Galeazzo II Visconti

Galeazzo II Visconti ruled the western half of the Milanese state for twenty-four years, founded the university of Pavia, and was the father of the man who nearly united northern Italy. He shared the lordship with his brother Bernabo after 1354, taking Pavia, Novara, Asti, Vercelli and the Piedmontese lands while Bernabo held Milan and the east - an unusual arrangement that worked because the brothers cooperated abroad while distrusting each other at home. He was the milder of the two by reputation, though the schedule of forty days of calibrated torture that contemporaries called the quaresima is attributed to him as often as to Bernabo. He married Blanche of Savoy, and he spent money on dynastic marriages of a kind that shows exactly what a fourteenth-century Italian signore wanted: his daughter Violante married Lionel of Antwerp, a son of Edward III of England, in a wedding at Milan in 1368 whose guests included Petrarch and, probably, Chaucer, and whose dowry was enormous - Lionel died within months. His son Gian Galeazzo he married to Isabelle of France. He founded the university at Pavia in 1361 and built the castle there, which housed one of the great libraries of Europe, and he patronised Petrarch for years. He fought the papacy alongside his brother and was excommunicated with him. He died in 1378, and Gian Galeazzo inherited the western territories, took the eastern ones from his uncle by arresting him on the road in 1385, and became the first Duke of Milan. Petrarch lived at Pavia under his patronage for periods in the 1360s. The university he founded is still running. His widow Blanche of Savoy outlived him by nearly twenty years and acted for her son.

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