Stefano Visconti ( 1287 – 4 July 1327) was a member of the
House of Visconti that ruled
Milan
Milan ( , , ; ) is a city in northern Italy, regional capital of Lombardy, the largest city in Italy by urban area and the List of cities in Italy, second-most-populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of nea ...
from the 14th to the 15th century.
Life
He was the son of
Matteo I Visconti
Matteo I Visconti (1250–1322) was the second of the Milanese Visconti of Milan, Visconti family to govern Milan. Matteo was born to Teobaldo (o Tibaldo) Visconti, Teobaldo Visconti and Anastasia Pirovano.
In 1287, Matteo's uncle Ottone Visco ...
.
Marriage
In 1318 he married Valentina
Doria, daughter of Bernabò Doria from
Sassello and of Eliena
Fieschi, with whom he had three children:
* Grandiana (also known as Diana) who married around 1333 Ramon de Vilaragut, Baron of Tripi and Lord of Alcaissia and Sollana, Captain-General and Admiral of the Army of the Kingdom of Sicily ;
*
Matteo II who married
Egidiola Gonzaga
*
Galeazzo II who married
Blanche of Savoy
*
Bernabò, who shared the rule in Milan after his death and married
Beatrice della Scala.
The marriage between Valentina and Stefano was to cement an alliance between their fathers wherein the
Ghibelline party (of which the Viscontis were members) would aid Valentinas father Bernabo Doria to destroy the Genoese
Guelphs
The Guelphs and Ghibellines ( , ; ) were Political faction, factions supporting the Pope (Guelphs) and the Holy Roman Emperor (Ghibellines) in the Italian city-states of Central Italy and Northern Italy during the Middle Ages. During the 12th ...
.
Death
Stefano died in the night of July 4, 1327, after a banquet he gave for the coronation of
Louis the Bavarian
Louis IV (; 1 April 1282 – 11 October 1347), called the Bavarian (, ), was King of the Romans from 1314, King of Italy from 1327, and Holy Roman Emperor from 1328 until his death in 1347.
Louis' election as king of Germany in 1314 was cont ...
as
King of Italy
King is a royal title given to a male monarch. A king is an absolute monarch if he holds unrestricted governmental power or exercises full sovereignty over a nation. Conversely, he is a constitutional monarch if his power is restrained by ...
.
Stefano's contemporaries linked his death to an attempted poisoning of the King, leading to the imprisonment of three of Stefano's four brothers,
Galeazzo,
Giovanni, and
Luchino, as well as of his nephew, the future Lord of Milan,
Azzo Visconti, in the fortress of
Monza
Monza (, ; ; , locally ; ) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) on the Lambro, River Lambro, a tributary of the Po (river), River Po, in the Lombardy region of Italy, about north-northeast of Milan. It is the capital of the province of Mo ...
: This event marked a crisis of the relations between the Holy Roman Empire and the Visconti.
The magnificent tomb of Stefano and his wife Valentina, carved in 1359 by
Bonino da Campione, is located in the Basilica
Sant'Eustorgio in Milan.
Ancestry
References
Sources
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Visconti, Stefano
1327 deaths
14th-century Italian nobility
Stefano
Year of birth unknown