Much _patientia_ was necessary before those days came. The country round was depopulated, and it was long before the old abundance flowed again into the city. There were times when bread lacked and the people murmured against the helpless Duke. Prices remained very high and there was little trade. A visit, however, from Charles V. in 1533, expected with fear and dismay by the citizens, to whom his name was only associated with ravaging lanzknechts and Spaniards, brought them, to their joyful surprise, good luck—a great influx of custom and rich payment for their goods, instead of robbery. In 1534 a brief reflection of its old glory brightened the city on the arrival of a bride for the Duke, the sixteen-year-old Cristina of Sweden, whose portrait by Holbein is in the National Gallery. The streets and squares were magnificently decked for her reception. The young princess, whose countenance, says the chronicler, was more divine than human, rode in under a golden baldaquin, surrounded by twelve of the noblest gentlemen of the city, so splendidly arrayed that each appeared an Emperor, and with such great white plumes in their caps that her Excellency seemed to move in the midst of a forest. The joy with which she was greeted was, however, shallow enough, and changed quickly to groans when the money for the Duchess’ maintenance had to be squeezed out of the people by a special tax. The fine bridal feast was soon followed by a still more pompous, but lugubrious pageant, when eighteen months later (1535), the last Duke of Milan was carried to his tomb in the great temple founded by the first Duke, Gian Galeazzo Visconte. Always delicate of constitution, and worn out by the great anxieties of his life, Francesco fell a victim to a severe illness in 1535. He left no child to inherit the ducal throne. There still survived, however, a Sforza, Gian Paolo, son of the Moro by Lucrezia Crivelli. This prince set off immediately for Rome, to press the Pope to support his claim to the Dukedom. But on his way he was seized with sickness and died. Men said that he was poisoned by those to whom his existence was an inconvenience. Thus was spent the dynasty of the Sforza, and Milan devolved as a vacant fief to the Empire. This great city, once the seat of Roman Emperors, the crowning place of Carlovingian and German monarchs, the capital of North Italy, and for centuries the heart of the most powerful principality in the peninsula, was now to sink to a mere provincial position, to become an impotent fragment of dismembered and captive Italy.