church were displayed; the revolt was inspired by the presence or the soul of Procida; and Peter of Arragon, who sailed from the African coast to Palermo, was saluted as the king and saviour of the isle. By the rebellion of a people, on whom he had so long trampled with impunity, Charles was astonished and confounded; and in the first agony of grief and devotion, he was heard to exclaim, "O God! if thou hast decreed to humble me, grant me at least a gentle and gradual descent from the pinnacle of greatness!" His fleet and army, which already filled the seaports of Italy, were hastily recalled from the service of the Grecian war; and the situation of Messina exposed that town to the first storm of his revenge. Feeble in themselves, and yet hopeless of foreign succour, the citizens would have repented, and submitted on the assurance of full pardon and their ancient privileges. But the pride of the monarch was already rekindled; and the most fervent entreaties of the legate could extort no more than a promise that he would forgive the remainder, after a chosen list of eight hundred rebels had been yielded to his discretion. The despair of the Messinese renewed their courage; Peter of Arragon approached to their relief;* and his rival was driven back, by the failure of provisions and the terrors of the equinox, to the Calabrian shore. At the same moment the Catalan admiral, the famous Roger de Loria, swept the channel with an invincible squadron; the French fleet, more numerous in transports than in galleys, was either burnt or destroyed; and the same blow assured the independence of Sicily and the safety of the Greek empire. A few days before his death, the emperor Michael rejoiced in the fall of an enemy whom he hated and esteemed; and perhaps he might be content with the popular judgment, that had they not been matched with each other, Constantinople and Italy must speedily have obeyed the same

of the Sicilian vespers may be found in Velly's History of France, tom. vi." See also the Guerra del Vespro Siciliano of Micheli Amari, lately published at Florence.-ED.] *This revolt, with the

subsequent victory, are related by two national writers, Barthélemy à Neocastro (in Muratori, tom. xiii.) and Nicholas Specialis (in Muratori, tom. x.), the one a contemporary, the other of the next century. The patriot Specialis disclaims the name of rebellion, and all previous correspondence with Peter of Arragon (nullo communicato consilio),

master.* From this disastrous moment, the life of Charles was a series of misfortunes; his capital was insulted, his son was made prisoner, and he sank into the grave without recovering the isle of Sicily, which, after a war of twenty years, was finally severed from the throne of Naples, and transferred, as an independent kingdom, to a younger branch of the house of Arragon.†

I shall not, I trust, be accused of superstition; but I must remark, that, even in this world, the natural order of events will sometimes afford the strong appearances of moral retribution. The first Palæologus had saved his empire by involving the kingdoms of the West in rebellion and blood; and from these seeds of discord uprose a generation of iron men, who assaulted and endangered the empire of his son. In modern times, our debts and taxes are the secret poison which still corrodes the bosom of peace; but in the weak and disorderly government of the middle ages, it was agitated by the present evil of the disbanded armies. Too idle to work, too proud to beg, the mercenaries were accustomed to a life of rapine; they could rob with more dignity and effect under a banner and a chief; and the sovereign, to whom their service was useless and their presence importunate, endeavoured to discharge the torrent on some neighbouring countries. After the peace of Sicily many thousands of Genoese, Catalans, &c., who had fought, by sea and land, under the

who happened to be with a fleet and army on the African coast (1. 1 c. 4. 9). * Nicephorus Gregoras (1. 5, c. 6) admires the wisdom of Providence in this equal balance of states and princes. For the honour of Palæologus, I had rather this balance had been observed by an Italian writer. See the Chronicle of Villani, the eleventh volume of the Annali d'Italia of Muratori, and the twentieth and twenty-first books of the Istoria Civile of Giannone. In this motley multitude, the Catalans and Spaniards, the bravest of the soldiery, were styled, by themselves and the Greeks, Amogavares. Monçada derives their origin from the Goths, and Pachymer (1. 11, c. 22) from the Arabs; and in spite of national and religious pride, I am afraid the latter is in the right. [When Charlemagne had driven the Saracens beyond the Ebro, and established his Marca Hispanica (ch. 49, vol. v. p. 409), that province, from the Goths and Alani by whom it was first conquered, was called Gudalaunia, which in course of time, was fashioned into Catalonia. Among the various races by which it had been peopled, the Gothic may have predominated; but six centuries had melted them so down

standard of Anjou or Arragon, were blended into one nation by the resemblance of their manners and interest. They heard that the Greek provinces of Asia were invaded by the Turks: they resolved to share the harvest of pay and plunder; and Frederic king of Sicily most liberally contributed the means of their departure. In a warfare of twenty years, a ship, or a camp, was become their country; arms were their sole profession and property; valour was the only virtue which they knew; their women had imbibed the fearless temper of their lovers and husbands; it was reported, that, with a stroke of their broad-sword, the Catalans could cleave a horseman and a horse; and the report itself was a powerful weapon.* Roger de Flor was the most popular of their chiefs; and his personal merit overshadowed the dignity of his prouder rivals of Arragon. The offspring of a marriage between a German gentleman of the court of Frederic the Second and a damsel of Brindisi, Roger was successively a templar, an apostate, a

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into one mass, that national distinctions were in a great measure obliterated. The Catalans were a high-spirited, independent people. In the thirteenth century, they were 'the most intrepid of Mediterranean sailors," and Roger de Loria, the commander of their fleet in the Sicilian war, was "the most illustrious admiral whom Europe produced, till the age of Blake and De Ruyter." During the next two hundred years, they maintained their pre-eminence among the first of maritime and commercial nations. (Hallam, Middle Ages, i. 517; ii. 84; iii. 393. Koeppen, 68. 99. 197.) To claim these sea-roving bands as the descendants of any one exclusive stock, is an idle subject of dispute. The name by which they were known, is more correctly Almugavari, a Moorish or Arabic word denoting socii, comites, adjuncti, according to Ducange, i. 327. Condé (Arabs in Spain, ii. p. 84-87, edit. Bohn), relates an expedition undertaken in 1014 by eighty citizens of Lisbon. He gives them the name of Almogavares, which he explains by the Spanish emprendadores, or adventurers. From that time the mariners who pursued this mode of life, occupied a particular quarter of the city, which was called the calle, or street, of the Almogavares. Mariana (De Reb. Hisp. 1. 12, c. 17, p. 533), very erroneously makes them "milites veterani et præsidiarii." Koeppen, still more mistaken, confounds them with the Spanish caballeros, knights of the frontier, and calls them "border-forayers."-ED.] * [Piratical war

fare had for ages been so successful, that it always presented to the unemployed a most inviting course of action and ready means of satisfying want or passion. The fruitful shores of the Mediterranean and rich cities that glittered along its coasts, attracted such adventurers into that sea. Early in the first crusade, a band of Hollanders, Flemings, and Frieslanders, who had for eight years been roaming and

A

pirate, and at length the richest and most powerful admiral of the Mediterranean.* He sailed from Messina to Constantinople, with eighteen galleys, four great ships, and eight thousand adventurers; and his previous treaty was faithfully accomplished by Andronicus the elder, who accepted with joy and terror this formidable succour. palace was allotted for his reception, and a niece of the emperor was given in marriage to the valiant stranger, who was immediately created great duke or admiral of Romania. After a decent repose, he transported his troops over the Propontis, and boldly led them against the Turks; in two bloody battles thirty thousand of the Moslems were slain; he raised the siege of Philadelphia, and deserved the name of the deliverer of Asia. But after a short season of prosperity, the cloud of slavery and ruin again burst on that unhappy province. The inhabitants escaped (says a Greek historian) from the smoke into the flames; and the hostility of the Turks was less pernicious than the friendship of the Catalans. The lives and fortunes which they had rescued, they considered as their own; the willing or reluctant maid was saved from the race of circumcision for the embraces of a Christian soldier; the exaction of fines and supplies was enforced by licentious rapine and arbitrary executions; and, on the resistance of Magnesia, the great duke besieged a city of the Roman empire.† These disorders he excused

by the wrongs and passions of a victorious army; nor would his own authority or person have been safe, had he dared to punish his faithful followers, who were defrauded of the just and covenanted price of their services. The threats and complaints of Andronicus disclosed the nakedness of the empire. His golden bull had invited no more than five

plundering on its waves, assisted Baldwin in his conquest of Cilicia. Wilken, 1. 163. 180.-ED.] [A German work, entitled " Spain in 1808," contains (vol. ii. p. 167) an interesting historical fragment on the Spaniards of the fourteenth century. Some details may there be found respecting Roger de Flor and his companions, which show some slight errors in Gibbon's account.-GUIZOT.] [See also the History of Arragon during the Middle Ages, by Dr. Ernst A. Schmidt, Leipzig, 1828.-ED.] + Some idea may be

formed of the population of these cities, from the thirty-six thousand inhabitants of Tralles, which, in the preceding reign, was rebuilt by the emperor, and ruined by the Turks. (Pachymer, 1. 6, c. 20, 21.) [See a note on these cities at p. 53.-ED.]

hundred horse and a thousand foot soldiers; yet the crowds of volunteers, who migrated to the East, had been enlisted and fed by his spontaneous bounty. While his bravest allies were content with three byzants, or pieces of gold, for their monthly pay, an ounce or even two ounces of gold were assigned to the Catalans, whose annual pension would thus amount to near a hundred pounds sterling; one of their chiefs had modestly rated at three hundred thousand crowns the value of his future merits; and above a million had been issued from the treasury for the maintenance of these costly mercenaries. A cruel tax had been imposed on the corn of the husbandman; 'one-third was retrenched from the salaries of the public officers; and the standard of the coin was so shamefully debased, that of the four-andtwenty parts only five were of pure gold.* At the summons of the emperor, Roger evacuated a province which no longer supplied the materials of rapine; but he refused to disperse his troops; and while his style was respectful, his conduct was independent and hostile. He protested, that if the emperor should march against him, he would advance forty paces to kiss the ground before him, but in rising from this prostrate attitude Roger had a life and sword at the service of his friends. The great duke of Romania condescended to accept the title and ornaments of Cæsar; but he rejected the new proposal of the government of Asia with a subsidy of corn and money, on condition that he should reduce his troops to the harmless number of three thousand men. Assassination is the last resource of cowards. The Cæsar was tempted to visit the royal residence of Adrianople; in the apartment, and before the eyes of the empress, he was stabbed by the Alani guards; and though the deed

* I have collected these pecuniary circumstances from Pachymer (1. 11, c. 21; 1. 12, c. 4, 5. 8. 14. 19), who describes the progressive degradation of the gold coin. Even in the prosperous times of John Ducas Vataces, the byzants were composed in equal proportions of the pure and the baser metal. The poverty of Michael Palæologus compelled him to strike a new coin, with nine parts, or carats, of gold, and fifteen of copper alloy. After his death, the standard rose to ten carats, till, in the public distress, it was reduced to the moiety. The prince was relieved for a moment, while credit and commerce were for ever blasted. In France, the gold coin is of twenty-two carats (onetwelfth alloy), and the standard of England and Holland is still higher. [See Note, p. 29.-Ed.]