Alfonso II d'Este
Alfonso II d'Este was the last duke of Ferrara, the patron who paid Torquato Tasso and then locked him in a madhouse for seven years, and the prince whose failure to produce an heir handed his city to the Pope. He succeeded his father Ercole II in 1559, at twenty-six, over one of the richest small states in Italy, with a court that had employed Ariosto and a tradition of theatre, music and tournament that he made the most of: the concerto delle donne, the three women singers whose ensemble was the wonder of the 1580s, was his. So were the carnival spectacles and the tilting-yards on which he spent the treasury. Tasso came to Ferrara in 1565, wrote the Gerusalemme Liberata there and dedicated it to him, and broke down in 1577. The duke had him confined in the hospital of Sant' Anna from 1579 to 1586, for madness by the court's account and for insolence by the poet's, and the legend of the poet imprisoned by the tyrant for loving his sister Leonora, which Goethe and Byron made verse of, is a later invention that the duke would not have recognised. His real problem was dynastic. Ferrara was a papal fief, held by the Este as vicars of the Church, and Pius V had ruled in 1567 that it could pass only to legitimate heirs. Three marriages produced none, and his cousin Cesare, whom he named to succeed, was the grandson of a liaison. When Alfonso died in October 1597 Clement VIII excommunicated Cesare, raised an army, and took Ferrara in January 1598 without a battle. The Este kept Modena and Reggio, which the emperor and not the Pope had granted, and the court went there; Ferrara became a provincial town of the Papal States, and stayed one for two hundred and sixty years.
- Lived: 1533 CE – 1597 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: duke, monarch, head_of_state, patron
