In the centre of the plain of Lombardy stood Milan, which at the close of the thirteenth century had fallen to the Visconti. That cruel but capable family, while they destroyed the liberties, extended the dominion of the republic, and absorbed most of the smaller states of the plain which escaped the rule of Venice. The territory, which on the extinction of the male line of the Visconti was seized by the Condottiere, Francesco Sforza (1450), stretched from the river Adda, where it marched with the Venetian lands, to the Sesia, where it met Piedmont then under the Duke of Savoy, and the Marquisate of Montferrat. In 1476, the son of Francesco, Galeazzo Maria, had paid the penalty of his tyranny, lust, and cruelty at the hands of three Milanese nobles who, if tyrannicide may ever be defended, are worthy of the name of patriots. He left a widow Bona of Savoy, who ruled in the name of her infant son Gian Galeazzo, aided by her husband’s wisest counsellor, Francesco Simonetta. Three years later, 1479, Ludovico ‘Il Moro,’ uncle of the young Gian, overthrew her rule, caused Simonetta to be executed, and assumed the regency. Ludovico, though ambitious, unscrupulous, and a lover of intrigue, was not wantonly cruel as many of his predecessors had been, and, if his rule was a despotic one, he was a liberal patron of the arts and kept his dominions contented and at peace. | Venice. To the east of the Duchy of Milan stood the republic of Venice. Once a democracy, she had by the close of the thirteenth century become a commercial oligarchy. At the close of the fifteenth century, not only did the Great Council monopolise the electoral functions of the state, but the Doge himself had become little more than an ornamental figure-head.[4] Venice originally had concerned herself little with the politics of the mainland. Entrenched behind her lagoons, she had turned her attention to the Mediterranean and the East, from whence came her commerce, the source of her wealth. At the commencement of the fifteenth century, however, she had turned her eye westward to form a territory on the mainland.[5] In this venture she had indeed met with great success, and, besides her possessions on the east of the Adriatic, in the Morea, and the Ægean Sea, she now ruled a large territory north of the Po, which stretched westwards to the Adda and northwards to the spurs of the Alps. But this policy had drawn her into the troubled tangle of Italian politics, and aroused the jealousy of the Italian states. Still Venice was formidable. By the treaty of 1479, she had surrendered indeed Scutari, Negropont, and most of her possessions in the Morea, but had retained her commercial privileges, and secured a temporary peace with the Turk. In 1488, she annexed, by a fiction of remarkable ingenuity, the island of Cyprus.