him that he had remained alone in a great stormy sea and inclined, fearfully, to asceticism. [...] the ghost of his beautiful and poor dead man was always before his spirit." (Rodolfo Renier, Gaspare Visconti) The ancient authors It was the contemporary historians on the other hand, unlike the modern ones, to recognize its importance: in addition to Sanuto, who writes of her that although "five months pregnant" wherever her husband went "for everything she followed him", Guicciardini also notes that Beatrice was "assiduously companion" to her husband "no less in the important things than in the pleasant ones". But if Sanudo merely shows it to us on the battlefield while supervising the troops, Alessandro Salvago clearly attributes to her the merit of having saved the state from Orléans. Even an illustrious and powerful figure such as Emperor Maximilian I called her principatus socia of her husband, that is, as the one who shared the government with the Moro. Paolo Giovio, on the other hand, paints an entirely negative picture of it, blaming Beatrice – traditionally attributed to Ludovico – for having called the French to Italy, although he is the only author to speak of it in these terms: All the opposite her secretary, Vincenzo Calmeta judges the behavior worthy of praise, not of reproach, when he writes of her: Not unlike Baldassarre Castiglione remembered her, many years later, with a few but significant words in his Cortegiano: "it still hurts me that you all have not met the Duchess Beatrice of Milan [...], so that you will never again have to marvel at the ingenuity of a woman". Ludovico Ariosto went even further, unifying Beatrice's fate with those of her husband and of the whole of Italy: Bernardino Corio even claims that already at the age of thirteen, even before arriving in Milan, Beatrice together with her father Ercole had urged Ludovico to reduce entirely in his own hands the government of the city, however her real influence in that period is difficult to prove. Nevertheless, already at the time of her stay in Naples, and therefore in a still puerile age, she proved to be such as to induce Count Diomedes Carafa to write to her father: "of her I predict that she will be a woman of great spirit and able to command ". Modern authors Even in the nineteenth century there are sporadic mentions of