Better still, Galeazzo Sforza knew men. No one of proved worth and activity had to fear his caprices. Cecco Simonetta, his father’s faithful minister, was retained in the highest offices throughout his reign; and his chief engineer and architect, Bartolommeo Gadio, kept undisturbed command of the great works of the Castello. Nor did the Duke’s heated temper affect his political judgment. He reconciled himself with Savoy, and with Lorenzo de’ Medici and Ferdinand of Naples formed that triple alliance which gave Italy her most splendid period of peace. In the cordial relations which he maintained with France he never forgot Milan’s appointed task of guarding the gate of Italy. Within his own dominions he held party passions in check, and followed his father’s prudent policy of employing in the important offices of State foreigners like the Sicilian Simonetta, and men who owed everything to the House of Sforza, and of diminishing the influence of the great nobles.
[Illustration: BRIDGE OVER NAVIGLIO NEAR SAN MARCO]
With peace without and order within, the tide of prosperity rose ever higher in the populous city. The vast lands of the Duchy were everywhere being brought to full fertility by irrigation works and the draining of wastes. Palaces surrounded by beautiful gardens and fruitful orchards and vineyards were springing up where before had been wilderness. Great schemes for new waterways between the different cities of the State were in hand, and all the immense increase of the country’s resources, resulting from improved agriculture and greater facilities of traffic, flowed by a thousand streams into the coffers of the capital. An extraordinary vitality seemed to possess all classes in this morning of the Renaissance. The larger horizons revealed to the spirit by the revival of ancient literature and thought, the multiplicity of new interests created by increased knowledge, the joy of the release from the mediæval sense of guilt and sorrow, gave to this age the vigour and enthusiasm of a regenerated world. Milan was one vast hive of vivacious energies, busy in commerce, in art and all kinds of handiwork, in learning, poetry, music. The Duke’s excited spirit was eager for all intellectual and artistic novelties. His Court was thronged with scholars and philosophers. Not content with the magnificent library of Pavia, he formed a fine collection of books in Milan, and printing-presses were set up in the city at this time. But above all else Galeazzo loved music. Milan had been from early times the resort of troubadours, minstrels and those skilled in ‘divers musicks,’ but never before had such beautiful singers been heard there as the Duke summoned from Flanders and all parts of Europe to compose the choir of the ducal chapel in the Castello. Music and the chase were Galeazzo’s favourite diversions; and the vast hunting-grounds and deep forests of the Duchy, full of wild boars and stags and all sorts of beasts and birds, the wide meres and watery channels crowded with waterfowl, were continually visited by gallant hunting and hawking trains. The picturesque interest of that far-off princely life, rich in all the adornments of rarest art, and fresh with the springing joy of that hopeful age, is enhanced for us by its dimness. It has all the poetic charm of a half-obliterated fresco. These historic figures appear to our vision in that stiffness and innocence and decorative grace, that mingling of mediæval romance and Renaissance beauty with which they were doubtless represented by the primitive painters who covered the walls of Galeazzo’s palaces in Milan and Pavia with scenes of the ducal life—frescoes, alas! long perished.