The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line who began that royal luxury of palaces with which Mantua was adorned.  He commenced the Ducal Palace; but before he went far with the work, he fell a prey to the science then much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting its last refinement from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia.  The poor Marquis was poisoned by his wife’s paramour, and died in the year 1444.  Against this prince, our advocate Arrighi records the vandalism of causing to be thrown down and broken in pieces the antique statue of Virgil, which stood in one of the public places of Mantua, and of which the head is still shown in the Museum of the city.  In all times, the Mantuans had honored, in diverse ways, their great poet, and at certain epochs had coined money bearing his face.  With the common people he had a kind of worship (more likely as wizard than as poet), and they celebrated annually some now-forgotten event by assembling with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil, which was destroyed by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by the Marquis’s own order.  This ill-conditioned person is supposed to have been “vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to be fellow-citizens of the prince of poets.”  We can better sympathize with the advocate’s indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquisate, to become a prince of the Roman Empire.  Mantua was thus subjected to the Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished; and the voluntary election of the Council, which bestowed the captaincy on each succeeding generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form, and of course.

The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been bred in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers, whom, indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful.  It is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him, and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his father’s hereditary enemies, the Visconti.  To make dates agree, it must have been the last of these, for the line failed during Lodovico’s time, and he had wars with the succeeding Sforza.  In the day of his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and with Venice, and the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head of the united armies, as we have already seen.  So the father and son met in several battles; though the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a sentiment of piety somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should never actually encounter his parent face to face.  Lodovico came home after the wars, wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son “the Turk,” a nickname that he never lost.

Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many works to enrich and beautify the city.  He established the first printing-office in Mantua, where the first book printed was the “Decamerone” of Boccaccio.  He founded a college of advocates, and he dug canals for irrigation; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan cloth.