Can Grande, like other despots, had two objects,--to make his signory secure, and to enlarge it. As he was secure of Verona, he cast his covetous glances abroad and fixed them on Vicenza, a little town some thirty miles to the northeast. Vicenza was, so to speak, no longer in the market, as she had been snapped up by her neighbour, Padua, which had had the advantage of being less than twenty miles away. But Can Grande played his cards well, and by help of the Emperor Henry VII, who appointed him Imperial vicar, got possession of the prize. Padua, a rich and prosperous Guelf city, with subject towns round about, and a famous university within, refused to acquiesce in a surrender of Vicenza to a Ghibelline lord. A long war ensued. The fair fields in the forty miles between Verona and Padua were laid waste, the poor peasants were dragged to one city or the other and held for ransom, and the Guelfs in Verona and the Ghibellines in Padua were persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured. At last Padua, her signory over, her neighbours lost, her population fallen away, her citizens fighting among themselves, her nobles destroying one another in the hope of becoming lords of the city, gave way and surrendered to Can Grande. Other cities shared Padua's fate, and Can Grande, by virtue of his conquests as well as of his character, became one of the chief powers in Italy. Can Grande was brave even to recklessness, covetous of dominion, steadfast in his political aims, true to his promises, generous to his enemies. On his death he bequeathed his signory to his nephew; and his body was buried in the churchyard of a little Gothic chapel, where stone effigies of armoured Scaligers on caparisoned steeds surmount Gothic tombs, and the pride of life and conquest strives to overcrow death.