k the city of Tunis; and of a truth it is said, if they had gone
on, in a short time they would have taken the city by force, or the
king of Tunis with his Turks and Arabs would have abandoned it.

Sec. 38.--_How King Charles concluded a treaty with the king of Tunis,
and how the host departed._

[Sidenote: 1270 A.D.]

The king of Tunis with his Saracens seeing themselves in evil case,
and fearing to lose the city and the country round about, sought to
make peace with King Charles and with the other lords by free and
liberal covenants, to which peace King Charles consented and concluded
it in the following manner: first, that all the Christians which were
prisoners in Tunis, or in all that realm, should be freed, and that
monasteries and churches might be built by the Christians, and therein
the sacred office might be celebrated; and that the gospel of Christ
might be freely preached by the minor friars and the preaching friars
and by other ecclesiastical persons; and whatsoever Saracen should
desire to be baptized, and turn to the faith of Christ, might freely
be allowed so to do; and all the expenses which the said kings had
incurred were to be fully restored to them; and beyond that the king
of Tunis was to pay tribute every year to Charles, king of Sicily, of
20,000 golden pistoles; and there were many other articles which it
were long to tell. Concerning this peace some said that King Charles
and the other lords did for the best, considering their evil state
from the pestilential air and the mortality among the Christians; for
the king of Navarre, when King Louis was dead, fell sick and departed
from the host and died in Sicily, and the cardinal legate of the Pope
died; and the Church of Rome in those times had no pastor which could
provide for all things, and Philip, the new king of France, desired to
depart from the host and return to France with his father's body.
Others blamed King Charles, saying that he did it through avarice, to
the end he might henceforward, by reason of the said peace, always
receive tribute from the king of Tunis for his own special benefit;
for if the kingdom of Tunis had been conquered by all the host of the
Christians, it would have afterwards pertained in part to the king of
France, and to the king of England, and to the king of Navarre, and
to the king of Sicily, and to the Church of Rome, and to divers other
lords which were at the conquest. And it may have been, both one cause