This volume presents in translation 100 previously unknown letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445-1488), daughter of the Duke of Milan, who was sent at age twenty to marry the son of the infamously brutal King Ferrante of Naples. Sforza´s letters display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples, then the two most powerful states in Italy, amid such grave crises as her brother´s assassination in Milan and the Turkish invasion of Otranto. Still, Ippolita lived as a hostage at the Neapolitan court, subject not only to the threat of foreign invasion but also to her husband´s well-known sexual adventures and her father-in-law´s ruthlessness. Soon after Ippolita´s mysterious death in 1488, the fraught Naples-Milan alliance collapsed.
