taken place before March 31, 1370, when his successor was appointed[144], the two great offices[145], and, I think, the facts above stated enable us to explain the reason why no more marshals were appointed after that date. The office of marshal had been hereditary in the family of De Novelles, and Gregorovius[146] pointed out that Ermengol de Novelles did not (as Hopf imagined) hold it till his death, but that Roger de Lluria was marshal before that event. I should suppose that Ermengol had been deprived of the office as a punishment for his rebellion against his sovereign[147]; that the conflict between Lluria and Pou proved that there was no room in the narrow court of Thebes for two such exalted officials as a vicar and a marshal; and, as Lluria, when he became vicar, combined the two offices in his person, it was thought a happy solution of the difficulty. Professor Lampros has published three documents[148] from the Vatican archives which refer to a mysterious scheme for the marriage of a Sicilian duchess of Athens. The documents have no date, except the day of the month, and in one case of the week, and one of them is partly in cypher. But I think that I have succeeded in fixing the exact date of the first to January 4, 1369, because in 1368, December 22 was on a Friday. This suits all the historical facts mentioned. The bishop of Cambrai, to whom the second letter is addressed, must be Robert of Geneva (afterwards the anti-pope Clement VII), who occupied that see from October 11, 1368, to June 6, 1371. The _dominus Anghia_, whose death has so much disturbed the diocese, is Sohier d’Enghien, who was beheaded in 1367; the _comes Litii_ is his brother Jean, count of Lecce, and the latter’s nephew, whose marriage “with the young niece of the king of Sicily, daughter of a former Catalan duke of Athens,” is considered suitable, is Gautier III, titular duke of Athens, who had inherited the claims of the Brienne family. The lady whose marriage is the object of all these negotiations must therefore have been one of the two daughters of John, Marquis of Randazzo and Duke of Athens and Neopatras, who died in 1348, and whose youngest child, Constance, may therefore have been _xx annorum et ultra_ at this period, and is known to have been single. She was the niece of King Peter II and cousin of Frederick III of Sicily, one of whose sisters is described as too old for the titular duke, which would of course have been the case in 1369. The allusions to Philip II of Taranto as still living also fix the date as before the close of 1373, when he died. Moreover Archbishop Simon of Thebes is known to have been in Sicily in 1367, and may have remained there longer. What was apparently an insuperable chronological obstacle, the allusion to _obitum domini regis Franciæ_, disappeared when I examined the original document in the Vatican library and found that the last two words were _regie fameie_, that is, _familiæ_.