re. They chose Tebaldo Visconti, then a monk
in pilgrimage at Jerusalem. But, before that election was accomplished,
one of the candidates for the Northern Empire had involuntarily
withdrawn his claim; Guy de Montfort had murdered, at the altar foot,
the English Count of Cornwall, to avenge his father, Simon de Montfort,
killed at Evesham. The death of the English king of the Romans left the
throne of Germany vacant. Tebaldo had returned from Jerusalem with no
personal ambition, but having at heart only the restoration of Greece to
Europe, and the preaching of a new crusade in Syria. A general council
was convoked by him at Lyons, with this object; but before anything
could be accomplished in the conclave, it was necessary to balance the
overwhelming power of Charles of Anjou, and the Visconti (Gregory X.)
ratified, in 1273, the election of Rudolph of Hapsburg.

230. But Charles of Anjou owed his throne, in reality, to the assistance
of the Milanese. Their popular leader, Napoleone della Torre, had
facilitated his passage through Lombardy, which otherwise must have been
arrested by the Ghibelline states; and in the year in which the Visconti
pope had appointed the council at Lyons, the Visconti archbishop of
Milan was heading the exiled nobles in vain attempts to recover their
supremacy over the popular party. The new Emperor Rudolph not only sent
a representative to the council, but a German contingent to aid the
exiled archbishop. The popular leader was defeated, and confined in an
iron cage, in the year 1274, and the first entrance of the Cavalli into
the Italian armies is thus contemporary with the conclusive triumph of
the northern monarchic over the republican power, or, more literally, of
the wandering rider, Eques, or Ritter, living by pillage, over the
sedentary burgher, living by art, and hale peasant, living by labor. The
essential nature of the struggle is curiously indicated in relation to
this monument by the two facts that the revolt of the Milanese burghers,
headed by their archbishop, began by a gentleman's killing an
importunate creditor, and that, at Venice, the principal circumstance
recorded of Jacopo Cavalli (see my notice of his tomb in the "Stones of
Venice," Vol. III. ch. ii. Sec. 69) is his refusal to assault Feltre,
because the senate would not grant him the pillage of the town. The
reader may follow out, according to his disposition, what thoughts the
fresco of the three kneeling knights, each