Innocent IV pursued his journey towards Rome; but found the capital of Christendom still less disposed than the first city of Lombardy to obey him. The Romans in 1253 called another Bolognese noble, named Brancaleone d’Andolo, to the government of their republic; and gave him, with the title of senator, almost unlimited authority. The citizens, continually alarmed by the quarrels and battles of the Roman nobles, who had converted the Colosseum, the tombs of Adrian, Augustus, and Cæcilia Metella, the arches of triumph and other monuments of ancient Rome, into so many fortresses, whence issued banditti, whom they kept in pay, to pillage passengers and peaceable merchants, demanded of the government above all things vigour and severity. They forgot the guarantee due to the accused, in their attention to those only which were required by the public peace. The senator Brancaleone, at the head of the Roman militia, successively attacked these monuments, become the retreat of robbers and assassins; he levelled to the ground the towers which surmounted them; he hanged the adventurers who defended them, with their commanders the nobles, at the palace windows of the latter; and thus established by terror security in the streets of Rome. He hardly showed more respect to Innocent than to the Roman nobility. The pope, in order to be at a distance from him, had transferred his court to Assisi. Brancaleone sent him word that it was not decorous in a pope to be wandering like a vagabond from city to city; and that, if he did not immediately return to the capital of Christendom of which he was the bishop, the Romans, with their senator at their head, would march to Assisi and send him out of it by setting fire to the town.