LIUTPRAND OF CREMONA
 
 

DE LEGATIONE CONSTANTINOPOLITANA

[Translated by F.A. Wright in The Works of Liudprand of Cremona, New York, 1930.]
 
 

CHAPTER 63

On the sixth of December we came to Leucas, where, as by all the other bishops, we were most unkindly received and treated by the bishop who is a eunuch. In all Greece - I speak the truth and do not lie - I found no hospitable bishops. They are both poor and rich; rich in gold coins wherewith they gamble recklessly - poor in servants and utensils. They sit by themselves at a bare little table, with a ship's biscuit in front of them, and instead of drinking their bath water they sip it from a tiny glass. They do their own buying and selling; they close and open their doors themselves; they are their own stewards, their own ass-drivers, their own "capones" - aha, I meant to write "caupones", but the thing is so true, that it made me write the truth against my will - as I say, they are "capones", that is, eunuchs, which is against canon law; and they are also "caupones", that is, innkeepers, which is again uncanonical. It is true of them to say:
 

Of old a lettuce ended the repast
To-day it is the first course and the last.

If their poverty imitated that of Christ, I should judge them happy in it. But their reason is sordid gain and the accursed hunger for gold. May God be merciful to them. I think that they act thus because their churches are tributary to the state. The bishop of Leucas swore to me that his church had to pay Nicephorus a hundred gold pieces every year, and the other churches the same, more or less according to their means. How unjust this is is shown by the enactments of the holy patriarch Joseph. At the time of the famine he made all Egypt pay tribute to Pharaoh, but the land of the priests he allowed to be exempt.