Faith is there not young but old where works do not accompany it; but faith is scorned, as it were, for its age, like a worn out garment. But I knew for certain of one synod that was held in Saxony in which it was decreed and confirmed that it was more fitting to fight with the sword than with the open, and better to submit to death than to turn one’s back to the enemy. Your own arm has experienced the truth of this,” in my heart I said “And may they (the Saxons) soon have occasion to show how warlike they are ! ”
On this same day, after midday, he ordered me to meet him on his return from the palace , although I was so weak and changed that the women who, before when they met me, called out in astonishment “Manna, manna”, [untranslatable] now pitying my misery, beat their breasts with their hands and said: “Poor sick man” What then, raising my hands to Heaven, I wished him,-Nicephorus, namely, as he approached-and you who were absent: oh that it might be fulfilled!
But you may well believe me, he made me laugh little, for he sat on an impatient and unbridled horse-a very little man on a very big beast. My mind pictured to itself one of those dolls which your Slavonians tie on to a foal, allowing it then to follow its mother with out a rein.
My unbounded sadness
After this I ‘was led back to my fellow citizens and fellow inmates five lions, into the aforesaid hated abode; where, during a space of three weeks .Was treated to the conversation of no-one save my companions On account of which my mind pictured to itself that Nicephorus wished never to let me go, and my unbounded sadness brought on one illness after another, so that I should have died had not the mother of God, by her prayers, obtained my life from the Creator and His son; as was shown to me not through a fancied but through a, true vision.
During these three weeks, then, Nicephorus had his camp outside of Constantinople, in a place that is called “At the Fountains”; and thither be ordered me to come. And, although I was so weak that not Only standing but even sitting seemed a heavy burden to me, he compelled me to stand before him with uncovered head; a thing which was entirely wrong in my state of ill health. And he said to me: “The envoys of your king Otto who were here before you in the preceding your promised me under oath -and the wording of the oath can be produced-that he would never in any way bring scandal upon our empire.
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