monarch. This court gave currency to those habits of polite culture,
magnificent living, and personal luxury which played so prominent a part
in all subsequent Italian despotism. It is tempting to overstrain a
point in estimating the direct influence of Frederick's example. In many
respects doubtless he was merely somewhat in advance of his age; and
what we may be inclined to ascribe to him personally, would have
followed in the natural evolution of events. Yet it remains a fact that
he first realized the type of cultivated despotism which prevailed
throughout Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Italian
literature began in his court, and many Saracenic customs of statecraft
were transmitted through him from Palermo to Lombardy.

While Frederick foreshadowed the comparatively modern tyrants of the
coming age, his Vicar in the North of Italy, Ezzelino da Romano,
represented the atrocities towards which they always tended to
degenerate. Regarding himself with a sort of awful veneration as the
divinely appointed scourge of humanity, this monster in his lifetime was
execrated as an aberration from 'the kindly race of men,' and after his
death he became the hero of a fiendish mythus. But in the succeeding
centuries of Italian history his kind was only too common; the
immorality with which he worked out his selfish aims was systematically
adopted by princes like the Visconti, and reduced to rule by theorists
like Machiavelli. Ezzelino, a small, pale, wiry man, with terror in his
face and enthusiasm for evil in his heart, lived a foe to luxury, cold
to the pathos of children, dead to the enchantment of women. His one
passion was the greed of power, heightened by the lust for blood.
Originally a noble of the Veronese Marches, he founded his illegal
authority upon the captaincy of the Imperial party delegated to him by
Frederick. Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Feltre, and Belluno made him their
captain in the Ghibelline interest, conferring on him judicial as well