Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples Letters and Orations

This volume presents in translation 100 previously unknown letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza (14451488), daughter of the Duke of Milan, who was sent at age twenty to marry the son of the infamously brutal King Ferrante of Naples. Sforzas letters display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples, then the two most powerful states in Italy, amid such grave crises as her brothers assassination in Milan and the Turkish invasion of Otranto. Still, Ippolita lived as a hostage at the Neapolitan court, subject not only to the threat of foreign invasion but also to her husbands well-known sexual adventures and her father-in-laws ruthlessness. Soon after Ippolitas mysterious death in 1488, the fraught Naples-Milan alliance collapsed.