There still survived, however, a Sforza, Gian Paolo, son of the Moro by Lucrezia Crivelli. This prince set off immediately for Rome, to press the Pope to support his claim to the Dukedom. But on his way he was seized with sickness and died. Men said that he was poisoned by those to whom his existence was an inconvenience.
Thus was spent the dynasty of the Sforza, and Milan devolved as a vacant fief to the Empire. This great city, once the seat of Roman Emperors, the crowning place of Carlovingian and German monarchs, the capital of North Italy, and for centuries the heart of the most powerful principality in the peninsula, was now to sink to a mere provincial position, to become an impotent fragment of dismembered and captive Italy.
We need not occupy ourselves with the further vicissitudes of the city under the now settled dominion of Spain, which all the chivalrous and repeated efforts of France in the sixteenth century was unable to overthrow. It is enough to note her transference from Spanish to Austrian rule after the War of Succession in the early years of the seventeenth century, and her continued subjection to the House of Hapsburg—with the brief Napoleonic interruption of 1796 to 1815—till in 1848 she rid herself by insurrection of the Austrian garrison, and ten years later became free and national at last as a member of the new-born Kingdom of Italy.
Her mediæval life ended with her mediæval liberty. Its robust passions, its vigorous and restless activity of body and mind, the sense of human power, the wide-ranging speculation, the audacious flights of the spirit, which mark its florescence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, turned to weariness, disillusion and despair. Individuality lost itself in the bonds of convention and submission. In art, in literature, everywhere—decay. On thought, on science, the blight fell. The same hand which had stilled the political aspirations of Milan was laid heavily upon her soul. The prepotence of Spain and the revival of dogmatic zeal in the Papacy meant the employment of every engine of oppression against that spiritual freedom which Italy had used both for good and for evil. The Holy Office was set up in the Convent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, and our friend Burigozzo lived long enough to see the pitiful ceremonies of the public recantations and penances of heretics before the door of the Duomo. But the most powerful agent of the Catholic reform in Milan was the famous Cardinal Archbishop, Carlo Borromeo, known to religious history as San Carlo. As Ambrose stands at the entrance of Milan’s mediæval era, with back turned upon the ruined Empire behind, and strong gaze broadening down the centuries of new faith, new hope, new ideals, so Carlo Borromeo stands at its close, as sternly facing towards the past, and closing the door upon the new world of thought and knowledge beyond. Her independent story is consecrated at its beginning and at its end by the mighty personality of a saint, who, whatever his influence upon her actual progress, gives by his example of will, of courage, and of spiritual exaltation, an everlasting inspiration to mankind.