iberal endowment of churches and monasteries. Yet the Catholic hero
asserted the rights of the civil magistrate. Instead of resigning the
investiture of benefices, he dexterously applied to his own profit the
papal claims: the supremacy of the crown was secured and enlarged, by
the singular bull, which declares the princes of Sicily hereditary and
perpetual legates of the Holy See.

To Robert Guiscard, the conquest of Sicily was more glorious than
beneficial: the possession of Apulia and Calabria was inadequate to his
ambition; and he resolved to embrace or create the first occasion of
invading, perhaps of subduing, the Roman empire of the East. From his
first wife, the partner of his humble fortune, he had been divorced
under the pretence of consanguinity; and her son Bohemond was destined
to imitate, rather than to succeed, his illustrious father. The second
wife of Guiscard was the daughter of the princes of Salerno; the
Lombards acquiesced in the lineal succession of their son Roger; their
five daughters were given in honorable nuptials, and one of them was
betrothed, in a tender age, to Constantine, a beautiful youth, the son
and heir of the emperor Michael. But the throne of Constantinople was
shaken by a revolution: the Imperial family of Ducas was confined to the
palace or the cloister; and Robert deplored, and resented, the disgrace
of his daughter and the expulsion of his ally. A Greek, who styled
himself the father of Constantine, soon appeared at Salerno, and related
the adventures of his fall and flight. That unfortunate friend was
acknowledged by the duke, and adorned with the pomp and titles of
Imperial dignity: in his triumphal progress through Apulia and Calabria,
Michael was saluted with the tears and acclamations of the people;
and Pope Gregory the Seventh exhorted the bishops to preach, and
the Catholics to fight, in the pious work of his restoration. His
conversations with Robert were frequent and familiar; and their mutual
promises were justified by the valor of the Normans and the treasures of
the East. Yet this Michael, by the confession of the Greeks and Latins,
was a pageant and an impostor; a monk who had fled from his convent, or
a domestic who had served in the palace. The fraud had been contrived by
the subtle Guiscard; and he trusted, that after this pretender had given
a decent color to his arms, he would sink, at the nod of the conqueror,
into his primitive obscurity. But victory was the