CHAPTER IV

_The Reign of Faction_

“Factions alone are the cause of our great ills.”—PRATO.

So wrote a Milanese chronicler in the sixteenth century. Had the people but one mind, he adds, assuredly no city would be more pleasant and fortunate than theirs. His complaint holds equally good for the thirteenth century. The presence of a foreign invader did indeed produce a temporary union of heart and hand, and so far the earlier generations show a noble contrast to their descendants of three hundred years later. But even while Frederick II. was still in the land, and in response to opportunities of selfish advantage offered by alliance with him, there were constant defections from the League, and we find the whole of North Italy seething with the warfare of city against city. After his death, when the mutual rage and hate was no longer checked by any fear of a general oppressor, the strife was continued with worse fury under _the diabolical names of Guelf and Ghibelline_, to use the expression of a contemporary writer, the divisions between city and city being repeated within each community itself. The Lombard scene dissolves into a whirling confusion of fratricidal war, in which beneath the cross-currents and blind purposes of individual passion and greed, we may distinguish the two steady principles of the Church and democracy on the one side, and the aristocratic and feudal element, deriving its right from the Empire, on the other. In Milan the issue, which had long before defined itself as a struggle between nobles and people, remains fairly clear. The plebeians had forced their way more and more into the government. Their right to share in the election of the Consuls had been long conceded, and some among them had even taken a place in that august body. In 1198 they had acquired the strength of union and organisation by forming themselves into an association calling itself the _Credenza di Saint Ambrogio_, with elective magistrates and officers of its own, and a certain share in the government and the revenues of the community. This body consisted of the lesser trades and guilds, but excluded the mass of poorer artisans and labourers. The merchants, bankers, traders in wool, etc., had their corporation also; the lesser nobles were banded in a society called the _Motta_, and the great nobles formed the _Società dei Gagliardi_, so that no less than four _factions_ existed in Milan at the opening of the thirteenth century, besides the populace, which threw its weight on one side or another, with the quick inconsistency of irresponsibility and impulse. Each faction had its separate claims and ambitions, but the tendency of the three lower ones was to unite against the great nobles, who, amid continual uproar and conflict, were gradually stripped of their exclusive power and privileges. And in 1258 the last and most sacred enclosure of their caste was stormed and carried by the Vulgar: a decree of the Republic threw open the highest offices of the Ambrosian Church to plebeians. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were, in fact, the Epoch of the People, and though all classes, high and low, fought loyally together against Barbarossa and Frederick II., it was the democratic preponderance in the city which determined its steady opposition to the imperial pretensions. The same principle threw Milan on the Guelf side, which she upheld with ardour in the general Lombard warfare, manifesting her party zeal especially in a fierce intermittent war with Pavia. That city was as necessarily Ghibelline, though the party cry on either side was but the excuse for the efforts of the one to hasten and the other to delay the inevitable absorption of the lesser by the greater.

With the power of the people was associated as of old the predominance of papal influence in the city and the depression of the archiepiscopal See. St. Peter had now completely subjected St. Ambrose. The assumption of supremacy in temporal as well as spiritual matters on the part of the Popes, their constant interference by means of legates, the activity of their innumerable and ubiquitous agents, the friars, had indeed reduced the seat of Ariberto to comparative insignificance, while the decay of feudal power and the depression of the aristocracy had robbed it of its wealth. But even assisted by the Pope, and at the height of their strength and triumph, the popular forces were impotent to establish any enduring order in the city. The nobles were still too powerful to submit peaceably to political inferiority. Moreover, as the offices and honours once confined to them became open to all, the successful and wealthy plebeians tended to join the upper class, which began to lose distinction of race in that of wealth and ability. The aristocracy, thus continually replenished with new blood, received fresh vigour and life, and the old divisions gradually merged into two classes, the _milites_, who fought on horseback and in armour, and the _plebs_, or general mass of citizens, who, little trained and lightly armed, accompanied the horsemen into battle on foot. The struggle between these two radical orders transformed Milan’s short period of republican liberty into a scene of anarchy and civil warfare, leading to the inevitable end of faction and strife, the tyranny of an individual.

Already by the end of the twelfth century the struggle of the factions over the annual election of the Consuls occasioned so much tumult and bloodshed, that the citizens in despair agreed with one accord to submit themselves to the government of a Podestà chosen from outside. But this device for peace ended by aggravating the strife. The faction uppermost for the time appointed a fierce partisan from another city, perhaps the leader of an exiled faction, who embroiled Milan with his own Commune, and exalted his sympathisers within her walls at the expense of the other party. The general discontent and disorder was reflected in constant changes in the Constitution. In the absence of any stable principle of government the power tended to fall into the hands of individuals. This was the opportunity of the nobles, from whose order the leaders of men naturally sprang. Taking advantage of the forces ready to their hands, these put themselves at the head of aristocrats or plebs, without much regard for principle, and in so doing resumed their ancient pre-eminence in the community, and initiated the new Epoch of Great Men, which was to succeed the failing Epoch of the People.

This process, at work throughout Lombardy, is shown in the second half of the thirteenth century in Milan by the gradual narrowing of the general party issue into a struggle for predominance between two great Houses, who represent and sum up in their mutual quarrel the diverse aims of the factions, and divide the community into two sharply defined and bitterly hostile bands, which fall inevitably, though by no means very precisely, into the wide general division of Guelf and Ghibelline. These were the Houses of the Della Torre, or Torriani, and of the Visconti.

In the race for supremacy the first far outstripped the second. The Della Torre were country nobles, who had, however, long been subjects and citizens of Milan, and though living usually on their estates in the Valsassina, they often appeared in the city and took part in its government and politics. They are named among the Capitani—the great secular nobles of Milan—from early in the twelfth century. They had from the first aided and protected the cause of the people against their own order, and it was this sympathy which lifted them to greatness on the democratic wave of the thirteenth century.

The power of this House in Milan arose first out of the gratitude of the city for the compassionate succour which Pagano della Torre, head of the House in 1237, gave to the wounded and starving fugitives from the disastrous battle of Cortenuova, whom he sheltered and tended in the Valsassina, and afterwards helped to get back safely to Milan. The Commune rewarded him with offices and with gifts of houses, and from that time the Torriani became regular inhabitants of the city and the principal leaders of the people’s faction.

Pagano _the Good_ himself died in 1241, but left a numerous kindred to inherit his popularity. In this year Frate Leone da Perego was elected Archbishop of Milan. The new Primate secretly aspired to raise his See to its old power and importance, and to shake off the tutelage of the Pope, and though but a year or two before he had fought loyally, as we have seen, beside the papal legate in the ranks marshalled against Frederick II., he now put himself at the head of the aristocratic party, and even invoked, it may be suspected, the aid of the powerful forces of heresy. But against the nobles was ranged Martino della Torre, nephew of Pagano, as leader of the people, who, in 1249, elected him their head with the title of _Anziano_,—Ancient—of the Credenza, and the Franciscan Leone was more than matched by the Dominican Pietro da Verona, whose zeal, sanctity, and awful inquisitorial powers were the strongest support of the Papacy in Milan. The murder of the Inquisitor in 1252 was almost certainly prompted by partisan motives. But it failed signally in its political as in its sectarian purpose, and for Papacy, people, and the Dominican Order alike, the bloody crown of the Martyr became an emblem of united strength and triumph. His death was followed by insurrections of the people. After a few years of comparative peace under the strong Podestà Manfredo Lancia, the feud between the two parties broke out afresh, and the Archbishop and nobles were driven out of the city. The following year a reconciliation took place (1257), and was solemnly confirmed in a treaty called the ‘Peace of St. Ambrose.’ In this the privileges already won by the popular party were formally conceded to them. All dignities and offices in the Commune, from the highest minister down to the town-trumpeter, were to be equally divided between the nobles and the Plebeians. Both sides swore to observe the peace in perpetuity. Yet two months later it was broken, and the nobles once more banished by the all-powerful Della Torre. They united with the Ghibellines of the other cities, and even treated with the terrible Ezzelino da Romano, whom the trembling populations of North Italy believed to be the son of the Devil. They promised him the Lordship of Milan if he would aid them, and in 1259, the last desperate year of his evil course, the Trevisan chief, issuing forth from Brescia, made a sudden stealthy dash with his famous horsemen upon the city. Martino della Torre, deceived as to the invader’s movements, had led the Milanese to meet him in another direction, and the city was undefended for the moment, and must have fallen into Ezzelino’s hands had not warning reached Martino just in time for him to hasten home and man the walls, thus defeating Ezzelino’s purpose.

The growing power of the Della Torre began before long to rouse suspicion and distrust in Rome, in spite of their steady championship of the popular cause. The hold of the Papacy upon Milan was in fact somewhat uncertain. The people still remembered with pride the ancient tradition of their Church, and were inclined at times to resent the constant interference of the Pope and his inquisitorial friars. In this feeling lay the possibility of a union between the Archbishop and the democratic party, which it was the policy of Rome to avert, even at the cost of prolonging and aggravating the miserable state of civil war in Milan. On the death of Frate Leone in 1257, the Della Torre sought to raise Raimondo, a son of Pagano the Good, to the archiepiscopal throne. Their intention was defeated by the opposition of the nobles, secretly instigated by Urban IV., and after some years of controversy over the vacant seat, Urban, thinking to hold the balance of parties in his own hands, appointed to it Otto Visconte (1263). The paradoxical spectacle of the Pope raising a Ghibelline noble to power, and the noble accepting it from the Pope—one of those strange eddies constantly occurring in the political current of the day—was completed by the alliance of the Della Torre with the celebrated Captain, Oberto da Pellavicino, protector of heretics, close comrade once of Ezzelino and the Ghibellines, and mortal foe of the Church. Into the hands of this typical figure of the North Italian drama, Martino, pressed by the hostility of the nobles and the secret machinations of the Pope, had in 1259 surrendered the Lordship of Milan for five years. Under his leadership the Torriani oppressed the friars, drove out the papal legate, Cardinal Ottaviano da Ubaldino, and on the elevation of Otto Visconte to the See, seized upon all the episcopal territories and revenues, and kept the new prelate for years out of his ecclesiastical capital. Pope Urban retaliated with spiritual thunders, and Milan lay long under the heavy spell of the papal interdict.

The Visconti and the Torriani were already deadly foes. The House of the Snake, which in Archbishop Otto, was now about to begin its great ascent, to the overthrow and destruction of the Tower of its rivals, probably derived its origin and name from one of the Viscounts of the Carlovingian rule, who had succeeded in converting the territory entrusted to his administration into an hereditary appanage. It was, in any case, of great antiquity in the city. The famous cognizance which its later career invested with a peculiar terror, is said to have been won by a noble crusader of the House, also an Otto, in single combat with a Saracen, who carried a shield emblazoned with the device of a seven-coiled serpent devouring a child. Otto slew the Saracen and adopted the device, which he transmitted to his descendants, and with it who knows what mysterious and persistent curse of guile and cruelty?

It is with Archbishop Otto, however, that the real fortunes of the House begin. Strong, crafty and determined, with a power of biding his time observable in a singular degree in all the notable members of his race, Otto was the right man to foster and direct the gradually reviving power of the nobles in Milan and lead them to victory over the Della Torre and the people. But for fifteen years he fought and intrigued in vain, leading his fellow-exiles and the forlorn hope of the Ghibelline party in Lombardy against the swelling tide of Guelf success, which the death of Ezzelino da Romano, the overthrow of the House of Suabia in Manfred and Corradino, and the ascendency of Anjou in the South, had brought to the full. The domination of the Torriani seemed to become every day more assured. Heads of the Lombard League, Martino and his family were all-powerful in North Italy. They drove the Ghibellines out of the surrounding cities, and established their own sympathisers in power everywhere. Many of the Communes accepted the actual sway of the great House. Martino died in 1263, and was buried in the Monastery of Chiaravalle. He was succeeded by his brother Filippo, on whose death, two years later, Napo, a son of the good Pagano, assumed the chieftainship.

Meanwhile the capital itself, spared, under the protection of these great lords, the bloody succession of sieges and captures which laid waste its neighbours, where the more evenly balanced parties caused revolutions with bewildering frequency, increased rapidly in wealth and luxury. The narrow, tortuous streets overflowed with the full, rich-coloured, sharply chequered life of the thirteenth century. Some terrible scene of Ghibelline prisoners slaughtered in the market-place, and dragged, mangled and bleeding, at the tails of horses through the streets, with yelling crowds of children after them, is succeeded by a May-Day holiday, when the most illustrious youths and maidens of the city, splendidly adorned, ‘weave joyful dances’ beneath pavilions spread in all the open spaces. And the blue sky roofing the sunny squares is suddenly darkened by the smoke ascending from the death-pyre of a heretic, while lean mendicant Brothers look on with triumph, certain that the cry which comes from that breaking chrysalis is the voice of the Devil discomfited. Now troops, knights and men-at-arms in clanking armour, with tattered banners held high, trample in over the drawbridge, returning from some exploit against the Ghibellines. Or it is a multitude of moaning Flagellants, in white shrouds stained with blood, whose self-inflicted lashes can scarcely fall fast enough to keep time with the pangs of their guilty consciences, as they hurl themselves against the gates, which the stout captains of the city keep shut, judging that fifteen different sects within their walls are enough, without admitting these crazy penitents to upset the unsteady minds of the people.

The narrow streets were filled with the hum of busy industries. Fine palaces and comfortable dwellings abounded, with wells and mills and all the necessaries of a prosperous existence. But wealth and its pleasant habits were causing the Milanese to forget the liberty for which they had once made all sacrifice. That word of sinister omen—_Signore_—was heard without protest among them. They had granted the title voluntarily to Martino della Torre, and both he and Filippo called themselves Perpetual Lords of Milan. The people preferred a domination which at least secured them peace, to the loss and suffering caused by continual civil struggles. Moreover, absorbed in trade and in peaceful industry, they had no time or inclination for the rapidly developing art of war, and a class of highly trained professional soldiers, fully equipped with weapons and armour, who engaged themselves for hire to any Commune, were superseding more and more the old city militia, composed of all the able-bodied men. These mercenaries, who owned no allegiance except to the master who paid them, lent enormous power to the ruler of a city, who, by means of them, was able to overawe discontent in the people. Thus, aided by the conditions of the times, the Torriani gradually established a virtual despotism over Milan, though careful not to alarm the popular mind by any grander sounding titles. It was not long, however, before they abandoned even this degree of caution, and in 1273 Napo persuaded the Emperor Rudolph to grant him the title of Imperial Vicar of Milan, thus obtaining a legal sanction for his usurpation.

Napo was a wise and prudent man, but in this step he went too far. The Della Torre fortune was even then on the wane. The Milanese might rejoice in the peace which despotism bestowed, but they loudly resented being called upon to pay for it by new and heavy taxation, and all the lovers of liberty feared the novel and arrogant title of Imperial Vicar. Among the supporters of the ruling House themselves, the long course of power enjoyed by the Torriani had bred envy and enmity. Dissensions arose, and the discontented were punished by spoliation and banishment. Numbers abandoned the party and joined Otto Visconte. Tumults shook the city once more, and sedition secretly gathered head. Napo, feeling his power slipping from him, used the cruel and tyrannous measures of despair to save himself and his House. Otto and the exiles, on the other hand, braced by adversity and clinging together in a determined band, were daily gaining strength. They were aided by the other Ghibellines of Lombardy, especially by the Pavesi, and with continual attacks and raids upon the Milanese territory they strove to vex and weaken the party in power. Nevertheless, for some years still their cause seemed hopeless. The Della Torre, who had cast off Oberto da Pellavicino when they were strong enough to do without him, had reconciled themselves with the Papacy in 1274, and their great prestige was apparently strong enough to defy defections and subdue discontent.

But time and circumstance were steadily undermining the great House, and with a sudden crash it fell. On a certain January night in 1277, the wife of Matteo Visconte was delivered, we are told, of her first son, who, because he was born _ad cantu galli_, as the cocks were crowing—heralding a false dawn, as their habit is in winter midnights—was named _Galeazzo_, first of the many of that name who were to crow over Milan. It was at this very moment that Otto Visconte—who, with his great-nephew, father of the new-born babe, and the rest of his kinsmen, had been making desperate attacks upon various points in the Milanese country, with little success so far—was creeping stealthily in the darkness, at the head of a strong body of fighting men, towards Desio, a village ten miles from Milan, where the Della Torre, disdainful of their oft-beaten foe, were sleeping encamped, with but a small force and under a careless watch. Awakened by the noise of attack, these latter rushed to arms; but too late. The enemy was in their midst. Francesco della Torre, son of Napo, fell pierced with wounds. The chief himself, overthrown in his weighty armour, lay grieving helplessly upon the ground, and with a crowd of sons and kinsmen was made captive. All was over. Otto Visconte rode victorious at last into Milan, where the citizens, who had heard of the discomfiture of their lords as they were starting with the Caroccio to the rescue, suited their faith to the occasion, and with immense applause and jubilee proclaimed the prelate Lord of Milan.

Thus, by the hazard of a moment’s battle, the long supremacy of the Torriani was overthrown. Napo was imprisoned in the terrible Tower of Baradello, whose ruins still crest a hill a mile or two on the Milanese side of Como. Here, within the bars of a cage, the once mighty chief languished for a year and a half till he died.

Meanwhile, the change of ruler had brought the city none of the relief from war and its burdensome cost, which the people had fondly expected. The kinsmen and adherents of the exiled family in the city were very numerous and strong, and the whole Guelf party in Lombardy was anxious to bring about the restoration of the Torriani. The new Lord of Milan was attacked with fury, and could only maintain himself by the energetic use of the sword, and by those same methods of proscription and banishment with which his predecessors had made themselves odious.

Otto was now, however, an old man, and worn out by the ceaseless struggles of his life. His mind was beset with the fears and suspicions of one who, under the stress of ambition, had himself practised overmuch deceit and treachery, and some years before his death, in 1295, he had surrendered the chieftainship to the young and ambitious Matteo. With extraordinary prudence and sagacity, Matteo steered his way amid the rocks and stormy waves of his course, beating back the open attacks of his enemies, matching their plots and snares with an invincible subtlety, and so ingratiating himself with the citizens by a show of moderation, piety and benevolence, that in a few years his somewhat unstable authority had transmuted itself, in accordance with the apparent will of the people, into virtual sovereignty. By force of craft rather than arms he had made himself master in Como, Alexandria, Novara and the Montferrat territory, and his conciliatory policy towards the opposite party won for him enormous influence as arbitrator in the disputes which ever racked Lombardy. He even propitiated Pope Boniface VIII. by politic concessions, which in no way lessened his own power. In 1294 his gifts and flattery prevailed upon the Emperor Adolfo to grant him the potent title of Imperial Vicar of Lombardy.

But the stealthy march of the Visconte’s ambition did not go unchecked. His pretensions roused the Guelf party to new efforts against him, and the impetuosity and recklessness of his sons as they grew up wrecked his careful plans, and excited once more to fiery heat those party passions which it was his aim to smooth and allay. His love for the splendid Galeazzo, born at the cock-crow of the Viscontean day, was the father’s undoing. In pursuance of his policy of tranquillising the party strife which forbade all stable and settled government in North Italy, Matteo made a marriage for this son with Beatrice d’Este, widow of Nino Visconte, Judge of Gallura, and sister of the Marquis of Ferrara, recognised chief of the Guelf party in Lombardy. The marriage was of evil omen for the Visconti. We all know those sad words on the little durability of woman’s love which fall from the ghost of the forgotten husband in the _Purgatorio_.[1]

Footnote 1: