On this occasion of his capturing Padua, therefore, Ezzelino indulged his love of bloodshed without stint. It was on this occasion that nearly eleven thousand—ten thousand and eight hundred, to be exact—Paduan soldiers were burned by his orders. The chronicler says that they were burned “in an hour”; but that is obviously impossible. I doubt whether Ezzelino, in those earlier stages of his career, ever had more than from twenty to twenty-eight thousand men under his command at once; and so it is probable that the executions were continued during a number of days or, even, of weeks. At the same time he built no less than eight prisons in Padua, two of which held each three hundred prisoners; and albeit the executioners were never idle, yet those prisons were always kept full. It is said that thousands perished in these and similar dungeons of Ezzelino at Verona, Vicenza, and Cittadella. The prisoners included young boys and girls, and also little children, with whom were huddled grown men and women of all ages and conditions; many died from want of air, and many went mad and attacked their miserable companions. And whenever any one died in prison, his or her body was left there to rot among the living until the next cleaning of the prison—which only took place at regular intervals of three months. One of Ezzelino’s most detestable exploits was achieved on his capture of Friola, when he caused the entire population to have their eyes put out, and their noses and legs cut off, and then to be thrown out beyond the town in still living heaps of bodies. And once he came nearly to a premature end, when one of the House of Monticoli, whom he had insulted, sprang upon him and so tore his face and neck with teeth and nails that Ezzelino bore the marks of them for the rest of his days; so frightful, too, were the tortures inflicted by Ezzelino upon his victims that one of them once—a certain man—fearing lest his sufferings might make him betray his friends, bit out his tongue and spat it into the face of Ezzelino, who was watching him being fastened to the rack. His own father-in-law, the father of his third wife, Beatrice Maltraversi—of the same house, I take it, as the English family of Maltravers—he had thrown into prison and starved to death.