With advancing life Frederick’s personal habits grew more and more oriental. He secluded his wives from the public gaze, keeping them under the custody of eunuchs after the Eastern fashion, and maintaining at Lucera a regular harem of concubines, the expenses of which were duly entered in the public accounts of the realm. Though a respectable strategist, Frederick was no warrior, taking small delight in feats of physical skill, and having little of the rough vigour and determination of his chivalrous contemporaries. But he was a subtle and almost a great statesman, who sought to gain his ends by craft, duplicity, and dexterity. Courteous, polished, and seductive in manner, he seemed to belong to a different race from that of his rude Swabian and Norman ancestors. His many-sided character, so full of contradictions, has nothing of the homogeneity and simplicity of the warriors and statesmen of the Middle Ages, but at one time reflects the astute and effeminate oriental, and at another anticipates the accomplished and brilliant despots of the Italian Renascence. His want of sympathy for the ideals of his time comes out strongly in his dealings with the Church. He was believed to have imbibed from his Arab and Jewish masters an utter scepticism as to all religion. Moses, Mohammed, and Christ, he is reported to have said, were three impostors who had deluded the world in turn; and he is also alleged to have maintained that the soul perished with the body. But if Frederick upheld these views before a select circle, he was careful to submit himself to all the obligations of the Church, and to prove his orthodoxy not only by the most formal and positive denials of these charges, but also by a most sanguinary persecution of heresy. [Sidenote: Frederick’s policy in Naples and Sicily.]