twenty-two years. The Florentines involved Venice, which soon gained further territory in an early truce ( 1427), while Florence paid the price of bringing the unwelcome attentions of the Milanese into Tuscany itself. For many of the central years of the war, though, the main protagonists were really the two condottieri, Niccolò Piccinino, who fought for Milan, and Francesco Sforza, who fought unreliably for Florence, going over to the side of Milan no fewer than three times and in the process carving out for himself substantial territory. By the end of the war he had become such a menace that he was attacked by Alfonso of Naples, who had been fighting for the acquisition of the kingdom, drawing papal interests into the conflict, so that by the 1440s all Italy was again embroiled in warfare. With the death of Filippo Maria Visconti in 1447 Sforza, who had married Filippo Maria's daughter, laid claim to Milan, in rivalry to Alfonso, and three years later was successful. In 1454 Milan and Venice finally agreed to a peace, the Peace of Lodi, and this was followed by general pacification and the formation of an Italic League. And surprisingly this time the peace held, by and large, for forty years.
Many reasons can be advanced for the pacification, and for the continuation of peace. The documents of the period show that financial exhaustion from the war was general, and was producing strains on the internal governments of the participants. The years immediately preceding the peace of Lodi also saw the arrival of more reasonable men, who clearly saw the need to end the wars; Alfonso of Aragon and Cosimo de' Medici in particular. The condottieri were by now relatively under control, and Francesco Sforza, too, was more amenable now that he had fulfilled his ambition by becoming duke of Milan. For Venice and the papacy there were also arguments of a different nature. The Turks had just taken Constantinople ( 1453), a long-expected act, of by now little more than symbolic significance, but no less important for that in psychological terms. And fear of outside intervention, be it from the Turks or elsewhere, proved a powerful force in holding the new alliance together.
Less tangible explanations can also be detailed. Diplomatic
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