00e Transformed
Giangaleazzo Visconti. By D. M. Bueno de Mesquita. (Co bridge University Press. 21s.) Tins is a careful study of the most powerful Italian ruler the late fourteenth century, the wealthiest prince in Europe the planner of that characteristically splendid, not to 5# ostentatious Visconti monument, the Certosa of Pavia. It his been worked up by it& author, a fellow of Corpus Christi Coll* Cambridge, mainly from recently published researches by Itali% and other scholars but also from his own independent wolt,,...11 the archives of Lombardy and elsewhere. References, bist graphy and index are all impeccable. There are appendices clel ing with controversial points and a collection of relevant do-' ments not previously printed. A number of neat little nigi clarify the complicated story of wars and diplomacy. The portrait of Giangaieazzo which emerges suffers f cool. fact that under the short-lived Ambrosian Republic WM.:. followed on the collapse of the Visconti power, a genera'''. after Giangaleazzo's death, the Castello of Milan was completely destroyed and with it all the carefully accumulated documents of the Duke's Chanceries. Still there remains enough material to bear out the picture of Giangaleazzo which is suggested in the Memorandum written by his most famous condottieri general, Cabo Malatesta of Rimini. This document was prepared for Giangaleazzo's young son, Giovanni, when he succeeded to his dead father's dukedom. "Peace rather than war, equality and impartial justice rather than personal inclination and private favour, respect for the law rather than violence, deference to the advice of his counsellors, close supervision of officials, taxation as low as the needs of the State allowed, and imposed according to the means of his subjects so that the burden fell on those most capable of sustaining it, swift and efficient collection of taxes so that the accounts should balance, and no grants of exemption." These were the lessons which Malatesta wanted the young Duke to learn from his father's example. So Giangaleazzo was not a monster who delighted in every form of treachery and vice, as Florentine propaganda painted him, nor was he, it seems clear, the single-minded patriot deliberately seeking to anticipate the work of centuries as some Italian nationalist historians would have us believe. In fact, another prophet of Italian unity, another ogre of the Italian Renaissance, appears in the cold light of modern scholarship as a mere human being : one who knew, and practised, more of the art of govern- ment than many of his successors. KENNETH BELL.
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