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Rh 1156 a fleet of forty vessels sailed ostentatiously to Constantinople itself, to proclaim William lord of Sicily, Aquila, Capua, Calabria, and the neighboring isles. The vessels, or some of them, worked their way up to the Bosphorus and into the Golden Horn as far as the imperial palace of Blachern. The crews discharged gilded arrows against the palace walls, and pompously proclaimed the praises of their sovereign to tho assembled inhabitants.

During the next twenty years the Sicilians gave little trouble to the empire. When Andronicos seized the throne in 1180, Alexis, a nephew of Manuel, who had been attached to that emperor as cup-bearer, was banished by the usurper. He fied to Sicily, and, in the language of Nicetas, discharged upon his country the venom he had amassed against Andronicos. He succeeded, probably without difficulty, in persuading the Norman king, William the Second, to turn his arms once more against the empire. Roger had done his best to plunder the southern portion of the Balkan peninsula, which lay immediately across the Adriatic. The subjects of his successors still looked in the same direction with envious eyes to the prosperous lands under the rule of Constantinople. They would probably in no case have been troubled to find excuses to justify them in their own sight in allying themselves with Alexis and in invading the countiy of the schismatics, who had cut themselves off from the rule of the pope and the real emperor. But they had now a fair pretext for the invasion. The Emperor Manuel had long been accused by his subjects of sacrificing their interests to benefit the Latin colonists. The Amallians, Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese had all been the objects of his favor. They were accounted rich, and were naturally believed to have enriched themselves at the expense of the Greeks. The emperor himself had been twice married, and each time to a Frank wife. His son Alexis had espoused a daughter of Philip of France, and his daughter a Marquis of Montferrat. During the crusading troubles he had asked the pope to send a legate with the army, and had expressed a wish to Alexander the Third, the reigning pope, that Greeks and Latins