usand
persons. Under these calamities, the mind of Guiscard alone was firm and
invincible; and while he collected new forces from Apulia and Sicily, he
battered, or scaled, or sapped, the walls of Durazzo. But his industry
and valor were encountered by equal valor and more perfect industry. A
movable turret, of a size and capacity to contain five hundred soldiers,
had been rolled forwards to the foot of the rampart: but the descent of
the door or drawbridge was checked by an enormous beam, and the wooden
structure was constantly consumed by artificial flames.

[Footnote 65: The Itinerary of Jerusalem (p. 609, edit. Wesseling) gives
a true and reasonable space of a thousand stadia or one hundred miles
which is strangely doubled by Strabo (l. vi. p. 433) and Pliny, (Hist.
Natur. iii. 16.)]

[Footnote 66: Pliny (Hist. Nat. iii. 6, 16) allows quinquaginta millia
for this brevissimus cursus, and agrees with the real distance from
Otranto to La Vallona, or Aulon, (D'Anville, Analyse de sa Carte des
Cotes de la Grece, &c., p. 3-6.) Hermolaus Barbarus, who substitutes
centum. (Harduin, Not. lxvi. in Plin. l. iii.,) might have been
corrected by every Venetian pilot who had sailed out of the gulf.]

[Footnote 67: Infames scopulos Acroceraunia, Horat. carm. i. 3. The
praecipitem Africum decertantem Aquilonibus, et rabiem Noti and the
monstra natantia of the Adriatic, are somewhat enlarged; but Horace
trembling for the life of Virgil, is an interesting moment in the
history of poetry and friendship.]

[Footnote 68: (Alexias, l. iv. p. 106.) Yet the Normans shaved, and the
Venetians wore, their beards: they must have derided the no beard of
Bohemond; a harsh interpretation. (Duncanga ad Alexiad. p. 283.)]

While the Roman empire was attacked by the Turks in the East, east, and
the Normans in the West, the aged successor of Michael surrendered the
sceptre to the hands of Alexius, an illustrious captain, and the founder
of the Comnenian dynasty. The princess Anne, his daughter and historian,
observes, in her affected style, that even Hercules was unequal to a
double combat; and, on this principle, she approves a hasty peace with
the Turks, which allowed her father to undertake in person the relief of
Durazzo. On his accession, Alexius found the camp without soldiers, and
the treasury without money; yet such were the vigor and activity of his
measures, that in six months he assembled an army of seventy thousand
men, [69] and perfo