se of Majo,
the great admiral, who abused the confidence, and conspired against the
life, of his benefactor. From the Arabian conquest, Sicily had imbibed a
deep tincture of Oriental manners; the despotism, the pomp, and even the
harem, of a sultan; and a Christian people was oppressed and insulted
by the ascendant of the eunuchs, who openly professed, or secretly
cherished, the religion of Mahomet. An eloquent historian of the times
[126] has delineated the misfortunes of his country: [127] the ambition
and fall of the ungrateful Majo; the revolt and punishment of his
assassins; the imprisonment and deliverance of the king himself; the
private feuds that arose from the public confusion; and the various
forms of calamity and discord which afflicted Palermo, the island, and
the continent, during the reign of William the First, and the minority
of his son. The youth, innocence, and beauty of William the Second,
[128] endeared him to the nation: the factions were reconciled; the
laws were revived; and from the manhood to the premature death of that
amiable prince, Sicily enjoyed a short season of peace, justice, and
happiness, whose value was enhanced by the remembrance of the past
and the dread of futurity. The legitimate male posterity of Tancred
of Hauteville was extinct in the person of the second William; but his
aunt, the daughter of Roger, had married the most powerful prince of the
age; and Henry the Sixth, the son of Frederic Barbarossa, descended from
the Alps to claim the Imperial crown and the inheritance of his wife.
Against the unanimous wish of a free people, this inheritance could only
be acquired by arms; and I am pleased to transcribe the style and sense
of the historian Falcandus, who writes at the moment, and on the spot,
with the feelings of a patriot, and the prophetic eye of a statesman.
"Constantia, the daughter of Sicily, nursed from her cradle in the
pleasures and plenty, and educated in the arts and manners, of this
fortunate isle, departed long since to enrich the Barbarians with our
treasures, and now returns, with her savage allies, to contaminate the
beauties of her venerable parent. Already I behold the swarms of angry
Barbarians: our opulent cities, the places flourishing in a long peace,
are shaken with fear, desolated by slaughter, consumed by rapine, and
polluted by intemperance and lust. I see the massacre or captivity
of our citizens, the rapes of our virgins and matrons. [129] In this