In one of these old structures, still known as the _Casa Reale_ or royal house, lived the noble family who were the lords of Aquino. Here Thomas Aquinas was born in the year 1225, being one of the five children of Count Landulf of Aquino, and his wife, Theodora Caraccioli, Countess of Teano. The family was not a royal house, but it was connected by intermarriage with the royal caste of Europe. It is said, but I have not been able to verify the statement, that Thomas’s grandfather had married a sister of the Emperor Barbarossa. His mother was descended from the Tancred of Hauteville, whose sons, Roger and Robert Guiscard, effected the Norman conquest of the two Sicilies. Sibylla, Queen of the Tancred who ended the first line of Norman sovereigns, is said to have been a daughter of the family. But the real importance of the lords of Aquino was due to their strategic position on the northern frontier of Apulia and to their military spirit. Richard of Aquino, the grandfather of Thomas, was the mainstay of Tancred’s cause on the mainland of Italy, and merited, by his treachery and barbarity, the cruel death the Emperor Henry VI. inflicted on him after the final conquest of the two Sicilies. His father, Landulf, seems to have been a man of less warlike character; but his uncle, Thomas of Aquinas, who succeeded Richard in the countship of Acerra, was the ablest of the Ghibelline chiefs of Southern Italy, and one of Frederic the Second’s most trusted captains. That emperor enlarged the dominions of the family, and gave ample scope to their fighting propensities in his wars with the popes. And Thomas’s two brothers, who were older than himself, embraced the opportunity of a military life. His sisters formed illustrious alliances with the noble families of Southern Italy. Pope Honorius III. is said to have been his godfather.