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
has delineated the misfortunes of his country: 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, 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. In this extremity (he interrogates a friend) how must
the Sicilians act? By the unanimous election of a king of valor and
experience, Sicily and Calabria might yet be preserved; for in the
levity of the Apulians, ever eager for new revolutions, I can repose
neither confidence nor hope. S