This was after his paternal grandfather Matteo I who was in conflict with the Catholic church had charges levelled against for planning to murder the Pope John XXII and for practicing necromancy.

Stefano's contemporaries linked his death to an attempted poisoning of the king, leading to the imprisonment of Bernabos uncles, Galeazzo, Giovanni, and Luchino, as well as of his cousin, the future Lord of Milan, Azzo Visconti.

On 27 September 1350 Bernabò married Beatrice Regina della Scala,[6] daughter of Mastino II, Lord of Verona and Taddea da Carrara, and forged both a political and cultural alliance between the two cities.

Warring on several different fronts, in December of that year he sued for peace with the new pope, Urban V, through the mediation of King John II of France.

With the peace signed on 13 March 1364, Visconti left the occupied Papal lands, in exchange for the raising of the ban upon a payment of 500,000 florins.

In 1373, the pope sent two papal delegates to serve Bernabò and Galeazzo their excommunication papers (consisting of a parchment bearing a leaden seal rolled in a silken cord).

Bernabò, infuriated, placed the two papal delegates under arrest and refused their release until they had eaten the parchment, seal, and silken cord which they had served him.

Bernabò, whose despotism and taxes had enraged the Milanese, is featured among the exempla of tyrants as victims of Fortune in Chaucer's[10] Monk's Tale as "god of delit and scourge of Lumbardye".

[13] An erratic small-size male head in marble now in the storerooms of Castello Sforzesco has recently been rediscovered and tentatively identified as a portrait of the elderly Bernabò.

He had at least 15 legitimate children with his wife Beatrice Regina della Scala:[15] His illegitimate offspring by Donnina del Porri, legitimated in a ceremony after the death of his wife in 1384,[a] were as follows: In addition, Bernabò had other illegitimate offspring by other mistresses:[18] —With Beltramola Grassi: —With Montanina de Lazzari: —With Beltameda Cassa: —With Giovannola Montebretto: —With Caterina Freganeschi: —With unknown mistresses: