A violent sedition broke forth at Milan. The Della Torres and the Guelfs were forced to leave that city. Matteo Visconti and the Ghibellines were recalled, and the former restored to absolute power. The Guelfs, too, in the rest of Lombardy, rose and took arms against the emperor. Crema, Cremona, Lodi, Brescia, and Como revolted at the same time. Henry consumed the greater part of the summer in besieging Brescia, which at last, towards the end of September, 1311, he forced to capitulate. He granted to that town equitable conditions, impatient as he was to enter Tuscany; but, although Lombardy seemed subdued to his power, he left more germs of discontent and discord in it than he had found about a year before. Henry VII arrived with his little army at Genoa, on the 21st of October, 1311. That powerful republic now maintained at St. Jean d’Acre, at Pera opposite to Constantinople, and at Kaffa in the Black Sea, military and mercantile colonies, which made themselves respected for their valour, at the same time that they carried on the richest commerce of the Mediterranean. Several islands in the Archipelago, amongst others that of Chios, had passed in sovereignty to Genoese families. The palaces of Genoa, already called the “superb,” were the admiration of travellers. Its sanguinary rivalry with Pisa had terminated by securing to the former the empire of the Tyrrhene Sea. From that time Genoa had no other rival than Venice. An accidental rencounter of the fleets of these two cities in the sea of Cyprus lighted up between them, in 1293, a terrible war, which for seven years stained the Mediterranean with blood, and consumed immense wealth. In 1298, the Genoese admiral Lamba Doria, meeting the Venetian commander Andrea Dandolo at Corzuola or Corcyra the Black, at the extremity of the Adriatic Gulf, burned sixty-six of his galleys, and took eighteen, which he brought into the port of Genoa, with seven thousand prisoners, suffering only twelve vessels to escape. The humbled Venetians, in the next year, asked and obtained peace. The Genoese, vanquishers in turn of the Pisans and Venetians, passed for the bravest, the most enterprising, and the most fortunate mariners of all Italy. The government of their city was entirely democratic; but the two chains of mountains which extend from Genoa, the one towards Provence, and the other towards Tuscany (called by the Italians Le Riviere di Genoa, because the foot of these mountains forms the shore of the sea), were covered with the castles of the Ligurian nobles; the peasantry were all dependent on them, and were always ready to make war for their liege lords. Four families were pre-eminent for their power and wealth--the Doria and the Spinola, Ghibellines; the Grimaldi and the Fieschi, Guelfs. These nobles, incensed against each other by hereditary enmity, had disturbed the state by so many outrages that the people adopted, with respect to them, the same