Professor Caterina Santoro's latest edition of Lombard documents, La politica finanziaria dei Visconti. Documenti. Vol. I, Settembre 1329 - Agosto 1385 (Milan, 1976), offers a convenient opportunity to look back over the last three decades and attempt a brief assessment of similar editions pertaining to the political and administrative history of Lombardy under the Visconti and the Sforza. With the possible exception of Naples, Milan is the one of the five principal Renaissance states that has attracted the least attention outside Italy, particularly in the United States where one seldom encounters even a review of a book devoted to Lombard history. Yet Milan is not only far more ancient but has been more consistently on the forefront of Italian history than both Florence and Venice on whom non-Italian scholars have concentrated their research efforts.

Five recently discovered documents reveal for the first time that eyeglasses with concave lenses for myopes were manufactured in Florence from at least the middle of the fifteenth century, about one hundred years before they were thought to be in use. This new evidence throws additional light on the development and early use of spectacles and on the early history of optical instruments and glass technology in general. These documents also reveal for the first time that Florence was the leading manufacturing center of high-quality eyeglasses and that spectacles had already become a prestigious item of personal adornment at least at the court of the dukes of Milan. This information should be of interest to historians of art and costume as well.

The enormous mass of fifteenth-century diplomatic documents deposited in European archives and libraries, mostly in Italy, has never been explored and utilized systematically. Relatively small selections have been published in various collections and appendices of specialized monographs, but the over-all significance of these papers has never been assessed. By contrast sixteenth-century diplomatic documents have given rise to many printed collections and publications ever since the third decade of the last century when Leopold von Ranke first made extensive and effective use of the Venetian dispacci and relazioni in his History of the Popes.

The struggle of the Italian League against the Italian territorial ambitions of Charles VII of France has been little studied in all its ramifications. By necessity, the attention of historians has been drawn primarily to the belated energetic efforts of the ‘King of Bourges’ in the latter part of his reign which led to the final defeats of the English invaders in the last phases of the Hundred Years War. The continuation of the Franco-Italian struggle under the more capable and astute successor of Charles VII, Louis XI, has attracted more attention, and has tended to obscure the first phase of the conflict. The first phase, however, is important for the proper evaluation of Louis XI's Italian policy, and it is to this period that this study is devoted.

The year 1494 marks the beginning of a series of French invasions of Italy. These invasions were to lead soon to a struggle among France, Spain, and the Empire for the control of the whole Italian peninsula. After 1519, when Spain and the Empire came under the scepter of one sovereign, Charles V of the Hapsburg dynasty, the contest for supremacy in Italy assumed the aspect of a great dynastic duel between the French Valois monarchs (Francis I, 1515–47; Henry II, 1547–59), and the Hapsburg rulers for the domination of Europe. This contest finally ended temporarily with the Spanish victory of St. Quentin (1557), and the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) which gave Spain supremacy not only in Italy but in Europe.