Lastly, the internal police,
and the kernel of the army for foreign service, was composed of
Saracens who had been brought over from Sicily to Nocera and Lucera--
men who were deaf to the cry of misery and careless of the ban of the
Church. At a later period the subjects, by whom the use of weapons had
long been forgotten, were passive witnesses of the fall of Manfred and
of the seizure of the government by Charles of Anjou; the latter
continued to use the system which he found already at work.
At the side of the centralizing Emperor appeared a usurper of the most
peculiar kind; his vicar and son-in-law, Ezzelino da Romano. He stands
as the representative of no system of government or administration, for
all his activity was wasted in struggles for supremacy in the eastern
part of Upper Italy; but as a political type he was a figure of no less
importance for the future than his imperial protector Frederick. The
conquests and usurpations which had hitherto taken place in the Middle
Ages rested on real or pretended inheritance and other such claims, or
else were effected against unbelievers and excommunicated persons. 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 nothing but the end pursued.
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