foreign soldiers,--Gualtier, duke of Athens. By acclamation, the people
themselves had elected that warrior to the state of prince, or tyrant,
of their state; before the year was completed, they revolted against his
cruelties, or rather against his exactions,--for, despite all the boasts
of their historians, they felt an attack on their purses more deeply
than an assault on their liberties,--they had chased him from their
city, and once more proclaimed themselves a Republic. The bravest, and
most favoured of the soldiers of the Duke of Athens had been Walter de
Montreal; he had shared the rise and the downfall of his chief. Amongst
popular commotions, the acute and observant mind of the Knight of St.
John had learned no mean civil experience; he had learned to sound a
people--to know how far they would endure--to construe the signs of
revolution--to be a reader of the times. After the downfall of the Duke
of Athens, as a Free Companion, in other words a Freebooter, Montreal
had augmented under the fierce Werner his riches and his renown. At
present without employment worthy his spirit of enterprise and intrigue,
the disordered and chiefless state of Rome had attracted him thither. In
the league he had proposed to Colonna--in the suggestions he had made
to the vanity of that Signor--his own object was to render his services
indispensable--to constitute himself the head of the soldiery whom his
proposed designs would render necessary to the ambition of the Colonna,
could it be excited--and, in the vastness of his hardy genius for
enterprise, he probably foresaw that the command of such a force would
be, in reality, the command of Rome;--a counter-revolution might
easily unseat the Colonna and elect himself to the principality. It
had sometimes been the custom of Roman, as of other Italian, States, to
prefer for a chief magistrate, under the title of Podesta, a foreigner
to a native. And Montreal hoped that he might possibly become to Rome
what the Duke of Athens had been to Florence--an ambition he knew well
enough to be above the gentleman of Provence, but not above the leader