[409] _Ezzelino_: Or Azzolino of Romano, the greatest Lombard Ghibeline of his time. He was son-in-law of Frederick II., and was Imperial Vicar of the Trevisian Mark. Towards the close of Fredrick's life, and for some years after, he exercised almost independent power in Vicenza, Padua, and Verona. Cruelty, erected into a system, was his chief instrument of government, and 'in his dungeons men found something worse than death.' For Italians, says Burckhardt, he was the most impressive political personage of the thirteenth century; and around his memory, as around Frederick's, there gathered strange legends. He died in 1259, of a wound received in battle. When urged to confess his sins by the monk who came to shrive him, he declared that the only sin on his conscience was negligence in revenge. But this may be mythical, as may also be the long black hair between his eyebrows, which rose up stiff and terrible as his anger waxed. [410] _Obizzo_: The second Marquis of Este of that name. He was lord of Ferrara. There seems little, if any, evidence extant of his being specially cruel. As a strong Guelf he took sides with Charles of Anjou against Manfred. He died in 1293, smothered, it was believed, by a son, here called a stepson for his unnatural conduct. But though Dante vouches for the truth of the rumour it seems to have been an invention. [411] _That bulicamë_: The stream of boiling blood is probably named from the bulicamë, or hot spring, best known to Dante--that near Viterbo (see _Inf._ xiv. 79). And it may be that the mention of the bulicamë suggests the reference at line 119. [412] _In God's house_: Literally, 'In the bosom of God.' The shade is that of Guy, son of Simon of Montfort and Vicar in Tuscany of Charles of Anjou. In 1271 he stabbed, in the Cathedral of Viterbo, Henry, son of Richard of Cornwall and cousin of Edward I. of England. The motive of the murder was to revenge the death of his father, Simon, at Evesham. The body of the young prince was conveyed to England, and the heart was placed in a vase upon the tomb of the Confessor. The shade of Guy stands up to the chin in blood among the worst of the tyrants, and alone, because of the enormity of his crime. [413] _Here took we passage_: Dante on Nessus' back. Virgil has fallen behind to allow the Centaur to act as guide; and how he crosses the stream Dante does not see. [414] _Attila_: King of the Huns, who invaded part of Italy in the fifth century; and who, according to the mistaken belief of Dante's age, was the devastator of Florence. [415] _Pyrrhus_: King of Epirus. _Sextus_: Son of Pompey; a great sea-captain who fought against the Triumvirs. The crime of the first, in Dante's eyes, is that he fought with Rome; of the second, that he opposed Augustus. [416] _Rinier of Corneto_: Who in Dante's time disturbed the coast of the States of the Church by his robberies and violence.