The traveller in Italy must often have noticed the difference in the shape of the battlements that nowadays add so much to the picturesqueness of old towers and half-ruined fortress walls. No doubt he has heard the term "Guelph" or "Ghibelline" applied to them. It is supposed that "Welf" and "Waiblingen" were first used in Germany as battle-cries at the conflict of Weinsberg in 1140. When the struggle for the imperial throne between Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick was hanging in the balance, the sympathies of Brescia, Milan, and other Lombard cities were enlisted on the side of Otto the Welf. In the subsequent feuds between the Pope's party and the Emperor's it became a necessity for the inhabitants of the cities of the northern part of the peninsula, if they wished to exist at all, to favour either one side or the other. The Guelph party were for the Pope, and the Ghibelline were partisans of the Emperor. And thus we find in the history of most of these towns an espousal, as policy dictated, of the Pope's cause at one time, and of the Emperor's some decades later. This apparent inconsistency was the outcome of family feuds within the city walls. For a term of years the Guelphic nobles might be in the ascendant, until, on the death or murder of a leading member, they succumbed to the prowess of the imperial party. The great families that pinned their faith to the ascendency of the latter adopted the swallow-tailed battlement on the towers of their castle walls, to distinguish them from the square-shaped that were already in existence. Italy throughout the middle ages was torn by internecine strife which was reflected throughout every class of society, and the subject of this chapter was no exception. Owning allegiance to the Pope, the Bolognese overran Romagna and forced the towns of that province to declare for the Church. In 1249 they defeated the Modenese at Fossalto and took King Enzio prisoner. For two-and-twenty years--in fact, for the rest of his life--they kept the unhappy man confined in the Palace of the Podestà, treated however, as we should treat a first-class misdemeanant, and according to his rank. The long-drawn-out feuds of the Lambertazzi and Gieremei families, and later on those between the great Visconti and Bentivoglio, kept the Bolognese in a perpetual state of faction fights, which lasted until the warlike Pontiff Julius II. annexed the city to the States of the Church.