Ezzelino III Da Romano - Legacy

Legacy

Much of what we know about Ezzelino comes from a literary tradition that was embroidered over the course of centuries. Despite the brevity of his reign, Ezzelino’s reputed cruelty became symbolic of tyranny. Poets and chroniclers living in recent memory of his tactics used his name to evoke the sense of arbitrary power and the moral transgressions it enabled. Fourteenth century authors raised the level of accusation, insisting that Ezzelino’s parentage was demonic.

Rolandino of Padua's Chronicle of the Trevisan March (c. 1262) charts the rise and the fall of the da Romano family, introducing Ezzelino as a young man throwing stones at the home of the family rival. The extremely partisan political work follows the fortunes of Padua under the tyrant's iron grip up to the commune's liberation by the Guelph League.

Albertino Mussato's Ecerinis (c. 1315) portrays Ezzelino as the son of the Devil. The Latin verse play introduces Ezzelino's mother, who provides testimony of the tyrant's infernal sire.

In Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, his soul is consigned to Hell, where Dante encounters him in the Seventh Circle, First Ring: the Violent against their Neighbors (Inferno, XII, 109). His younger sister Cunizza is also cited by Dante, in Paradise, IX, 31-33.

Before Ezzelino, the seizing of political power in city-states throughout the Middle Ages had been based on real or pretended inheritance claims, or else were directed against infidels and the excommunicated. But with him, as the historian Jacob Burkhardt relates, "Here for the first time the attempt was openly made to found a throne by wholesale murder and endless barbarities, by the adoption in short, of any means with a view to nothing but the end pursued." The example set by the success of this kind of ruthlessness was not lost on the future tyrants of late Middle Age and early Renaissance Italy.