them to die of famine.  Wealth, eminence, and beauty attracted his displeasure no less than insubordination or disobedience.  Nor was he less crafty than cruel.  Sons betrayed their fathers, friends their comrades, under the fallacious safeguard of his promises.  A gigantic instance of his scheming was the coup-de-main by which he succeeded in entrapping 11,000 Paduan soldiers, only 200 of whom escaped the miseries of his prisons.  Thus by his absolute contempt of law, his inordinate cruelty, his prolonged massacres, and his infliction of plagues upon whole peoples, Ezzelino established the ideal in Italy of a tyrant marching to his end by any means whatever.  In vain was the humanity of the race revolted by the hideous spectacle.  Vainly did the monks assemble pity-stricken multitudes upon the plain of Paquara to atone with tears and penitence for the insults offered to the saints in heaven by Ezzelino’s fury.  It laid a deep hold upon the Italian imagination, and, by the glamor of loathing that has strength to fascinate, proved in the end contagious.  We are apt to ask ourselves whether such men are mad—­whether in the case of a Nero or a Marechal 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 Haematomania, 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 the puppet of passions which the sane man cannot so much as picture to his fancy, the victim of desire, ever recurring and ever destined to remain unsatisfied; nor is any hallucination more akin to lunacy than the mirage of a joy that leaves the soul thirstier than it was before, the paroxysm of unnatural pleasure which wearies the nerves that crave for it.