Gian Galeazzo Visconti (1351-1402) ruled Milan as its Duke (1385-1402) after taking the place by force of arms from Bernabo Visconti, his own uncle. Formerly (and by 1378), Gian Galeazzo had been Lord of Pavia and, eighteen years before that, on 08 October 1360, he was married by his parents, to Isabella the daughter of French King John II. This marriage was a treaty of some convenience between the House of Valois and that of the Visconti in North Italy. Young Gian was nine and Isabella eleven years old.
The times were full of grave uncertainty. People and rats and fleas with plague spread and killed each other wildly across Europe in those days. Smartest policies revolved around securing earlier marriages in order to unite the nobles with those available families that were aspiring but who also seemed capable. The process was to mix bloodlines and share resources in order to outlast the ravages of plague that only very few could completely avoid.
Only one of Gian Galeozzo and Isabella's children reached adulthood. Her name was Valentina born in Milan in 1371. Her mother Isabella died in the next couple years, but her father continued to dote on little Valentina. A Princess that grew up in Pavia she became the Duchess of Milan. Her father searched all over for a suitable partner for his princess. Her dowry would be rich if there were no male heirs, including Asti and Milan. At last Gian agreed to let her go to her mother's House of Valois. A young Louis d'Orleans was selected to partner the princess who already was Duke of Tourraine and called Count of Valois, and he too was just a teenager. A papal dispensation had to be arranged (they were cousins), and the agreement was signed in January 1387, in Valentina's sixteenth year. Only after Gian Galeazzo himself felt secure did he allow his daughter to leave town. It was then she would move to Paris.
Later on, this Louis became Count of Blois and Soissons, but through the 1390's he had to spend most of his time thwarting attacks from Jean, the Duke of Burgundy. Another set of stories. Valentina would bear him eight children and at thirty-seven years old, survive her husband by a year and a month. Four of their children would survive into adulthood.
Meanwhile, Gian Galeozzo, rather than fight with his uncle (who had fifteen heirs), agreed to marry one of his cousins, the daughter Katerina in the Bernabo Visconti line. She bore Gian two sons both of which would in succession become Duke in Milan. Gian himself would die in 1402. Valentina's step-brothers were called both mad and cruel but despite or because of the many attempts against them, would gain fame in Milan for their tyrannical behavior. Valentina did not outlast the younger step-brothers but, three of her children did.
One of these, Charles, would become Duke d'Orleans and Valois, a poet in captivity and, later, Lord of Coucy. He fought at Agincourt in 1415 where he was captured by the English, who then kept him imprisoned for twenty-five years. When he returned to France (in 1440), he took time to marry Marie de Cleves and they had three children. She was interesting, too. One of these children, that she bore the aged Charles, in 1462 (when Charles was sixty-eight years old), would become another Louis Duke of Orleans and then, in 1498, Louis XII, King of all of France. It was in this way that eighty-nine years after she died, Valentina would become the grandmother of a French King.
Much of this came from Guicciardini's History of Italy in the period chronicling 1498.
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