resisted, and Brescia, which was instead sacked after an easy victory of his German knights over the crusaders' army. In 1258 he launched a broad Ghibelline offensive in Lombardy and Veneto along with Oberto Pallavicino of Cremona. After a failed attempt to assault Milan itself, he was wounded by an arrow in the course of the Battle of Cassano d'Adda and had to retreat but was captured near Bergamo. He killed himself by intentional self-neglect during his imprisonment in the castle of Soncino, near the city of Cremona in Lombardy. In the following year his brother Alberico was put to death, and the Romano family became extinct. It was only after his death that the alliance between Sambonifacio and Este fell apart. Legacy Much of what we know about Ezzelino comes from a literary tradition that was embroidered over the course of centuries; despite the brevity of his reign, Ezzelino's reputed cruelty became symbolic of tyranny, poets and chroniclers living in recent memory of his tactics used his name to evoke the sense of arbitrary power and the moral transgressions it enabled; fourteenth century authors raised the level of accusation, insisting that Ezzelino's parentage was demonic. Rolandino of Padua's Chronicle of the Trevisan March (c. 1262) charts the rise and the fall of the 'da Romano' family, introducing Ezzelino as a young man throwing stones at the home of the family rival; the extremely partisan political work follows the fortunes of Padua under the tyrant's iron grip up to the commune's liberation by the Guelph League. Albertino Mussato's Ecerinis ( c. 1315 ) portrays Ezzelino as the son of the Devil; the Latin verse play introduces Ezzelino's mother, who provides testimony of the tyrant's infernal sire. In Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, his soul is consigned to Hell, where Dante encounters him in the Seventh Circle, First Ring: the Violent against their Neighbors (Inferno, XII, 109). His younger sister Cunizza is also cited by Dante, in Paradise, IX, 31-33. Before Ezzelino, the seizing of political power in city-states throughout the Middle Ages, had been based on real or pretended inheritance claims or else were directed against infidels and the excommunicated; but with him, as the historian Jacob Burkhardt relates, "Here for the first time the attempt was openly made to found a throne by wholesale murder and endless barbarities, by the adoption in short, of any means with a view to