Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/215

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MARRIAGE EMBASSY TO HUNGARY
211

thority. Then shall the king be not at once the tormentor and the slave of his people, but as the honored receptorium of the wisdom and virtue of his age.”

Solomon well knew during this address, that the king’s afflicting ailment required alleviation such as he only could supply He knew that the virulence of the Sarcoptes Scabiei must compel respectful attention to his philosophy, and that the king and his nobles endured tortures from the truculent prohibition of that medical science which an inhuman fanaticism had forbidden alike the priest and the layman to acquire.[1]

Solomon also was fully known to have received the commission to investigate the perfect health of the princess Judith, and her absolute exemption from the least symptom of that prevailing contagion, that for centuries before and after this period formed the dreadful domestic penalty inflicted by superstitious barbarism.

  1. See Councils of Rheims, 1131; of Lateran, 1139; of Tours, 1163; Labbe Conc. t. X. pp. 984, 1101, 1421; Bulls of Alexander and of Honorius III., du Boulay, Hist. Univ. t. III. p. 96. Martene Thes. Nov. Anec. t. IV. pp. 1760, 1819, 1943. Hist. Litt. t. XVI. p. 99.