minds of the day, and free from the vices of the profligate, he
concentrated all his powers, among which must be reckoned profound
dissimulation and an irreconcilable spirit of vengeance, on the
destruction of his opponents. He had been wounded in every point in
which a ruler is open to offence; for the leaders of the barons, though
related to him by marriage, were yet the allies of his foreign enemies.
Extreme measures became part of his daily policy. The means for this
struggle with his barons, and for his external wars, were exacted in
the same Mohammedan fashion which Frederick II had introduced: the
Government alone dealt in oil and corn; the whole commerce of the
country was put by Ferrante into the hands of a wealthy merchant,
Francesco Coppola, who had entire control of the anchorage on the
coast, and shared the profits with the King. Deficits were made up by
forced loans, by executions and confiscations, by open simony, and by
contributions levied on the ecclesiastical corporations. Besides
hunting, which he practiced regardless of all rights of property, his
pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him,
either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in
the costume which they wore in their lifetime. He would chuckle in
talking of the captives with his friends, and make no secret whatever
of the museum of mummies. His victims were mostly men whom he had got
into his power by treachery; some w ere even seized while guests at the
royal table. His conduct to his prime minister, Antonello Petrucci, who
had grown sick and grey in his service, and from whose increasing fear
of death he extorted 'present after present,' was literally devilish.
At length a suspicion of complicity with the last conspiracy of the
barons gave the pretext for his arrest and execution. With him died
Coppola. The way in which all this is narrated in Caracciolo and Porzio
makes one's hair stand on end.