Francesco I Sforza

Francesco Sforza spent the 1420s and 1430s fighting for whoever paid - the Papal States, Milan, against Venice - building a reputation sharp enough that Duke Filippo Maria Visconti married him to his daughter Bianca Maria after the Peace of Cremona in 1441. When the Visconti line ended, Sforza took Milan by force in 1450 and set about making it work: he fixed the canals, rebuilt the bureaucracy, stabilized the treasury. Four years later he brokered the Treaty of Lodi, a balance-of-power arrangement that bought the Italian states decades of relative quiet. He died in 1466 and left the duchy to his son Galeazzo Maria, though it wasn't until 1494 that another son, Ludovico, received the emperor's formal blessing.