arb of an Arab devotee, preached a crusade, and led an
army into Italy, where he died of dysentery before the city of Cosenza.
The only way of explaining his eccentric thirst for slaughter is to
suppose that it was a dark monomania, a form of psychopathy analogous to
that which we find in the Marechal de Retz and the Marquise de
Brinvilliers. One of the most marked symptoms of this disease was the
curiosity which led him to explore the entrails of his victims, and to
feast his eyes upon their quivering hearts. After causing his first
minister Ibn-Semsama to be beaten to death, he cut his body open, and
with his own knife sliced the brave man's heart. On another occasion he
had 500 prisoners brought before him. Seizing a sharp lance he first
explored the region of the ribs, and then plunged the spear-point into
the heart of each victim in succession. A garland of these hearts was
made and hung up on the gate of Tunis. The Arabs regarded the heart as
the seat of thought in man, the throne of the will, the center of
intellectual existence. In this preoccupation with the hearts of his
victims we may therefore trace the jealousy of human life which Ibrahim
displayed in his murder of pregnant women, as well as a tyrant's fury
against the organ which had sustained his foes in their resistance. We
can only comprehend the combination of sanguinary lust with Ibrahim's
vigorous conduct of civil and military affairs, on the hypothesis that
this man-tiger, as Amari, to whom I owe these details, calls him, was
possessed with a specific madness.

APPENDIX II.

_Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, lib. i. cap. 4._ See Chap. iv. p. 195.

After the freedom regained by the expulsion of the Duke of Athens and
the humbling of the nobles, regularity for the future in the government
might have been expected, since a very great equality among the burghers
had been established in consequence of those troubles. The city too had
been divided into quarters, and the supreme magistracy of the republic
assigned to the eight priors, called _Signori Priori di liberta_,
together with the Gonfalonier of Justice. The eight priors were chosen,
two for each quarter; the Gonfalonier, their chief, differed in no
respect from his colleagues save in precedence of dignity; and as the
fourth part of the honors pertained to the members of the lesser arts,
their turn kept coming round to that quarter to which the Gonfalonier
belonged. This magistracy remained for