Blanche of Savoy

Blanche of Savoy married Galeazzo II Visconti, held the western Milanese lands during his absences, and outlived him by nearly a decade as a considerable political figure in her own right. She was the daughter of Aymon, Count of Savoy, and the marriage in 1350 was a straightforward alliance between the Visconti and a house that controlled the alpine passes into Italy - which is to say it was about roads. She was regent in Pavia and the Piedmontese territories when Galeazzo was campaigning, and her correspondence and account books survive well enough to show her running an administration rather than presiding over one. She was a serious patron: she commissioned devotional manuscripts, including a book of hours illuminated at Milan that is among the finest Lombard manuscripts of the century, and she endowed churches and hospitals. Petrarch, who lived under Visconti patronage at Pavia, wrote to her. After Galeazzo died in 1378 she remained at Pavia while her son Gian Galeazzo governed, and their relationship was not simple - he was suspicious of her contacts with Savoy, and she was placed under a form of house arrest in her last years, though the sources disagree about how severe it was. She died in 1387, two years after her son had taken Milan from his uncle Bernabo and while he was building the state that nearly swallowed northern Italy. She is buried in Pavia. Her book of hours is in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin. She founded the church of Santa Maria del Carmine at Pavia. Her daughter-in-law Isabelle of France died in childbirth in 1372.

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