The position of a little city surrounded with untilled land and an empty sepulcher was really not worth the trouble of decapitating mankind through the centuries.

The Saracen monarch, therefore, graciously delivered Jerusalem over to him, and the Pope again excommunicated Frederick for having conquered the Holy Land without bloodshed.
"He was a great man," Don Esteban used to murmur.

"It must be admitted that he was a great man...." He would say this timidly, regretting that his enthusiasm for that remote epoch should oblige him to make this concession to an enemy of the Church.

He shuddered to think of those sacrilegious books that nobody had seen, but whose paternity Rome was accustomed to attribute to this Sicilian Emperor--especially _Los Tres Impostores_ (The Three Imposters), in which Frederick measured Moses, Jesus and Mahomet, by the same standard.

This royal author was, moreover, the most ancient journalist of history, the first that in the full thirteenth century had dared to appeal to the judgment of public opinion in his manifestoes against Rome.
His daughter had married an Emperor of Byzantium, Juan Dukas Vatatzes, the famous "Vatacio," when he was fifty and she fourteen.