When you were besieging Bari only three hundred Hungarians seized five hundred Greeks near Thessalonica and led them into Hungary. Which attempt, inasmuch as it succeeded, induced two hundred Hungarians in Macedonia, not far from Constantinople, to do the like ; of whom forty, when they were retreating incautiously through a narrow pass, were captured.
These Nicephorus, freeing them from custody and adorning – them with most costly garments, has made his body guard and defenders-taking them with him against the Assyrians. But what kind of an army he a has you can conjecture from this,-that those who are in command over the others are Venetians and Amalfians!
Outside of Constantinople
But no more of this! Learn now what happened to me. On the sixth day before the Calends of August (July 27), 1 received at -Umbria, outside of Constantinople, permission from Nicephorus to return to you, And when I came to Constantinople, the patrician Christophorus, the eunuch who was the representative of Nicephorus there, sent word to me that I could not then start to return because the Saracens at that time were holding the sea and the Hungarians the land-I should have to wait until they retired. Both of which facts, oh woe is me, were false!
Then wardens were placed over us to prevent myself, and my companions from going out of our habitation. They seized and slew or put in prison the poor of Latin race who came to me to beg alms. They did not permit my Greek interpreter to go out even to buy supplies-but only my cook, who was ignorant of the Greek tongue and who could speak to the vendor, when he bought of him, not with words but by signs of his fingers or nods of his head. He bought for four pieces of money only as much as the interpreter for one.
And when some of my friends sent spices, bread, wine and apples,-pouring theta all on the ground, they sent the bearers away overwhelmed with blows of the fist. And had not the divine pity prepared before me a table against my, adversaries, I should have bad to accept the death they arranged for me. But Ho who permitted that I should be tempted, mercifully granted then that I should endure. And these perils tried my soul at Constantinople from the second day before the Nones of June (June 4), until the sixth day before the Nones of October (Oct. 2)-one hundred and twenty days.
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