and its consummation, three years later, by the defeat of Conradin.
The town of Benevento had offered no resistance to Charles, but he gave it up to pillage, and massacred its inhabitants. The slaughter, indiscriminate, continued for eight days; the women and children were slain with the men, being of Saracen blood. Manfred's wife, Sybil of Epirus, his children, and all his barons, died, or were put to death, in the prisons of Provence. With the young Conrad, all the faithful Ghibelline knights of Pisa were put to death. The son of Frederick of Antioch, who drove the Guelphs from Florence, had his eyes torn out, and was hanged, he being the last child of the house of Suabia. Twenty-four of the barons of Calabria were executed at Gallipoli, and at Rome. Charles cut off the feet of those who had fought for Conrad; then—fearful lest they should be pitied—shut them into a house of wood, and burned them. His lieutenant in Sicily, William of the Standard, besieged the town of Augusta, which defended itself with some fortitude, but was betrayed, and all its inhabitants, (who must have been more than three thousand, for there were a thousand able to bear arms,) massacred
