Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Ezzelino, hereditary lord of Bassano, was one of the leaders of the party of the Ghibellines against the Guelphs, and a supporter of the Hohenstaufens in their unavailing contest for the supremacy in Italy. Never has any human being earned so dark a character for cruelty as Ezzelino; never, until our own day, in which (1906) the “Viedomosti” of Moscow suggested the massacre of a million people as the means of quieting the Russian revolution, has any one aspired to rival Ezzelino’s record as a slayer of unarmed people. Beside this man, such small fry as Cromwell, Gilles de Retz, and their kind sink into insignificance. The Florentine historian, Villani, describes Ezzelino as “the cruelest and most terrific tyrant that ever existed among Christians. By his might and tyranny he lorded it for a long time over the March of Treviso and the town of Padua and a great part of Lombardy. He made away with a fearful part of the citizens of Padua, and blinded a great number, even of the best and noblest among them, taking away their possessions and sending them adrift to beg through the world. And many others by divers torments and martyrdoms he put to death, and in one hour caused eleven thousand Paduans to be burnt.”

Ezzelino’s principal opponent in the city of Verona and the surrounding country was the family of San Bonifacio, who headed the party of the Guelphs. In truth, Ezzelino himself would appear to have been simply a madman, hæmatomaniac; although, at the same time, he showed energy, resolution, and shrewdness altogether beyond the ordinary, so that the Emperor Frederick made him his Vicar in the north of Italy. One city after another found itself compelled to submit to Ezzelino; Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Feltre, and Belluno, together with many other small towns and strong places, succumbed to him. A small, wiry man and pale, with hair, as we are told by a contemporary, “between the white and the red,” Ezzelino’s very look is said to have struck terror into the majority of those who beheld him. The only good deed recorded of him was his interfering to put a stop to the sack of Vicenza in 1236, when, in company with his master, the Emperor, he wrested the city from the Guelphs. Ezzelino’s object in doing this seems to have been less one, however, of humanity than that of acquiring for himself the gratitude of the citizens whom he intended to make ultimately his own subjects. As an instance of the discipline maintained by him, it is told that, on this occasion, on finding his orders disobeyed by a captain of German “Landsknechts,” he cut the man down on the spot, so that the rest of the soldiery were awed into good behaviour. No sooner, however, had they departed from it than Ezzelino, as the Imperial Commissary of the town, proceeded to set up a special tribunal on his own account, by means of which he speedily put to death some two thousand citizens of Padua that he found there, in revenge for the action of their native city in having declared against him a short while previously. Here, too, as also at Verona, many nobles were burned in the public square, after having been dragged for miles at a horse’s tail.

It was not until the following year—1237—that Ezzelino succeeded in reducing Padua itself to submission. The Paduans he hated even more venomously than he hated the rest of mankind, because of their long resistance to him; for Padua, the City of Saint Anthony, had all along been a stronghold of the Guelph party; that is to say, of the Church, in her struggle for civilisation and humanity, against the Emperor and his barons who were opposed to any lessening of their power by the erection of popular institutions. The wars between the Guelphs and their opponents, the Ghibellines, began in the Eleventh Century and lasted for some four hundred years; during which period innumerable despots ruled over various cities and districts in Italy, putting to death countless thousands of their fellow-creatures and, very frequently, meeting their own end at the hand of murderers either by dagger or poison. And, of them all, Ezzelino was the most universally execrated by reason of his monstrous cruelty.

On this occasion of his capturing Padua, therefore, Ezzelino indulged his love of bloodshed without stint. It was on this occasion that nearly eleven thousand—ten thousand and eight hundred, to be exact—Paduan soldiers were burned by his orders. The chronicler says that they were burned “in an hour”; but that is obviously impossible. I doubt whether Ezzelino, in those earlier stages of his career, ever had more than from twenty to twenty-eight thousand men under his command at once; and so it is probable that the executions were continued during a number of days or, even, of weeks. At the same time he built no less than eight prisons in Padua, two of which held each three hundred prisoners; and albeit the executioners were never idle, yet those prisons were always kept full.

It is said that thousands perished in these and similar dungeons of Ezzelino at Verona, Vicenza, and Cittadella. The prisoners included young boys and girls, and also little children, with whom were huddled grown men and women of all ages and conditions; many died from want of air, and many went mad and attacked their miserable companions. And whenever any one died in prison, his or her body was left there to rot among the living until the next cleaning of the prison—which only took place at regular intervals of three months.

One of Ezzelino’s most detestable exploits was achieved on his capture of Friola, when he caused the entire population to have their eyes put out, and their noses and legs cut off, and then to be thrown out beyond the town in still living heaps of bodies.

And once he came nearly to a premature end, when one of the House of Monticoli, whom he had insulted, sprang upon him and so tore his face and neck with teeth and nails that Ezzelino bore the marks of them for the rest of his days; so frightful, too, were the tortures inflicted by Ezzelino upon his victims that one of them once—a certain man—fearing lest his sufferings might make him betray his friends, bit out his tongue and spat it into the face of Ezzelino, who was watching him being fastened to the rack. His own father-in-law, the father of his third wife, Beatrice Maltraversi—of the same house, I take it, as the English family of Maltravers—he had thrown into prison and starved to death.

In the year 1255, however, Pope Alexander IV issued Letters of Crusade against the monster—Ezzelino had already long before been laid under the ban of Major Excommunication—and gave the Papal Benediction to all who joined themselves to the forces preparing to deal with that enemy of the human race. The Archbishop of Ravenna was appointed to the chief command and he was soon joined by the troops of Venice and of Este. But the victory was not to be an easy one; for three whole years the contending forces wrestled with each other in Lombardy and Venetia, until Ezzelino was at last defeated and captured, on September 16, 1259, in a battle on the banks of the Adda. Thence he was taken, desperately wounded, to the castle of Soncino for safekeeping, with the intention of bringing him to trial for his enormities; a design frustrated by Ezzelino himself, a few days later, when, in a fit of rage and despair, he tore the bandages from his wounds and so bled to death.

The downfall of Ezzelino it was that ushered in the advent of a nobler race of despots—the Scaligeri—in the person of Mastino della Scala, who was elected Chief Magistrate of Verona by the people on learning the glad news of Ezzelino’s death; and, in 1262, they chose him to be “Chief of the People.” Mastino was a Ghibelline, however, and his popularity could not endure for ever among a populace that had already suffered so much from its subjection to that party. On October 26, 1277, Mastino was stabbed, together with his friend Antonio Nogarola, near his own house; and to him succeeded his brother Alberto, who was the first of the Scaligeri to place the family on a semi-royal footing by means of his conquests and the matrimonial alliances arranged by him for his two eldest sons, Bartolomeo and Alboino. It was the youngest, however, of the nephews of the murdered Mastino, Cangrande della Scala, who was to prove himself the greatest of them all. On the death of Bartolomeo, the eldest of the brothers, Alboino assumed the reins of government in Verona, and called in Cangrande to assist him.

Cangrande—“The Great Dog”—was the very “beau-ideal” of a despot; as splendid in his person and mind as in his disposition and his victories, his is one of the most striking figures of the Middle Ages. As Boccaccio says of him, he was “one of the most noted and magnificent lords known in Italy since the time of Frederick II,” and the Guelph historian Villani styles him “the greatest tyrant and the richest and most powerful prince that has been in Lombardy since Ezzelino da Romano”; whilst Petrarch styles Cangrande “the consoler of the houseless and the afflicted,” in commemoration of Cangrande’s kindness to Dante when the latter was exiled from Florence, as well as of the hospitable treatment accorded to other unfortunates by the generosity of “The Dog.” Among these guests of Cangrande were included many of his prisoners of war, such as Giacomo da Carraraam and Albertino da Mussato, whom he treated with all the courtesy and consideration shown by him to his voluntary guests, such as Dante himself and Spinetta Malaspina.