All the calamities which the prophetic orator had deplored, were surpassed by the cruelty and avarice of the German conqueror. He violated the royal sepulchres, and explored the secret treasures of the palace, Palermo, and the whole kingdom; the pearls and jewels, however precious, might be easily removed; but one hundred and sixty horses were laden with the gold and silver of Sicily. The young king, his mother and sisters, and the nobles of both sexes, were separately confined in the fortresses of the Alps; and on the slightest rumour of rebellion the captives were deprived of life, of their eyes, or of the hope of posterity. Constanza herself was touched with sympathy for the miseries of her country; and the heiress of the Norman line might struggle to check her despotic husband, and to save the patrimony of her newborn son, of an emperor so famous in the next age under the name of Frederick II. Ten years after this revolution, the French monarchs annexed to their crown the duchy of Normandy; the sceptre of her ancient dukes had been transmitted, by a granddaughter of William the Conqueror, to the house of Plantagenet; and the adventurous Normans, who had raised so many trophies in France, England, and Ireland, in Apulia, Sicily, and the East, were lost either in victory or servitude, among the vanquished nations.[l] In Sicily the circumstances of the conquest led the Norman settlers to remain far more distinct from the older races of the land than they did in England, and in the end not to lose themselves in those older races of the land but in the settlers of other races who accompanied them and followed them. So far as there ever was a Sicilian nation at all it might be said to be called into being by the emperor-king Frederick II. In his day a Latin element finally triumphed; but it was not a Norman French-speaking element of any kind. The speech of the Lombards at last got the better of the Greek, Arabic, and French; how far its ascendency can have been built on any survival of an earlier Latin speech which had lived alongside of Greek and Arabic, this is not the place to inquire. NORMAN INFLUENCE [Sidenote: [1130-1194 A.D.]]