Mare Nostrum | Page 2

response: "Good day,
Señor Marquis!" "Good day, Señor Baron!" Although his relations
never went beyond this salutation, Ferragut used to feel toward these
noble personages the sympathy that the customers have for an
establishment, looking upon them with affectionate eyes for many
years without presuming to exchange more than a greeting with them.
His son Ulysses was exceedingly bored as he followed the monotonous
incidents of the chanted mass in the darkened, almost deserted, church.
The rays of the sun, oblique beams of gold that filtered in from above,
illuminating the spirals of dust, flies and moths, made him think in a
homesick way of the lush green of the orchard, the white spots of the
hamlets, the black smoke columns of the harbor filled with steamships,

and the triple file of bluish convexities crowned with froth that were
discharging their contents with a sonorous surge upon the
bronze-colored beach.
When the embroidered mantles of the three priests ceased to gleam
before the high altar, and another priest in black and white appeared in
the pulpit, Ulysses would turn his glance toward a side chapel. The
sermon always represented for him a half hour of somnolence, peopled
with his own lively imaginings. The first thing that his eyes used to see
in the chapel of Santa Barbara was a chest nailed to the wall high above
him, a sepulcher of painted wood with no other adornment than the
inscription: "Aqui yace Doña Constansa Augusta, Emperatriz de
Grecia,"--Here lies Constance Augusta, Empress of Greece.
The name of Greece always had the power of exciting the little fellow's
imagination. His godfather, the lawyer Labarta, poet-laureate, could not
repeat this name without a lively thrill passing across his grizzled beard
and a new light in his eyes. Sometimes the mysterious power of such a
name evoked a new mystery and a more intense interest,--Byzantium.
How could that august lady, sovereign of remote countries of
magnificence and vision, have come to leave her remains in a murky
chapel of Valencia within a great chest like those that treasured the
remnants of old trumpery in the garrets of the notary?...
One day after mass Don Esteban had rapidly recounted her history to
his little son. She was the daughter of Frederick the Second of Suabia, a
Hohenstaufen, an emperor of Germany who esteemed still more his
crown of Sicily. In the palaces of Palermo,--veritable enchanted bowers
of Oriental gardens,--he had led the life both of pagan and savant,
surrounded by poets and men of science (Jews, Mahometans and
Christians), by Oriental dancers, alchemists, and ferocious Saracen
Guards. He legislated as did the jurisconsults of ancient Rome, at the
same time writing the first verses in Italian. His life was one continual
combat with the Popes who hurled upon him excommunication upon
excommunication. For the sake of peace he had become a crusader and
set forth upon the conquest of Jerusalem. But Saladin, another
philosopher of the same class, had soon come to an agreement with his

Christian colleague. 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
Vatatzés, the famous "Vatacio," when he was fifty and she fourteen.
She was a natural daughter soon legitimized like almost all his
progeny,--a product of his free harem, in which were mingled Saracen
beauties and Italian marchionesses. And the poor young girl married to
"Vatacio the heretic," by a father in need of political alliances had lived
long years in the Orient as a basilisa or empress, arrayed in garments of
stiff embroidery representing scenes from the holy books, shod with
buskins laced with purple which bore on their soles eagles of gold,--the
highest symbol of the majesty of Rome.
At first she had reigned in Nicaea, refuge of the Greek Emperors while
Constantinople was in the