Violante Visconti
Violante Visconti was married three times for political reasons and buried two husbands who died within months of the wedding. She was a daughter of Galeazzo II Visconti, lord of Pavia, in a family that had bought its way into European royalty by paying enormous dowries for foreign titles - her aunt's marriage had cost the Visconti a fortune and her own cost them another. In 1368, at thirteen, she married Lionel of Antwerp, a son of Edward III of England, at a wedding in Milan whose guests included Petrarch and probably Chaucer, with thirty courses and a gift after each. Lionel died at Alba five months later, and his English companions accused her family of poison. She was married in 1377 to Secondotto of Montferrat, who was killed at Asti the following year. Her third husband was her own cousin Ludovico Visconti, which kept the dowry in the family. The dowries are the point of her. The Visconti were signori of Milan, not princes, and they used marriage payments to buy the recognition that birth would not give them - a strategy that eventually worked, since a later Visconti daughter's line produced claims that brought French armies into Italy. She died in 1386 at thirty-two, the year her uncle Bernabo was imprisoned and poisoned by her brother Gian Galeazzo, who then made himself the first duke of Milan. Almost nothing survives of what she thought about any of it. The wedding at Milan is documented course by course and gift by gift, because the chroniclers were interested in the expenditure; what she made of a thirteen-year-old's marriage to a thirty-year-old Englishman who died within the year is not recorded anywhere, which is the ordinary condition of women used this way.
- Lived: 1354 CE – 1386 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: noblewoman
