their opportunity, and, at a moment when the garrison was weak, entered, seized the place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the Greek emperor once more.  He could not maintain war with the Saracens, but by a treaty made with them he secured his faithful Taorminians in the possession of the city.  After forty years of peace under this treaty it was again besieged for several months, and fell on Christmas night.  Seventeen hundred and fifty of its citizens were sent by the victors into slavery in Africa.  Greek troops, however, soon retook the city in a campaign that opened brilliantly in Sicily only to close in swift disaster; but for five years longer Taormina sustained continual siege, and when it fell at last, with the usual carnage of its citizens and the now thrice-repeated fire and ruin of Saracenic victory, we may well believe that, though it remained the seat of a governor, little of the city was left except its memory.  Its name even was changed to Moezzia.

The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hundred years, until the landing of Count Roger, the Norman, the great hero of mediaeval Sicily, who recovered the island to the Christian faith.  Taormina, true to its tradition, was long in falling; but after eighteen years of desultory warfare Count Roger sat down before it with determination.  He surrounded it with a circumvallation of twenty-two fortresses connected by ramparts and bridges, and cut off all access by land or sea.  Each day he inspected the lines; and the enemy, having noticed this habit, laid an ambush for him in some young myrtles where the path he followed had a very narrow passage over the precipices.  They rushed out on him, and, as he was unarmed and alone, would have killed him, had not their cries attracted one Evandro, a Breton, who, coming, and seeing his chief’s peril, threw himself between, and died in his place.  Count Roger was not forgetful of this noble action.  He recovered the body, held great funeral services, and gave gifts to the soldiers and the church.  The story appealed so to the old chronicler Malaterra, that he told it in both prose and verse.  After seven months the city surrendered, and the iron cross was again set up on the rocky eminence by the gate.  It is a sign of the ruin which had befallen that the city now lost its bishopric and was ecclesiastically annexed to another see.

Taormina, compared with what it had been, was now a place of the desert; but not the less for that did the tide of war rage round it for five hundred years to come.  It was like a rock of the sea over which conflicting billows break eternally.  I will not narrate the feudal story of internecine violence, nor how amidst it all every religious order set up monasteries upon the beautiful hillsides, of whose life little is now left but the piles of books in old bindings over which my friend the librarian keeps guard, mourning the neglect in which they are left.  Among both the nobles and the fathers were some examples