mission to Constantinople, where he acquired Greek, an accomplishment most unusual in Western Europe in his day, and upon which he lets us see that he highly valued himself. He was at this time in the service of the Lombard prince Berengar, the last Italian for many centuries to claim the title of King of Italy. Berengar was unpopular with the clergy, and this may have determined Luitprand's secession from his service. In the last chapter of his unfinished history of his times he speaks vaguely of the ingratitude of his master, but breaks off before coming to particulars. In any case he betook himself about 956 to the German Emperor Otto I., who in 960 invaded Italy, dethroned Berengar, and, proceeding to Rome, where the power and repute of the Papacy were then at their lowest ebb, caused himself to be crowned King of the Romans, a step which immediately brought him into collision with the Byzantine Empire.

The situation of this empire at the time was the reverse of that depicted in Clough's poem:

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!

But westward, look, the land is bright.

Under an able and warlike Emperor, the Byzantine power was making great progress in the East: it had recovered Crete, and was about to recover Antioch. In Italy its situation resembled that of Spain, outside the limits of the Iberian Peninsula, in the Europe of the seventeenth century: the shadow of a great name, the dwindling of whose power had not been accompanied by any abatement of its pretensions. Upper Italy had been lost to the Lombards, Sicily to the Saracens, but the Adriatic coast and the extreme south of what was afterwards the kingdom of Naples remained to the Eastern Emperor under the designations of Apulia and Calabria. Above all, the Byzantines were firmly convinced that they were the ancient Romans, that their sovereign was Cæsar as well as Basileus, that Charles the Great had been an upstart usurper, and that Otto the Great was just such another, and worse, inasmuch as, instead of affecting submissiveness towards the Popes (who were, after all, only the Eastern Emperor's chaplains, if you saw things in a right light), he had taken upon himself to reform their morals, and to set them up and pull them down ad libitum. Otto's assumption of the title of King of the Romans was, therefore, regarded at Constantinople much in the light in which Queen Victoria's assumption of the title of Empress of

India would have been regarded at Delhi, if it had been made while the Great Mogul yet retained any shadow of authority. Otto on his part was sincerely desirous of living in peace with his neighbours, and the best means he could devise to that end was that they should cease to be his neighbours by becoming his subjects. He had a marriageable son, the Greek Emperor had a marriageable step-daughter. What more appropriate than that the young people should be wedded, and that the bride should bring Apulia and Calabria as her marriage portion, thus enabling her father to devote his entire attention to the Saracens and Bulgarians, and Otto to round off his Italian kingdom until he should be lord of all

Begirt by wall of Alp and azure sea,
And cloven by the ridges Apennine?

The position of affairs at Constantinople was singular. The Empress Theophano, widow of the late Emperor Romanus, was suspected of having poisoned her father-in-law, Constantine, that she might govern through her husband, and her husband, that she might govern by herself. As it proved, she had lost authority by the exchange of a handsome young husband for an ugly and disagreeable one. Nicephorus Phocas, a warrior and statesman, who paid little court to Venus and the Graces, was called by the public voice to the head of affairs, and heroically assumed the burden not only of the Empire, but of the Empress and her young children by Romanus, to whom he appears to have behaved with perfect honour and loyalty, virtues the easier of practice as he had no children of his own. Harsh, avaricious, bigoted, and generally disliked, Nicephorus was nevertheless an able ruler and a consummate general, and the last man in the world to yield anything to either the threats or the blandishments of his German Imperial brother. An envoy sent by Otto in 967 seems not only to have failed to extract anything from Nicephorus, but to have exceeded his instructions in making concessions. Anger perhaps had a share in inviting Otto to a perfidious attack on Bari, the capital of the Greek possessions in Italy, which entirely miscarried. War, one would have thought, must have been the inevitable consequence of such an outrage, but it merely produced another embassy, with special instructions to urge young Otto's marriage with the younger Theophano, and the cession of Apulia and Calabria as her dowry. It may be suspected that this step was

VOL. XVI.-NO. 91, N.S.

5

instigated by Luitprand, anxious to air his Greek, and forgetting that he would find in Nicephorus a different kind of man from the affable Emperor who had received him nineteen years before. Fortune had lately smiled upon him; in the last book of his 'History,' written while still an exile in Germany, he speaks despondingly of his position and prospects; but when Otto became master of Lombardy, one of his first acts had been to make the refugee Bishop of Cremona, where, in the opinion of his contemporaries, he had covered himself with glory by procuring for his cathedral the relics of St. Himerius. The Emperor being unacquainted with Italian, Luitprand had acted as his orator in the important and yet grotesque business of the deposition of Pope John XII., who was no sooner displaced by the Emperor than he was reinstated by the people, and had cut off quite a considerable number of his enemies' noses before (if we may receive the weighty testimony of Luitprand), he was brained by the Devil. One fact of considerable interest emerges from this gloomy chaos, the existence of an Italian language in which an Italian assembly needed to be addressed, but which has not left a single written monument for more than two centuries afterwards.

Luitprand's narrative of his mission takes the form of an official report addressed to his sovereigns, the Emperor Otto, the young prince of the same name associated in the Empire, and the Empress Adelaide. He arrived, he says, at Constantinople on June 4, 968, with a suite of twenty-five persons, and, after having been kept in the rain till the eleventh hour, and otherwise treated in a scurvy manner in contempt of your Majesties,' was conducted to a palace inhabited by five lions, concives et cohabitatores mei. He incidentally admits the magnificence of the edifice by complaining that, the Greek authorities having neglected to supply bedding, he and his companions had to pillow their heads upon marble. But it was equally accessible to heat and to cold, and armed guards prevented all ingress and egress. It was further inconveniently distant from the Imperial residence, to which, when summoned thither, Luitprand was compelled to walk. Worse, it was destitute of water, and the wine was undrinkable by reason of its contamination with pitch, rosin, and gypsum. [Nothing to eat but billy goats, and nothing to drink but turpentine!] Worst of all was the major-domo. 'Should your Imperial Majesties desire to find one like him, your Majesties must absolutely go to the Devil, for there is not his

fellow outside the infernal regions, if there.' The day after his arrival Luitprand was called before the Emperor's brother Leo, Prefect of the Palace and Logothete, a reed of a man who will pierce your hand if you stay it on him. We had a tremendous tussle respecting your Majesty's title, which he would not allow to be Basileus, but only Rex. When I said that these were just the same thing, he said that I had come there to kick up a row (non pacis sed contentionis causa venisse), and, in a passion, took your letters from the hand of the interpreter. The next day I was summoned before Nicephorus himself, a monstrous being, dwarfish, great-headed, eyed like a mole, grizzled with a thick cropped beard, a long thin neck, a sooty complexion, the sort of fellow you would not care to meet after dark. He has too much flesh before and too little behind, his thighs are too long for his stature, and his legs too short, and he is unprovided with an instep. His robe of byssus may have been white when he began to wear it in ancient times. He chatters fluently, is endowed with the disposition of a fox, and is a very Ulysses for fraud and falsehood. On his left, but at a much lower level, sat the two young Emperors formerly his masters and now his subjects. "We should have desired," said he, "to accord you a friendly and magnificent reception, but for the impiety of your master, who has seized upon our city of Rome, put Berengar and Adelbert to death, slain many Romans with the sword, hanged others, blinded others, banished others, assailed our Apulian cities with fire and sword, and, to fill up the measure of his iniquities, sent you, their chief counsellor and prompter, to be a spy upon us." To whom I. "My master has not made a forcible conquest of Rome, but has delivered it from the yoke of harlots. What was your Majesty about? Were you asleep, and all your predecessors? But my master, arising from the ends of the earth, has cut off the wicked. and restored the Vicars of the Apostles to their rightful authority and honour. When after this rebels rose up against him, he punished them conformably to the precepts of the Emperors Justinian, Valentinian, and Theodosius. As to Berengar and Adelbert, they were rebels, and had broken their oaths and fealty suadente diabolo." "But," said he, "we have a soldier of Adelbert's here who affirms the contrary." "Well," said I, “I have a soldier too, and he shall fight him." "Let be," said he, "let us suppose this all right. Now please explain why your master has invaded my dominions with fire and sword." Whereupon

I proceeded to rehearse how these Italian territories were your Majesties' lawful possessions, and that you had shown extraordinary forbearance in so long delaying to assert your right to them, and that you were willing even now to receive them as the dowry of the Princess Theophano; when Nicephorus, "It is past the second hour, and we have to attend a procession. We will give you a fitting answer in due season."

'All the way from the Palace to Saint Sophia was thronged with armed men bearing diminutive bucklers and puny javelins. And the crowd that thronged to the spectacle were mostly barefoot. The tunics of the nobles were all in holes; they would have looked far better in their ordinary dress. There was no show of gems or gold except on the person of Nicephorus himself, who looked uglier than ever in his Imperial ornaments. I was given a high seat near the choristers, and saw the monster come creeping in, and heard the singers quiring "Behold the Morning Star!""

Luitprand continues to relate how Nicephorus the same day bade him to a banquet, and, not choosing to accord him precedence over any of his officers, assigned him the sixteenth place and omitted to give him a napkin. At dinner he indulged in a scornful invective against the German soldiers, the more interesting as he was himself the author of a valuable work on tactics which has come down to us. He thought the Germans far too heavily armed, and brought against them those charges of gluttony and drunkenness to which they have been deemed obnoxious in all ages. On the subject of sea power he discoursed like Captain Mahan, and concluded that the Roman Emperor need have no fear of a sovereign who was unable to reduce the civitatula of Bari, Luitprand, by his own account, replied to the Imperial sarcasms with so much much spirit that Nicephorus lost patience, and commanded him to withdraw. Returned to the lions' den, he petitioned the Emperor's brother that he might be allowed to send despatches home, or else to depart upon a Venetian vessel. After a few days he was summoned before the ministers of Nicephorus, who made him narrate the purpose of his embassy over again, and then informed him that, although in a general way the alliance of a princess of the House of Porphyrogenitus with a Western barbarian was an inconceivable thing, yet for the sake of amity and concord they were willing to make a counter-proposal. Let the German Emperor, instead of demanding a dowry with Theophano, himself