When the king had arranged these matters, he remembered that
sentence of divine scripture, "Whosoever will give alms, ought to
begin from himself," and prudently began to reflect what he could
offer to God from the service of his body and mind; for he proposed
to consecrate to God no less out of this than he had done of things
external to himself. Moreover, he promised, as far as his infirmity
and his means would allow, to give up to God the half of his
services, bodily and mental, by night and by day, voluntarily, and
with all his might; but, inasmuch as he could not equally
distinguish the lengths of the hours by night, on account of the
darkness, and ofttimes of the day, on account of the storms and
clouds, he began to consider, by what means and without any
difficulty, relying on the mercy of God, he might discharge the
promised tenor of his vow until his death.
After long reflection on these things, he at length, by a useful
and shrewd invention, commanded his chaplains to supply wax in a
sufficient quantity, and he caused it to be weighed in such a
manner that when there was so much of it in the scales, as would
equal the weight of seventy-two pence, (58) he caused the chaplains
to make six candles thereof, each of equal length, so that each
candle might have twelve divisions (59) marked longitudinally upon
it. By this plan, therefore, those six candles burned for
twenty-four hours, a night and day, without fail, before the sacred
relics of many of God's elect, which always accompanied him
wherever he went; but sometimes when they would not continue
burning a whole day and night, till the same hour that they were
lighted the preceding evening, from the violence of the wind, which
blew day and night without intermission through the doors and
windows of the churches, the fissures of the divisions, the
plankings, or the wall, or the thin canvass of the tents, they then
unavoidably burned out and finished their course before the
appointed time; the king therefore considered by what means he
might shut out the wind, and so by a useful and cunning invention,
he ordered a lantern to be beautifully constructed of wood and
white ox-horn, which, when skilfully planed till it is thin, is no
less transparent than a vessel of glass. This lantern, therefore,
was wonderfully made of wood. and horn, as we before said, and by
night a candle was put into it, which shone as brightly without as
within, and was not extinguished by the wind; for the opening of
the lantern was also closed up, according to the king's command, by
a door made of horn.
By this contrivance, then, six candles, lighted in succession,
lasted four and twenty hours, neither more nor less, and, when
these were extinguished, others were lighted.
When all these things were properly arranged, the king, eager to
give up to God the half of his daily service, as he had vowed, and
more also, if his ability on the one hand, and his malady on the
other, would allow him, showed himself a minute investigator of the
truth in all his judgments, and this especially for the sake of the
poor, to whose interest, day and night, among other duties of this
life, he ever was wonderfully attentive. For in the whole Kingdom
the poor, besides him, had few or no protectors; for all the
powerful and noble of that country had turned their thoughts rather
to secular than to heavenly things: each was more bent on secular
matters, to his own profit, than on the public good.