Meanwhile Bernabò’s sons were swept away by other faction leaders, to return and be again overthrown, as the fortunes of the struggle surged backwards and forwards. One after another of Gian Galeazzo’s great captains snatched and held the city for a time. Now Ottobuono Terzo—now Carlo Malatesta—now Facino Cane, the most famous of them all, ruled in the name of the utterly incapable Prince, while out of the ruins of Gian Galeazzo’s vast State, which Venice, Florence and the Church had hastened to dismember, each faithless governor seized some remaining fragment wherewith to create a small independent dominion for himself. Thus while the great Duke’s conquests, further off, were quickly lost, cities close to the capital and long subject to the Visconti fell to these lesser depredators. Pavia and other towns were captured by Facino Cane, who kept the young Filippo a virtual prisoner, and Monza became the stronghold of Estorre Visconte and his spirited sister Valentina. The confusion and struggle in Milan continued throughout the ten years of Giovanmaria’s reign. The condition of the city was lamentable. Peace and order were destroyed, and the names of Guelf and Ghibelline were heard again in the streets, inflaming household against household and awakening the horrors of civil war. The Duke made no attempt to rule for himself. His only share in the government was the execution of State prisoners, whom he caused to be torn to pieces, under his own eyes, by dogs trained for the purpose. The extraordinary passion for dogs, together with the hatred of humankind, visible in Bernabò and others of the Visconti, had become an extravagant ferocity in this degenerate member of the race. The story of Milan during his reign is like some dreadful dream, in which, when sleep has fallen on the incessant riots and fighting, through the darkness of the night stalk the awful figures of the maniac Prince, gloating in his sport, and his huntsman, Squarcia Giramo, beside him, with their terrible hounds in leash, on the scent of human blood. The Duke’s appetite for blood was rewarded with Dantesque fitness. He died in 1412, suffocated in his own blood in the precincts of the palace, under the daggers of three Milanese nobles, who had sworn to rid the world of a monster, and his body, lying in its blood in the Cathedral, whither it had been carried and left alone by the general horror, had for its only pall blood-red roses strewn upon it by a harlot.