Parma; and sent his natural son, Frederick, king of Antioch, with sixteen hundred German knights, to give the Ghibellines assured preponderance in the next quarrel.
The Uberti took arms before their arrival; rallied all their Ghibelline friends into a united body, and so attacked and carried the Guelph barricades, one by one, till their antagonists, driven together by local defeat, stood in consistency as complete as their own, by the gate of St. Peter, 'Scheraggio.' Young Frederick, with his German riders, arrived at this crisis; the Ghibellines opening the gates to him; the Guelphs, nevertheless, fought at their outmost barricade for four days more; but at last, tired, withdrew from the city, in a body, on the night of Candlemas, 2nd February, 1248; leaving the Ghibellines and their German friends to work their pleasure,—who immediately set themselves to throw down the Guelph palaces, and destroyed six-and-thirty of them, towers and all, with the good help of Niccola Pisano,—for this is the occasion of that beautiful piece of new engineering of his.
99. It is the first interference of the Germans in Florentine affairs which belongs to the real
