Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan (born 1392)

Filippo Maria Visconti was the duke of Milan from 1412 to 1447. Reports stated that he was "paranoid", but "shrewd as a ruler." He went to war in the 1420s with Romagna, Florence, and Venice in the Wars in Lombardy but was eventually forced to surrender under Pope Martin V. He would return to war again, where another peace agreement was required to stop the war. He married twice and his second wife was Marie, whom he married in 1428. Marie was the daughter of his ally Amadeus VIII. When he died, Fillippo was the last of the Visconti male line and was succeeded by Francesco Sforza, husband to his natural daughter Bianca Maria Visconti, birth by his mistress Agnese del Maino.

The Duchy of Milan was a state in Northern Italy, created in 1395 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, then the lord of Milan, and a member of the important Visconti family, which had been ruling the city since 1277. At that time, it included twenty-six towns and the wide rural area of the middle Padan Plain east of the hills of Montferrat. During much of its existence, it was wedged between Savoy to the west, Republic of Venice to the east, the Swiss Confederacy to the north, and separated from the Mediterranean by the Republic of Genoa to the south. The duchy was at its largest at the beginning of the 15th century, at which time it included almost all of what is now Lombardy and parts of what are now Piedmont, Veneto, Tuscany, and Emilia-Romagna.