keepers.

During his earlier imprisonment Enzio had been allowed some alleviation,
his friends being permitted to visit him and solace him in his
seclusion; but after this effort to escape he was closely confined, some
say, in an iron cage, until his death in 1272.

Thus ended the royal race of the Hohenstauffen, a race marked by
unusual personal beauty, rich poetical genius, and brilliant warlike
achievements, and during whose period of power the mediaeval age and its
institutions attained their highest development.

As for the ruthless Charles of Anjou, he retained Apulia, but lost his
possessions in Sicily through an event which has become famous as the
"Sicilian Vespers." The insolence and outrages of the French had so
exasperated the Sicilians that, on the night of March 30, 1282, a
general insurrection broke out in this island, the French being
everywhere assassinated. Constance, the grand-daughter of their old
ruler, and Peter of Aragon, her husband, were proclaimed their
sovereigns by the Sicilians, and Charles, the son of Charles of Anjou,
fell into their hands.

Constance was generous to the captive prince, and on hearing him remark
that he was happy to die on a Friday, the day on which Christ suffered,
she replied,--

"For love of him who suffered on this day I will grant thee thy life."

He was afterwards exchanged for Beatrice, the daughter of the unhappy
Helena, whose sons, the last princes of the Hohenstauffen race, died in
the prison in which they had lived since infancy.

_THE TRIBUNAL OF THE HOLY VEHM._

The ideas of law and order in mediaeval Germany were by no means what we
now understand by those terms. The injustice of the strong and the
suffering of the weak were the rule; and men of noble lineage did not
hesitate to turn their castles into dens of thieves. The title "robber
baron," which many of them bore, sufficiently indicates their mode of
life, and turbulence and outrage prevailed throughout the land.

But wrong did not flourish with complete impunity; right had not
entirely vanished; justice still held its sword, and at times struck
swift and deadly blows that filled with terror the wrong-doer, and gave
some assurance of protection to those too weak for self-defence. It was
no unusual circumstance to behold, perhaps in the vicinity of some
baronial castle, perhaps near some town or manorial residence, a group
of peasants gazing upwards with awed but triumphant eyes; the spe