It is with Archbishop Otto, however, that the real fortunes of the House begin. Strong, crafty and determined, with a power of biding his time observable in a singular degree in all the notable members of his race, Otto was the right man to foster and direct the gradually reviving power of the nobles in Milan and lead them to victory over the Della Torre and the people. But for fifteen years he fought and intrigued in vain, leading his fellow-exiles and the forlorn hope of the Ghibelline party in Lombardy against the swelling tide of Guelf success, which the death of Ezzelino da Romano, the overthrow of the House of Suabia in Manfred and Corradino, and the ascendency of Anjou in the South, had brought to the full. The domination of the Torriani seemed to become every day more assured. Heads of the Lombard League, Martino and his family were all-powerful in North Italy. They drove the Ghibellines out of the surrounding cities, and established their own sympathisers in power everywhere. Many of the Communes accepted the actual sway of the great House. Martino died in 1263, and was buried in the Monastery of Chiaravalle. He was succeeded by his brother Filippo, on whose death, two years later, Napo, a son of the good Pagano, assumed the chieftainship. [Illustration: CHIARAVALLE] Meanwhile the capital itself, spared, under the protection of these great lords, the bloody succession of sieges and captures which laid waste its neighbours, where the more evenly balanced parties caused revolutions with bewildering frequency, increased rapidly in wealth and luxury. The narrow, tortuous streets overflowed with the full, rich-coloured, sharply chequered life of the thirteenth century. Some terrible scene of Ghibelline prisoners slaughtered in the market-place, and dragged, mangled and bleeding, at the tails of horses through the streets, with yelling crowds of children after them, is succeeded by a May-Day holiday, when the most illustrious youths and maidens of the city, splendidly adorned, ‘weave joyful dances’ beneath pavilions spread in all the open spaces. And the blue sky roofing the sunny squares is suddenly darkened by the smoke ascending from the death-pyre of a heretic, while lean mendicant Brothers look on with triumph, certain that the cry which comes from that breaking chrysalis is the voice of the Devil discomfited. Now troops, knights and men-at-arms in clanking armour, with tattered banners held high, trample in over the drawbridge, returning from some exploit against the Ghibellines. Or it is a multitude of moaning Flagellants, in white shrouds stained with blood, whose self-inflicted lashes can scarcely fall fast enough to keep time with the pangs of their guilty consciences, as they hurl themselves against the gates, which the stout captains of the city keep shut, judging that fifteen different sects within their walls are enough, without admitting these crazy penitents to upset the unsteady minds of the people.