he kept in the background at Pavia, declaring him a helpless invalid. Philip de Commines describes Ludovico as ‘clever, but very nervous and cringing when he was afraid: a man without faith when he thought it to his advantage to break his word’. Outwardly he displayed the genial manners customary in a Renaissance prince, and presided at Milan over a court so famed for its hospitality, wit, and intellect that it drew within its circle painters, sculptors, writers, and scholars, as well as military heroes and men of fashion.