ABSTRACT
On 12 November 1475, Ferrante, king of Naples, lay dying in Carinola, thirty miles north of his home at Castel Nuovo in the capital. His daughter-in-law Ippolita Maria Sforza posted a series of letters to her brother Galeazzo Maria Sforza, duke of Milan, describing the king’s symptoms and warning him of the danger the king’s illness posed. Seventeen years earlier, in June 1458, Ferrante himself had dispatched letters to Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, warning that Ferrante’s father Alfonso, who was then king of Naples, was dying. Ferrante’s letters about his father’s illness suggest that the aging king had fallen prey to malaria. His dispatches to Sforza anticipate the anxious letters Ippolita Sforza would send to Galeazzo a generation later, describing her father-in-law’s decline in November 1475. Tall, strikingly blond, and classically educated, Ippolita Sforza and her convoy of nobles, professors and poets, royal cavalrymen, and bearers entered the kingdom of Naples on 14 September 1465.
