them. A mere remnant of what had seemed a brilliant army reached Venice with the remains of the fleet, and the arrival of these few spread mourning and desolation amongst the citizens. Outraged at the weakness and lack of wisdom displayed by the Doge during the expedition, the people united to wreak their vengeance upon him, and he was promptly assassinated. Amongst the many families whose youngest and bravest were victims of this fruitless expedition, none was more nearly exterminated than the Giustiniani. One hundred men of their name and race had sailed away to Greece; not one came back. The Venetians [Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 89._] felt that the city itself was bereaved by their loss. One man of marriageable age alone survived in Venice to stand between the name of Giustiniani and its extinction, and he was [Sidenote: _Lazzarini, Guida, 270._] a monk in the monastery of Saint Nicholas. Thither the people proceeded in a body, they claimed him from the order, they brought him [Sidenote: _Mol. Dogaressa, 75._] home to his ancestral palace, they besought the Pope to free him from his vows. Alexander III. readily acceded to a request so unanimous; at the same time, as if to provide him with a wife whose position should be somewhat similar to his own, the pontiff liberated also from her nunnery the daughter of the former Doge, Vital Michiel II. The former monk and the former nun were united in bonds of matrimony, and became the parents of no less than twelve children, nine of whom were sons. When the twelve were all grown up, Giustiniani founded in the island of Amiano a convent, to which his wife and their three daughters retired while he returned to his monastery of Saint Nicholas on the Lido. [Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 118._] The immediate result of the disastrous expedition to Greece seems to have been that Venice momentarily lost her hold upon the Levant, and was obliged to retire from the strong commercial position she had acquired in Constantinople; but an alliance with William, the king of Sicily and the son of Roger, soon turned the scale in favour of the Republic. The Emperor Manuel Comnenos, terrified at the thought of a coalition between Sicily and Venice, paid the latter a large sum of money by way of indemnity.