In the erection of public buildings he was magnificent.  The Certosa of Pavia and the Duomo of Milan owed their foundation to his sense of splendor.  At the same time he completed the palace of Pavia, which his father had begun, and which he made the noblest dwelling-house in Europe.  The University of Pavia was raised by him from a state of decadence to one of great prosperity, partly by munificent endowments and partly by a wise choice of professors.  In his military undertakings he displayed a kindred taste for vast engineering projects.  He contemplated and partly carried out a scheme for turning the Mincio and the Brenta from their channels, and for drying up the lagoons of Venice.  In this way he purposed to attack his last great enemy, the Republic of S. Mark, upon her strongest point.  Yet in the midst of these huge designs he was able to attend to the most trifling details of economy.  His love of order was so precise that he may be said to have applied the method of a banker’s office to the conduct of a state.  It was he who invented Bureaucracy by creating a special class of paid clerks and secretaries of departments.  Their duty consisted in committing to books and ledgers the minutest items of his private expenditure and the outgoings of his public purse; in noting the details of the several taxes, so as to be able to present a survey of the whole state revenue; and in recording the names and qualities and claims of his generals, captains, and officials.  A separate office was devoted to his correspondence, of all of which he kept accurate copies.[1] By applying this mercantile machinery to the management of his vast dominions, at a time when public economy was but little understood in Europe, Gian Galeazzo raised his wealth enormously above that of his neighbors.  His income in a single year is said to have amounted to 1,200,000 golden florins, with the addition of 800,000 golden florins levied by extraordinary calls.[2] The personal timidity of this formidable prince prevented him from leading his armies in the field.  He therefore found it necessary to employ paid generals, and took into his service all the chief Condottieri of the day, thus giving an impulse to the custom which was destined to corrupt the whole military system of Italy.  Of these men, whom he well knew how to choose, he was himself the brain and moving principle.  He might have boasted that he never took a step without calculating the cost, carefully considering the object, and proportioning the means to his end.  How mad to such a man must have seemed the Crusaders of previous centuries, or the chivalrous Princes of Northern Germany and Burgundy, who expended their force upon such unprofitable and impossible undertakings as the subjugation, for instance, of Switzerland!  Not a single trait in his character reminds us of the Middle Ages, unless it be that he was said to care for reliques with a superstitious passion worthy of Louis XI.  Sismondi sums up the description of this extraordinary despot