It is an account, therefore, of a most wild passage in the affairs rather of the Middle Ages than of the Spanish peninsula,--one that may be trusted, notwithstanding its air of romance, since its foundations are laid in the great work of Zurita, and one by no means wanting in picturesque effect, since its details are often taken from Ramon Muntaner, the old Catalan, who had himself shared the perils of this very expedition, and described them in his own Chronicle with his accustomed spirit and vigor. Parts of it are very striking in themselves, and strikingly told; especially the rise of Roger de Flor till he had reached the highest place a subject could hold in the Greek empire, and then his assassination in the presence and by the command of the same Emperor who had raised him so high,--his blood soiling the imperial table, to which, with treacherous hospitality, he had been invited. The whole is written in a bold and free, rather than in a careful style; but the coloring is well suited to the dark ground-work of the picture, and, though less energetic in its tone than Mendoza’s “War of Granada,” of which, from the first sentence, we see it is an imitation, it is often more easy, flowing, and natural.[216] [216] “Expedicion de los Catalanes contra Griegos y Turcos, por Francisco de Moncada, Conde de Osona,” Barcelona, 1623, and Madrid, 1772 and 1805, 12mo. There is an edition, also, of Barcelona, 1842, 8vo, edited by Don Jaime Tió, with a poem at the end by Calisto Fernandez Campo-redondo, which is on the same subject with the History, and in 1841 gained a prize at Barcelona for its success at a festival, that reminds us of the days of the Floral Games and of the Marquis of Villena. Another military history written by a nobleman connected with the service of his country, both in its armies and its diplomacy, is to be found in an account of eleven campaigns in Flanders by Coloma, Marquis of Espinar, published in 1625. A translation which he made of the “Annals” of Tacitus has been regarded as the best in the language; but, in his own work, he shows no tendency to imitate the ancients. On the contrary, it is, as it were, fresh from the fields of the author’s glory, and full of the honorable feelings of a soldier, sketching the adventures of the army when in camp, when in immediate action, and when in winter-quarters; and adding to his main narrative occasional glimpses of the negotiations then going on in the Low Countries respecting Spanish affairs, and of the intrigues of the courtiers at Madrid round the death-bed of Philip the Second. The style of Coloma is unequal; but much of what he describes he had seen, and the rest had passed within the compass of what he deemed sure information; so that he speaks, not only with authority, but with the natural vivacity which comes from being so near the events he records, that their color is imparted to his language.[217]