he city against
itself. Guelf and Ghibelline tore Ravenna as they tore Florence and
Siena in pieces.

The two great Ghibelline families were the Ubertini and the Mainardi
and these at first gained the mastery of the city; but in 1218 Pietro
Traversari with the aid of the Mainardi turned the Ubertini out and,
what is more, made himself master.

Pietro Traversari was succeeded as Podesta in 1225 by his son Paolo,
who became Guelf and fought in Innocent IV.'s quarrel against the
emperor Frederick II.; Frederick was able to turn the Traversari out
of Ravenna in 1240 and to hold the city for eight years, but in 1248
the pope retook it and the Traversari were restored though not I think
to the chief power. They remained in power till in the last year of
the reign of Gregory X., 1275, Guido da Polenta appears.

Rudolph of Hapsburg was now king--not emperor, for he was never
crowned by the pope. He had been a partisan of the second Frederick's,
but pope Nicholas III. did not find in the founder of the Hapsburg
dynasty the stuff of the Hohenstaufen. In 1278 he forced Rudolph to
secure to him by an "irrevocable decree" all that the papacy had ever
claimed in the Exarchate and the Pentapolis. The empire renounced all
its claims in the Romagna and the Marches; the confines of the states
of the Church were defined anew, and the cities of which the pope was
absolute lord were named one by one. Of course among these was
Ravenna.

The Polentani appear first in the story of Ravenna in or about the
year 1167, when we find them acting as vicars for the archbishops. We
next hear of them as Podesta, their long rule really beginning, as I
have said, in 1275, when Guido il Vecchio, a rather formidable
soldier, appears as captain of the people and victor over Cervia,
whose territory he added to the dominion of Ravenna. It was indeed
this man who first in the Ravenna of the Middle Ages attempted to
establish an independent or semi-independent state, by adding
territory to territory and thus creating a lordship. For this end he
allied himself with the Malatesta of Rimini--a master stroke, for the
Polentani of Ravenna and the Malatesta of Rimini had long been bitter
foes.

The alliance was cemented by a marriage which all the world knows as
an immortal tragedy. Guido Vecchio had a beautiful daughter,
Francesca. Malatesta had two sons, the elder Giovanni called, for he
was a cripple, _lo Sciancato_, the younger, for he was very fair,
known