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 Hæmatomania,
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 nomenclature of disease to these
exceptional monsters, we need not allow that their atrocities were, at
first at any rate, beyond their control. Moral insanity is often nothing
more than the hypertrophy of some vulgar passion--lust, violence,
cruelty, jealousy, and the like. The tyrant, placed above law and less
influenced by public opinion than a private person, may easily allow a
greed for pleasure or a love of bloodshed to acquire morbid proportions
in his nature. He then is not unjustly termed a monomaniac. Within the
circle of his vitiated appetite he proves himself irrational. He becomes