MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

BOOK III.

HENRY VI—PHILIP—OTHO IV.

CHAPTER XIII.

PHILIP - OTHO IV. [1197—1209.

Italy during the Contest for the Empire—Innocent's Regency in the Sicilies—Majority of Frederic Roger—Innocent at Rome —Papal Dominions—Broils in Northern Italy—Houses of Este and Romano, 

It seemed advisable, ere proceeding with the history of the Sicilies—now part of the dominions of the House of Swabia—to show the multifarious concerns, duties, and interests, incessantly claiming the attention of Innocent during his regency of this kingdom. When the contents of the last five chapters are recollected, it will hardly be matter of surprise that he did not effect much for the realms temporarily committed, with their boy-sovereign, to his charge; though it may of regret, and perhaps of censure, that he thought proper to undertake such a charge. His partial failure is, however, only another example of the one great splendid error of this highly gifted pontiff, viz., believing that as pope he ought to do, and therefore could do, more than human powers are equal to achieving. The record of his proceedings proves that, here as elsewhere, Innocent was earnestly desirous to discharge his duty faithfully and efficiently; both public, as Regent—or Lord Paramount, for rather as such than in virtue of the Empress-Queen’s will, did he assume the government—and private, as Guardian of the royal orphan. In the latter capacity, the pains he took to insure a good education, after the fashion of the times, to his ward, have been seen; and, happily endowed and organized as was the ward, it seems wonderful, that, amidst the disorders and distractions of both court and country those pains should have been so amply repaid as we shall find they were.

As Regent he was less fortunate. Of the different factions—the German and the Sicilian, still contending with each other, as well as with the Papal deputies, for the royal authority, through possession of the young King, the Saracens and great Barons, still, severally, in rebellion against all these—the German, from the personally ambitious views that Markwald had betrayed, was, in Innocent’s eyes, the most offensive. He has been charged with designing to publish a crusade against him. None was published however; and surely a Pope of views so lofty, and piety so profound, is not without proof to be accused of desiring to pervert to objects altogether worldly, if he did to spiritual objects, other than recovering the birth-place of Christianity, the passionate devotion impelling his contemporaries to take the Cross.

In the midst of all these Sicilian civil wars, in the year 1200, yet further to complicate the confusion, civil and foreign—Pisa and Genoa were fighting for and occupying Syracuse—came a new claimant; avowedly, indeed, of only a small portion, but awakening distrust, as a probable future pretender to the whole. This was Gaultier de Brienne, who, deserting the Crusade, professedly but for a moment, repaired in arms to Rome, and averring that William III, the dethroned boy-King of Sicily, was dead, demanded as the heritage of his wife Albina, Tancred’s eldest daughter—naturally her brother’s heir—the county of Lecce, inherited by William from his grandmother, and the principality of Tarento, given him by his triumphant competitor, Henry VI. The demand troubled Innocent, whether suzerain or regent. Albina’s right to inherit the private possessions of her deceased brother was unquestionable; but that brother had worn the crown of the Sicilies; and he dreaded almost equally either to introduce a sixth faction—that of a rival to his ward—into the faction-torn kingdom; or, by such gross injustice, as rejecting the lawful claims of the usurpers family, to provoke general enmity to that ward. The Holy Father endeavoured to obviate the evil consequences that he apprehended from an act of justice which it was wrong, if not impossible to refuse. He required, preliminarily, from Brienne an oath of allegiance to King Frederic, sworn in presence of the College of Cardinals; and further, a specific pledge never to undertake, or join in any enterprise, injurious to him or his interests. Brienne, thus bound, was immediately invested with both principality and county. But possession Innocent could not give him : and, forgetting his promise to the Crusaders, he returned home to raise in France a troop sufficient to seize and retain Albina’s now acknowledged heritage.

The Sicilian Council was less kindly disposed towards Tancred’s family. The old Archbishop of Palermo, ever the staunch partisan of Constance, whose marriage and recognition as heir had been very much his work, dreaded the vengeance of her rival’s daughter; and his apprehensions were shared by the Grand-Chancellor, Bishop of Troja. Nor were the politics of the Council altered in this respect by the death of the Archbishop, which soon afterwards took place; the Bishop of Troja, through the influence of himself and his colleagues, being immediately elected by the Chapter of Palermo. The Council unanimously and positively denied the Pope’s right to dispose of Sicilian and Apulian counties and principalities. That Innocent was offended by this denial of the right he assumed, there can be no doubt; none that it would disincline him to extraordinary indulgence, in a case directly offending his principles, namely, the translation of the Bishop of Troja to the archbishopric. The good-natured Cardinal Cencio had, somewhat rashly, sanctioned the election which Innocent at once pronounced void. The Grand-Chancellor did not willingly or easily give up his metropolitan see, and a struggle ensued. But ultimately the victory was the Pope’s. The Grand-Chancellor remained Bishop of Troja, whilst Brienne, with his French troops, made himself master of Tarento and Lecce; where, as long as he lived, he continued to be Innocent’s active supporter.

And valuable was such a supporter to the Pope, whose regency has been seen as troubled as his pontificate. The tumults and revolts that broke out upon a report of his death—a severe illness having really brought him to the brink of the grave—were indeed easily quelled when his perfect recovery was known. But the lull was only momentary. New troubles speedily arose, and even the death of Markwald—who, in 1202, sank under a painful, and then too difficult, surgical operation—had little or no effect in permanently allaying these disorders, though some, in softening the ferocity of their character; Markwald having been distinguished for cruelty towards prisoners of war. Another German, Diephold Earl of Acerra, took the ex-Duke of Ravenna’s place, and claimed the lieutenancy of Apulia, in virtue of the Emperor’s will, produced by Markwald. The struggle for the young king’s person and the fighting for portions of his realm were incessant. In the year 1204 Brienne defeated Diephold in a pitched battle, and in the elation of victory exclaimed that henceforward no German would dare to attack even an unarmed Frenchman. Within the year the boaster was surprised in his camp by Diephold, defeated in his turn, wounded, and taken prisoner, surviving only a very few days. At his death he left an only daughter; but the widowed Princess bore him a posthumous son, and immediately upon her recovery—if she waited so decorously long—bestowed herself and her principality upon a Conte di Tricarico.

Upon the loss of Brienne the Pope listened to Diephold’s overtures. After some negotiation, the German, promising entire devotion to the interests of the Roman See and the commands of his Holiness, was relieved from excommunication. Thus restored to Christian fellowship, he flew to Palermo, to try his chance amongst the rest for possession of the royal boy and the helm of the state. He not only failed, but was made a prisoner by his rivals; erelong, however, he effected his escape from captivity, and returning to Apulia, renewed the civil war.

The young King, the prize for which all contended, had seen only seven summers, when Innocent opened a negotiation for his marriage. In this seeming precipitancy, he was actuated by two strong motives, superadded to his desire of complying with a wish, expressed by Constance in her last will. He was anxious to procure for the regal child, a protector who could have no selfish interest interfering with the plans devised for the prosperity of his ward and his ward’s dominion; and he was eager to recompense the King of Aragon’s devotion to the papacy. He trusted to achieve both objects by selecting a sister of Don Pedro’s, the bride whom Constance had indicated, for the consort of the very juvenile sovereign. The portion and dower were settled, and it was arranged that the Queen­mother should conduct the bride, her only remaining unmarried daughter, Sancha, to Palermo, and there act as Innocent’s deputy in the regency, whilst superintending the education of the wedded children. She was to be escorted by a body of Aragonese troops, sufficient to protect the youthful bridegroom against both his turbulent subjects and his ambitious guardians. This plan was never carried into execution, and, when Frederic Roger did marry, the person of the bride was changed—Sancha had, pending this negotiation, become the wife of the younger Raymond of Toulouse. But, if a new bride were to be sought whilst the bridegroom was advancing, at least, towards a more bridegroom-like age, the matrimonial treaty remained unaltered, undisturbed, even by King Philip’s plans for providing his royal nephew with a consort. The lady upon whom the German monarch fixed for his niece was the promised bride of his own rival, Otho, the sister of one of his accepted sons-in-law, Maria, daughter of the powerful Duke of Brabant, whom Philip was striving by all possible means to gain over from Otho to the Swabian dynasty, whether as represented in himself, in his nephew, or the son for whom he still hoped.

The negotiations lingered through all the disorders of Sicily and Apulia. Innocent, even when apparently upon the point of reconciliation with Philip, adhering to his own selection, professedly in compliance with the wash of the deceased Empress-Queen. Thus arrived the eventful year 1208, in which the royal uncle was murdered and the royal nephew entered the 14th year of his age. At this period of life, in the opinion of Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians, a prince possesses all the judgment, knowledge, and experience requisite for the government of his fellow creatures, and his minority accordingly ceases. Innocent, in consonance with this notion, made his final arrangements for safely transferring the government to his ward. He held an assembly of the Estates of the continental provinces at San Germano, in which he appointed the Earls of Celano and Fondi, Lieutenants or Governors of those provinces, fixed the number of horsemen they were to send to Sicily for the King’s service, and regulated other points of government. To this assembly young Frederic sent messengers, conveying to Innocent’s brother, Conte Ricciardo di Segni, a grant of the county of Sora, which he, Conte Ricciardo, had conquered from Conrad von Marley, one of Henry VI’s endowed German favourites, and of all the other fiefs he had torn from the hated Germans. Innocent, announcing the close of his own regency, and his surrender of the sovereign authority into the hands of his former ward, dismissed the assembly with an exhortation to be faithful and obedient to their young King. 

To him the Pope delivered over the kingdom; not indeed free from intrigue, broils, and rebellion, or from the then usual concomitant of unsettled government, bands of robbers, but yet in a condition better than that in which he had received it from the deceased Empress-Queen, or than any in which he had seen it during his regency. Frederic’s majority, young as he still was, had put an end to the most noxious contest, to wit, that for the regency: besides which, Markwald’s death and Diephold’s submission had terminated the most serious of the rebellions harassing his government; and, finally, the fierce resentment, provoked by the tyranny of Henry VI, blazing in full force when Constance expired, had now, in some measure, subsided. The claims advanced by the supreme pontiff against the Sicilian treasury, upon giving in the accounts of his administration, have been censured as exorbitant; and if, as is very probable, they were so, this is another proof of the degree in which Innocent laid himself open to imposition, by attempting more than any individual could accomplish.

Prior to resigning his authority the Holy Father had concluded the long-pending negotiation for his ward’s marriage, substituting, for Sancha, her elder sister Constance, Queen-dowager of Hungary, who, upon the death of her only child had returned to her native Aragon. She was necessarily several years older than Frederic, though still in the bloom of womanhood; and the Pope, perhaps, thought that the experience, she had perforce had of the perils and the difficulties encircling a throne, more than counterbalanced this objection ; rendering her, to so very young a king, a valuable wife, capable of performing, in other guise, the office he had allotted to a royal mother-in-law. Constance was sent by her brother, suitably escorted, to Palermo, in February, 1209, when the marriage was immediately celebrated; but nearly the whole of her Aragonese escort is said to have died of the climate of Palermo during the nuptial festivities. The bride’s cousin, the Earl of Provence, who had accompanied her, was one of the sufferers.

Almost the first measure of the young King produced a momentary quarrel with the Pope; and it may be taken as indicative of the character, especially of the determination to resist encroachments upon his rights, that ulti­mately so embroiled him with the Roman See. He attempted to exercise, over the election of an Archbishop of Palermo, the influence that had always been enjoyed by his Norman ancestors. Innocent sternly admonished him that he was bound strictly to conform to the renunciation of that wrongfully obtained prerogative, and of other analogous pretensions in ecclesiastical affairs, which he, Innocent himself, had extorted from the maternal anxiety of the harassed Constance upon her deathbed. Frederic yielded—whether as a boy yielding to wonted authority, whether prudently, as feeling himself not yet equal to a contest with the Pope, must be matter of conjecture. No second cause of difference with his ex-guardian appears to have arisen.

The history of the rest of Italy must now be briefly brought down to the same epoch with that of Germany and the Sicilies.

The harmony between Innocent and the Romans was not of long endurance. The first interruption came from the Barons, who sought, if they could not get the sovereignty wholly into their own hands, at least to emancipate themselves from papal authority. The citizens, always the ready tools of any and every ambitious dema­gogue, apparently mistook the clemency of their new pontifical sovereign, for weakness; whilst the demagogue’s part was, upon this occasion, played by the Barons. They excited the people by assertions that Innocent encroached in a thousand ways upon the established municipal and popular rights, but especially in regard to the nomination and number of Senators, of whom the people preferred a body of fifty-six, popularly elected; which the Pope had changed to a single Senator, named by himself. Among the great Church vassals, the most decidedly hostile to the papal authority were the Poli family, and Giovanni Capocci, who boasted his descent from the Cornelii of ancient Rome. They assumed for themselves and their confederates the title of Good Men (Buoni Uomini) of the People.

Whilst Innocent was endeavouring by moderation, mildness, and charity, to counteract and stifle these intrigues and insurrectionary movements, an opportunity of conferring important obligations upon his mutinous subjects occurred in the year 1202. He did not neglect it. An earthquake felt, though unequally, in England, Italy, and Syria,—in the last-named country 200,000 persons are said to have fallen victims to this terrible convulsion of nature,—was followed by storms, so frightfully destructive, that again the end of the world was believed to be at hand. If the catastrophe predicted did not ensue, a calamity, the usual consequence of extensive ravages by such physical phenomena, did. The greater part of Europe suffered from grievous scarcity; Italy the most. Upon being apprised of the distress, which in Rome amounted to famine, Innocent at once left the enjoyment of his summer retreat at Anagni, and hastened back to his capital, to relieve the starving Romans. He ordered corn, at whatever price, wherever it was to be had, to be purchased, and sent to Rome. At his palace gates, 8000 persons received their daily rations; he sent provisions to the hospitals and other charitable institutions; and the necessities of those of a somewhat higher grade, whom a sense of self-respect led to prefer any degree of suffering to the appearance of mendicancy, he caused to be relieved with a delicate secrecy that spared their feelings. In his sermons, and he was a frequent preacher, he earnestly exhorted those who had the means, as Christians to follow his example. Of one of these sermons a specimen has been given in the notes.

By such conduct Innocent recovered or won the affections of the Roman people; but constancy never was a popular virtue, and the effect scarcely survived the cause. Plenty returned, and the noisy flatteries of demagogues soon overpowered the still, small voice of gratitude. The first open symptom of this obliviscence of past benefits, was the active participation of the Romans, in direct contravention of the Pope’s commands, in the feuds and insurrections of neighbouring towns, subject to the Church. But this was only a symptom of the power exercised over them by their noble leaders, and to abate the evil, it had become necessary either to destroy the baronial power, or to conciliate the Barons. Innocent adopted the latter course; and addressed himself to winning the Poli, whose embarrassed circumstances— their estates being so loaded with debt as to afford them a bare subsistence,—seemed to render them accessible. He asked the hand of Oddo di Poli’s daughter for his own nephew, the son of his brother, Conte Ricciardo; who, in consideration of the marriage, discharged all the incumbrances upon the Poli property; thus relieving them from their pressing difficulties, by constituting himself their sole, and indulgent creditor. But the measure did not effect the purpose for which it was planned.

The transaction constituted Conte Ricciardo, in modern phraseology, mortgagee of the Poli fiefs. Whether he took any legal steps to benefit by the position, seems doubtful; but the Poli loudly taxed him with despoiling them of their patrimony. He proposed that, whatever complaint or claim they might have to make, should be laid before almost any judges they pleased; namely, before the Pope, the College of Cardinals, the ordinary tribunals, or arbitrators selected from either the nobles or the citizens; whilst Innocent, to avert suspicion of unduly favouring his brother, supplied the adverse party with the money requisite to defray the expense of a law-suit. But plausible cause of complaint, not the redress of a wrong, real or imaginary, or the prosecution of an idle law-suit, was the object of the Poli. By the affectation of excessive devotion, combined with a caricatured display of poverty, they worked upon the ever excitable descendants of the stoical old Romans. In the attempt to get up an actual assault upon the Pope, whilst officiating at the high altar of St. Peter’s, during Easter, a.d. 1203, they indeed failed; but they succeeded in causing him to be insulted, whilst borne in solemn procession as part of the Easter rites. Innocent showed himself impassible upon the occasion, but thenceforward did not for many years reside at Rome except as he thought propriety absolutely required.

And now, deserted by the Pope, Rome was again the theatre of such urban warfare, amongst the inhabitants of the same street or of adjacent streets, as was then customary in Italian towns, boasting any degree of self- government, in the intervals of their outbreaks against mesne lord or sovereign. When the time of choosing the single Senator approached, Innocent, who had again fixed his abode at Anagni, appointed a committee of twelve men, to whom he intrusted the nomination. The Romans hereupon mutinied, seized the members of the Committee, and, by imprisoning, constrained them individually to swear that they would elect fifty-six Senators instead of a single Senator, and all the fifty-six chosen should be Good Men of the People. This step immediately produced dissensions that rose so high as to sicken even the Romans; and they now prayed the Pope to return. He did so, and substituted a single Senator, Gregorio Pierleone, of the family of the anti-pope Anaclet, to the fifty-six. The new Senator was a good and amiable man, without either the address or the audacity that the times required; and the ringleaders prepared, taking advantage of his deficiencies, to carry their point by main force. Capocci rebuilt a tower, which adjoined his own residence, but had long since been thrown down. Pandolfo di Saburra, an ex-Senator, who had acted as mediator in the recent broils, resenting this infraction of both law and compact, and supported by the friends of order, remonstrated; but in vain. He then raised an opposition tower upon an old ruin, so near to Capocci’s mansion, that the attack and defence of the one must needs endanger the inhabitants of the other. Forthwith all stone towers were repaired throughout Rome, and where none existed, wooden ones were run up. Conte Ricciardo built an extraordinarily lofty tower, of the more lasting material; the remains of which are still to be seen, as the tower of the Conti. Ricciardo’s kinsman, Pietro Annibaldi, built another to obstruct the approach to the Coliseum ; from which the Frangipani were waging war upon him ; whilst Capocci excited the populace to attack the fortress of the Pope’s brother, which was, he asserted, built in enmity to their liberties. The tower of the Conti was successfully defended; not so Ricciardo’s palace; of that the in­surgents possessed themselves, and afterwards constructed a sort of redoubt in front of the Lateran itself. At length the violence of the ringleaders, especially against Annibaldi, who was much beloved and respected, alienated the great body of the people. They returned to their allegiance, and again the supreme power was in Innocent’s hands.

He was now urged to embrace the opportunity of crushing his opponents; but replied, that he ruled as the vicegerent of Him who even in wrath forgot not mercy; and he used his superiority to endeavour to effect a cordial reconciliation. He rewarded and encouraged the reviving loyalty of the Romans, by indulging them with fifty-six Senators. For the investigation of the differences between his brother and the self-entitled Good Men of the People, he appointed arbitrators; who at the end of six months, if within that time the parties could not agree upon a compromise, were to decide according to law and justice. But this suited not the views of Capocci and the Poli. Openly they censured the Pope’s measures, and underhand renewed their intrigues amongst the people. They flattered the vanity of the would-be Lords of the universe, by asserting that the fiefs, over which the Pope claimed the suzerainty, ought, in law and justice, to be held, not of the Church, but of the city of Rome; and the Poli formally transferred their homage to the municipality. Innocent as formally protested against such spoliation of the Church; pronounced the transfer invalid, and the fiefs so transferred, forfeited by the attempt. He then publicly conferred these forfeited Poli fiefs upon Ricciardo, who might be said to have purchased them. But he, at the same time, impressed upon his brother the expediency of promptly agreeing to any proposal for an amicable compromise; whether by an exchange for other lands, or the redemption of the mortgaged fiefs by repayment of his advances. Capocci and the Poli, now very generally forsaken, ultimately accepted the Pope’s conditions.

In various ways Innocent so augmented the papal dominions that he is sometimes called the founder of the popedom’s temporal power. He employed the sums which his simple and abstemious habits enabled him to accumulate, in the redemption of towns and castles that his predecessors had pledged for loans of money, and in the purchase of others. He took advantage of the virtual suspension of the Imperial authority in Italy, during the contest for the Empire, to induce Spoleto and Ancona to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Church, and he recovered the would-be republic, Perugia. He strengthened himself by alliance with Tuscan nobles and cities, whose interests were identical with those of the papacy; encouraging as many of the latter as he could influence, to follow the example of their Lombard sisters; further obtaining a pledge from them never to acknowledge an Emperor, whose election the Pope had not sanctioned. Philip had sent Leopold, the Ghibeline Archbishop of Mainz—whose election Innocent had disallowed—to maintain his duchy of Tuscany in its allegiance. An army, circumstanced as he was in Germany, he could not spare him, nor yet money to hire mercenaries; and he relied principally upon a zeal and activity inspired by the disappointed prelate’s resentment against Innocent, as his personal enemy. But the prelate was no match for the pontiff, who now revived the old claim to Sardinia and Corsica; less in virtue of Matilda’s gift, than as recovered from the Moslem.

At Rome, the Senate of fifty-six—whose business seems to have been much that of municipal authorities in a regular monarchy, as, e.g. the maintenance of public order, the inforcement of police regulations, and the administration of justice in minor cases—had exercised their office, as Innocent foresaw that they would, so negligently, —no one feeling personally responsible, and each trusting to the rest—that justice and peace seemed to have fled the land, leaving crime triumphant. So great, so general was the evil, that, in 1207, the Romans entreated the Pope again to appoint a single Senator. Gladly he complied, conferring the office upon an honest and able man; crimes were thenceforth punished, and tranquillity was restored. In the course of this same year, Innocent held, at Viterbo, what may be called an Assembly of the Estates of the Papal dominions, including the newly gained Matildan provinces. In this Assembly he required all the members, in the name of all their fellow-citizens, to do him homage as Lord Paramount; and he published divers laws, by which the Church vassals were to be governed. The chief of these were prohibitions, under pain of excommunication, of lay interference in ecclesiastical affairs, and of individual vengeance, in other words, of private war; aggrieved persons, of whatever condition, being commanded to seek redress from the regular tribunals. But from such legal protection, murderers, robbers, and outlaws, were excepted; upon them, every one, it should seem, being at liberty to execute justice. Throughout the Estates of the Church, Rome included, tranquillity was, at the epoch of Philipps murder, tolerably restored.

The state of Tuscany has been incidentally apparent, save as Sardinia may be held part, as a dependency of the marquesate. There, two of the Judges professed attachment to Pisa, whilst two declared themselves vassals of Genoa, and the Archbishop of Pisa claimed the whole island as a fief of his See. It scarcely need be added that incessant feuds raged. Innocent vigorously interfered. He pronounced that the Archbishop had no authority except by delegation from the Roman See, and com­manded him to confine his intervention to ecclesiastical concerns. He summoned all temporal questions before his own supreme tribunal as Suzerain; and when the Judge of Gallura died, leaving an only daughter, the Pope, in the same capacity of Suzerain, asserted his right to dispose of the heiress in marriage.

Northern Italy had, during the contest for the Empire, been undisturbed by imperial claims to obedience in addition to allegiance. The Lombard League had been renewed in its full organization; and although those really independent, because powerful, republican cities, Venice and Genoa, confident in their own strength, stood aloof, very considerable nobles became members. Even the Ghibeline Marquess Boniface of Montferrat joined the confederation, possibly knowing himself too weak to cope with its enmity whilst there was no Emperor to protect him. But gladly had he seized the opportunity which the proposed command of the fourth Crusade offered, to withdraw from a connexion so repugnant to his feelings, as not only a vassal and partisan, but a kinsman of the Swabian Emperors. In fact, such was at this time the relative strength of the League and the Empire, that a Republic of Lombardy really might then have been established, had any portion of good sense tempered the intense individual selfishness prevalent in the councils of the League; had the actuating love of liberty not been of that aggressively, and meanly, ambitious kind, to which, being a member of a large republic, is as annoying as being a dependency of an empire. Each town wanted to be absolutely independent, the stronger to be likewise master of the weaker; and Milan, to be, what Rome once was, to wit, a republic, the despotic sovereign of all within reach.

Hence, no sooner was the external pressure, the dread of a mighty Emperor, which had rendered union indis­pensable to self-defence, removed, than vicinal rivalries and petty enmities revived. War broke out between Milan and Cremona, between Verona and Mantua, between Padua and Vicenza, between Modena and Reggio, between Ravenna and Ferrara, between Bologna and Mantua, in the Lombard League; in the Tuscan, between Florence and Sienna, and so on in both, through towns of inferior note. Innocent exerted himself strenuously to mediate between foes, the more inveterate from their close affinity, geographical and social; whose union he deemed of vital importance, as a counterpoise to the imperial power. But not even in Tuscany could he succeed. Nor were these feuds of cities with each other the only interruptions to Lombardy’s tranquillity. Within the cities themselves was discord; the inferior classes now beginning to contend sharply with the superior for the offices of magisterial government, and in some the contention ere long became as virulent as it was violent. But the evils consequent upon these incessant broils, were not altogether without compensation. The state of habitual excitement, produced by such a life of storm and tempest, prevented the energy which had generated alike the desire for independence, and the struggle that acquired it, and which had, in return, been fostered and strengthened by that struggle, from sinking into indolent security, enervated amidst the peaceful and luxurious indulgences, usually attendant upon accumulating wealth and undisturbed commercial prosperity. To that habitual excitement the world may probably be indebted for the poets and artists who presently arose out of this commotion of the social element.

According to some writers, these neighbourly feuds were in Italy most savagely waged, prisoners of war being often not merely insulted and ill-used, but actually butchered. According to others they were almost blood­less, the object of the belligerents being rather booty than the gratification of hostile or vindictive passions.  These contradictory statements are not, perhaps, absolutely irreconcilable. The, martial townsmen might not be blood­thirsty in the field, and yet treat their captives barbarously, either to extort a heavy ransom, or from private vengeance, even from temper, or that love of displaying and exerting power, which in children assumes the appearance of reckless cruelty. Abstinence from shedding blood is not, however, the usual characteristic of wars of rivalry; and it is hard to conceive that hostilities between inimical towns should be thus innocuous, when the sanguinary spirit of the broils amongst the fellow-citizens of single towns is proved by recorded facts; such as, that a monk, named Alberto, in the year 1207, traversing northern and central Italy, to preach peace and good will, found at Imola twenty-seven, and at Ferrara forty-five murders to be atoned. A more likely solution of the difficulty may be, that those modern writers who sneer at the bloodlessness of the wars waged by the Lombard cities, are unwittingly casting over this pugnacious age, the hue of another, later, and but little later era, when Italian wars were chiefly managed, and wholly fought by Condottieri, whose respective armies were their stock in trade; who, unin­terested in the quarrel, hired their human cattle out to either party; and, whilst eager for prisoners—always ransomed—forbore to injure their common business, or provoke retaliation, by killing each other’s men.

But the spirit sustained by the stimulus of such feuds was insufficient to insure these municipal republics, against the almost invariable fate, sooner or later, of democracies; as were the spiritual weapons, wielded by the Pope, to repress their violence, or to clear them of heresy. In several even Guelph towns, persons lying under excommunication are found elected to the highest offices; whilst a Bishop of Belluno, and a Papal Legate are named amongst the victims of popular outrage; and heresy flourished amidst the allies of the Pope. During the ten years’ suspension of Imperial authority, whilst Philip and Otho were struggling for the crown, not only were nearly all the weaker towns inthralled by the stronger, but in some of those stronger, enterprising individuals were already arising, who, either by force or by policy, under the apparently modest title of Signore, anglice Sir, or Lord, or perhaps Dynast, speedily made themselves the unresisted tyrants of their, erst coequal, fellow-citizens. To enume­rate these despots of single cities, most of whose races, through their own vices and follies, perished, politically if not physically, in the course of two or three generations, were to load a page with names which only an Italian antiquary could care to remember. Such of these ephemeral Signori as, during the period under consideration, exercised any material influence over the fate of their country, will appear, as required, in the course of the narrative. The houses of Savoy and of Este alone—those of Romano and Visconti though powerful were short lived—steadily went on, increasing in importance, and acquired a permanent place amongst European rulers. During the greater part of the thirteenth century the house of Romano was the mightiest of the class, and a brief sketch of some portions of the history of both this family, and the rival dynasty of Este, which, at the epoch of Philip’s murder, divided the Trevisan march with the Romanos, will abundantly illustrate the character of these Signori, generally the par­ricidal children of democracy, though neither of these two races deserved the opprobrious title. The latter both as having first risen to eminence, and been the more permanently great, must here take the lead.

The house of Este, which ranks amongst the ancestral of the Queen of England, was already, in the eleventh century, of sufficient dignity to obtain as a wife for its head a daughter of the mighty Welfs of Swabia and Bavaria. It then divided into two branches; and, whilst the eldest son of that marriage succeeded to his maternal uncle’s high position in Germany, a younger son continued the line in Italy. The Estes appear, however, to have lost some of their possessions to Marquess Boniface, father of the celebrated Matilda; and not to have again attained to great importance, until suddenly enriched by a mar­riage, which they turned to their own advantage, in a way, even then unusually irregular. The way was this. Early in the twelfth century the Torelli—likewise bearing the name of Salinguerra, to denote, it is supposed, their warlike spirit—and the Adelardi were the two most powerful families of Ferrara, and constantly opposed to each other, though neither of them seems to have aspired to nominal dominion over Ferrara. In the last quarter of that century, the headship of the Adelardi was reduced to the childless Guglielmo—him who had compelled Archbishop Christian to raise the siege of Ancona—and, as future hope, there remained only a little daughter of one of his brothers, named Marchesella. Her, Guglielmo proclaimed the heiress of the Adelardi, and had had recognised as such. Upon his deathbed, in a generous wish to terminate feuds so injurious to his native city, where thirty- two fortified towers were ever ready to wage war for Adelardi or Salinguerri, he affianced Marchesella to the heir of the latter, and delivered the little bride over for education to the father of her boy-bridegroom. But after Guglielmo Adelardo’s death, the collaterals, connexions, and partisans of the family, grudging such an increase of wealth and power to their enemies, stole the little heiress from her intended father-in-law’s mansion; and, in the year 1180, gave her in marriage to their friend Azzo di Este. Marchesella died in childhood, and her collateral heirs naturally claimed her property, inasmuch as not only there was no issue of the marriage, but, from the youth of both parties, it could as yet be but a ceremony. Azzo, to whom her estates had, somewhat imprudently, been at once made over, refused to restore them. The forty years of incessant feuds that ensued, in the course of which each party was ten times expelled from Ferrara, were still in progress in the first decade of the thirteenth century, but the Estes enjoyed throughout northern and central Italy the power and consequence derived from this immense accession to their domains. They thereupon had assumed the title of Marchese; and now obtained its ratification from the Pope. The head of the Estes had always, even when lord of only a few castles upon the Euganean hills, been esteemed the head of the Italian Guelphs; and, of course, now became more efficiently so: such he will be seen through the remainder of these volumes.

With respect to the rival house of Onara and Romano, that the second Ezzelino di Romano, surnamed the Stammerer, was selected by the Milanese, as a man of high distinction, to share in the command of the army of the League, in One insurrection against Frederic Barbarossa, and subsequently to negotiate their reconciliation with their acknowledged sovereign, has been seen. But it was his son, Ezzelino III—surnamed the Monk, because, when weary of the turmoil of his far from ascetic career, he retired to a monastery—who raised the family nearly to the zenith of its grandeur. He is no unimportant person of the age; and some incidents of his life are highly characteristic of the state of morals, manners, and public opinion in Italy, at the period in question.

This third Ezzelino, during his father’s life, married Agnes, a daughter of the rival house of Este; she died in childbed, and he took for his second wife Speronella Dalesmannini. This lady had previously four times pronounced the nuptial vow; and for aught that appears to the contrary, notwithstanding the indissolubility, as a sacrament, of Roman Catholic marriage, three, if not all four of her husbands might still be alive to claim her. Of these four matrimonial engagements, only the first, with Giacopino di Carrara, was of the commonplace, orderly kind, and it is but justice to Speronella to say that, not by her voluntary act, was it broken. Her beauty so fired the passions of Conte Pagano, then Imperial Governor of Padua, that, abusing—as the Imperial Governors were charged with abusing—the too arbitrary power which, in this capacity, he possessed, he tore her from her lawful husband and made her—the perplexing part of the story—not his paramour, but his wife. From this compulsory state of sinful bigamy Speronella effected her own liberation; but, in lieu of returning to her proper husband, who might, indeed, refuse to take her back, she wedded a third spouse, named Traversario. This gentleman may possibly have left her a widow, for of him nothing more is heard; and she is soon afterwards found as the wife of a fourth husband, Pietro di Zaussano, from whom she eloped, to espouse the heir of the mighty Ezzelino di Romano. But she had now acquired, if innate it were not, a taste for change. Her new lord, upon his return from a visit to Olderico di Fontana, indiscreetly expatiated upon his host’s hospitality, wealth, and personal beauty; the sculpture-like perfection of which had impressed him whilst bathing together. Speronella was enamoured through her ears; and now, reckless of the power of the Romanos, which she had been so ambitious to share, she fled from her fifth consort to plight her brittle faith to a sixth in Olderico, who seems to have unhesitatingly married the wife of his friend. Of this polyandrian lady no further mention occurs; it may therefore be hoped that as Olderico’s wife or widow she ended her eccentric conjugal career. But her deserted lord’s third marriage exhibits a picture of the tone of Italian morality in the middle ages as loathsome if not as surprising as Speronella’s matrimonial freaks.

Ezzelino the Monk’s sister, Cuniza, Countess of Camposanpietro, communicated to her father, Ezzelino the Stammerer, the satisfactory intelligence that the hand of the great heiress of the province, Cecilia di Abano, or Baone, was promised to her eldest son, Gerardo. The information was not received as his daughter had anticipated. The knowledge that the Abano fiefs were to be brought into the family suggested to the Signor di Romano the idea that they might better add to the power of the house of Romano instead of enriching the heir of Camposanpietro, though his own grandchild. And Speronella’s flight having left his son and heir again a single man, he at once acted upon the suggestion. He caused the heiress of Abano to be waylaid, seized and brought to Bassano, where she was instantly married to Ezzelino the son. But the disappointed suitor, Gerardo di Camposanpietro, did not tamely submit to the loss of his bride and her broad lands. If compensation he could not, vengeance he was resolute to have; and setting spies upon the movements of his new aunt, he surprised her upon a journey, by superiority of numbers overpowered her escort, and forcibly compelled her to submit to embraces, which but for his grandfather’s act of violence, would have been lawful. Thus publicly dishonoured he sent her home to her husband. Ezzelino immediately repudiated this victim to the unbridled passions of the age, and what became of her does not appear.

As his fourth wife, Ezzelino the Monk espoused Adelaida di Mangone, which proved a more lasting as a more fruitful union than the others; Adelaida presenting him with two sons and four daughters. But his domestic felicity in the marriage, for which the outrage perpetrated upon Cecilia di Abano had made room, did not soften the offended husband’s resentment against the Camposanpietros—for to the whole family he imputed the scheme—or shake his determination not to be insulted with impunity, even by his nephew. He took vengeance in kind. He seduced, or forcibly carried off Maria di Camposanpietro, a near relation of Gerardo, and kept her openly as a concubine in one of his castles, until she had borne him a daughter. Then, retaining the child, he dismissed the helplessly wretched mother, to the infamy and misery he had designedly brought upon her. The enmity between the two families, so near akin in disposition and in blood, necessarily continued for many years, ever generating fresh crimes, and ever increasing in virulence. But one nefarious attempt, of which they might fairly be suspected, is more generally imputed to the Marquess of Este. In the winter of the year 1206, Ezzelino visiting Venice, to enjoy the pleasures of the Carnival, was disporting himself in the Piazza di San Marco, with eleven of his knights, clad exactly like himself, and all masked, when they were suddenly attacked by assassins; and one of the party, Buonaccorsio di Treviso, being mistaken for Ezzelino, was slain. The professional murderers who had struck the fatal blow, presently discovering their blunder, returned in haste to remedy it, by killing the as well prescribed, as the unintended. The Marquess of Este, who—whether casually, or as one of his friend and brother-in-law Ezzelino’s party—was present, endeavoured, by throwing his arms about Ezzelino with a show of protecting him, really so to fetter his movements, as to baffle his efforts to defend himself. But Ezzelino broke from the treacherous embrace; his friends gathered around him, and the bravoes were over­powered.

At length the daughter of the unfortunate Maria di Camposanpietro grew up to womanhood, and advanced a claim to some portion of her mother’s property. Negotiations upon the subject were opened, which terminated in a general reconciliation; general, that is to say, between the Romanos and the Camposanpietro descendants of the Romano family; for between the Romanos and the Estes all pretence of kindly sentiments seems to have been dropped, after the affair of the Piazza di San Marco; and the ill-will, usually existing between the heads of opposite factions, was again frankly avowed.

BOOK III. HENRY VI—PHILIP—OTHO IV

CHAPTER XIV.

OTHO IV. [1208—1212.

  Otho’s Election—Fate of the Regicides—Otho3s Measures— Coronation-Progress—Alienation of the Pope—Invasion of Apulia—Return to Germany—Marriage—Frederic invited to Germany.