Note 112 — Chapter VI · THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.

Discorsi, iii. 6; comp. Storie Fiorent. l. viii. The description of conspiracies has been a favourite theme of Italian writers from a very remote period. Luitprand (of Cremona, Mon. Germ., ss. iii. 264-363) gives us a few, which are more circumstantial than those of any other contemporary writer of the tenth century; in the eleventh the deliverance of Messina from the Saracens, accomplished by calling in Norman Roger (Baluz. Miscell. i. p. 184), gives occasion to a characteristic narrative of this kind (1060); we need hardly speak of the dramatic colouring given to the stories of the Sicilian Vespers (1282). The same tendency is well known in the Greek writers.