Many sleuths, both professional and amateur, have devoted years to unravelling the circumstances of the heist, but one man who has worn out more shoe leather than most in pursuit of this mystery is Stephen Kurkjian, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter now retired after 40 years at The Boston Globe.

Unlike fiefs, pronoiai were granted only by the emperor, and so they played no role in producing the subinfeudation and the hierarchical social and political structure characteristic of Western feudalism. Pronoia was a fiscal and administrative institution; the fief territorial and personal. The grant of a pronoia was primarily a grant of revenue expressed as a monetary sum (the posotes), not in terms of a quantity of property.

This was a statue of a slightly adipose child in a bath hat with its nappy round its ankles.

When we have done it, we have done or duty, and all that is in our power, and indeed all that needs.