The preacher’s injunctions to forgive injuries were not observed by him himself when an excess of enthusiasm had raised him to the office of chief magistrate of Verona. He ordered the execution of sixty men and women belonging to the most respectable families of the town, whom he condemned as heretics, and who were all burnt alive. The success obtained by Fra Giovanni at the assembly at Paquara proved his undoing. He became proud and ambitious; he aimed at becoming a ruler in those towns where he had preached peace and goodwill, and after a period of war, rebellion and imprisonment he retired to Bologna, shorn of all glory and leaving Lombardy a prey to insurrection and strife. Verona was no exception to this condition of affairs. Her state was torn by rival factions, the one headed by the Counts of San Bonifacio; the other by the Montecchi (or Monticoli), the latter of whom Shakespeare has immortalized for us under the name of Montague. Their faction was supported on more than one occasion by Ezzelino da Romano, who finally succeeded in making himself lord of Verona, and who was thus the first of the tyrants to oust the power of the Communes and introduce that of the “_Signori_” in their stead. Ezzelino has left perhaps the most unenviable record among all the bloodthirsty tyrants of the Middle Ages. The Florentine historian Villani says of him that “he was the cruellest and most redoubtable tyrant that ever existed among Christians. By his might and tyranny he lorded it for a long time ... over the March of Treviso, and the town of Padua, and a great part of Lombardy. He made away with a fearful part of the citizens of Padua, and blinded a great number, ever of the best and noblest among them, taking away their possessions and sending them adrift to beg through the world. And many others by divers torments and martyrdoms he put to death, and in one hour caused 11,000 Paduans to be burnt.”