ABSTRACT
In the course of tracing the origin and development of the Milanese permanent resident embassy at Naples during the second half of the fifteenth century, as part of continuing research for a forthcoming book encompassing the leading Italian states of the age, it was my intention to treat foreign affairs as sparingly as possible, consistently with the central objective of assessing the growth of the institution and the role played by its first representatives. I found this necessary, self-imposed limitation difficult to apply in the case of Naples because in reading big segments of correspondence between the two states I came to realize as never before that they contained the key for a deeper understanding of the entire diplomatic scene of fifteenth-century Italy. The troubled relations between the two sons of Francesco Sforza, Galeazzo Maria and Ludovico Maria, and Ferrante constitute in my view the fatal linear progression leading to the French invasion of Italy in 1494. This correspondence also makes it clear that Naples was the focus of intense diplomatic activity·throughout this period.! Exposed in the Adriatic to the power of Venice and the advancing Turks, threatened in the Tyrrhenian by Genoa and the Angevins, Ferrante cultivated relations with potential allies outside Italy such as Aragon, Burgundy, and England. In fact, the king displayed in this decade much of the same European-
wide geopolitical acumen shown by his late mentor, Francesco Sforza. Unfortunately, Ferrante's key role throughout the second half of the century has to be pieced together from the largely biased dispatches of ambassadors at his court, mostly Milanese, because few Neapolitan diplomatic papers survived the violent events in that kingdom, including the wanton destruction of what was left by the retreating German army in 1943.2
On the other hand, it is ironic but not surprising that Galeazzo Maria should have proved incapable of fulfilling his inherited role as the diplomatic leader of the Italian peninsula. During his late teens both Francesco and his wife, Bianca Maria, had noticed some serious character flaws in Galeazzo reminiscent of his maternal grandfather, Filippo Maria Visconti and of some other members of that family; namely, capriciousness, irascibility, moodiness, and general intractability, sometimes masked by a disarming charm that confounded his parents because it compounded his unpredictability.3 Barely a month before his sudden death (8 March 1466), Francesco had so become exasperated by his irresponsible behavior as the nominal leader of an expeditionary force sent to help Louis XI quell a baronial revolt (the War of the Public Weal) that he admonished his son to stop acting like a 'pucto' and behave like a man. 4 His unexpected succession at the age of 22 while he was still in France exacerbated his youthful shortcomings, which now came to include profligate spending for luxuries and mistresses, cruelty, impulsiveness and intemperate speech, misguided ambition to outdo his father especially in his pursuit of the royal crown, indecisiveness in decision making, and above all lack of balance and moderation, all of which realized the worst fears of his mother and co-ruler of the duchy. Unlike his widely admired father, whom he resembled only in his amorous escapades, he was utterly unprepared emotionally or by training to take, or even less share, the process of governing arguably the richest state in Italy with the most powerful army and the most developed diplomatic network of any state in Europe. He had never governed a
2 There is no biography of Ferrante based on archival documents or even on the most recent publications. The collection of eight studies published by E. Pontieri, Per Ia storia del Regno di Ferrante I d'Aragona, re di Napoli, 2nd ed. (Naples, 1969) can hardly serve this function. On the other hand, the interplay of politics and humanism during his reign has been admirably treated by J.H. Bentley, Politics and culture in Renaissance Naples (Princeton, 1987).
