Bernabo Visconti

Bernabo Visconti ruled Milan for thirty years by terror and was destroyed by his nephew at a friendly meeting on the road. He shared the lordship with his brother Galeazzo II, taking the eastern territories and the city itself, and governed with a ferocity that was notorious even by the standards of fourteenth-century Lombardy: he is credited with the quarantena, a schedule of forty days of torture calibrated so that the victim survived to the end of it, and he required the citizens of Milan to quarter and feed his hunting dogs, five thousand of them, on pain of ruin. He fought the papacy for most of his life, was excommunicated repeatedly, and on one occasion made the papal legates who brought him the bull eat it, parchment, lead seal and silk cord. He had many children by his wife Regina della Scala and a great many more by others, and he married them into every house that mattered, including an illegitimate daughter to the mercenary John Hawkwood. In May 1385 his nephew Gian Galeazzo, whom he had consistently underestimated, sent word that he was passing Milan on pilgrimage and would like to embrace him. Bernabo rode out with two sons and a small escort; Gian Galeazzo had brought a large one, and arrested all three. He died in prison at Trezzo seven months later, poisoned by most accounts. His equestrian tomb monument by Bonino da Campione, carved in his own lifetime, is in Milan. Chaucer met him on an embassy in 1378 and put his fall into the Monk s Tale as an example of fortune reversed. His daughters married into the houses of Bavaria, Austria and Cyprus. Gian Galeazzo took the whole Visconti state without a battle.

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