MONUMENTS OF THE CAVALLI FAMILY 137

restoration of Greece to Europe, and the preaching of a new crusade in Syria. A general council was convoked by him at Lyons, with this object; but before anything could be accomplished in the conclave, it was necessary to balance the overwhelming power of Charles of Anjou, and the Visconti (Gregory X.) ratified, in 1273, the election of Rudolph of Hapsburg.

14. But Charles of Anjou owed his throne, in reality, to the assistance of the Milanese. Their popular leader, Napoleone della Torre, had facilitated his passage through Lombardy,¹ which otherwise must have been arrested by the Ghibelline states; and in the year in which the Visconti pope had appointed the council at Lyons, the Visconti archbishop of Milan was heading the exiled nobles in vain attempts to recover their supermacy over the popular party. The new Emperor Rudolph not only sent a representative to the council, but a German contingent to aid the exiled archbishop. The popular leader was defeated, and confined in an iron cage, in the year 1274,² and the first entrance of the Cavalli into the Italian armies is thus contemporary with the conclusive triumph of the northern monarchic over the republican power, or, more literally, of the wandering rider, Eques, or Ritter,³ living by pillage, over the sedentary burgher, living by art, and hale peasant, living by labour. The essential nature of the struggle is curiously indicated in relation to this monument by the two facts that the revolt of the Milanese burghers, headed by their archbishop,⁴ began by a gentleman’s killing an importunate creditor, and that, at Venice, the principal circumstance recorded of Jacopo Cavalli (see my notice of his tomb in The Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. ii. § 69⁵) is his refusal to assault Feltre, because the senate would not grant him the pillage of the town. The reader may follow out, according to his disposition,

¹ [In 1265: see Sismondi, ch. xxi. (vol. iii. p. 343).]

² [The true date is 1277: see Sismondi, ch. xxii. (vol. iii. pp. 433-436).]

³ [Compare Aratra Pentelici, § 232 (Vol. XX. p. 363).]

⁴ [See above, p. 135.]

⁵ [In this edition, Vol. XI. p. 101.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]