The growing power of the Della Torre began before long to rouse suspicion and distrust in Rome, in spite of their steady championship of the popular cause. The hold of the Papacy upon Milan was in fact somewhat uncertain. The people still remembered with pride the ancient tradition of their Church, and were inclined at times to resent the constant interference of the Pope and his inquisitorial friars. In this feeling lay the possibility of a union between the Archbishop and the democratic party, which it was the policy of Rome to avert, even at the cost of prolonging and aggravating the miserable state of civil war in Milan. On the death of Frate Leone in 1257, the Della Torre sought to raise Raimondo, a son of Pagano the Good, to the archiepiscopal throne. Their intention was defeated by the opposition of the nobles, secretly instigated by Urban IV., and after some years of controversy over the vacant seat, Urban, thinking to hold the balance of parties in his own hands, appointed to it Otto Visconte (1263). The paradoxical spectacle of the Pope raising a Ghibelline noble to power, and the noble accepting it from the Pope—one of those strange eddies constantly occurring in the political current of the day—was completed by the alliance of the Della Torre with the celebrated Captain, Oberto da Pellavicino, protector of heretics, close comrade once of Ezzelino and the Ghibellines, and mortal foe of the Church. Into the hands of this typical figure of the North Italian drama, Martino, pressed by the hostility of the nobles and the secret machinations of the Pope, had in 1259 surrendered the Lordship of Milan for five years. Under his leadership the Torriani oppressed the friars, drove out the papal legate, Cardinal Ottaviano da Ubaldino, and on the elevation of Otto Visconte to the See, seized upon all the episcopal territories and revenues, and kept the new prelate for years out of his ecclesiastical capital. Pope Urban retaliated with spiritual thunders, and Milan lay long under the heavy spell of the papal interdict. The Visconti and the Torriani were already deadly foes. The House of the Snake, which in Archbishop Otto, was now about to begin its great ascent, to the overthrow and destruction of the Tower of its rivals, probably derived its origin and name from one of the Viscounts of the Carlovingian rule, who had succeeded in converting the territory entrusted to his administration into an hereditary appanage. It was, in any case, of great antiquity in the city. The famous cognizance which its later career invested with a peculiar terror, is said to have been won by a noble crusader of the House, also an Otto, in single combat with a Saracen, who carried a shield emblazoned with the device of a seven-coiled serpent devouring a child. Otto slew the Saracen and adopted the device, which he transmitted to his descendants, and with it who knows what mysterious and persistent curse of guile and cruelty?