Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Personality of Italian Towns—Verona—Its History—Early Years—Ezzelino da Romano, Unique in Cruelty—Wholesale Execution and Imprisonment—Pope Alexander IV Assails the Monster—Ezzelino Wounded and Captured—Suicide—New Line of Despots—Cangrande della Scala—Dante and Petrarch—Further Lords of Verona—Later History—The Drei Kaiser Bund.

Almost every ancient Italian town possesses some distinctive attribute of its own, whether of pure beauty or grandeur or sanctity; or, else, of mere gentle charm, gladsome or melancholy, such as Sorrento or Ravenna; but of them all perhaps the most richly endowed—Rome itself alone excepted—with stirring memories of the men and their deeds, good and bad, of bygone ages, is the city of Verona.

One of the earliest—and very possibly, too, one of the best—representations of Verona is to my mind that visible in the background of the painting of the deposition of our Saviour from the cross, by Paolo Morando, better known as Cavazzola. In that picture the artist gives us a wonderfully vivid impression of his native town, as a pile of old masonry incasing a hill that rises up from the bank of a river—the Adige—against the cold clear sky of an evening of spring. This picture was painted about 1520, a few years after the restoration of Verona to the Venetian Government by Francis I of France, after wresting it from the Emperor of Germany, Maximilian of Hapsburg. Thenceforth its history was comparatively uneventful, that of an appanage of Venice, until the Napoleonic era, when the French took the town, afterwards sharing it for a space with the Austrians, 1798-1800. From then on the allegiance of Verona was claimed—and enacted—in turn by France and Austria until it became part of the King of Sardinia’s territories after the peace of Nikolsburg in 1866.

But it is in the history of Verona’s earlier days that we find her greatest glories side by side with her greatest suffering, from the nightmare of the attempt upon her sovereignty by Ezzelino da Romano to the “Golden Age” of the Scaligeri.

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.

In spite, however, of Dante’s very real gratitude to Cangrande, there grew up a coldness between them which seems to have been mainly brought about by Dante’s unsociable and critical temperament. It was no less experienced a judge of men and of the society of his time than Petrarch who writes of Dante and his relations with Cangrande:

After Cangrande’s demise, however, the lordship of his dominions fell into very different hands. He was succeeded by his two nephews, Mastino and Alberto, of whom the elder was devoured by an insatiable ambition to extend his lordship still further and to make of it an independent kingdom and the arbiter of Italian destinies; whilst the younger, Alberto, was merely a man of pleasure. Thus it came about that before long Mastino had engaged his people in disputes with the republics of Florence and Venice and the clans of Este, Visconti, and Gonzaga; Alberto, as his subscription to the general ill-will, having at the same time inflicted an outrageous wrong upon the great Paduan house of Carrara in the person of one of its women. So that the Scaligeri had to contend with external foes and with rebellion as well. By the end of 1339, ten years after Cangrande’s death, their dominions had been reduced to the two cities of Verona and Vicenza; moreover, Mastino had been excommunicated for killing his uncle’s kinsman, Bishop Bartolomeo della Scala, in anger at some remonstrance on the prelate’s part. His repentance, though, was sincere and lasting; for it is said of him that, after the crime, he never again suffered any living being to look upon his face, not even allowing his wife, Taddea de Carrara, a relative of the lady injured by Alberto, to behold it. Mrs. Wiel, in her brilliant history of Verona, to which famous work I would fain express my immense obligation, is of the opinion that this tradition may well owe its origin to the fact that the armoured equestrian statue of Mastino, over his tomb in Verona, is represented with the vizor down, as indicating Mastino’s desire to conceal his features permanently from sight.

But from now on, for more than forty years, murder plays almost the chief part in the chronicle of the Scaligeri. After Mastino came his son, Cangrande II, who was murdered by his younger brother, Cansignorio, aged twenty, with his own hand on December 14, 1359. Soon after, Cansignorio was proclaimed, together with his own younger brother Alboino, lord of Verona, but soon Cansignorio exiled Alboino to Peschiera, because he was afraid of the youth’s popularity with the citizens. Years went by whilst Alboino lay in exile at Peschiera; during which years two natural sons, Bartolomeo and Antonio, were born to Cansignorio in Verona. Cansignorio, however, was not fated to live long, for death came to seek him out in his thirty-sixth year, but he knew of its certain coming some time beforehand, and faced it resignedly. But, even while he was dying, the news was circulated in the streets of Verona that his brother Alboino had suddenly died at Peschiera—of poison, as the people declared, in order that he might not succeed to the lordship that Cansignorio had destined for his own illegitimate sons. But then every death of which the cause was not quite plain was ascribed to poison in those days, so that it seems only charitable to believe that public opinion may have been at fault in its verdict upon the death of Alboino della Scala.

Cansignorio himself died on October 19, 1375, and his sons, Bartolomeo and Antonio, reigned for a while together in his stead. But Antonio was infected with ambition to be the sole ruler of Verona; moreover, he was jealous of the love which all who knew him bore toward Bartolomeo.

Now it chanced that the latter, in the month of July, 1381, was courting a beautiful daughter of the family of Nogarola, whose dwelling stands in the street of “the two Moors,” not far from the palace of the Scaligeri. Bartolomeo, though, was not her only suitor, for he had a rival in the person of a cadet of the house of Malaspina. And Antonio, seeing how the thing was, resolved to make use of this situation to rid himself of Bartolomeo and to reign alone in Verona. Accordingly, on the evening of July 12, 1381, he hired a number of “bravi,” or professional assassins, and concealed them in Bartolomeo’s apartments in the Palazzo Scaligeri. Later on, Bartolomeo, who had been hunting, came home attended by a friend called Galvani, and they supped together, after which the two lay down and fell asleep; thereupon the murderers came out from their hiding-place and killed the sleepers with many blows of their knives, Bartolomeo receiving as many as twenty-six stabs, all in front. Then the “bravi,” having draped the bodies in black mantles with hoods that they pulled over the faces of them, carried them noiselessly down out of the palace and through the deserted streets to the “piazzetta” of Santa Cecilia, where they left them at the door of Palazzo Nogarola—so that all might believe the murder to have been the work of that family. And there the dead Bartolomeo and his friend were found in the morning by the indignant citizens of Verona, who had loved Bartolomeo more than they loved his younger brother.

But when they came to Antonio with the dreadful news, he feigned great sorrow and anger, and declared it to be his belief that the Lord Nogarola, together with young Malaspina, had committed the crime in order to be revenged upon Bartolomeo della Scala for having dishonoured the girl to whom, as was well known, he had been paying court.

And then, that all men might accept his story for the truth, Antonio had Nogarola arrested, with Malaspina and the girl herself, and condemned them to be tortured in order to make them admit the truth of his villainous accusation. But without success; for not one of the three would consent to confirm the lie in spite of their torments, and it is recorded that the girl even expired on the rack sooner than satisfy the demands of her torturers. The fortitude of the victims now began to have its influence upon public opinion, which came round ultimately to the conviction that Antonio himself had caused his brother to be assassinated for his own private ends, a conviction that was soon voiced aloud wherever men met together in Verona; so that Nogarola and Malaspina had to be released and declared innocent, greatly to Antonio’s rage and confusion and to the joy of all good men. Shortly afterwards, Antonio found an opportunity of turning away the thoughts of his subjects from these events, so unfavourable to himself and his popularity, by ordering a series of feastings and entertainments on the occasion of his marriage to one of the most beautiful and the most foolish women of that or any other age—Samaritana de Polenta, the daughter of the neighbouring despot of Ravenna. Of Samaritana it is recorded, as an instance of her folly, that she would not put on even a pair of stockings unless they were decorated with jewels.

The festivities were held in the great Arena and were a complete success, so far as Antonio’s design of averting the popular reprobation from himself was concerned. Nevertheless, they were destined—together with the coming of Samaritana—to usher in a period altogether disastrous to Antonio’s fortunes, by reason of the fatal extravagance that now seized upon the administration and court of Verona, and the consequent increase in the taxation of the people. Soon, Antonio found himself compelled to engage in war with his neighbours of Padua, much as did Napoleon III in 1870 and with almost exactly the same result. For the Veronese troops, softened by disuse and led by incompetent generals, suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of their opponents under such experts as “AucÚa” (Sir John Hawkwood) and Giovanni d’Azzo; until at length Antonio, deserted by all who had once fawned upon him, fled from his capital under cover of a night of November, 1387. On the next day the town declared for the Visconti, the lords of Milan. In the meanwhile Antonio della Scala was making his way to Venice with Samaritana and their one small son; and there he died in August of the following year, leaving his wife and son to be cared for by the Venetian Republic, which settled a small annual pension upon them, and so ended the reign of the Scaligeri over Verona.

The Arena of Verona, above mentioned, is a very ancient and very perfectly preserved amphitheatre in the centre of the town; so old is it, indeed, that no man may say with certainty when it was first erected, although there seems little doubt but that the Romans were the builders of it. The Arena has been the theatre of every imaginable kind of spectacle, savage and solemn and pathetic, from the martyrdoms of early Christians and the gladiatorial combats of Trajan’s day, down through the ages to the bull-fights of Napoleonic times and the last scene of the Austrian domination in Venetia, when the Italian soldiers captured during the battle of Custozza were brought into Verona in the course of the afternoon of June 24, 1866, to be confined in the old amphitheatre.

In the month of July, 1805, Napoleon, who was then returning to Paris after his coronation as King of Italy at Milan, arrived at Verona and expressed his wish to witness a bull-fight. Such a spectacle was accordingly organised for his pleasure, and the great man came to preside over the entertainment in the Arena on the afternoon of the 16th of the month—at the very moment when he was straining every nerve, politically speaking, to prepare for an universal European war, and while his fertile brain was completing the details of his projected attack upon the English coast from Boulogne.

The account of this bull-fight says that a fine, courageous bull was loosened, and overcame, one after another, the dogs that were set on to it, until Napoleon, carried away by excitement, ordered that two, and then three, dogs should be set on to the bull at once; this number proving insufficient, moreover, the Emperor commanded that all the dogs kept there for purposes of bull-baiting should be let in to attack the bull simultaneously. Needless to add that the unlucky bull was eventually overpowered by its numerous adversaries and that it succumbed beneath their combined attack. It was at this point that one of Napoleon’s general aides-de-camp turned to him, with the laughing suggestion of a warning to be gathered from what had just passed beneath their eyes: namely, the danger of a general hostile alliance of the European Powers, the which it might well be possible for Napoleon to defeat one by one, or even by two or three at a time, but which must as certainly succeed in overcoming him when united by the bond of their common danger. We are not told what answer Napoleon returned to this; but it certainly did not influence him, seeing that he at once set himself to defeating the most formidable of his opponents, Austria, England, and Russia—an undertaking in which the disaster of Trafalgar was well balanced for him by the triumphs of Ulm and Austerlitz.

It is recorded, too, that he returned to Verona for a repetition of the detestable entertainment in the Arena in the month of November, 1807; but that on this occasion the bull-fight was spoiled for him by the early on-drawing of the night—which is not surprising when we read that the spectacle did not begin until half-past four in the afternoon! The last of these loathsome affairs took place, it is grievous to think, under good Archduke John of Austria, in the autumn after Waterloo, on the occasion of his assuming the functions of Governor of Venetia—the solitary instance of his sanctioning anything approaching cruelty. It was in the Arena of Verona that my dear old Adelaide Ristori made her first bow to the public of Northern Italy, although she was already well known to that of Rome. I cannot say at this moment precisely when she first acted in Verona; but I fancy it was at some time in the forties of the last century, the “roaring forties,” when Venetia was making ready for the eruption of ’48. Verona was the special darling of “Father” Radetzky, of whose beloved Quadrilateral it formed the chief fortress, and it was he who fortified it so well and lovingly as to make it well-nigh impregnable. It was to Verona, moreover, that he fell back with his small but well-disciplined army during those dark days of May, 1848, when, as the poet Grillparzer wrote in a poem addressed to the fearless old hero:

From Verona, too, it was that the Austrian troops took train in the July of 1866, under Archduke Albrecht, to go up into Moravia to the assistance of Benedek’s army; and from Verona it was that the Archduke’s historic telegram was despatched, on receipt of the news of Sadowa, to the Emperor at Vienna, bidding him take heart and have no fear for the outcome of the struggle: “Nothing is lost yet so if only both Army and People will spurn discouragement from them. After the defeat at Regensburg came the glorious day of Aspern....”

But it was in vain that the lion-hearted Archduke tried to obtain the prolongation of the struggle; the country was willing to do its best, but the Emperor, by force of his responsibilities, was forced to view the matter from a different standpoint. It went against his conscience to lay a further burden of sacrifice and suffering upon his people, and so he did not hesitate to take upon himself the heartbreaking decision to suspend hostilities. The decision, too, however painful, was a wise one; and from that hour Austria has never ceased to grow in health and strength until to-day, when her position in the councils of Europe is once more what it was under Maria Theresa. Let us hope soon to see the time when, as her best friends have never ceased from urging her to do, Austria will put aside all the petty difficulties that have come between her and her mighty eastern sister, and so will join herself to Russia, together with Germany, in a firm and lasting renewal of her only natural policy—that of the Dreikaiserbund, the good old alliance of the three Emperors. In regard to this question, I wonder if I may be allowed to quote the dying injunction of the Emperor Nicholas to his son, the Tsarevitch Alexander, in 1855—“And tell Fritz” (Frederick William III of Prussia) “not to forget Papa’s words”—by which he referred to the advice given by Frederick William II to his son, to the effect that he ought never to let anything interfere with the natural alliance of Prussia with Russia.