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"The Normans," says Malaterra, "are a cunning and revengeful people; eloquence and dissimulation appear to be their hereditary qualities: they can stoop to flatter; but unless they are curbed by the restraint of law, they indulge the licentiousness of nature and passion.

Geoffrey Malaterra, who outlined the Norman character many centuries ago with much psychological acuteness, insisted on the excessiveness of that gens effrenatissima, the tendency to unite opposite impulses, the taste for contradictory extremes. Now of all their conquests the Normans only made one true and permanent Conquest, the Conquest of England.

The story appealed so to the old chronicler Malaterra, that he told it in both prose and verse. After seven months the city surrendered, and the iron cross was again set up on the rocky eminence by the gate. It is a sign of the ruin which had befallen that the city now lost its bishopric and was ecclesiastically annexed to another see.

In 1092 Busita, daughter of Roger I., Count of Sicily and Durazzo, and wife of Coloman, king of Hungary, came here accompanied by Geoffrey Malaterra. In 1114 Ordelaffo Faliero took it, and in 1115 it was destroyed to the foundations by Domenico Michieli. Some of the inhabitants, with the bishop and clergy, fled to Scardona; the rest, with the notables, to Sebenico.