Isabella of Naples, "Unique in Misfortune"

She was not yet two years old when they promised her to her three-year-old cousin. The pope gave his blessing.

Isabella of Naples was born on 2 October 1470, the granddaughter of a king. In September 1472 the contract was drawn up that gave her to Gian Galeazzo Sforza, heir to the Duchy of Milan. They were first cousins, so the Pope had to be asked. He said yes.

She grew up at Castel Capuano in Naples, taught by the poet Giovanni Pontano, and she wrote verses of her own. Her cousins, the d'Este sisters, spent part of their childhood beside her, and she was closest to Beatrice. Her mother was a Sforza of Milan and a woman of learning. Her father kept a mistress and showed his wife little respect.

Her mother died in August 1488, in the same month that the envoy from Milan arrived in Naples to settle the last details of the wedding. The wedding was not delayed. On 23 December Isabella was married by proxy, before a Milanese delegation led by her husband's brother. The day after Christmas she set out for Milan with a large household. She reached Genoa on 18 January, met Gian Galeazzo at Tortona on 24 January, and was married again in Milan Cathedral on 2 February. She was eighteen years old.

The ambassadors wrote home about the bride. One said the new duchess was dark-faced and not very beautiful, but kind. Another said she was so radiant she seemed like the sun. The duke, they agreed, was beautiful, and he was pale, studious and melancholy.

On 13 January 1490, in the Sala Verde of the castle at Porta Giova, the court watched a masque called Paradise. Leonardo da Vinci had designed the scenery and costumes. Seven men played the seven planets, and each one in turn spoke in praise of Isabella. For as long as it lasted, she sat at the centre of the universe.

Soon afterwards the couple were moved to Pavia, against their will, to a household prepared by Gian Galeazzo's uncle Ludovico, who governed Milan as regent. He did not mean to give it back.

On 30 January 1491 Isabella gave birth to a son, Francesco. Milan was celebrating the wedding of Ludovico and her cousin Beatrice. Ludovico sent her Neapolitan servants home and took charge of the boy's education. She was kept short of money and wrote to her father asking him to step in. Her rooms in Milan were dark. Leonardo was staging pageants for Beatrice now, and in 1493 Beatrice was sent to Venice as the duchy's ambassador.

On 26 January 1493 Isabella gave birth to a daughter, Ippolita Maria. No one marked it. The day before, Beatrice had given Ludovico a son, and the city was in festival. A year later, on 2 February 1494, at Vigevano, Isabella gave birth to another daughter, Bona. By then she and her husband were living in the castle at Pavia, prisoners in all but name.

Ludovico had urged Charles VIII of France to attack Naples. In October 1494 the king came into Lombardy on his way south, and Ludovico and Beatrice received him with honour. Isabella went to him in tears and begged him to spare her father. Charles was embarrassed. He felt for her husband, who was dying. Philippe de Commines, who travelled in the king's train, remarked that she would have done better to pray for herself, young and fair as she still was.

Gian Galeazzo died on 21 October 1494, after days of agony from a relapse of his stomach illness. He was twenty-five. The next day the nobles proclaimed Ludovico duke.

Isabella was now pregnant and alone. For almost six weeks she shut herself away at Pavia with her three children and saw no one. In December Ludovico persuaded her to move to the castle in Milan, where she was, of course, kept under guard. In February 1495 she gave birth to a daughter, Bianca Maria. That December her father died. In October 1496 her brother, the new king of Naples, followed him. Bianca Maria, eighteen months old, died soon afterwards. Her world grew ever smaller.

Then in 1499 the French invaded Milan. Ludovico fled. Isabella asked Louis XII to make her son Duke of Bari. Louis took the boy to France and put him in a monastery. She never saw Francesco again.

Next she took her two daughters south to Naples. In 1501 her uncle gave up his throne to the French king, and the family was held on the island of Ischia. There Ippolita Maria died, aged eight. Isabella began to sign her letters "Isabella, unique in misfortune."

After negotiations with Spain's representatives, she was given the Duchy of Bari in her own right, with the titles of Princess of Rossano and Lady of Ostuni. In April 1502 she took possession. She made her home in the Norman-Swabian castle at Bari with Bona, and she made it a court. Poets and artists came, and the first book printed in Bari was produced there. She strengthened the castle's defences against the kind of war that had broken Milan and Naples, and she set watchers over officials who were notorious for corruption.

She raised Bona herself. The girl received a humanist education that included statecraft. In 1510 Bona fell gravely ill, and Isabella asked a convent to pray for her. When Bona recovered the two of them went to the convent together to give thanks.

In January 1512 Isabella learned that Francesco had died in France after a fall from a horse while hunting. After that cruel misfortune Bona was her only surviving child.

She had always meant Bona to go back to Milan. She wanted to marry her to her cousin Massimiliano Sforza, Ludovico's son, and join the two branches of the family. In January 1515 Bari voted her 18,000 ducats for the dowry. Massimiliano would not marry, and in September the French took Milan again.

Things took an unexpected turn for the pair when in October 1515 the Queen of Poland died. The Emperor Maximilian wanted to choose the next queen, and Bona was one of the names that had been shortlisted. Isabella sent Bona's tutor to Vienna to argue for her and in the spring of 1517, King Sigismund agreed.

Bona was married by proxy at Castel Capuano, the palace where her mother had grown up, on 6 December 1517. A Polish nobleman stood in for the king. The contract promised him a hundred thousand gold ducats, and Isabella raised extra taxes in Bari to pay for the ceremony. The winter was cold, and she put off the journey more than once.

On 3 February 1518 she finally said goodbye to her only surviving child. She had the print of Bona's foot cut into the stone where the girl had stood, with an inscription that here the Queen of Poland had stood when she took leave of Donna Isabella, her mother, Duchess of Milan.

She had planned to travel to Poland to be with her daughter. Then her aunt Joanna died and left her a fortune, part of which the king of Spain also claimed. A legal battle ensued and the case was still unsettled when Isabella died.

Bona gave her four grandchildren while she lived: Isabella in 1519, Sigismund Augustus in 1520, Sophia in 1522 and Anna in October 1523. At the start of October Isabella had fallen seriously ill. In early February the illness worsened, and she died on 11 February 1524, aged fifty-three. She was buried in the church of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples.

Anna was four months old. She would one day be Queen of Poland in her own right. She would never meet her grandmother.