he whole of the Costiera
d'Amalfi, allowing the citizens to retain their own form of government.
Four years after this, the Pisan fleet, coming to aid the people of Naples
against King Roger, utterly destroyed the once vaunted navy of Amalfi, and
sacked both the city itself and the two hill-set towns of Scala and
Ravello. Its political liberty had already been crushed by the Normans,
and now its ships and its wealth were dissipated by the Pisans; it was a
double measure of ignominy and disaster from which Amalfi never recovered.
Amidst its humiliations and sorrows, the stricken city had also to mourn
the loss of its greatest treasure, its secular _palladium_, that most
precious copy of the Pandects of Justinian, which the Pisan marauders
seized and carried back with them to their city on the Arno. Here in Pisa
the famous volume remained in safe keeping for some three hundred years,
and then, as Time's round brought its inevitable vengeance on the
plunderers of Amalfi, it was removed by the victorious Florentines to
their own city. So intense a veneration for the book itself now manifested
itself amongst the scholars and students of Florence, that at one period
offerings of incense were often made to the inscribed wisdom of past ages
as to a most holy relic of some Saint, and the clerk or jurist about to
peruse its faded characters was wont, first of all, to breathe a prayer of
genuine gratitude on his knees for the preservation of this ancient book.
Amalfi, Pisa, Florence, each in its turn has owned the guardianship of
this most famous literary jewel, which is to-day jealously guarded as the
chief treasure of the world-renowned Laurentian Library.

It is true that the prosperity of Amalfi did not disappear immediately
after the inroad of the Pisans, for Boccaccio, writing in the fourteenth
century, still speaks of the ancient territory of the destroyed Republic
as "a rocky ridge beside a smiling sea, which its inhabitants call the
Costa d'Amalfi; full of little cities, of gardens, of fountains, and of
rich and enterprising merchants." It was in fact reserved for relentless
Nature herself to complete the work of destruction that Norman armies and
Pisan fleets had more than half accomplished. We have already spoken of
the terrible land-slips to which this beautiful shore is eminently
subject, even at the present day, as the mass of wreckage outside the old
Capuchin convent only too clearly testifies. In the year 1343, durin