A year later (1466), when the Duke himself died, his dynasty seemed to be securely founded in Milan. Yet, in the absence of the heir, the Duchess and her councillors hastened to put the Castle into a state of defence, and to take every precaution against rebellion. Galeazzo Maria, was hurriedly summoned from France, where he was fighting for Louis XI. in the Barons’ War. His return was accomplished with the utmost speed and secrecy, and the story of his passage through the dominions of Savoy, disguised as the servant of a travelling merchant, the attempt to capture him as he passed by a certain castle in the mountains, his escape into sanctuary, and thence, after three days’ concealment, into the fastnesses of the hills, where by difficult ways he was conducted into his own territory, strikes at once that note of romance and extravagance which accompanies the strange personality of Galeazzo Maria Sforza throughout his short course to the grave. Once in his own dominions the new duke had nothing to fear. The habit of servitude had become only too confirmed in the Milanese, and they sealed their submission to the House of Sforza by accepting Francesco’s son without protest as their Lord. Galeazzo, born too late to remember aught but the triumphant days of his House, or to have known any interruption in the flattery, servility and fear which waited on princes in the fifteenth century, found himself at twenty-two monarch of a great State and vast riches, lord of the lives and destinies of large populations, and master, in all the vigour and freshness of his youth and of the unexhausted Sforza blood, of that incomparable treasure of delight and varied human experience which the Renaissance of learning, of knowledge, of beauty, had added to the heritage of power bequeathed to the Italian tyrants by their immediate ancestors. Is it a wonder that the princes of that bright new day, in all the pride of the restored faith in human greatness and possibility, should have believed themselves more than men, and like the old Roman emperors, whose histories they read and whose heirs they considered themselves, should have assumed the proud appellation of _Divi_—Gods? These favourites of Time and Fortune lacked, however, one thing: that discipline of the will—more rigorous than the self-mortification of the apostles of asceticism—which the religion of beauty and joy requires in its followers.