priest was likewise the head of the people, and the pastoral staff which topped the lofty Campanile stood for temporal as well as spiritual dominion. In times of peace the Sacred Car was housed within the church, and in the church those warlike decisions were taken which occasioned it to be drawn forth that it might go in the midst of the host against the enemy. But the noblest moment in the story of the old Cathedral was its restoration after the ruin of the city by Barbarossa in 1166. The ruthless destruction of the Campanile, a tower _of such marvellous beauty, such great breadth and admirable altitude that there was said to be none other like it in Italy_, had wrecked it in great part. The labour of the men, the jewels of the women, went to the rebuilding, till the church stood up once more in the midst of the re-risen city, defying the destroyer. With the building of the present Duomo all the vestiges of those ancient and good days were swept away. Milan’s liberty was gone, and the church which symbolised it, both in association and in its Lombard style of architecture, had been allowed to become half-ruinous. The population had outgrown the capacity of the church, and in their rapidly growing wealth and importance it was natural that prince and people should desire a cathedral more suited to their condition. So the old building fell for ever. The citizens acquiesced in the scheme for a new Cathedral, but the enormous temple which rose on the site of the old one, the Duomo of to-day, was the conception of Gian Galeazzo Visconte, and of him alone. It was the measure of his vast ambition and audacious will. He planned it great enough for the capital of a Kingdom of Italy. The citizens seconded him with generous offerings, but whether their enthusiasm was genuine or merely flattery of the tyrant’s wishes mattered nothing. Gian Galeazzo was doubtless moved to this work by a desire to expiate the crime by which he had acquired sole sovereignty, and to entomb it in the memories of his subjects beneath this proud ornament to the city. He is said to have had another motive, shared by the people. A strange evil, we are told, afflicted Milan at this time. Some say that the women were unable to bring their male children safely to the birth; others, that a mysterious malady prevailed among the boy babies, withering them within a few years. The citizens were filled with terror at the doom of extinction which seemed to impend over them. Gian Galeazzo’s three sons by Isabella of France had all died in infancy, leaving him only the girl Valentina, and at this time his second wife, Caterina Visconte, was still childless.