Champollion-Figeac, “Louis et Charles ducs d’Orléans,” p. 253. The will is dated Oct. 17, 1403: Pisa was probably counted in the “autres terres que puis avoir.”
The first investiture was granted him on Sept. 5, 1395. From this date he held his duchy of Milan as an imperial fief. But as what manner of fief? And which class of fiefs admits a woman to be her father’s heir?
These questions, seemingly simple, are in reality difficult to answer, because feudal law was quite indefinitely modified by provincial custom. It was chiefly custom which decided if an hereditary fief could be inherited by a woman in default of males. Thus in France the provinces of Burgundy and Normandy were strictly masculine fiefs; but Lorraine, Guienne, and Artois descended to daughters in default of sons; and the duchy of Brittany, the kingdoms of Cyprus, Navarre, and Naples (a Papal fief), will occur to every mind; while in Germany itself, in the stronghold of feudalism, the duchy of Mecklenburg descended to daughters on extinction of the masculine branch; many fiefs in Swabia, Zutphen, Pomerania, and Saxony, followed this example.
In the North of Italy the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy had become so trivial a thing, that sons, born in or out of wedlock, were generally forthcoming in sufficient numbers to distance any feminine claim; and the Imperial investiture—save in the case when it carried with it the Imperial Vicariat—was rather a rose in the buttonhole of the tyrant than a necessary legalization of a tyranny stronger than the law. Yet the marquisate of Montferrat was brought into the house of the Palæologi through a feminine succession; and in 1387 Valentine Visconti brought the country of Asti (no less than Milan an Imperial fief) unquestioned to her husband, and with only the Pope’s investiture. A century later Caterina Sforza ruled in Pesaro. The custom in Italy, then, though dubious, various, and full of irregularities and confusions was, on the whole, the same as the custom in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Swabia, Hungary, Brittany, Navarre, and other places: on extinction of the male descent a woman might succeed. If her succession were provided for by the terms of the investiture; or, in other cases, unless she were deliberately excluded.[52]