97. Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the Duke of Milan, is Assassinated, Milan, Duchy of Milan 1476

Galeazzo Maria Sforza is 15 in this painting from 1459 — it’s a detail from Benozzo Gozzoli’s “Journey of the Magi.” Later he will be a pretty badly behaved duke, but at the moment he’s been making friends with Lorenzo de’ Medici, who’s only 10. The friendship will serve the Duke well later on, when he becomes badly behaved.

Sometimes when our medieval rulers get assassinated we can see why, and that’s the case for Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who was a very bad sort of person. So, not surprisingly, he got stabbed to death by conspirators. Two of them were out for personal gain, but one was a poet who was, he believed, serving the greater communal good, which charms Anne. We tell you all about Sforza and the assassination, which is, really, the point  of this episode, but the gem of information for Michelle was that one of the churches of Florence got burnt down on account of spectacular stage effects that were really too spectacular.

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