egs, and to be cast forth to the mercy of the
elements. On another occasion he walled up a family of princes in a
castle and left them to die of famine. Wealth, eminence, and beauty
attracted his displeasure no less than insubordination or disobedience.
Nor was he less crafty than cruel. Sons betrayed their fathers, friends
their comrades, under the fallacious safeguard of his promises. A
gigantic instance of his scheming was the coup-de-main by which he
succeeded in entrapping 11,000 Paduan soldiers, only 200 of whom escaped
the miseries of his prisons. Thus by his absolute contempt of law, his
inordinate cruelty, his prolonged massacres, and his infliction of
plagues upon whole peoples, Ezzelino established the ideal in Italy of a
tyrant marching to his end by any means whatever. In vain was the
humanity of the race revolted by the hideous spectacle. Vainly did the
monks assemble pity-stricken multitudes upon the plain of Paquara to
atone with tears and penitence for the insults offered to the saints in
heaven by Ezzelino's fury. It laid a deep hold upon the Italian
imagination, and, by the glamor of loathing that has strength to
fascinate, proved in the end contagious. We are apt to ask ourselves
whether such men are mad--whether in the case of a Nero or a Marechal
de Retz or an Ezzelino the love of evil and the thirst for blood are not
a monomaniacal perversion of barbarous passions which even in a cannibal
are morbid.[2] Is there in fact such a thing as Haematomania,
Bloodmadness? But if we answer this question in the affirmative, we
shall have to place how many Visconti, Sforzeschi, Malatesti, Borgias,
Farnesi, and princes of the houses of Anjou and Aragon in the list of
these maniacs? Ezzelino was indeed only the first of a long and horrible
procession, the most terror-striking because the earliest, prefiguring
all the rest.

[1] Alexander IV. issued letters for this crusade in 1255. It was
preached next year by the Archbishop of Ravenna.

[2] See Appendix, No. I.

Ezzelino's cruelty was no mere Berserkir fury or Lycanthropia coming
over him in gusts and leaving him exhausted. It was steady and
continuous. In his madness, if such we may call this inhumanity, there
was method; he used it to the end of the consolidation of his tyranny.
Yet, inasmuch as it passed all limits and prepared his downfall, it may
be said to have obtained over his nature the mastery of an insane
appetite. While applying the