162 LA CROMA, OMBLA, RAGUSA VECCHIA
little triapsidal basilica which surely, all save a few additions, belongs to the age of the Lion-hearted king. Indeed we should be tempted to fix on this, rather than any other church of Ragusa or its island, as the work of Richard himself. It looks greatly as if a Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine had had a hand in it. A single wide body with three apses opening into it, is not a Dalmatian idea, as it is not an English idea. But something like it might easily be found in Richard’s own land of Southern Gaul ”; so writes Freeman with that acute sense of history and architecture which characterizes his work. Though the story of Richard’s sojourn at La Croma is now usually relegated to the region of romance, Freeman supports the substantial veracity of the tale.
  The Benedictines founded a monastery on the island, and the Emperor Sigismund passed sometime, in 1398, among the pines, cypresses, laurels and rosemary which thickly clothe the rocks. But La Croma has always had a mysterious and sinister repute. It was from the rocks ot La Croma that the Ragusans flung those guilty of treason or sacrilege. The Archduke Maximilian, of unhappy Mexican memory, acquired the island and built