verses in Italian.  His life was one continual combat with the Popes who hurled upon him excommunication upon excommunication.  For the sake of peace he had become a crusader and set forth upon the conquest of Jerusalem.  But Saladin, another philosopher of the same class, had soon come to an agreement with his Christian colleague.  The position of a little city surrounded with untilled land and an empty sepulcher was really not worth the trouble of decapitating mankind through the centuries.  The Saracen monarch, therefore, graciously delivered Jerusalem over to him, and the Pope again excommunicated Frederick for having conquered the Holy Land without bloodshed.

“He was a great man,” Don Esteban used to murmur.  “It must be admitted that he was a great man....”

He would say this timidly, regretting that his enthusiasm for that remote epoch should oblige him to make this concession to an enemy of the Church.  He shuddered to think of those sacrilegious books that nobody had seen, but whose paternity Rome was accustomed to attribute to this Sicilian Emperor—­especially Los Tres Impostores (The Three Imposters), in which Frederick measured Moses, Jesus and Mahomet, by the same standard.  This royal author was, moreover, the most ancient journalist of history, the first that in the full thirteenth century had dared to appeal to the judgment of public opinion in his manifestoes against Rome.

His daughter had married an Emperor of Byzantium, Juan Dukas Vatatzes, the famous “Vatacio,” when he was fifty and she fourteen.  She was a natural daughter soon legitimized like almost all his progeny,—­a product of his free harem, in which were mingled Saracen beauties and Italian marchionesses.  And the poor young girl married to “Vatacio the heretic,” by a father in need of political alliances had lived long years in the Orient as a basilisa or empress, arrayed in garments of stiff embroidery representing scenes from the holy books, shod with buskins laced with purple which bore on their soles eagles of gold,—­the highest symbol of the majesty of Rome.

At first she had reigned in Nicaea, refuge of the Greek Emperors while Constantinople was in the power of the Crusaders, founders of a Latin dynasty; then, when Vatacio died, the audacious Miguel Paleologo reconquered Constantinople, and the imperial widow found herself courted by this victorious adventurer.  For many years she resisted his pretensions, finally maneuvering that her brother Manfred should return her to her own country, where she arrived just in time to receive news of her brother’s death in battle, and to follow the flight of her sister-in-law and nephews.  They all took refuge in a castle defended by Saracens in the service of Frederick, the only ones faithful to his memory.