ver,
and the objects of precious luxury. The mariners who swarmed in her
port, excelled in the theory and practice of navigation and astronomy:
and the discovery of the compass, which has opened the globe, is owing
to their ingenuity or good fortune. Their trade was extended to the
coasts, or at least to the commodities, of Africa, Arabia, and India:
and their settlements in Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and
Alexandria, acquired the privileges of independent colonies. After three
hundred years of prosperity, Amalphi was oppressed by the arms of the
Normans, and sacked by the jealousy of Pisa; but the poverty of one
thousand fisherman is yet dignified by the remains of an arsenal, a
cathedral, and the palaces of royal merchants.

Chapter LVI: The Saracens, The Franks And The Normans.--Part III.

Roger, the twelfth and last of the sons of Tancred, had been long
detained in Normandy by his own and his father' age. He accepted the
welcome summons; hastened to the Apulian camp; and deserved at first the
esteem, and afterwards the envy, of his elder brother. Their valor and
ambition were equal; but the youth, the beauty, the elegant manners,
of Roger engaged the disinterested love of the soldiers and people.
So scanty was his allowance for himself and forty followers, that he
descended from conquest to robbery, and from robbery to domestic theft;
and so loose were the notions of property, that, by his own historian,
at his special command, he is accused of stealing horses from a stable
at Melphi. His spirit emerged from poverty and disgrace: from these base
practices he rose to the merit and glory of a holy war; and the invasion
of Sicily was seconded by the zeal and policy of his brother Guiscard.
After the retreat of the Greeks, the _idolaters_, a most audacious
reproach of the Catholics, had retrieved their losses and possessions;
but the deliverance of the island, so vainly undertaken by the forces
of the Eastern empire, was achieved by a small and private band of
adventurers. In the first attempt, Roger braved, in an open boat, the
real and fabulous dangers of Scylla and Charybdis; landed with only
sixty soldiers on a hostile shore; drove the Saracens to the gates of
Messina and safely returned with the spoils of the adjacent country.
In the fortress of Trani, his active and patient courage were equally
conspicuous. In his old age he related with pleasure, that, by the
distress of the siege, himself, and the