Beatrice d'Este (29 June 1475 – 3 January 1497), was Duchess of Bari and Milan by marriage to Ludovico Sforza (known as "il Moro"). She was one of the most important personalities of the time and, despite her short life, she was a major player in Italian politics. A woman of culture, an important patron, a leader in fashion: alongside her illustrious husband she made Milan one of the greatest capitals of the European Renaissance. With her own determination and bellicose nature, she was the soul of the Milanese resistance against the enemy French during the first of the Italian Wars, when her intervention was able to repel the threats of the Duke of Orléans, who was on the verge of conquering Milan. Life Childhood Birth She was born on 29 June 1475 in the Castello Estense of Ferrara, second child of Ercole I d'Este and Eleonora d'Aragona. The Duke of Ferrara longed for a male heir, so her birth was welcomed as a disgrace. Childhood in Naples (1477-1485) Two years later Beatrice was taken to the Aragonese court with her mother and sister on the occasion of the second marriage of King Ferrante with Joan of Aragon. The procession, escorted by Niccolò da Correggio, arrived in Pisa and from there embarked on a galley arriving in Naples on 1 June 1477. On 19 September, Eleonora gave birth to Ferrante and when less than a month later she had to return to Ferrara, she decided to take her eldest daughter Isabella with her, while King Ferrante convinced her to leave both the newborn and Beatrice in Naples, with whom he had immediately shown himself to be in love. Beatrice thus lived in the Neapolitan city for eight years, entrusted to the care of the nurse Serena and the cultured and virtuous aunt Ippolita Maria Sforza, and grew up between the ducal residence of Castel Capuano, where she lived with her younger brother and with her three cousins, Ferrandino, Pietro and Isabella, and the royal residence of Castel Nuovo, where the king and queen of Naples resided. Ferrante considered it a "same thing" with the infanta Giovannella his daughter, so much so that the Este ambassador wrote in 1479 to her mother Eleonora that the father would also return her son, now that he was older, but not Beatrice, because "his majesty wants to give her in marriage and keep her