ABSTRACT
Tall, handsome, swarthy, with an expression of calm self-command, Duke Ercole had such a chilly personality that he was called the North Wind and the Diamond. Intelligent, crafty, cautious, unscrupulous, Ercole could be blind to political disasters within his own duchy and shortsighted about foreign politics. He was a good husband and a reasonably good father to his six legitimate and two illegitimate children. Ercole destroyed Niccolo III’s faction with a cruel efficiency he was never to display again. In subsequent political crises he was crafty, devious and coldly expedient. But he really disliked action, preferring peace to war, and liked best to play the role of a splendid Renaissance prince, building and rebuilding, collecting books, producing plays, patronizing the arts and at all times being magnificent. Before the coming of the French, Ercole had displayed increasing signs of a highly emotional religious piety.
