While Rome, Florence and Venice have each found English historians, and while fresh books on Renaissance Italy appear every day, no English writer has told the story of the Sforza as a whole. The scant attention which has been given to the history of Milan may be compared with the brief visit which the traveller pays to the capital of Lombardy before he presses on to other Italian cities. Yet those who pause to look will find, hidden under the bustle of a modern commercial town, numerous relics of an age when the Duchy of Milan was deemed the first State in Italy. To the student of history the rule of the Sforza presents one of the most characteristic examples of an Italian tyranny at the time of the Renaissance.