false! Then wardens were placed over us to prevent myself and my companions from going out of our habitation. They seized and slew or put in prison the poor of Latin race who came to me to beg alms. They did not permit my Greek interpreter to go out even to buy supplies—but only my cook, who was ignorant of the Greek tongue and who could speak to the vendor, when he bought of him, not with words but by signs of his fingers or nods of his head. He bought for four pieces of money only as much as the interpreter for one. And when some of my friends sent spices, bread, wine and apples,—pouring them all on the ground, they sent the bearers away overwhelmed with blows of the fist. And had not the divine pity prepared before me a table against my adversaries, I should have had to accept the death they arranged for me. But He who permitted that I should be tempted, mercifully granted then that I should endure. And these perils tried my soul at Constantinople from the second day before the Nones of June (June 4), until the sixth day before the Nones of October (Oct. 2)— one hundred and twenty days.
But, to increase my calamities, on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary the holy mother of God, there came—an evil augury for me—envoys of the apostolic and universal pope John, through whom he asked Nicephorus "the emperor of the Greeks" to close an alliance and firm friendship with his beloved and spiritual son Otto "august emperor of the Romans." Before the question as to why this word, this manner of address, sinful and bold in the eyes of the Greeks, did not cost its bearer his life—why he was not annihilated before it was read, I, who, in other respects, have often shown myself enough of a preacher and with words enough at my command, seem dumb as a fish! The Greeks inveighed against the sea, cursed the waves, and wondered exceedingly how they had been able to transport such an iniquity and why the yawning deep had not swallowed up the ship. "Was it not unpardonable," they said, " to have called the universal emperor of the Romans, the august, great, only Nicephorus: ' of the Greeks ';—a barbarian, a pauper: 'of the Romans '? Oh sky! Oh earth! Oh sea!" "But
