Gabriello Visconti shared with his half-brothers the heritage of Gian Galeazzo.

The line of the Medici was continued by princes of more than doubtful origin.

Suspicion rested on the birth of Frederick of Urbino.

The houses of Este and Malatesta honored their bastards in the same degree as their lawful progeny.

The great family of the Bentivogli at Bologna owed their importance at the end of the fifteenth century to an obscure and probably spurious pretender, dragged from the wool-factories of Florence by the policy of Cosimo de' Medici.