They may have supposed that the legal proceedings against them, which they knew were certain to take place at one time or another, would be conducted in the semi-constitutional fashion which was adopted towards the national journals in 1848.
Here Pandolfo, chief of the Baglioni family, held a semi-constitutional authority, which the Visconti first helped him to transmute into a tyranny, and then, upon Pandolfo's assassination, seized as his own. All Italy and even Germany had now begun to regard the usurpations of the Milanese despot with alarm.